"The Chernobyl disaster, more than anything else, opened the possibility of much greater freedom of expression, to the point that the system as we knew it could no longer continue. It made absolutely clear how important it was to continue the policy of glasnost, and I must say that I started to think about time in terms of pre-Chernobyl and post-Chernobyl."
Mikhail Gorbachev on Chernobyl, 20 years after. I'll post more on this as the April 26 anniversary looms.
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Gorbachev ignorantly likens Chernoby to TMI, a mere meltdown.
He also may be unaware of just how long before his heyday the seeds of Chernobyl were planted; unaware, more specifically, of just how much difference the westward, rather than eastward, flight of a certain Hungarian physicist made.
At that same site, more details on the reactor kinetics he foresaw, and forebade in his adopted country, making sure no country outside the former Soviet Union ever, after 1950 or 1951, took the chance of a Chernobyl.
--- Graham Cowan, former hydrogen fan
B: internal combustion, nuclear cachet
Posted on April 19, 2006 9:04 AM by G. R. L. Cowan
I noticed that, too (Chernobyl=TMI). But I thought the point of his article -- that official state secrecy led to ignorance and exacerbated (or caused?) the disaster, making everyone realize the necessity of glasnost.
But thanks for the good links.
Posted on April 19, 2006 12:04 PM by Judith Lewis