“What’s it like, radiation? Maybe they show it in the movies? Have you seen it? Is it white, or what? Some people say it has no color and no smell, and other people say that it’s black. Like earth. But if it’s colorless, then it’s like God. God is everywhere, but you can’t see Him.” Like so many others affected by the meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the interviewee in Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl, struggled to grasp how something too small to be perceived by our senses could have such an enormous effect on human affairs.
Author: Mariana Budjeryn
Mariana Budjeryn, Ph.D, research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center and visiting professor at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt is writing a book on Ukraine’s nuclear disarmament. | Twitter: @mbudjeryn