Photographer farflungphotos describes:

All the stations in Moscow’s metro are completely different from one another. Some of them are so opulent, with grand marble halls and chandeliers, all hidden away underground. People seemed to be using them as places just to hang out and meet up with friends. The trains were really frequent too, practically on each others tails. You never have to wait more than a few minutes for one to come along.

Sure, Clinton played his sax on TV, Bush groped Angela Merkel, but Boris Yeltsin gave speeches drunk, tossed women into the water, danced on stage, and generally did all manner of laughable things. But he also turned back a hardline coup by jumping atop a tank and dragged Russia kicking and screaming toward democracy.

Not since cigar chomping, Scotch drinking Winston Churchill led Britain through World War II has the world had a more colorful leader. The Canadian Broadcasting Company called it “strange behavior,” noting:

Yeltsin’s behaviour became increasingly bizarre during his years in office as rumours of excessive drinking swirled. In 1994, the burly, bear-like Yeltsin jumped on the stage during a visit to Germany to conduct a brass band while singing and dancing. Later the same year, he failed to get off a plane during an official visit to Ireland. Russian officials told Irish officials that Yeltsin was unwell, while the common belief among journalists covering the visit was that he was drunk.

In 1997, he unexpectedly announced during a visit to Sweden that he would cut Russia’s nuclear arsenal by one-third and work toward a total world ban on nuclear weapons. Russian officials scrambled to correct the president.

The following year, during a banquet with Pope John Paul II, Yeltsin toasted his “love of Italian women,” and on another occasion, played wooden spoons on the balding head of Askar Akayev, the president of ex-Soviet state Kyrgyzstan.

He made headlines in Canada for taking former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney boar hunting in 1993, a move that angered animal activists.

Yeltsin was born to a poor peasant family in the Ural mountains and studied engineering and worked as a construction manager before joining the Communist party.

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I’m not going to make this point well, but let me try.

Now that we’ve recognized the long tail of violence and the “open source insurgency” and seen the Hezbollah missile threat, it’s hard not to imagine a growing threat from enemy or terrorist missiles. In short, as technology becomes cheaper, the weapons people can use against us become more complex.

Iran and North Korea have been developing and testing missiles for some time, but the 800 pound gorilla here is Russia.

US hubris lead to the downing of a U-2 spy plane in 1960 by a salvo of Russian S-75 Dvina surface to air missiles, revealing how advanced the Russian technology was.

Thus began a small conflict that pitted Russian missile designers against US aircraft designers, each trying to neutralize or circumvent the other’s technology.

So today, in the context of US missile defense plans and increasingly sophisticated adversaries, I wonder if we shouldn’t take a moment to think about where we’re going.

Here are some facts: our missile defense system tests have yet to show any success, and those who know are saying it’s a losing battle.

Add to that Russian pride in their recently tested Topol-M missile, designed “to subdue USA’s $50-billion air defense.”

“[T]he missile performs unpredictable flight maneuvers,” making interception impossible. “The successful test launch of the Topol-M missile has proved that the up-to-date Russian warhead is capable of subduing the USA’s air defense, Russian military specialists say.”

The Topol-M test was performed in early 2006 in central Kazakhstan. Western response was largely silent, with two exceptions. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists noted:

As we predicted two years ago, the emerging U.S. antiballistic missile defense system has provoked a direct Russian response. Missile defense appears to be a major part of Russia’s decision to retain multiple-warhead ICBMs and to develop new weapons capabilities.

And the British American Security Information Council’s Missile Defense Update remarked:

Russia [has] successfully developed and tested a new generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) with multi-targeted independent vehicle (MIRV) warheads that could penetrate any ABM system in the world, including the US system.

So where does this end? Where is our time and money best spent? Should we build a largely ineffective missile shield, against which our adversaries will build ever more sophisticated (and deadly) missiles?

abm, ant-ballistic missile system, icbm, ied, iran, long tail, missile, missile defense, missile testing, missiles, north korea, russia, violence

Mark Nelson’s Pripyat series on flickr is full of the pictures of desolation that people seem to be looking for as we solemnly honor the twentieth anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster.

Google added high-resolution satellite photos of the area yesterday, and Pripyat.com offers both stories and photo galleries to help us remember.

It is there that I learned that Rimma Kiselica, the woman who has guided so many of those who’ve reported from the dead-zone, died on March 19.

Meanwhile, it turns out that people have started to graffiti the town. Mary Mycio, who wrote Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl, takes great offense at such things:

For someone like me, who considers Pripyat a monument — with universal lessons about folly, tragedy and our complex relationship with our planet — this approaches desecration.

While I respect Pripyat as a monument, Mark’s picture above does make me wonder. In a command economy, who orders somebody to make bumper cars or other carnival rides? How did the Soviet system work for such things?

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Twenty years ago today at 1:23:44, the Chernobyl NPP reactor number four exploded. Five thousand tons of lead, sand, and other materials were dropped on the resulting fire in an attempt to stop the spread of the radioactive cloud. The world learned of the accident when Western European nuclear facilities identified radiation anomalies and traced them to the Chernobyl plant, forcing the USSR to make its first public announcement on the matter.

By November, the ruined reactor was entombed in a sarcophagus, and the irradiated equipment abandoned nearby, but the human scale of the disaster remains enormous to this day.

Despite this, a thread of fascination with the abandoned cities, especially near-by Pripyat, pervades much of the peer-produced work related to Chernobyl (David McMillan’s photos are an outstanding example). Day tours of the area are available from SAM Travel Company Ukraine (and maybe here too, but where are the booking details?).

Because of the need for power, the remaining reactors of Chernobyl NPP were kept in operation until 2000, and and even now there are 12 RBMK reactors like those at Chernobyl in operation in Russia and Lithuania. Safety (and training, I hope) is said to have improved. Westron, a joint venture between Westinghouse and Hartron, is bringing Western-style safety systems to Eastern European power plants, even though they often get paid in IOUs. (Sadly, “Western-style safety” may not mean what it used to. Practice here.)

Search MaisonBisson for more nuclear related stories.

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Nearly 20 years after the initial events of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of April 26 1986, the story is still unfolding. This month’s National Geographic Magazine tells of the “long shadow of Chernobyl” — grown children of the disaster now fear having their own children while some elderly residents return to their old homes inside the 1,000 square mile, still contaminated “exclusion zone.” The print article seemed to offer hope, noting that even the pines of the “red forest” — so called because they received so much radiation that it bleached the chlorophyl from them, and some say the trees actually glowed — are beginning to grow back now. But the multimedia companion materials tell a somewhat more morose tale.

A note at ibiblio, however, brings to mind how different our world was in 1986:

Chernobyl has become a metaphor not only for the horror of uncontrolled nuclear power but also for the collapsing Soviet system and its reflexive secrecy and deception, disregard for the safety and welfare of workers and their families, and inability to deliver basic services such as health care and transportation, especially in crisis situations. The Chernobyl catastrophe derailed what had been an ambitious nuclear power program and formed a fledgling environmental movement into a potent political force in Russia as well as a rallying point for achieving Ukrainian and Belorussian independence in 1991.

Time Magazine did a ten year retrospective and has an index to coverage, but Wikipedia’s entry is rich with detail and potential lessons.

One of the most interesting lessons may be that the reactor was not designed in ignorance of the instability that eventually caused the Chernobyl disaster, but as a reasoned and calculated approach to the problems of the time (makes me wonder what Henry Petroski would say about it). The reactor was designed to operate using light water and un-enriched natural uranium, a technical marvel so unique that the wikipedia entry on heavy water explains:

Heavy water is used in certain types of nuclear reactors where it acts as a neutron moderator to slow down neutrons so that they can react with the uranium in the reactor. Light water also acts as a moderator but because light water absorbs neutrons, reactors using light water must use enriched uranium rather than natural uranium, otherwise criticality is impossible. In effect to achieve criticality in a reactor, one must enrich either the moderator or the fuel.

Because uranium enrichment and heavy water production are both complex and costly, it’s easy to imagine the engineers proud of their accomplishment and accountants relieved. It’s the sort of scene that looks different in retrospect, but one that we’re quite familiar with.

The biggest lesson may be that the best plans and procedures can never be substituted for well trained, knowledgeable people. In this case, the plant’s operators had no training on the peculiarities of the reactor design, and so had no way of knowing how non-standard operations during the planned test would change the operating characteristics, safety, and stability of the reactor.

It is a sad irony that the reactor actually became less-stable during low-power operations, and sadder still that the operators had neither any knowledge of this, nor any indication of it in the control room.

And all of that was made worse by the fact that in the immediate aftermath of the explosion, operators had no way of knowing that the reactor had been breached, and they were all receiving deadly doses of radiation as high as 20,000 roentgen per hour.

Kerry Cupit’s Chernobyl gallery begins with a photo from that first day following the explosion at 1:23:47 that morning. While the plant operators were doubtful of any radiation risk, the firefighters and later “liquidators” were told nothing of it. The extreme levels of radiation were described by one firefighter as “tasting like metal.” He died soon after.

It wasn’t until the night following the explosion, with two people already dead and fifty-two hospitalized, that officials finally acknowledged the scale of the danger and ordered the the evacuation of Pripyat and the surrounding area.

The evacuation left a ghost town. And despite the disaster, this empty landscape has captured our imaginations. The fictitious story of Elena, the “kidd of speed” who toured the exclusion zone on motorcycle became legend in 2004, thanks largely to the eerie and dramatic photos of abandoned Pripyat.

Architectural photographer Robert Polidori visited in 2001. The resulting book, Zones of Exclusion: Pripyat and Chernobyl, is a study of the haunting desolation and, perhaps, of the serene beauty of these modern ghost towns. Jury Kosin’s Chernobyl album reminds us of the people consumed by the disaster. The photo at the top, of the secondary school south of Chernobyl, comes from Greenpeace.

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I regularly check the English language online edition of Pravda for laughs and sometimes for their take on US domestic affairs. But today’s headline left me scratching my head. What calendar are these people using, anyway?

The headlined story is offered without any context or explanation. As it turns out, author Ian Magnussen really did mean February 5th 2006, not 2007 or later. Had it appeared two months ago it might have been called speculative fiction, though more likely seen as a crazy conspiracy theory. I just find it a bit scary. But still, why publish it now?

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I don’t remember exactly why I found myself looking up Moscow’s Ostankino Tower, a 1772 ft (540 m) tall radio-television tower. Compared to the world’s tallest buildings, it’s taller than all the greats: the Taipei 101, the Sears Tower, Empire State Building, though some people keep towers — even those with observation platforms — in a category separate from skyscrapers.

So what’s a tower enthusiast to do? Go take a look at the World Federation of Great Towers (also at Wikipedia). That’s how I found the Olympic Tower, in Montreal.

The Federation makes no distinction between towers and skyscrapers. Well, actually, there are some distinctions. Here’s their membership criteria:

• Structures must have the shape of a tower
• Structures must be symbolic of tourism in the town or country where they are situated
• Structures must have an Observation or Viewing Deck, with the purpose of receiving tourists at the Tower
• The construction of the tower must be completed and the tower open and functioning as an observatory/public venue

Oh, there’s a $1500 annual membership fee. And, yeah, there are a few conspicuous absences. It’s not clear if they don’t meet the criteria, or if they just don’t pay, but you won’t find Petronas Towers, or Sears, or a lot of others in the in the list. So back to Wikipedia for their list of the world’s tallest structures, including radio towers, chimneys, pylons, minarets, oil platforms, silos, buildings in-progress, and skyscrapers that aren’t eligible for World Federation of Great Towers.

But as great and tall as all these things may be, they still have nothing on our Warren Rocket.

tags: broadcast tower, empire state building, great towers, kvly-tv mast, moscow, ostankino tower, oylmpic tower, radio television tower, russia, sears tower, taipei 101, tallest, tallest structures, tallest towers, world federation of great towers, world record, world’s tallest

Don’t worry. I’m right on top of whatever happens in Pravda, the leading newspaper of the Russian Federation. Or, at least, I’m right on top of whatever they report in their English language version. The thing that had me choking on my onion and boursin cheese bagel this morning was the story headlined FBI arrests another spy in the White House, ‘prevents’ Philippine revolution. The whole Philippine thing is entertaining and laughable on its own, but further down in the story the reader will find so many layers of irony and amusement as to spray their breakfast cereal about the room.

Both the US and Russia have had their McCarthies, their purges, and spies, so a harkening back to McCarthyism might be chuckle-worthy. But then the author, Ivan Shmelev, drops the hammer. Here it is:

The CIA’s and FBI’s “success” in the struggle against spies can probably be interpreted as an attempt of the services to put a good face on things against the harsh criticism of unprofessional work in connection with the investigation of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. More and more reports about the background of the horrendous attacks surface in the USA, casting doubts on the official version of the tragedy. One shall assume that American special services are trying to display vigilance looking for spies in the White House.

If nothing else, I like Pravda as a guage of how the rest of the world sees us. Their glasses don’t have the same rosy lenses favored by American media.

tags: america, american, boursin cheese, cia, espionage, fbi, fbi arrests, mccarthyism, philippine revolution, politics, pravda, russia, spies, spy, terrorist attacks, usa, white house