Jun. 26th, 2021

starlady: Everything is legal in New Jersey. (legal in jersey)
Higginbotham, Adam. Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019). 

I became gripped by the Chernobyl disaster last year after consuming the first three episodes of the TV show. I formed a somewhat jaundiced prejudgement of this book based on an interview he gave the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, in which he discusses his strange decision not to engage more proactively in debunking the rampant misinformation about the disaster even as he hits out at the then-unreleased TV show for not being completely accurate. I think fiction is fiction and history is history; the differences between them are obvious. But having read the book, I would venture to say that it's excellent and important despite its flaws--and I think comparing it to the TV show is a worthwhile exercise that both helps keep the cast of characters straight and illuminates both some of the profound problems of the Soviet system that the show elides as well as the ways in which narrative shapes narrative. For example, it's clear to me that debunking misinformation would have interrupted Higginbotham's narrative flow, which is a legitimate concern, but to me doing it somehow, even awkwardly, outweighs the loss of textual elegance. Similarly, I do wish there were a few more diagrams of the plant interior.

Higginbotham's essential innovation is the hundreds of interviews he conducted with experts and survivors--many of whom have died in the interim--to construct a picture of the disaster itself and the acute phases of the aftermath. Did they save the world? Well, probably. I came away with slightly more sympathy for some of the main players in the TV show in some cases and in others slightly less; my personal evaluation is that Higginbotham maybe goes slightly too far in his quasi-exoneration of Dyatlov, whose perpetually unexplained decision to conduct the planned test at 200 MW instead of the prescribed 700 is probably one of the two key proximate causes of the disaster. (The other being Toptunov's mistake in failing to set the automatic power maintenance system, resulting in the system defaulting to a maintenance level of 0 MW.) But Higginbotham is right that the disaster was conditioned by every aspect of the Soviet system, and the Soviet deputy prime minister was right when he told Gorbachev that Chernobyl was inevitably going to happen somewhere. Ultimately the fact that none of the operators understood the profound risks in the reactor's design because the flaws and the intervening lesser disasters were treated as state secrets meant that something was always going to go catastrophically wrong. And now we know that above 1 sievert, radiation does have a smell: ozone, because it ionizes the air. And it tastes of metal or sour apples.

Higginbotham does gently push back on the idea of "radiophobia" and other conditions invented to obscure the profound damage done to the people who were exposed to radiation from the disaster--though one of Chernobyl's lessons is that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki binary of "survival" and "fatality" has more gray in it than previously realized; maximum survivable doses were revised upwards thanks to what doctors learned in 1986. Which is not to say that what happened is okay, because it isn't, but it is to say that there are a lot of health problems that can fall short of killing people in the short or even medium term, and these have not been adequately surveyed because survivors' testimony has been systematically denied and downplayed, in what for me as a trained historian is an obvious red flag. But the book for this topic is Kate Brown's Manual for Survival, which I haven't read yet.

ExpandLarger implications )
starlady: A woman in a sepia photograph wearing a military uniform (fight like a girl)
source: Terminator series (The Terminator, Terminator 2, Terminator: Dark Fate)
audio: Gossip, "Fire with Fire"
length: 2:50
download: 311MB on MediaFire
summary: It ain't the end of the world, girl.

AO3 page | tumblr post | YouTube link with captions

Lyrics on AZ Lyrics

Premiered at [community profile] con_txt 2021.




I love Sarah Connor. I love Sarah Connor, but this vid was a slog. It was a slog to finish clipping, putting it together felt like pulling teeth, and then I realized that some of my sources were too low quality and I needed to redownload and reclip, which sent me down the rabbit hole that is the Blu-Ray/HD release history of Terminator 2. (You know that meme about what topic you can talk about long enough that your kidnappers will drop you on the side of the road?) When all that was finally dealt with and I thought I was at the end I realized that my sequence was set to 30fps…but all three movies were shot in 24fps. And when I dropped everything into a new sequence with the correct settings, there were a lot of small tweaks and retiming required. In the end I'm happy with the final product, but I also am going to take a few weeks off from vidding.

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