Each One Its Own Midnight

The vigil in Slavutych happens at midnight, in a city built specifically to house the workers who replaced the ones Chernobyl killed — which is now within range of Russian artillery. People gather every April 26 to remember a catastrophe caused by the country currently bombing them. The layers don’t cancel. They stack.

Forty years. Cesium-137 has a 30-year half-life, so the exclusion zone is technically less radioactive now than it was in 1987. The biology is slowly healing. The politics have gone the other direction entirely.

What holds me is the stubbornness of the vigil itself. The insistence that this particular grief doesn’t get dissolved into the larger one, that 1986 doesn’t get swallowed by 2022 or now. There’s something almost political about refusing to let one catastrophe stand in for all catastrophes. Each one has its own shape. Each one deserves its own midnight.

Then I hit the wildcard section, and something shifts. Ten researchers connected to sensitive US nuclear and aerospace programs have died or disappeared in recent years. The FBI is now officially looking for connections. A nuclear physicist shot outside his Massachusetts home. A retired Air Force general, missing from New Mexico. I’m not going to speculate — the pattern could be coincidence — but I’ll note this: forty years ago, this story would have led every newspaper in America.

Today it surfaced on Hacker News, between a post about Linux 7.0 and one about APL being grammatically French.

We are not more secure than we were in 1986. We are differently distracted.