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Chernobyl and the Production of Ignorance: Review of Kate Brown's Manual for Survival

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 August 2020

Olga Kuchinskaya
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Extract

What is the number of casualties from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster? Historian Kate Brown's important book grew out of apparent frustration with the controversy surrounding the accident. Brown was frustrated with the position of United Nations agencies—often repeated in the media—that only thirty-one to fifty-four died as the result of the accident, most of them emergency responders. The only recognized effect for the general population was an increase in nonfatal thyroid cancer in children. She was also frustrated with the assertions that we might never know the actual death toll.

Type
Critical Discussion Forum: Kate Brown, A Manual for Survival: Chernobyl Guide to the Future
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 79 , Issue 2 , Summer 2020 , pp. 288 - 292
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies

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References

1 Brown, Kate, Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (New York, 2019), 3Google Scholar.

2 Robert Proctor, Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don’t Know about Cancer (New York, 1995); Robert N. Proctor and Londa L. Schiebinger, Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Stanford, 2008); Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth of Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York, 2010).

3 Brown, Manual for Survival, 309.

4 Brown, Manual for Survival, 165.

5 Svetlana Alexievich, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster (London, 2005), 240–41.

6 Brown, Manual for Survival, 302–3.

7 Ibid., 256.

8 Ibid., 29.

9 These were the Institute of Radiobiology, the Institute of Radiation Medicine (in Minsk, with branches in Gomel΄, Mogilev, and Vitebsk), the Institute of Radioecological Problems, and the Institute of Agricultural Radiology. See Olga Kuchinskaya, The Politics of Invisibility: Public Knowledge about Radiation Health Effects after Chernobyl (Cambridge, Mass., 2014), 138, 141.

10 Alexey V. Yablokov, Vassily B. Nesterenko, Alexey V. Nesterenko, and Janette D. Sherman-Nevinger, eds., Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 1181 (Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2009). One of the more visible examples of Belarusian Chernobyl-related research is the work of Evgeni Demidchik and his colleagues at the Center for Cancers of the Thyroid Gland (established in 1990), who demonstrated the biological and clinical specificity of radiation-induced cancer in children and developed protocols for treating those patients.

11 Brown, Manual for Survival, 284.