Soviet authorities deployed conscripted men as disposable ‘biorobots’ at Chernobyl

Evidence

Four months after the initial Chernobyl explosion, the Soviet authorities sent in robots to remove radioactive debris; when off-the-charts radiation levels rendered the robots dysfunctional, young men were conscripted to replace them. The men recognized they were being treated not as human employees but as “biological resources to be used and thrown out… [S]lated for bio-robotic death.” As the Ukrainian director of the Ministry of Health declared, “no one has ever defined the value of a human here.” — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 145

Categorization

• SHARE: The biorobot detail (robots failing, then men conscripted as ‘biological resources’) is a striking fact for anyone working on techno-environmental disaster or labor expendability.