LAST EDITED ON Jun-12-24 AT 08:33 PM (EDT)
 
I'm relistening the Audible edition of Adam Higginbotham's Midnight in Chernobyl at the moment. At one point in the narrative, a few days after the reactor explosion, it contains a description of an actual international conversation that happened, and which could possibly be paraphrased thus:

WEST GERMANY
Uh hey, USSR? We're getting a Scheißetonne of weird radionuclides in the wind coming from your neighborhood. WTF is going on?

SWEDEN
Yeah, we've noticed that too. What gives?

THE SOVIET UNION
Nothing! Everything is fine. Listen, never mind about that--what do you know about fighting graphite fires? Like really big graphite fires? That are radioactive? Asking for a friend.

Ah, those wily Soviet diplomats. The West will never make the connection.

--G.
NARRATOR: The West made the connection.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

And they never stopped lying. One of the more darkly hilarious moments in the Chernobyl miniseries from HBO takes place in episode 4, involving the attempt to utilize a West German police robot to clear chunks of graphite from the roof of Reactor No. 4. An attempt that lasted less than an hour before the radiation fried the robot's electronics, rendering it a hunk of radioactive scrap that still sits in a junk heap in the Exclusion Zone. The remnants of Reactor No. 4 were still belching out roughly 15,000 roentgen of radiation, yet what was the number the Central Committee fed to their West German counterparts?

2000 roentgen.

>2000 roentgen.

To be fair, that's at least admitting there's a problem, unlike 3.6 roentgen.

"There has been an... incident on Praxis."

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Ah, Chernobyl. There was no cause for alarm.

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.