Hello Stalkers!
We continue our little series with real-life stories that we smuggled into the game.
As we mentioned, many of these stories can be heard during dialogues with comrades in the base. For example, Olga will at some point mention something about "cloud seeding" and how her mother witnessed fighter jets shooting silver iodide bullets into the clouds. Causing rainfall was a common practice in the countries of the former Soviet Union and beyond, but on the eve of the Chernobyl Disaster it took an especially dark turn. The main goal was to make the rain wash down the radioactive particles from the deadly cloud before it could reach Moscow. As a result, smaller towns and villages in Ukraine and Belarus suffered the most from ensuing contamination.
Another scary anecdote takes us more to the Far East. Our good friend Olivier mentions something that he heard in passing. “Did you know that the medical data collected after the nuclear attack on Japan was classified? (...) An American diplomat I met told me about it. He said the US military was surprised by the lethality of the radioactive fallout. After all, the Americans put over $ 20 billion into the Manhattan Project. After an amazing victory, they could not publicly admit how dangerous their weapons were to civilians. Even the US troops that helped the Japanese rebuild were sick. So the Americans confiscated all medical records - both American and Japanese - and kept them secret."
However, it's not just medical data. Information about the terrible effects of nuclear weapons, especially the effects of radiation and accompanying diseases, was censored by Americans and reached the wider public only to a limited extent. During the first post-war years in the USA, no photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombing were included in the publications, because the army was very careful about it. Some of the photos appeared for the first time in September 1952 in the magazine "Life", causing considerable consternation and shock to the readers. Some people admited that although they knew, like all Americans, about the bombing of japanese cities, they did not imagine the extent of the destruction and the enormity of human suffering. If you would like to learn more on the subject of the medical effects of an atomic attack on Japan, please refer to the document "Medical Effects of Atomic Bombs the Report of the Joint Commission for the Investigation of the Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan".
Moving on to a different story: have any of you ever heard of Pamir? Well, it's basically a nuclear power plant on wheels that got Mikhail quite excited in one of the conversations with the protagonist of Chernobylite. “Imagine a convoy of huge trailers. One with a reactor, one with a gas turbine, the third with a control room, and the fourth with staff."
Pamir-630D (as the full name sounds like) was supposed to be a Soviet mobile nuclear reactor. We kid you not! In the years 1976-1985, the Institute of Nuclear Energy of the Academy of Sciences of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic conducted research and in the early 1980s, two prototypes were built, which at that time represented the world's only "nuclear power plant on wheels".
In appearance, the Pamir-630D was a set of two multi-tonne trailers suspended on a military tractor MAZ-796. Behind a solid metal wall a 630-kW reactor and a turbojet device were placed. The other two vehicles were equipped with a "Minsk" control computer and a cabin that could accommodate 28 people. All-terrain vehicles were designed to take the Pamir-630B anywhere in the far north, traversing the tundra and swamps with ease. The installation was supposed to be operational at the lowest ambient temperature. The creators of Pamir have implemented the most compact single nuclear loop program. Unlike most other small nuclear power plants, the coolant was not water and steam, but a dissociated gaseous "nitro" based on dinitrogen tetroxide. According to the designers' vision, the device was to work continuously for 2,000 hours. As a result, one of the two Pamirs ran for 3,000 hours, although its capacity was lower than planned. Nuclear fuel inventory would last for a few years.
Despite quite decent performance, the project was scrapped. There were two reasons. The first was the Chernobyl disaster, which led to the cancellation of the government-approved small-scale power generation program. Belarusians, who also felt the effects of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion, have stopped testing the Pamir in their territories. The second reason was quite prosaic: funding problems. The design of mobile nuclear devices may have looked good on paper, but ultimately no country in the 1990s had enough money to build them.
More real-life stories from Chernobylite are coming in the next reports ;)
That's it for today!
Take care, Stalkers!
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