The word technology has numerous meanings which are determined by who is using it. To a young doctor, technology might consist of this year’s version of the flu shot. To a child, technology might consist of an image of a robot, somewhat square and most definitely silver. To an elderly person, technology might just be the computer mouse that they are trying to learn how to use. Technology is all encompassing: from computers to pens, to pencils, to phones, to toothpaste. Nevertheless, technology also includes guns, bombs, nuclear energy, and much more that could be potentially dangerous in the wrong hands. But then the question is: whose hands are the wrong hands? While some might say that weapons and knowledge of this power should remain
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Were the Soviets not acknowledging the consequences of Chernobyl by trying to keep a large population calm in the midst of a crisis? In his article Apocalypse: What Disasters Reveal, Junot Diaz explores the reasoning behind why the world’s disasters occur. He says: “disasters don’t just happen. They are always made possible by a series of often-invisible societal choices” (Diaz 3). I would like to draw attention to the word “choices” that Diaz uses. While the meltdown of the nuclear reactor was not a choice, the results that made Chernobyl the disaster that it was - the deaths, and the after effects of the radiation - were created by choice. By restricting the information given to the public it is evident that even government figures, who had initiated the development of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in the first place, had little regard for how this nuclear radiation would affect the citizens of the Soviet Union. The government sent many people to work in radiated areas near the reactor. To further that, most people ignored the fact that they were slowly dying because of the land they were living on because they had no idea what radiation was. As Diaz explains, “disasters don’t just happen”, and if the Soviet government had given more thought to the consequences of exposing citizens to nuclear radiation then perhaps Chernobyl would have never been considered a disaster in the first
Were the Soviets not acknowledging the consequences of Chernobyl by trying to keep a large population calm in the midst of a crisis? In his article Apocalypse: What Disasters Reveal, Junot Diaz explores the reasoning behind why the world’s disasters occur. He says: “disasters don’t just happen. They are always made possible by a series of often-invisible societal choices” (Diaz 3). I would like to draw attention to the word “choices” that Diaz uses. While the meltdown of the nuclear reactor was not a choice, the results that made Chernobyl the disaster that it was - the deaths, and the after effects of the radiation - were created by choice. By restricting the information given to the public it is evident that even government figures, who had initiated the development of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in the first place, had little regard for how this nuclear radiation would affect the citizens of the Soviet Union. The government sent many people to work in radiated areas near the reactor. To further that, most people ignored the fact that they were slowly dying because of the land they were living on because they had no idea what radiation was. As Diaz explains, “disasters don’t just happen”, and if the Soviet government had given more thought to the consequences of exposing citizens to nuclear radiation then perhaps Chernobyl would have never been considered a disaster in the first