The Crime of Chernobyl: The Nuclear Gulag

The real authors of this book are the victims of the disaster at Chernobyl that occurred on the 26th April 1986. Wladimir Tchertkoff recorded their voices in the villages of the north of Ukraine and in the forests in the south of Belarus. They are the millions of peasant farmers who consume food containing caesium 137 on a daily basis: the young pregnant mothers, themselves contaminated, who are unknowingly poisoning the life developing within them: the children whose lives are condemned, even if they are born apparently healthy, because they will become ill as a consequence of consuming radionuclides, morning, noon and night. Then there are the "liquidators", the unsung heroes of Europe who were sacrificed in order to extinguish the fire at the power station. They suffer any number of unknown "atomic" illnesses. Hundreds of thousands of them are ill, tens of thousands have already died prematurely, and continue to die in unimaginable suffering....And finally there are the doctors and physicists, at least the few of them who have not submitted to the will of the nuclear lobby. This book also tells the story of the struggle undertaken by two Belarusian scientists who risked their careers, their health and their personal safety to come to the aid of the contaminated populations. Forced into the role of dissidents by the refusal of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna to recognise the harmful effects of low dose radiation on health, the physicist Vassili Nesterenko, and the doctor and pathologist Yury Bandazhevsky, were persecuted in their own country for their opposition to the official dogma. Vassili Nesterenko died in 2008, having suffered innumerable health problems following his exposure to high levels of radiation in April 1986, when he flew over the exploded reactor in a helicopter. This book was first published in 2006 in France. Despite the biblical proportions of the disaster that could have rendered the whole of Europe uninhabitable, the world has still not learnt its lesson. The real health effects from the accident at Chernobyl continue to be covered up by governments, by the nuclear industry and by the international institutions that support them. This cover-up has made certain that sooner or later, another catastrophe would arise. In 2011, following an earthquake and tsunami, three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Power Plant experienced a nuclear meltdown. The health effects there are just beginning.