Opaque Lucidity

Untouched

April 26th (Wednesday) will mark the 20th anniversary of the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in the Ukraine. I was a freshman in high school then and I remember my Spanish teacher (who had escaped from Cuba with her family soon after Castro came to power) telling us how the Soviets were just too damn stupid to handle nuclear power. Now that we know more about what actually happened, it's pretty clear that many things contributed to the accident: training, operations, design. Needless to say, the accident helped drive a nail in the coffin of nuclear power in the United States, a power source we need now more than ever.

I was reading an article in the Financial Times about the anniversary and one of the paragraphs struck me:

The explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear plant in 1986 was yet another catastrophe from which Ukraine had to bounce back in the last century. The country lost 10m in the second world war and 7m in a famine in the 1930s.

17 million people in a generation. We Americans tend to think of our loses in World War Two with sadness and horror---400,000 people did not come home from Europe and the Pacific. I do not mention this to trivialize their deaths, but to make a point that loss of the caliber suffered by the Ukrainians changes the way a society views itself and events.

Imagine a nuclear accident in the US of the magnitude of Chernobyl. It could very possibly cause an economic collapse (remember what happened after 9/11) or worse. But the Ukrainians plod along, just as their Russian and Chinese neighbors have. It does not make them better or tougher than us, just different. It also makes me thankful that we have not had to become desensitized to that kind of death.

I am reminded of a statement made by Joseph Stalin, the man who was responsible for the deaths of the more than 30 million Soviet citizens (those of you who ignorantly spout off about more people being killed over religion than anything else in history need to look at the Soviets and Chinese in the 20th century):

"One death is tragic; a million deaths is a statistic."