Serija Chernobyl - obična propaganda

AlfaOmega wrote:Odlična analiza serije, kome se da čitati.

procitao , cuo za seriju i cekam par sati mira u komadu da pogledam

Ringo10 wrote:Sertija je dobra ali je KGB prenaglasen. Kao mracni KGB.

Je dobra je serija. Nije dokumentarac pa određene slobode ne smetaju. činjenica je da se to dogodilo i da su Ruje to pokušale zataškati i skrivati koliko su mogli.

Koliko je KGB bi "mračan" o tom ni ti ni ja ne možemo raspravljati. Mračniji nego što ti misliš i ništa manje mračan do samog kraja i raspada SSSR-a.

danni1 wrote:

Ringo10 wrote:Sertija je dobra ali je KGB prenaglasen. Kao mracni KGB.

Je dobra je serija. Nije dokumentarac pa određene slobode ne smetaju. činjenica je da se to dogodilo i da su Ruje to pokušale zataškati i skrivati koliko su mogli.

Koliko je KGB bi "mračan" o tom ni ti ni ja ne možemo raspravljati. Mračniji nego što ti misliš i ništa manje mračan do samog kraja i raspada SSSR-a.

Rusija sa tim Černobilom nema ništa. To je u Ukrajini i problem Ukrajine. U toj elektrani su radili građani Ukrajine i ja fakat ne vidim šta sadašnja Rusija ima sa time. 

Neki na Zapadu nikako da puste SSSR da se upokoji na miru. Isto kao i vi ustaše što ne puštate Jugovinu da se upokoji.

Inače vođe SSSRa su bile mahom NERUSI. Prvi pravi Rus je bio Andropov koji je vladao 11 mjeseci i Gorbačov koji je i upokojio SSSR. Lenjin nije bio pravi Rus, pa Staljin, pa Hruščov pa Brežnjev  ... ni jedan nije bio pravi Rus.

mutava baštarda wrote:

Ringo10 wrote:Sertija je dobra ali je KGB prenaglasen. Kao mracni KGB.

Misliš, zli rusi malo ozračili ukrajince....
Ne bi rekao, serija 1/1 odavno bolji nisam gledao...

Tu su Ukrajinci ozračili sami sebe. Ta elektrana je u Ukrajini i stvarno ne znam šta današnja Rusija ima sa njom.

Ringo10 wrote:

mutava baštarda wrote:

Ringo10 wrote:Sertija je dobra ali je KGB prenaglasen. Kao mracni KGB.

Misliš, zli rusi malo ozračili ukrajince....
Ne bi rekao, serija 1/1 odavno bolji nisam gledao...

Tu su Ukrajinci ozračili sami sebe. Ta elektrana je u Ukrajini i stvarno ne znam šta današnja Rusija ima sa njom.

Rusija = Srbija

Ukrajina = Hrvatska

:D

Leviathan2 wrote:

dijagram wrote:

AlfaOmega wrote:Pa fino ti piše, ni reaktor eksplodira, neg krov, usljed oslobađanja velike količine energije koja je nakon toga počela izlaziti vani. 
A oslobađanje velike količine energije ni isto što i eksplozija samog reaktora.

To ti je eksplozija, navedeno oslobadjanje energije koje ima takvu brzinu reakcije i udarni val da strga reaktor ko kutiju sibica.


Nije eksplodiralo nuklearno gorivo ali se dogodila eksplozija, jos kakva.

Tip piše gluposti po tom pitanju.

Dobro, s nekim razlogom, al gluposti.

drz se krovova
a definiciju eksplozije ostavi nekom drugom

Gle ovog internet ratnika:)
Naravno da znam.
Prije 30 godina obucavao sam nase diverzante pored ostalog i o MES.
No ne moras biti strucan, dovoljno i pismen i sam mozes shvatiti kakve gluposti su navedene u clanku.
Ili ne mozes.

Uf nikako da je pogledam, imam je na USB sticku

Hektorović wrote:

Ringo10 wrote:

mutava baštarda wrote:

Ringo10 wrote:Sertija je dobra ali je KGB prenaglasen. Kao mracni KGB.

Misliš, zli rusi malo ozračili ukrajince....
Ne bi rekao, serija 1/1 odavno bolji nisam gledao...

Tu su Ukrajinci ozračili sami sebe. Ta elektrana je u Ukrajini i stvarno ne znam šta današnja Rusija ima sa njom.

Rusija = Srbija

Ukrajina = Hrvatska

:D

Rusija i Srbija u sustini nemaju veze ni u kojem smislu

Ukrajina danas je jedno banderovsko sranje pod vlasti AMerike

A sta je Hrvatska to vi sami definirajte

Inače serija ima ideološke konotacija, to priznaje i sam autor, ali prije svega one protiv climate change deniera na vlasti, gdje se ignorira znanost i stručnjaci.

Leviathan2 wrote:

vuksadinare wrote:Jadne ruje nemaju propagandu..oni vavijek posteno

jebali te ruje da te jebali
serija je obicno americko smece,  i ful iskrivljavanje istine
da li im je namjera da biude propaganda il da im serija bude atraktivna i senzacionalisticka ne znam
a to su takozvane umjetnicke slobode
kao i hrpa americkijeh filova o nekima dogadjajima koji postaju za neke ljude istina
nije mi se jednom dogodilo da udjem u raspru sa nekima koji se drze uvjerenja ko pijan plota i na kraju saznas da su gledali filn

Kakvo iskrivljavanje istine? Ima tu scenarijske i redateljske slobode, ali serija nit je smece nit je neistinita...il ti nisi gledo pa seruckas bezeze

Meni je falio onaj sovjetski naglas kod likova barem,kad vec jezik nije ukrainski... a i Šerbina i Legasov su dobili malo drugacije dimenzije, ali nije hebeni dokumentarac da nemos ubacit malo dramatike

n_razbojnik wrote:Kakvo iskrivljavanje istine? Ima tu scenarijske i redateljske slobode, ali serija nit je smece nit je neistinita...il ti nisi gledo pa seruckas bezeze

Meni je falio onaj sovjetski naglas kod likova barem,kad vec jezik nije ukrainski... a i Šerbina i Legasov su dobili malo drugacije dimenzije, ali nije hebeni dokumentarac da nemos ubacit malo dramatike

Pa to, ovdje komentiraju likovi koji nisu niti gledali...

Serija je ok, ali se malo uhvatila neopravdana histerija oko svega.

Vrlo lijepo urađena, vjerojatno ima i malo ideološkog nabrijavanja ali oke, to ovisi o tome tko režira, msm s koje strane. Da su Rusi radili vjerojatno bi ublažili tu stranu, ovako je naglašena.

U ostalom tko uopće očekuje objektivnost igdje!?

Hektorović wrote:

Ringo10 wrote:

mutava baštarda wrote:

Ringo10 wrote:Sertija je dobra ali je KGB prenaglasen. Kao mracni KGB.

Misliš, zli rusi malo ozračili ukrajince....
Ne bi rekao, serija 1/1 odavno bolji nisam gledao...

Tu su Ukrajinci ozračili sami sebe. Ta elektrana je u Ukrajini i stvarno ne znam šta današnja Rusija ima sa njom.

Rusija = Srbija

Ukrajina = Hrvatska

:D

ZDS, slava gerojami :D

Ringo10 wrote:

mutava baštarda wrote:

Ringo10 wrote:Sertija je dobra ali je KGB prenaglasen. Kao mracni KGB.

Misliš, zli rusi malo ozračili ukrajince....
Ne bi rekao, serija 1/1 odavno bolji nisam gledao...

Tu su Ukrajinci ozračili sami sebe. Ta elektrana je u Ukrajini i stvarno ne znam šta današnja Rusija ima sa njom.

Ekipa izašla u noći malo bliže gledati neobičan plamen koji ide iz nuklearke, poveli i dicu...

mutava baštarda wrote:

Ringo10 wrote:

mutava baštarda wrote:

Ringo10 wrote:Sertija je dobra ali je KGB prenaglasen. Kao mracni KGB.

Misliš, zli rusi malo ozračili ukrajince....
Ne bi rekao, serija 1/1 odavno bolji nisam gledao...

Tu su Ukrajinci ozračili sami sebe. Ta elektrana je u Ukrajini i stvarno ne znam šta današnja Rusija ima sa njom.

Ekipa izašla u noći malo bliže gledati neobičan plamen koji ide iz nuklearke, poveli i dicu...

rečeno im je da gori samo krov-

kic wrote:

mutava baštarda wrote:

Ringo10 wrote:

mutava baštarda wrote:

Ringo10 wrote:Sertija je dobra ali je KGB prenaglasen. Kao mracni KGB.

Misliš, zli rusi malo ozračili ukrajince....
Ne bi rekao, serija 1/1 odavno bolji nisam gledao...

Tu su Ukrajinci ozračili sami sebe. Ta elektrana je u Ukrajini i stvarno ne znam šta današnja Rusija ima sa njom.

Ekipa izašla u noći malo bliže gledati neobičan plamen koji ide iz nuklearke, poveli i dicu...

rečeno im je da gori samo krov-

Znači i ti bi išao gledati kako gori krov od nuklearke...

mutava baštarda wrote:

kic wrote:

mutava baštarda wrote:

Ringo10 wrote:

mutava baštarda wrote:

Ringo10 wrote:Sertija je dobra ali je KGB prenaglasen. Kao mracni KGB.

Misliš, zli rusi malo ozračili ukrajince....
Ne bi rekao, serija 1/1 odavno bolji nisam gledao...

Tu su Ukrajinci ozračili sami sebe. Ta elektrana je u Ukrajini i stvarno ne znam šta današnja Rusija ima sa njom.

Ekipa izašla u noći malo bliže gledati neobičan plamen koji ide iz nuklearke, poveli i dicu...

rečeno im je da gori samo krov-

Znači i ti bi išao gledati kako gori krov od nuklearke...

lako je sad biti pametan, većina ljudi se sami dovedu u opasnost

gledjio sa man nekim starim slikama,kako je na mjestu reaktora br.4 koji je otpuhnuo u zrak,velik velika rupa...sad..mozda niej eksplodirao,nego se odarni val necega odbio od krov i vratio i iskopao rupu..bit ce da je to..

epikur37 wrote:Serija je ok, ali se malo uhvatila neopravdana histerija oko svega.

Vrlo lijepo urađena, vjerojatno ima i malo ideološkog nabrijavanja ali oke, to ovisi o tome tko režira, msm s koje strane. Da su Rusi radili vjerojatno bi ublažili tu stranu, ovako je naglašena.

U ostalom tko uopće očekuje objektivnost igdje!?

Pa sam kreator je poprilično otvoren da je radio ideološki protiv climate change denirera i ignoriranja znanosti...

Najjaču kritiku serije, objavio je u biti turbokapitalistički Forbes... očito je da cilja na poprilično jak nuklearni lobi.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/06/06/why-hbos-chernobyl-gets-nuclear-so-wrong/#6a7f10ea632f


Why HBO's "Chernobyl" Gets Nuclear So Wrong
[url=safari-reader://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/]Michael Shellenberger[/url]



No, the radiation from Chernobyl didn't hurt your baby.
HBO

Para la traducción al español, haga clic aquí
Za hrvatski prijevod kliknite ovdje
Since the start of HBO’s mini-series about the 1986 nuclear disaster, “Chernobyl,” journalists have praised the series for getting the facts of the event right, even if its creators took some creative liberties.
“The first thing to understand about the HBO mini-series “Chernobyl,” wrote a reporter for The New York Times, “is that a lot of it is made up. But here’s the second, and more important, thing: It doesn’t really matter.”

The reporter notes a similar inaccuracy I wrote about last month: “radiation victims are often covered in blood for some reason.”
But HBO “gets a basic truth right,” he writes, which is that Chernobyl was “more about lies, deceit and a rotting political system than... whether nuclear power is inherently good or bad.”
This is a point that the creator of “Chernobyl,” Craig Mazin, has stressed. “The lesson of Chernobyl isn’t that modern nuclear power is dangerous,” he tweeted. “The lesson is that lying, arrogance, and suppression of criticism are dangerous.”
Representatives of the nuclear industry agree. “Viewers might see the Hollywood treatment and wonder what the relevance is outside the USSR,” writes the Nuclear Energy Institute. “The short answer is: not much.”
Personally, I’m not so sure. Having now watched all five episodes of “Chernobyl,” and seen the public’s reaction to it, I think it’s obvious that the mini-series terrified millions of people about the technology.
“Two weeks after I finished the series, I couldn’t stop thinking about it,” wrote a Vanity Fair reporter. “What stayed with me most were the bodies of the radiation-poisoned first responders, so ravaged by their exposure that they are putrefying slowly, horribly, while clinging to life.”
“I watched the screeners with my husband, and for days afterward we were googling the disaster, sending morbid facts to each other,” writes the Vanity Fairreporter, "while my father... has researched all the active nuclear power plants in the United States.”
“I watched the first episode of Chernobyl,” tweeted Sarah Todd, a sports writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Then I spent a couple of hours reading about nuclear power. Now I’m in a full blown panic and I need someone to explain to me how it is at all okay to live on the east coast when this is the situation.”
Many thought the mini-series was, indeed, about nuclear power.
“But nuclear energy itself is perhaps the show’s most developed character,” writes a reviewer for The New Republic.”It is constantly talked about, its nature endlessly debated and described… It becomes a demon.”
This reaction wasn’t just from journalists. “After finishing Chernobyl I immediately googled to find the nearest power plants,” tweeted one viewer. “Scary.” Said another, “I have watched a lot of gore and horror, but this takes it over the top. Why? Because it could happen again one day.”
“[P]ay attention on what is going on in Belarus,” an artist tweeted to me. “We fear our new nuclear plant because it’s constructed by Russians.
“They dropped 1st reactor from 4m height,” she said. “The 2nd’s shell was damaged during transportation. They installed it anyway. So watching HBO’s Chernobyl, please, consider that it could happen again pretty soon.”
What “Chernobyl” Gets Wrong
In interviews around the release of HBO’s “Chernobyl,” screenwriter and show creator Mazin insisted that his mini-series would stick to the facts. "I defer to the less dramatic version of things,” Mazin said, adding, “you don’t want to cross a line into the sensational."
In truth, “Chernobyl” runs across the line into sensational in the first episode and never looks back.
In one episode, three characters dramatically volunteer to sacrifice their lives to drain radioactive water, but no such event occurred.
“The three men were members of the plant staff with responsibility for that part of the power station and on shift at the time the operation began,” notes Adam Higginbotham, author of, Midnight in Chernobyl, a well-researched new history. “They simply received orders by telephone from the reactor shop manager to open the valves.”
Nor did radiation from the melted reactor contribute to the crash of a helicopter, as is strongly suggested in “Chernobyl.”  There was a helicopter crash but it took place six months later and had nothing to do with radiation. One of the helicopter’s blades hit a chain dangling from a construction crane.
The most egregious of “Chernobyl” sensationalism is the depiction of radiation as contagious, like a virus. The scientist-hero played by Emily Watson physically drags away the pregnant wife of a Chernobyl firefighter dying from Acute Radiation Syndrome (ARS).
“Get out! Get out of here!” Watson screams, as though every second the woman is with her husband she is poisoning her baby.
But radiation is not contagious. Once someone has removed their clothes and been washed, as the firefighters were in real life, and in “Chernobyl,” the radioactivity is internalized.
It is conceivable that blood, urine, or sweat from a victim of ARS could result in some amount of harmful exposure (not infection) but there is no scientific evidence that such a thing occurred during the treatment of Chernobyl victims.
Why, then, do hospitals isolate radiation victims behind plastic screens? Because their immune systems have been weakened and they are at risk of being exposed to something they can’t handle. In other words, the contamination threat is the opposite of that depicted in “Chernobyl.”
The baby dies. Watson says, “The radiation would have killed the mother, but the baby absorbed it instead.” Mazin and HBO apparently believe such an event actually occurred.
HBO tries to clean-up some of the sensationalism with captions at the very end of the series. None note that claiming a baby died by “absorbing” radiation from its father is total and utter pseudoscience.
There is no good evidence that Chernobyl radiation killed a baby nor that it caused any increase in birth defects.
“We’ve now had a chance to observe all the children that have been born close to Chernobyl,” reported UCLA physician Robert Gale in 1987, and “none of them, at birth, at least, has had any detectable abnormalities.”
Indeed, the only public health impact beyond the deaths of the first responders was 20,000 documented cases of thyroid cancer in those aged under 18 at the time of the accident.
The United Nations in 2017 concluded that only 25%, 5,000, can be attributed to Chernobyl radiation (paragraphs A-C). In earlier studies, the UN estimated there could be up to 16,000 cases attributable to Chernobyl radiation.
Since thyroid cancer has a mortality rate of just one percent, that means the expected deaths from thyroid cancers caused by Chernobyl will be 50 to 160 over an 80-year lifespan.
At the end of the show, HBO claims there was “a dramatic spike in cancer rates across Ukraine and Belarus,” but this too is wrong.
Residents of those two countries were “exposed to doses slightly above natural background radiation levels,” according to the World Health Organization. If there are additional cancer deaths they will be “about 0.6% of the cancer deaths expected in this population due to other causes.”
Radiation is not the superpotent toxin “Chernobyl” depicts. In episode one, high doses of radiation make workers bleed, and in episode two, a nurse who merely touches a firefighter sees her hand turn bright red, as though burned. Neither thing occurred or is possible.
“Chernobyl” ominously depicts people gathered on a bridge watching the Chernobyl fire. At the end of the series, HBO claims, “it has been reported that none survived. It is now known as the "Bridge of Death.”
But the “Bridge of Death” is a sensational urban legend and there is no good evidence to support it.
“Chernobyl” is as misleading for what it leaves out. It gives the impression that all Chernobyl first responders who suffered Acute Radiation Syndrome (ARS) died. In reality, 80 percent of those with ARS survived.
It’s clear that even highly educated and informed viewers, including journalists, mistook much of “Chernobyl” fiction for fact.
The New Yorker repeated the claim that a woman’s baby “absorbed radiation” and died. The New Republic described radiation as “supernaturally persistent” and contagious (a “zombie logic, by which anyone who is poisoned becomes poisonous themselves”). The Economist, People, and others repeated the “bridge of death” urban legend.
There is a human cost to these misrepresentations. The notion that people exposed to radiation are contagious was used to terrify, stigmatize, and isolate people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, Chernobyl, and again in Fukushima.
Women in the areas that received low levels of radiation from Chernobyl terminated 100,000 to 200,000 pregnancies in a panic, and those who were exposed to Chernobyl radiation were four times more likely to report anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Why “Chernobyl” Got Nuclear So Wrong
“Chernobyl” is supposedly about the lies, arrogance, and suppression of criticism under Communism, but the mini-series portrays life in the Soviet Union in the 1980s as inaccurately, and melodramatically, as it portrays the effects of radiation.
“There are a lot of people throughout the series who appear to act out of fear of being shot,” notes a writer for The New Yorker. “This is inaccurate: summary executions, or even delayed executions on orders of a single apparatchik, were not a feature of Soviet life after the nineteen-thirties.”
The central tension of the mini-series is the effort by the heroic scientists to discover what caused the Chernobyl reactor to fail but Soviet scientists “were well aware of the faults of the RBMK reactor years before the accident,” notes author Higgenbotham, and “reactor specialists came down from Moscow within 36 hours of the explosion and quickly pinpointed its probable cause.”
But the need for dramatic tension alone can’t explain why “Chernobyl” got nuclear wrong.
Consider how one of the scientist heroes describes radiation: as “a bullet.” He asks us to imagine Chernobyl as “three trillion bullets in the air, water and food… that won’t stop firing for 50,000 years.”
But radiation isn’t like a bullet. If it were we would all be dead since we are every moment being shot by radiation bullets. And some of the people who are exposed to the most bullets, such as residents of Colorado, actually live longer.
What starts in episode one as a bullet evolves through the mini-series into a weapon. “Chernobyl reactor number 4 is now a nuclear bomb,” the hero scientist says, one that goes off “hour after hour” and “will not stop… until the entire continent is dead.”
Until the entire continent is dead? The fear being conjured is, obviously, of nuclear war. As such, “Chernobyl” uses the same trick as every other nuclear disaster movie.
In the 1979 “China Syndrome,” a scientist famously claims that an accident at a nuclear plant "could render an area the size of the state of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable."
Hollywood borrowed the misrepresentation of melting uranium fuel as an exploding nuclear bomb from anti-nuclear leaders like Ralph Nader, who in 1974 claimed, "A nuclear accident could wipe out Cleveland and the survivors would envy the dead."
In the end, HBO’s “Chernobyl” gets nuclear wrong for the same reason humankind as a whole has been getting it wrong for over 60 years, which is that we’ve displaced our fears of nuclear weapons onto nuclear power plants.
In reality, Chernobyl proves why nuclear is the safest way to make electricity. In the worst nuclear power accidents, relatively small amounts of particulate matter escape, harming only a handful of people.
During the rest of the time, nuclear plants are reducing exposure to air pollution, by replacing fossil fuels and biomass. It’s for this reason that nuclear energy has saved nearly two million lives to date.
If there is a silver lining to “Chernobyl” and pseudoscientific dreck like MIT professor Kate Brown’s book, Manual for Survival, it’s come in the form of newly outspoken radiation scientists and honest journalists like Higgenbotham.
“Nuclear power plants emit no carbon dioxide and have been statistically safer than every competing energy industry,” he writes, “including wind turbines.”
As for our exaggerated fears of nuclear weapons, the last 74 years have been the most peaceful of the last 700. As the bomb has spread, deaths from wars and battles have declined by 95%.
Can human consciousness evolve to understand why something so dangerous has made the world so safe?
I’m increasingly hopeful. One of the best books I’ve read lately is an ethnography of nuclear weapons scientists, Nuclear Rites, by an anti-nuclear activist turned anthropologist, Hugh Gusterson.
At the very end, he admits “nuclear deterrence played a key role in averting the genocidal bloodshed of a third world war and if a world full of nuclear weapons is a dangerous place, so in a different way is a world without the terrible discipline enforced by nuclear weapons.”
If Hollywood ever decides to tell the true story of nuclear, and explain for viewers the paradoxical relationship between safety and danger, it won’t need to resort to sensationalism. The truth is sensational enough.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/06/11/top-ucla-doctor-denounces-depiction-of-radiation-in-hbos-chernobyl-as-wrong-and-dangerous/#5ef48be31e07


Top UCLA Doctor Denounces Depiction Of Radiation In HBO's "Chernobyl" As Wrong And "Dangerous"
[url=safari-reader://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/]Michael Shellenberger[/url]

27,803 viewsJun 11, 2019, 11:42am




Robert Gale, MD
Gale

A top US medical doctor who treated radiation victims in Chernobyl has criticized HBO’s depiction of the accident and radiation’s health effects as inaccurate and “dangerous.”
“Another error [in HBO’s “Chernobyl”] was to portray the victims as being dangerously radioactive,” UCLA’s Robert Gale wrote in “The Cancer Letter,” a subscription-based newsletter. 
Gale has been a world-renowned expert on bone marrow transplantation, which is used to treat radiation victims, since before the Chernobyl accident. After the accident, Gale reached out to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who asked Gale to come “immediately.”

“I spent the next two years mostly in the Soviet Union working with my colleagues at the Institute for Biophysics and Clinical Hospital 6 dealing with a bit more than 200 persons with acute radiation exposures,” Gale writes.
“In the subsequent 30 years, I have been involved in several studies of the long-term medical consequences of the accident—initially in the ex-Soviet Union and later in the Russian Federation, Ukraine and Belorussia.”
Gale, who worked for UCLA at the time of the accident, says that the firefighters who suffered from Acute Radiation Syndrome were not contagious, as they are portrayed as by HBO's "Chernobyl."
“Most radiation contamination was superficial and relatively easily managed by routine procedures. This is entirely different than the [1987] Goiania [Brazil] accident, where the victims ate 137-cesium [from an old teletherapy machine] and we had to isolate them from most medical personnel.”
Gale criticizes the portrayal in “Chernobyl” of a baby’s death supposedly from “absorbing” deadly amounts of radiation from her dying father, a firefighter who helped put out the blaze. 
“The radiation would have killed the mother,” says HBO's fictional scientist-hero played by Emily Watson, “but the baby absorbed it instead.” 
“Chernobyl” suggests strongly that the event actually occurred, I noted in my last column, to which a number of readers emailed or tweeted to claim that the event did, in fact, occur. How did they know? Why, it was described in a book, Voices From Chernobyl.
“She looked healthy,” says a character from the book. “But she had cirrhosis of the liver. Her liver had twenty-eight roentgen. Congenital heart disease. Four hours later they told me she was dead."
For many readers those few sentences were apparently proof that a) a baby died, b) an autopsy was conducted, c) the autopsy found elevated radiation levels in the liver and heart disease, d) the radiation was traced to Chernobyl, and e) the results of the autopsy were withheld from scientific authorities but shared with the mother.
But there is no record that the event occurred, and Gale says it could not have happened.
“Lastly, there is the dangerous representation that, because one of the victims was radioactive, his pregnant wife endangered her unborn child by entering his hospital room,” writes Gale. 
“First, as discussed, none of the victims were radioactive; their exposures were almost exclusively external, not internal,” writes Gale. “More importantly, risk to a fetus from an exposure like this is infinitesimally small.”
Even high levels of radiation result in few birth defects, Gale notes. “For example, amongst the several hundred pregnant women exposed to high-dose radiation from the A-bombs, there were only 29 children with attributable developmental defects. All were exposed in the second trimester, when cells are migrating to the brain from the neural crest.”
In HBO’s “Chernobyl,” the radiation victims look terrifying — more like monsters, or zombies, than human. Gale writes, “the effects are portrayed as something horrendous, unimaginable. This is inaccurate.
"In doing haematopoietic cell transplant, we commonly expose people to much higher radiation doses than received by any of the Chernobyl victims. So do radiation therapists. We know what the toxicities are and we are reasonably effective in mitigating them.”
As I noted last month, HBO’s “Chernobyl” misrepresents radiation exposure as the main or only factor behind the deaths of 29 firefighters. In reality, writes Gale, there were “synchronous injuries” that “make people more susceptible to radiation damage [and] can kill people even if you successfully reverse the radiation-induced damage.” 
Fear-mongering, Gale noted, resulted in many women unnecessarily terminating their pregnancies. 
“We estimate incorrect advice from physicians regarding the relationship between maternal radiation exposure from Chernobyl and birth defects,” writes Gale, “resulted in more than one million unnecessary abortions in the Soviet Union and Europe. Ignorance is dangerous.”
The very same doctors whose advice encouraged one million women to seek abortions are also behind the claims by groups ranging from Greenpeace to Helen Caldicott to MIT historian Kate Brown that many more people died from Chernobyl radiation than experts, the World Health Organization and the United Nations, found.
Gale knew that fear and panic would create more harm than radiation and so “I later brought my family to Kiev to reassure people there was no need to evacuate.”
Most radiation victims survived, Gale notes. “Our scorecard treating the 204 victims was reasonably good. Sadly, 29 died but we could rescue 175 (86 percent).  If we include the two immediate deaths at the Chernobyl NPF, there were 31 deaths.”
Gale used a novel treatment method, which he tested on himself. “One interesting intervention, suggested by Prof. David Golde (UCLA) was  use of a molecularly cloned haematopoietic growth factor,” writes Gale. 
“Sargramostim had been tested in dogs and monkeys to increase granulocytes, but had not been given to humans. We brought it into the Soviet Union from Switzerland—hidden in a passenger’s checked luggage with the permission of a Politburo Chernobyl commission,” Gale writes.
“The problem was the Soviets didn’t want the Chernobyl victims to be the first humans to receive a new therapy. The solution was for Vorobiev and I to inject one another with sargramostim,” writes Gale.
“We lived and so, we got permission to proceed.”
“I’m amazed the producers didn’t get technical advice from a health physicist or radiobiologist rather than basing much of their screenplay on a novel (Voices of Chernobyl),” write Gale.
In his article, Gale takes issue with the portrayal of Soviet authorities as reluctant to seek outside help.
“I was immediately invited to come to Moscow and shortly thereafter to bring three colleagues,” Gale writes. “In my experience dealing with nuclear accidents, this is rather unusual and indicates a desire to do everything possible to help the victims—throwing politics to the wind. And whilst in Moscow, we were free to expropriate supplies and equipment from many Russian medical centers.”
“Even more extraordinary, when I requested the Soviets allow me to bring in an Israeli scientist to help (there were no diplomatic relations with Israel at the time), they agreed, albeit with some arm-twisting.”
Gale says the accident was impossible to cover-up, as portrayed by HBO. "Anyone looking at the destroyed reactor building, mass of firefighting equipment, and personnel streaming into the reactor complex—the smoke from the fire clearly visible from Pripyat about 4 km away etc.—I cannot imagine anyone would try to cover this up. It would be like standing in lower Manhattan after destruction of the Twin Towers and pretending there was no problem."
"All governments try to contain bad news of this type," notes Gale. "I see rather little difference between the initial U.S. government reaction to the Three Mile Island (TMI) accident, the initial Japan government reaction to the Fukushima-Daiichi accident, and the Soviet response to Chernobyl."
“Although the 31 immediate Chernobyl-related deaths are sad,” he concludes, “the number of fatalities is remarkably small compared with many energy-related accidents, such as the Benxihu coal mine disaster in China 1942, which killed about 1500 miners, and the 1975 Banqiao dam accident, also in China, which killed about 250,000 people.”
“About 15,000 people reportedly die mining coal every year, although the true number may be much higher, and this figure does not consider morbidity from occupational hazards such as coal workers’ pneumoconiosis (black lung disease).
“About 1 million Egyptians are estimated to have become blind from trachoma because of construction of the Aswan High Dam. For reference, about 400 Americans are estimated to die on the highway over Memorial Day weekend.”