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Voices from Chernobyl

Marat Filippovich Kokhanov, Former Chief Engineer of the Institute for Nuclear Energy of the Belarussian Academy of Sciences

"Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster" by Svetlana Alexievich, translated from the Russian by Keith Gessen

Already by the end of May, about a month after the accident, we began receiving, for testing, products from the thirty-kilometer zone. They brought us the insides of domestic and undomesticated animals. After the first tests it became clear that what we were getting wasn't meat, but radioactive by-products. We checked the milk. It wasn't milk, it was a radioactive by-product.

High doses were everywhere. In a few villages we measured the thyroid activity for adults and children. It was one hundred, sometimes two and three hundred times the allowable dosage. The tractors were running, the farmers were digging on their plots. Children were sitting in a sandbox and playing. We'd see a woman on a bench near her house, breast-feeding her child — her milk has cesium in it — she's the Chernobyl Madonna.

We asked our bosses: "What do we do? How should we act?" They said: "Take your measurements. Watch television". On television Gorbachev was calming people: "We've taken immediate measures". I believed it. I'd worked as an engineer for twenty years, I was well acquainted with the laws of physics. I knew that everything living should leave that place, if only for a while. But we conscientiously took our measurements and watched the television. We were used to believing.

Source: The Paris Review

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