The first million is the hardest...

Ace Hoffman
April 26th, 2011

Today is the 25th anniversary of Chernobyl. Today, a quarter century ago, the ruthless murder of a million people began. And the cover-up.

How quickly we forget! How destined we are to repeat!

Today's commemorations around the world might have gone practically unnoticed by the mainstream media, save perhaps for a 60-second spot about a decaying sarcophagus, were it not for Fukushima.

Today we honor and remember the already-dead from Chernobyl:

1) The "liquidators" who helped clean it up (about 800,000 young men) who now die like flies of cancer, leukemia, and a thousand other stranger ailments.

2) The local citizens who were not told for a week or more that anything was wrong, even while the rest of the world knew because a nuclear reactor power company in Sweden had alerted the "free" public (that is, the Western media) several days after Chernobyl exploded, after the ill winds tripped their own monitors.

3) The people around the world who also MUST have died, in addition to the million who lived nearer the plant or were among the liquidators.

4) The descendents, for at least seven generations, of all these people -- that's how far the DNA is likely to show damage, perhaps even further down the line.

"The million" are only the ones that were reasonably easy to count. I use the term "easy" very relatively: WHO wouldn't count them -- for five years they didn't even start to take a half-hearted look. IAEA wouldn't count them (and probably prevented WHO from doing so). It would be bad for the promotion of nuclear power, their mandate and perceived mission. The nuclear industry didn't want them counted. The nuke-loving cash-strapped secretive militaristic Russian government certainly didn't want them counted. Nobody wanted them counted.

So they weren't counted. Not easily, unless the term is relative. People halfway around the world, not under Soviet censorship, propaganda, or oppression, were NEVER counted by anyone. Billions of Curies, tens of thousands of terabecquerels... didn't just disappear. Many of them were breathed in by someone. They killed people all over the world, and still do. So will Fukushima Daiichi.

Cover-ups and lies hide the million-dead from the ongoing Chernobyl horror. Some say it's only tens of thousands, some say "merely" thousands, and some -- the nuclear industry in America, for instance-- just three or four dozen.

Nobody says, "nobody died at Chernobyl" like they (lie) and say about Three Mile Island.

Until last month Chernobyl was the worst industrial accident in human history -- unless you believe the lies.

New pictures have reportedly been released of Fukushima Daiichi Unit 3 -- the MOX reactor -- indicating the reactor pressure vessel itself had exploded last month (see Jeff's article, below).

The nuclear industry represents a small fraction of 1% of the human work force, even in America or France. These people could all be building wind turbines, except for those people who will have to guard the waste -- a cost society must incur forevermore, and which keeps getting more and more costly, and will continue to do so, at least until we stop making more waste every day.

It's time to stop the assault on human and other life. It's time to turn off the nukes.

Forced down our throats, and paid well to work there, society gave it a try.

Nuclear power has failed miserably. It's not enough to prevent new reactors, or even to prevent relicensing -- one unit at Fukushima had just been relicensed for another ten years just weeks before the catastrophe began. It's not enough to wait months and months for the "lessons learned" from Fukushima. It's not enough to be promised improvements, changes, more and better backup systems. All those are nice. But we need to close the reactors down forever.

Sincerely,

Ace Hoffman
Carlsbad, CA

The author. 54. has, like you, seen far too many nuclear disasters (one is too many). Visit his web site: www.acehoffman.org to read his book online or as a free download: "The Code Killers", about the many ways the nuclear industry destroys humanity.