Chernobyl: 35 Years On

*The Chernobyl nuclear power plant on fire in April 1986.*

Monday marks 35 years since an explosion at Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine -considered the worst nuclear disaster in history. I first reported on it from NJ in 1986 with the team at The Ukrainian Weekly. I visited the site for the first time, years later, for an in-depth feature package for the South China Morning Post.

At the time of the explosion, Soviet authorities tried to conceal the tragedy, lied and their reprehensible actions caused untold death and illness.

Early on, the estimates from sources on both side of the Iron Curtain suggested that as many as 15,000 people could already be dead from the accident. Decades later, the world had learned that about 300,000 people were ultimately impacted by the disaster, but no one will ever really know the full tally of human suffering. And all the way until the end of the Cold War, the official Soviet numbers placed the death toll at the absurdly low number of 31.

During my first visit to Chernobyl, I recall how the nearby city of Prypiat appeared frozen in time, with children’s toys lifeless on the ground. A frozen playground here and weathered ‘Pravda’ newspapers from the day of the explosion there.

Recalling those tragic events, former deputy director of the plant Sergei Parashin told SKY News years later: it is “hard for the younger generation to imagine that we lived at a time when information was restricted. We didn't have many truths. But this truth was a lie.”

In the case of Chernobyl, it was the Swedes who blew the whistle. In the case of the coronavirus outbreak in China, it was brave doctors such as Li Wenliang - and on Dec. 31 2019, Taiwan’s Centre for Disease Control.

In my forthcoming book, Digital Pandemic, I draw parallels between how Soviet authorities handled the Chernobyl disaster then - and how some three decades later the Chinese Communist Party used eerily similar tactics to conceal the Covid-19 outbreak from their own citizens and the world.

As I wrote for CNN Opinion in February 2020: “that manipulation and suppression (by authorities in Beijing) of information is what allowed the wide spread of the novel coronavirus in the first place.”