Talk:Kyshtym

There was 1 PBq of Sr-90, and 13 TBq of Cs-137. The contaminated zone, called East Urals Radioactive Trace (EURT), measuring 300 x 50 km was contaminated by more than 4 kBq/m² of Sr-90. The global fallout of Sr-90 was about 2 kBq/m².

These numbers don't add up. 2 kBq/m² = 2 GBq/km². 1 PBq would thus be deposited in a mere 1000 km x 500 km. 210.9.140.246 (talk) 15:46, 27 October 2008 (UTC)

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Hoover discusses Kyshtym in a long footnote in his memoir.

"This enterprise became a microcosm of later Russia. The business prospered until the Russian Revolution in 1917. I had resigned as a director in 1915 to give my time to Belgian Relief. In 1916, the Bolsheviks began agitation in the plants. Finally with the crash of the Revolution in 1917, the Communists assembled large meetings of the workmen and ultimately passed three resolutions, the gist of which was: (1) dismissal of the ownership--the property belonged to the workers; (2) dismissal of the management--the work would be directed by committees of the workmen; (3) wages were raised by 100 percent.

A Russian committee called upon the American staff and courteously tendered them a train of sleeping cars and locomotives, with flowers, food and coal aboard, to take them out. They advised going to Vladivostok--3,000 miles. In the face of raging terror and murders our people naturally accepted. The committee expressed their appreciation for the kindly attitude of the Americans at all times past. Our sixty Americans, with their wives and children, reached Vladivostok without difficulty.

Then began the hideous tragedy of enthroned ignorance. The Russian technical and administrative staff was roughly driven out, many being brutally treated and killed as "bourgeois."

To understand the full impact of the shift from intelligence to ignorance inherent in Communist destruction, it must be understood that the chemical and metallurgical operations and the mechanical equipment had to be conducted minute by minute by highly trained technical men. Many of the operations were most delicately adjusted to ore content, fluxes, fuel, heat, chemical and gas reactions, etc. The great mechanical equipment was represented in warehouses full of blueprints and patterns, from which the machinery had been designed and constructed. Every item was on card catalogue immediately under the technician's hands. Products had to be sold, money secured and intricate accounting carried on, so that each worker should receive on due date his pay check. A thunderclap surcharged by centuries of mistreatment of a race and guided by blind stupidity shattered all this tuned intelligence in an instant.

First the metallic mixtures in one of the large furnaces were unbalanced, and the furnace "froze." That disaster had happened to us once. The workers at that time had observed that our remedy had been to blast out a large part of the frozen furnace and build it over again. They could do this. The Communists were well-trained in destruction. But when they searched for the blueprints and patterns with which to make the new iron-work, they did not even know how to find them. The chemical cycles failed likewise. In a week the works were shut down, and the 100,000 people destitute. The very furies of ignorance were in the saddle.

All these details came to me years after when I was administering the relief of the Russian famine in 1923-- a famine mostly due to ignorance. I had sent some of our former engineers on the relief staff, as they spoke Russian and knew Russia. One of them had charge of the famine-relief in the Urals. In Kyshtim he found thousands had died of destitution and starvation. The people, recognizing him, flocked around to know if the Americans were coming back to restart the works. They even sent a petition to be transmitted to me, saying that they would be "good and obedient" if we would only give them work again. Who knows what Golgothas humanity must surmount?

From "The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: Years of Adventure" page 112-113 (footnote)

Timbabwe (talk) 04:28, 26 January 2019 (UTC)