Citas Petryna -i-

- Biological Citizenship: The Science and Politics of Chernobyl-Exposed Populations-

"Most scientists today would agree that given the state of technology at the time of the disaster, specialists "did not how to make an objective assessment of what had happened." Tom Sullivan, who until recently directed the Atmospheric Release Advosory Capability (ARAC) group at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in Livermore, California, agrees with this general appraisal. (...) "A 200 by 200 kilometer area had been sufficient to model prior radiation releases," he told me. "We did the imaging near the Chernobyl plant using this 200 kilometer square grid, but the grid was so saturated, I mean, you couldn't even make sense of it because every place had these enormously high radiation values.... Our codes were not prepared for an event of this magnitude."

Soviet scientists, too, were unprepared, but they did not admit their ignorance. In an August 1986 meeting with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), they presented a crude analysis of the distribution of radiation in the Zone of Exclusion and in the Soviet Union: "assessments were made of the actual of the actual and future radiation doses received by the populations of towns, villages, and other inhabited places. As a result of these and other measures, it proved possible to keep exposures within the established limits."

The issue at stake is the state' capacity to produce and use scientific knowledge and nonknowledge to maintain political order."