Final Warning: The Legacy of Chernobyl

...In the company of Hammer, Gale gets to meet with Gorbachev, with U.S...

...W hile frightening people about nuclear power plants in general, the authors seem oblivious to the fact that Soviet RBMK reactors of the kind that exploded at Chernobyl are unstable and uncontained systems, designed to produce plutonium for bombs, and therefore unacceptably dangerous by the standards applied to commercial power plants in America and Western Europe...

...Final Warning, told in the first person by Dr...

...Gale in an arena where he is technically competent instead of naive, and where the same impulses that drive his concerns about nuclear energy are passionately directed to saving lives...

...In press interviews, television panels, and other public discussions of nuclear energy, individuals with genuine credentials and experience are increasingly overlooked in favor of charismatic self-promoters and politically motivated alarmists...

...Gale and written with attorney and journalist Thomas Hauser, reads more like two books than one...

...The more successful sections of Final Warning steer clear of technical and political matters and dwell instead on Dr...

...Gale also interrupts his narrative to bore the reader over an entire chapter with the details of his utterly banal upbringing in Flatbush, Brooklyn and career at Hobart College where "I did well academically and broadened my intellectual interests, moving beyond science to study philosophy, literature, and other aspects of Western Civilization...

...Gale, unfortunately, comments on the action with the conviction that he has at last reached his rightful level of importance on the world stage...

...In keeping with the book's title, the authors begin by arguing that the Chernobyl accident (from which thirty-one people died) provides a final warning of "how deadly nuclear power can be and how helpless the world is when radiation rages wild...

...A different writer might have found occasion for irony in this sudden leap into circles of power and wealth...

...More significant, however, is that Dr...

...Gale's leap from relative obscurity outside of hematology circles to newfound celebrity as the Dr...

...Because the authors make an illogical leap from their reports on Chernobyl to pronouncements on the dangers of nuclear weapons and calls for the U. S. government to participate in "meaningful arms reduction," one might think they would pay attention to the fact that power and weapons production are part of a single industry in the USSR, but kept separate in the United States...

...Kildare of Pravda and Soviet TV provides another promising story line...

...Thus Dr...

...The tone of alarm continues as the reader is told that a nuclear power plant meltdown in the United States would kill 27,000 people and seriously injure another 73,000...

...The first book, comprising the first and last chapters of the larger volume, is a sketchy and misleading sermon on the dangers of nuclear energy that is likely to confuse lay readers looking for lessons from Chernobyl...

...Nor do they care 45 to address the plain fact that nuclear power as practiced outside the Warsaw pact poses considerably less risk to public health and safety than the alternatives for bulk generation of electricity...

...Here we see Dr...

...The final product here might be consigned to the same shelf with diet books, hospital soap operas, and other unsuccessful stabs at immortality by hambone surgeons and ear, nose, and throat specialists...

...Robert Peter Gale, a specialist in bone marrow transplants at the UCLA Medical Center, joined a team of Western physicians and scientists asked by the Soviets to assist in the treatment of radiation victims from the Chernobyl nuclear accident...

...Similarly, the reader is warned that a single atom of plutonium from the Chernobyl accident could find its way into an American citizen's lungs and eventually cause cancer...

...One only wishes for more detail on the prognosis and progress of individual patients, which would allow the reader to get more involved in the story of their treatment...

...Nothing short of a role in influencing the most crucial issues of our day will suffice for Dr...

...Gale, who has appeared in California as a kind of unclothed, ignorant, pop celebrity-emperor for all those committed and committable anti-nuclearists who were put on this earth to save us...

...Gale's grandiosity makes him eager to comment on nuclear issues about which he knows very little, and where he continually confuses his exquisite fears and concerns with practical decisions related to the defense and energy policies of the United States...

...From the start, Gale and Hauser demonstrate that they don't understand what happened at Chernobyl and how it relates to the nuclear technology we Jonathan Cohen is a science writer living in Palo Alta California...

...The second book is Dr...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1988 use to generate electricity in the United States...

...Correspondingly, the kinds of misrepresentations and confusions that characterize Final Warning have steadily gained currency in the United States and Western Europe over the past two decades, providing impetus for an irrational political movement that lumps all things nuclear into a single object of superstition and dread...

...Gale's experience treating gravelyinjured Soviet firefighters and plant workers, many of whom heroically sacrificed themselves to both ionizing radiation and blistering heat in efforts to put out the fires that followed the accident...

...However, they show no awareness of this information and choose not to dwell on the fact that the Chernobyl accident could not happen in a U.S...

...but Dr...

...Secretary of State Shultz, with John Denver, and to fly around the world on Hammer's private Boeing 727...

...46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1988...

...As if these expressions of unabashed self-esteem weren't enough, Dr...

...The seriousness of the subject matter, however, and the emergence in the media of Dr...

...power plant...

...By the time Dr...

...Gale's rather self-impressed account of his role-in the mercy mission and fling as a celebrity in the Soviet Union...

...The fact that these figures represent a highly dubious, worst-imaginable case that could be expected once in every 100,000 meltdowns (every million years or so) is left unsaid...

...Gale tells us that "I have as much if not more insight into global affairs than most people," that Secretary Shultz "is one of the few people in the forefront of the Reagan administration whom I regard as a top-notch professional," that the state of Israel deserves to exist, that the Statue of Liberty Centennial Celebration was inappropriately reverent to "sacred ideals," and that he would not consider leaving the Soviet Union "without paying tribute to the victims of Babi Yar...

...Although most of the critically injured Soviets he treats with experimental bone marrow transplants eventually die, his singlemindedness in affording these heroes their best chance at survival is enough to generate some compelling medical drama...

...Gale's work with his patients is finished and he is on a jet back to Los Angeles, the reader is likelyto feel that he too is confined on a long journey with a talkative and insufferably self-enamored ass...

...Gale and other non-authorities as prominent spokesmen on matters of nuclear policy, make bad books like this one important...

...Taken under the wing of Armand Hammer, Gale is presented as a kind of gift to Gorbachev and other party luminaries with whom Hammer cuts his deals, much in the style that other capitalists provide call girls to foreign VIPs...

...Unmentioned is that said atom has about one-quadrillionth of a chance of harming anyone, leaving the citizen much more at risk from asteroid collisions or polar bears escaped from the local zoo...