Imbeciles, morons and Chernobyls

That's how screenwriter and director Craig Mazin responded to criticism that he had already joined the Hollywood industry of anti-nuclear paranoia with the cult HBO series in favor of, clearly, fossil energy lobbies. I, for one, did not even realize that "Chernobyl" could be read in any other way than as an autopsy of a mindless totalitarian system that is entirely based on lies. For starters, it's not even a Chernobyl story: it's a disturbing gray dystopia, different only in that it's based on a true event. In short, it is a story about society and the state as they end up when the government, disconnected from real life, enacts laws on the press and laws of physics alike, so party ideologues write, for example, a law on energy conservation.

In short, a series about contemporary Croatia. If, in fact, the dystopia about the Chernobyl disaster is a story about a monstrous system built on the concept of party obedience and political suitability before reason and expertise - and it is - then you have no choice but to watch that series again, from that key: that is, comrades, series about Soviet Croatia.

It is the story of HDZ's Croatia from the first episode, when the local party committee gathers in an underground shelter in Chernobyl after the explosion, and an old veteran of the Homeland War - the term "Homeland War", after all, is a literal translation of the Soviet Patriotic Army - forbids the thought of the evacuation of Pripyat and proposes to cover up all that bullshit, in order to prevent panic. "When people", namely, "start asking questions, they should simply be told to mind their own business and leave state affairs to the state". Croatia is also a story when Comrade Uljana Homjuk from the Belarusian Nuclear Energy Institute requests measures to protect citizens in Minsk, and Comrade Garanin arrogantly snaps at her that he trusts the Party that "everything is under control" - "I am a nuclear physicist", then Uljana reminds him , "and you came to the post of secretary from a shoe factory" - and when at a meeting in Moscow party experts assure Comrade Gorbachev that "the profession follows everything" and that it is a minor incident that will certainly not harm the reputation of the USSR, and when in in the last episode, the main character, engineer Valery Legasov, admits in court that instead of common sense and professional canons, they followed the orders of the Central Committee. Fortunately, after the construction of the Krško power plant, reasonable Slovenians unilaterally abandoned the inter-republic agreement from 1970, so no nuclear power plant was built in Croatia. I can very plastically imagine - I can actually imagine it in all five episodes - how this matter would look if the agreed construction of the nuclear plant on the island of Vir near Zadar was taken over by HDZ comrades after the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Look at it this way - I, for one, am: the whole crap with reactor number four of the "Vladimir Ilyich Lenin" nuclear power plant in Chernobyl began at the very moment when it was officially put into operation on December 20, 1983, even though no safety test of the reactor was carried out at all, without which, according to the profession, it could not and should not be open. The comrades, however, were in a hurry, because in the eternal glory of the Soviet Union and the Communist Party, showing their teeth to the West, it was supposed to be opened by the New Year, and even - never enough glory - before the deadline.

Question: if, for example, the second nuclear power plant had really been built in Croatia and completed, I am speaking from memory, in October 1995, do you really think that Franjo Tuđman would have waited for the safety test, or would he - to the eternal glory of Croatia and the HDZ, showing everything teeth to the Serbs - the headquarters was ceremoniously opened without a security test, at the big final pre-election meeting of the HDZ in Vir on October 27, two days before the parliamentary elections in 1995? Look at it this way: a safety test at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was carried out only two and a half years after opening, and after three unsuccessful attempts. The fourth time, despite the fact that it was clear that the matter was getting out of control and that it was going to be shit, the test was carried out after the "order from above" to the end, and it ended as it ended. In Soviet-style democracies, namely, security tests are not performed for security reasons, but to satisfy form and protocol.

Question: if, for example, an order came from Zagreb that the safety test at the "Croatian Knights" nuclear power plant on Vir should be carried out to the end, even though it is clear that it will be bullshit, do you think that a beardless young engineer on the night shift - the nephew of a certain Kalmeta godfather with a purchased diploma from the Faculty of Transport in Zagreb - fucked Kalmeta and Tuđman and HDZ, or would he continue to lower the power of the reactor as he was told?

Look at it this way: do you think that the emergency meeting of the county HDZ after the explosion would have ended any differently than the meeting of the local Chernobyl committee on the night of the disaster? Would the president of the local HVIDR say anything else and in any way different than the decorated Soviet hero in the Chernobyl basement at the meeting of the crisis headquarters? And would the HDZ strongman tell a nuclear physicist from the Ruđer Bošković Institute that he came to the Ministry from a shoe factory in Borovo anything else and in any way different from that apparatchik in Minsk? Finally, the explosion - as Comrade Legasov explained at the trial - did not occur only because the Soviet bureaucratic protocols were above the laws of quantum physics: the disaster was planned in the very design of the power plant. Why did the reactor, in layman's terms illogically, explode after shutting down? "For the same reason," says Legasov, "that our reactors do not have isolation rooms like in the West, for the same reason that we do not use properly enriched fuel, and for the same reason that we are the only country that makes water-cooled graphite reactors with positive discharge coefficient." So he explains: "It's cheaper."

And if it were to occur to someone today to build an atomic power plant in honor of the eternal Croatian state, the HDZ and the parliamentary elections, do you really think that the project would be won by anyone other than the famous Radić IGH, who would build it, clearly, on Maslenica, or - around two more - in Gunja? Do you really think that, for example, the painting of isolation rooms would be awarded to anyone other than Skladgradnja žužul brothers? Do you think that the fuel would be procured by anyone except, I know, General Cermak, and that the exclusive contract for the supply of material for the regulating rods could be obtained by anyone besides Vasa Brkić's living brother, to whom the Požega-Slavonia County would grant a concession for that old graphite mine on Are they swearing?

Do you think, finally, that the security of the Croatian nuclear power plant would have been taken care of by anyone other than dear God, Archbishop Želimir Puljić of Zadar and the parish priest of Vir, Rev. , overqualified experts with diplomas from the Faculty of Transport in Zagreb? Do you think I'm exaggerating?

Let's ignore, say, the recent "minor incident" at the Plat Hydroelectric Power Plant near Dubrovnik, expertly insulated with flammable PVC. Let's even ignore the fine example of the mayor of Minsk, Milan Bandić, who is a national defense officer by profession, who, upon the warning of a construction engineer and authorized construction expert about the insecurity of the collapsed city bridges, arrogantly snapped that it was "the same as my grandmother talking about Mount Everest".

Just a few days before HBO will show the first episode of "Chernobyl", for example, Al Jazeera published the news that measurements in elementary schools in Ogulin showed a five times higher concentration of radioactive radon than allowed. The information is also based on a full four-year-old report of the State Institute for Radiological and Nuclear Safety, which has never been made public: moreover, the Institute explained to journalists that "as a state institution, they have no legal obligation to inform anyone of their findings"!

We are talking, I remind you once again, about high levels of radioactive radon in elementary schools: do you still think that you would ever see any report from the State Institute for Nuclear Safety about, say, a small incident on the island of Vir? When I wrote about the State Institute for Nuclear Safety a few years ago, the last announcement on their official website was a two-year-old Christmas card, and in the Institute for Protection against Ionizing Radiation, for example, out of twelve employees, six were heads and supervisors. Just in our little Institute, you understand, there are more chiefs than there were in 1986 in the Soviet State Nuclear Commission. Protection and security? You will surely remember that minor incident two years ago, when Andrej Plenković opened a bypass in Vodice for the purposes of the election campaign - without any safety study, magnificently ignoring the warnings of the profession - after which three people died in six traffic accidents in the first month. and six more seriously injured. By God, there would not have been many more dead and wounded if Plenković had inaugurated the "Dr. Franjo Tuđman" nuclear power plant instead of the bypass in Vodice. Finally, for a precise reconstruction of the disaster at the Vir nuclear power plant, one should not go further than Vir itself. If he were to find himself on that island today - a huge, lawless and desolate concrete favela that the president of the State Council for Spatial Planning Jerko Rošin called "a village of lepers that can only be rehabilitated if a bomb falls on it" - there would be no way for the intending traveler to to conclude that it is not in Pripyat, Ukraine, and that a nuclear reactor did not really explode on Vir about thirty years ago. And all his doubts would be dispelled if he saw Zdravko Tomac in the middle of that dusty radioactive leprosarium.

The famous multi-party doyen Tomac, himself the owner of a private weekend reactor on that island, precisely explained the causes of the disaster in the newspaper back then: "Everything was normal on Vir until the announcements about the construction of the nuclear power plant started, so, in order to prevent that, Wild construction began on the island."

Yes, comrades, I am talking about HDZ's Croatia: a country that prevents a nuclear disaster with uncontrolled illegal construction, prevents an ecological disaster with another ecological disaster, and preserves the nature and environment of the sea coast by concreting and favellizing entire islands. Which - if I'm allowed to paraphrase the profession - can only really be rehabilitated in the end by building some kind of reliable Soviet nuclear power plant. And a person would really like to be a special kind of imbecile or moron, let's say Chernobyl, to believe that in addition to the Party, the Church and war veterans - who in that Soviet republic decide on education and television and the judiciary and football - nuclear physicists would ask about the nuclear power plant . As you have understood by now, nuclear reactors are understood as Bandić's grandmother is to Mount Everest. If at the end you had any doubts about whether "Chernobyl" is a Croatian story, here is Moscow's reaction, from where it is today - thirty-three years later! - they angrily say that it is Western propaganda, announcing their own series based on historical facts. Like the fact that the Americans and the CIA are clearly behind everything.

Of course. Who else - we would learn from Vrdoljak's extraordinary series "Vir" - if not the Serbs? With due respect, in the falsification of history, party obedience and political suitability, i.e. "lies, arrogance and absence of criticism", for the Russians and Soviets we, comrades, are a nuclear superpower.

(hr.n1info.com)