The Meanings of a Disaster by Karena Kalmbach

Author:Karena Kalmbach [Kalmbach, Karena]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, General, Political Science, Public Policy, Science & Technology Policy, Technology & Engineering, Power Resources, Nuclear
ISBN: 9781789207033
Google: XSDcDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2020-12-07T22:16:26+00:00

Critical Voices

The GSIEN activists had been among the first to contest the official French statements on Chernobyl’s impact in 1986, in particular Bella and Roger Belbéoch. In the 1980s, the Belbéochs were among the best known and most publicly visible French anti-nuclear activists and also co-founders of the Comité Stop Nogent in 1987. In May 1986, Bella Belbéoch wrote an article for Ecologie, the Société française d’écologie magazine. Her predictions for the trajectory of the official Chernobyl evaluations became a reference point for critical voices in the French Chernobyl debate. On 1 May 1986, she wrote:

In the coming days, we can expect an international complot of official experts who will try to minimize to the maximum the number of victims of this catastrophe. The continuance of the civil and military nuclear programmes imposes on the collectivity of states a tactical complicity that exceeds ideological or economic conflicts. The international health organizations, which are in principle independent from the states but strictly controlled by the Great Powers, will serve as liaison agencies to uphold the appearance of objectivity and neutrality.112

Because of their concerns, Bella and Roger Belbéoch continued to closely follow the work and reports of the international committees and expert groups put in charge of evaluating Chernobyl’s impact in the most affected regions of Eastern Europe. They scrutinized the publications released by the WHO and the IAEA. In 1992, in their contribution to the first edition of the journal L’Intranquille, they addressed the wider public, strongly criticizing the official narrative diffused internationally about Chernobyl’s impact.113 The following year, a revised and expanded version of this article was published as a book.114 In it, the Belbéochs discussed various aspects of the Chernobyl issue: the contemporary situation in the most affected regions, the struggle to define the dose limit for evacuation, the changing estimates of the number of victims, the alienation strategies applied in the West and so on. A key aspect of their argument was contesting the radiophobia concept that featured prominently in the Soviet and international expert groups’ evaluation. In the chapter ‘Le complot international’ (the international conspiracy) the authors incorporated all the aspects on Chernobyl they had presented into one claim: ‘There is nothing surprising about what is happening at the moment within the circle of experts’.115 As Bella Belbéoch had predicted in her article for Ecologie in 1986, all Chernobyl-related activities and communications were aimed at protecting the international civil and military enterprise from being profoundly questioned:

The complicity of the Western experts, scientists, technicians, doctors, sociologists and specialists in humanitarian aid was, without reservations, aimed at helping the central powers to ‘manage’ the social, economic, and political crisis that had emerged as a consequence of the accident. It was necessary to convince the people living in the contaminated areas that they had nothing to fear about their health. Those who were sent to ‘liquidate’ the consequences of the catastrophe at the site itself were not to question the doses of radiation they received or would receive. The rapid

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