The letter regarding Natasha brought to mind an article by Bro. Alan Eyre published three years ago in the Caribbean Pioneer titled “Death Rays from Chernobyl.” In it, he reported information received from Jewish scientists regarding the impact of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in May, 1986. The evidence seems clear that it played a critical role in the collapse of the Soviet Union coming as it did on the heels of a long series of ecological calamities.
Devastation to the food supply
According to reports from the scientists: “Virtually all water over a wide area of the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe will remain a source of contamination and irradiation for decades. Over vast areas, what food is produced cannot be marketed or consumed because it is rejected as dangerously contaminated. Only food aid from the West is keeping millions alive. Western governments have been persuaded to hide the reason for this level of food aid because they fear repercussions on their own nuclear industries.
“Evidence is abundant that Chernobyl was a major factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union and its communist bureaucracy.”
A history of disasters
By itself, Chernobyl was not enough to bring down the empire. It was enough, however, in light of the decades of destructive events that preceded it. The following quotes give some idea of what had been happening:
“A radiation map, which has never been released to the public but which was made available to U.S. News, pinpoints more than 130 nuclear explosions, mostly in European Russia. They were conducted for geophysical investigations, to create underground pressure in oil and gas fields or simply to move earth for building dams. No one knows how much they have contaminated the land, water, people and wildlife, but the damage is almost certainly enormous.
“Some 920,000 barrels of oil -roughly 1 out of every 10 barrels produced — are spilled every day in Russia, claims Alexei Yablokov, science adviser to Russian President Boris Yeltsin. That is nearly the equivalent of one Exxon Valdez spill every six hours. To speed up construction of oil pipelines, builders were permitted to install cutoff valves every 30 miles instead of every 3, so a break dumps up to 30 miles’ worth of oil onto the ground” (U.S. News & World Report, April 13, 1992).
And then there was Chernobyl.
One man, one mistake
The specific cause of the Chernobyl disaster was evidently one mistake made by one man.
Technicians at the site “had set out to test a system for improving plant safety.” The problem was this: “All nuclear plants take power from the electricity grid [i.e. from electricity produced by the plant itself] to operate their safety systems. Should that power from the grid be lost, then backup generators, usually diesel-powered, start up, but only after a short time lag [of a few seconds]. The Chernobyl experiment was designed to ensure that operators could fill the gap in time between the loss of power from the grid and the start-up of the diesels.”
In preparation for the test, a technician “had disconnected various automatic safety devices, including the shutdown scram mechanism, since their intervention would have spoiled the experiment.” As a result, when one of the technicians miscalculated during the experiment, the necessary safety devices were all off and an unstoppable sequence of events began that resulted in the explosion. (From “Nuclear Energy After Chernobyl,” by Peter Bunyard in The Earth Report, April, 1990).
A divine perspective
How easy it is for the angels to affect the course of events. One man, one mistake contributing to the collapse of the Soviet Union — and contributing to the opportunity for Natasha, and others like her, to accept the gospel of salvation.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One