If the Chernobyl disaster held one lesson, Mikhail Gorbachev wrote in 2006 on the catastrophe’s 20th anniversary, it was that nuclear devastation – whether caused by an accident or the deployment of a weapon – is far more horrifying than the world seemed to realize. Yet countries around the world continue to cling to nuclear technology.
China has begun to build a parallel international order, centered on itself. If the European Union aids in its construction – even just by positioning itself on the fault line between China and the United States – it risks toppling key pillars of its own edifice and, eventually, collapsing altogether.
Now that the old rules governing macroeconomic cycles no longer seem to apply, it remains to be seen what might cause the next recession in the United States. But if recent history is our guide, the biggest threat stems not from the US Federal Reserve or any one sector of the economy, but rather from the White House.
Amid much discussion of the challenges facing the Chinese economy, the line-up of usual suspects typically excludes the most worrying scenario of all: popular unrest. While skeptics would contend that widespread protest against the regime and its policies is unlikely, events elsewhere suggest that China is not immune.
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MOSCOW – The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl 20 years ago this month, even more than my launch of perestroika, was perhaps the main cause of the Soviet Union’s collapse five years later. Indeed, the Chernobyl catastrophe was a historic turning point: there was the era before the disaster, and there is the very different era that has followed.
The morning of the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear station on April 26, 1986, the Politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union met to discuss the situation and organized a government commission to control the situation and ensure that serious measures were taken, particularly regarding the health of people in the disaster zone. Moreover, the Academy of Science established a group of leading scientists, who were immediately dispatched to the Chernobyl region.
At that point, the Politburo did not have an accurate and complete picture of the situation. But it was the general consensus that, in the spirit of the already-established glasnost policy, we should openly share information upon receiving it. Claims that the Politburo concealed information about the disaster are thus far from true.
PS 25
25 years of the World's Opinion PageProject Syndicate celebrates its 25th anniversary with PS 25, a collection of our hardest-hitting commentaries so far.
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