Hundreds of books, long and short, have been written about the Chernobyl tragedy. Few people are left indifferent once they understand a little about the biggest technological catastrophe in history. Wladimir Tchertkoff’s book “The Crime of Chernobyl — the Nuclear Gulag” occupies a central place in this library aboutChernobyl.
Many journalists, like Wladimir Tchertkoff, a documentary film maker for Swiss television”, were shocked by what they saw in the areas affected by the radioactive emissions following the explosion at Reactor 4 of the Lenin nuclear power plant in Chernobyl (Ukraine). Many witnesses, like Tchertkoff, were revolted by the events that followed in the scientific and political world after the Catastrophe. But very few were able to gather together all the facts to back up these feelings of indignation in a formidable work of documentation.
Tchertkoff’s book does not limit itself to remembering the events. It demands of each of us that we grasp the fact that following the Chernobyl catastrophe, the damage to human health and to the natural environment will be felt for hundreds of years over immense areas of the northern hemisphere contaminated by strontium-90 and caesium-137, and for tens of thousands of years by plutonium in a number of areas of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia.
disaster, of which humanity has no experience. The same can be said of Gulf War Syndrome in Iraq and of the health problems experienced by the Serbian and Albanian populations in Yugoslavia where tonnes of uranium-238 (described as “depleted” but having a half-life of four and a half billion years) were dropped. If research
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