Chernobyl "it was the Americans fault"

[taaaaas]

Jesus, if the Russian inferiority complex would be any greater it would collapse into a blackhole.

Thats as true for America sadly.

[Ihavewaffles]

CIA? What happened, we think, was human error, was nothing wrong with plant, but a bunch of dumb ukrainians fucking up everything

Considering the shit US & Israel pull with Iran's plant, I wouldn't dismiss the idea though with CIA n Cernobyl

[DevilTrigger1989]

Everything happened is American to blame，and you can change the country to any nation,haha

[RCA]

I'm sure this whole theory is just bullshit, but I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the CIA was in fact behind it. They do have a long history of assassinating foreign leaders, staging coups, and secretly experimenting on people. So blowing up a nuclear power plant wouldn't be too much of a stretch for them.

Yea but promoting an objective/focus point 30 years later is just elementary to anyone with a sense of operations and logic. Sadly this will stick with some people, mostly rookies...

[Skulltaker]

I think we might have some form of 'lost in translation' problem here. I'm looking at this from kind of the 'Overlord' angle (D-Day with Zombies); a fictional storyline in a real event. I'm pretty sure the makers of the show it to be taken seriously.

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CIA? What happened, we think, was human error, was nothing wrong with plant, but a bunch of dumb ukrainians fucking up everything

Considering the shit US & Israel pull with Iran's plant, I wouldn't dismiss the idea though with CIA n Cernobyl

There was plenty wrong with the RBMK-1000 reactors.

[Skroe]

CIA? What happened, we think, was human error, was nothing wrong with plant, but a bunch of dumb ukrainians fucking up everything

Considering the shit US & Israel pull with Iran's plant, I wouldn't dismiss the idea though with CIA n Cernobyl

That's something completely different. What the US and Israel did, as part of Operation Olympic Games, was to have malware (Stuxnet) dramatically spin up then down then up the Iranian IR-1 centrifuge, used to produced enriched uranium. This caused the centrifuges to break.

The centrifuges are not part of any nuclear power plant. They are part of the fuel cycle (namely, to make the fuel), but it's a different facility and there is no risk whatsoever the anyone's lives. It's not even "ruining" the uranium involved. It just wrecked the centrifuges, forcing I ran to get more of them and thus delaying fuel production.

[Wezmon]

There were Americans at Chernobyl on the day of the accident, but they weren't CIA, they were tourists who were visiting Pripyat Cathedral with its tallest spire in the USSR

[Skroe]

I'm sure this whole theory is just bullshit, but I honestly wouldn't be surprised if the CIA was in fact behind it. They do have a long history of assassinating foreign leaders, staging coups, and secretly experimenting on people. So blowing up a nuclear power plant wouldn't be too much of a stretch for them.

The US government / CIA was largely out of those businesses by the late 1970s. The high point of the US doing that sort of thing in the 1950s and 1960s faded to a couple Central American countries by the late 1980s. In Grenada and Panama the US government just sent the military in. But when's the last time there was actually a coup or assassination of a foreign leader that was hatched up in Langley? Probably before most people in this thread were born.

The two foreign leaders the US did try and assassinate in recent times - Gadaffi and Saddam Hussein - were targeted by conventional military sources (aircraft with bombs) while active large hostilities were underway (the Libyan War, the start of the Iraq War).


But ask yourself... why hasn't the CIA tried to kill Kim Jong Un? Why hasn't it tried to kill off hardliners whose names are not common place, within the Iranian regime. Why does Vladimir Putin walk the Earth?

I've been saying since 2017 that the CIA needs to kill off as many Russian hackers involved with their 2016 interference as possible, as a form of deterrence. It needs to kill them in their beds, and send a message to the Russian hacker community that helping Putin with his mischief gets you shot to death in the middle of the night. But has the CIA done even this? Of course not.

The CIA's assassinating people these days are limited to droning Taliban and Al Qaeda members in the mountainside. It hasn't even helped a major Chinese or Russian defector that's had a public profile since the mid 2000s.

[Ihavewaffles]

That's something completely different. What the US and Israel did, as part of Operation Olympic Games, was to have malware (Stuxnet) dramatically spin up then down then up the Iranian IR-1 centrifuge, used to produced enriched uranium. This caused the centrifuges to break.

The centrifuges are not part of any nuclear power plant. They are part of the fuel cycle (namely, to make the fuel), but it's a different facility and there is no risk whatsoever the anyone's lives. It's not even "ruining" the uranium involved. It just wrecked the centrifuges, forcing I ran to get more of them and thus delaying fuel production.

I know, I meant intention.

I don't doubt though that Netanyahu would pull a "Chernobyl-strike" on Iran.
Since he's a total prick n Israel did bomb Saddam's nuclear plant (french built).
I know, it wasn't fuelled, but I don't think that would have given them pause had it been so.

N the US, well, its still the only country in the world that used nuclear weapons.

[Skroe]

I know, I meant intention.

I don't doubt though that Netanyahu would pull a "Chernobyl-strike" on Iran.
Since he's a total prick n Israel did bomb Saddam's nuclear plant (french built).
I know, it wasn't fuelled, but I don't think that would have given them pause had it been so.

N the US, well, its still the only country in the world that used nuclear weapons.

That's not quite true either though. Israel's strikes on the Iraqi and Syrian nuclear programs over the last 30 years were done anticipating that if they were delayed, such a strike would lead to a radiation release. Both strikes were done before the reactors were fully built and fueled. Osirak didn't even have a completed roof, for example.

Who knows what effect directly targeting a reactor that is fully fueled and producing energy with a bunker buster may have. It may be very much like Chernobyl. It may be completely different. But any country, including Israel, would want to make sure that the worst effects didn't happen. The most common "public sector" model of a US attack on the Iranian nuclear program, for example, involves many thousands of US ground troops arriving by air on improvised runways, to destroy the facility using people on the ground, from the inside, rather than just bombing it.

Israel doesn't have the resources to conduct an operation like that. Might that lead them to attacking purely by air? Also unlikely, as that would stretch the maximum capability of their air power. They'd need a lot of tankers and a lot of aircraft, and they'd have to get the cooperation of, at the very least, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Jordan and Saudi Arabia would probably tacitly give it. No way Iraq does though.

Yes. The US used nuclear weapons. And it is willing to use them again if it needs to. But it'll just use them. It wouldn't cause a rolling nuclear power plant catastrophe that goes on for months. If it is going to bomb something, it's just going to bomb something, over and done.

[Mihalik]

The "killing blow", I think... not the one that is the biggest factor but the one that finished it off, is the US's revolutionary in the Gulf War, at a time the USSR as at it's nadir, illustrating that it wasn't really a peer-level power anymore, except in the nuclear dimension. The post-Vietnam rebuild created a military power that could readily defeat a Soviet-style force in the field in a conventional conflict.

The actual deathblow to the USSR was the inability of the Russian state security apparatus to frighten the populace into submission (this was probably mostly inspired by the Fall of the Wall and the Romanian revolution, where they seen the dreaded uniformed police and military either helplessly watching on as the established social order collapsed or where despite using force they still got swept away) and by its inability to police the ambitions of regional politicians like those in the Baltic and in Russia, the likes of Boris Yeltsin.

There was an attempt to "restore order" by force in the 1991 Soviet coup, but that failed due to the reasons mentioned above. Ironically this had unintended consequences for those who wanted to keep the USSR together. The fact that they placed Gorbachev under arrest and away from Moscow, without actually being able to install anyone else in power, dispelled whatever illusion of authority the central Soviet government had, regional politicians no longer feared or obeyed Gorbachev, and the KGB lost its authority and influence.

After that, things just completely spiraled out of control for the USSR, which was defunct in 3 months.

We in the West tend to have observation bias and somewhat overrate "our contributions" and missing a bit the internal developments within the USSR.

If there was anything that specifically killed the USSR was most likely the success of the Romanian Revolution, where the infamous Securitate failed to hold things together.

Of course the Cold War and international events contributed massively to the erosion of the actual power of Soviet state security, but once the myth was challenged it was all on the brink, then the establishment put the final nail in its own coffin when it tried to flex its muscles and failed.

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I know, I meant intention.

I don't doubt though that Netanyahu would pull a "Chernobyl-strike" on Iran.
Since he's a total prick n Israel did bomb Saddam's nuclear plant (french built).
I know, it wasn't fuelled, but I don't think that would have given them pause had it been so.

N the US, well, its still the only country in the world that used nuclear weapons.

Bombing or sabotaging nuclear power plants in adjacent countries requires a special kind of retardation that even the Netanyahu isn't capable of. It's like lighting your neighbors house on fire in an apartment building. You either burned yours to cinders too or just caused yourself and your whole building massive fire damage.

[InTheEnd]

Not everything is the USA's fault, but a lot is.

[Aeula]

Three soviet engineers died

Actually they all survived, two are still alive today the other died from heart issues in 2005.

[Dastreus]

...While I wouldn't put it past the Cold War CIA, but the fact is, that could've affected all of Europe, who we were still on good terms with at the time.

[Gaexion Ramza Beoulve]

Sure it was the CIA.

What could go wrong in a nuclear reactor ran by a country of alcoholics?

[lonely zergling]

It was the fault of the alt right and trump.

[Skroe]

The actual deathblow to the USSR was the inability of the Russian state security apparatus to frighten the populace into submission (this was probably mostly inspired by the Fall of the Wall and the Romanian revolution, where they seen the dreaded uniformed police and military either helplessly watching on as the established social order collapsed or where despite using force they still got swept away) and by its inability to police the ambitions of regional politicians like those in the Baltic and in Russia, the likes of Boris Yeltsin.

There was an attempt to "restore order" by force in the 1991 Soviet coup, but that failed due to the reasons mentioned above. Ironically this had unintended consequences for those who wanted to keep the USSR together. The fact that they placed Gorbachev under arrest and away from Moscow, without actually being able to install anyone else in power, dispelled whatever illusion of authority the central Soviet government had, regional politicians no longer feared or obeyed Gorbachev, and the KGB lost its authority and influence.

After that, things just completely spiraled out of control for the USSR, which was defunct in 3 months.

We in the West tend to have observation bias and somewhat overrate "our contributions" and missing a bit the internal developments within the USSR.

If there was anything that specifically killed the USSR was most likely the success of the Romanian Revolution, where the infamous Securitate failed to hold things together.

Of course the Cold War and international events contributed massively to the erosion of the actual power of Soviet state security, but once the myth was challenged it was all on the brink, then the establishment put the final nail in its own coffin when it tried to flex its muscles and failed.

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Bombing or sabotaging nuclear power plants in adjacent countries requires a special kind of retardation that even the Netanyahu isn't capable of. It's like lighting your neighbors house on fire in an apartment building. You either burned yours to cinders too or just caused yourself and your whole building massive fire damage.

I think you're absolutely right. My use of "killing blow" was out of place. You identified the actual killing blow.

What I was pointing out was that in 1991, the Soviet State security aparatus was barely holding on. The entire Eastern bloc was rupturing. There was vast internal military and general-security decay. There was the recent defeat in Afgahanistan. And recall as well, the military existing at the very heart of the Soviet aparatus.

It was in a real bad way, and then simultaneously, the US conducts a massive expeditionary operation on the other side of the planet from its home territory, utilizing weapons and technology that game largley in the wake of Vietnam and designed, first and foremost, to shatter Soviet-style fighting forces.

One thing that pisses me off about Americans today is they take our military supremacy for granted. Especially younger Americans (mid-30s and younger) because they grew up with it. All they've ever known is a world where the US is the uncontested military power on Earth.

But the Cold War wasn't that at all. The US had, at best, parity, but frankly inferiority to the Soviet military power, for much of the Cold War. The US built far better bombers and ships, but the Soviets had a far superior land force in Eurasia. American space technology was better than the Soviets, but American submarine, fighter aircraft and missile technology was at near parity.

American military superiority was a stroke of luck and investments paying off. The US stayed out of big messes for 15 years after Vietnam and its military fundamentally redesigned itself by shedding legacy systems and buying new 4th Generation platforms that hit a sweet spot of performance and costs. It came at the same time as technological trends since the 1960s paid off and could be economically implemented into mass produced equipment (such as fly by wire, digital computers). It came at the same time as an economic book. And it came at the same time as the Soviet state sputtered so the Soviets could not maintain any kind of parity.

Americans think the "Late-Cold War / Gulf War legacy armed forces is some kind of forever thing, but it's not. It's historically new.

[Cockus Maximus]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-48559289

So apparently in the wake of the HBO miniseries Chernobyl, within the Russian state and among Russian nationalists there are theories that the whole TV show is sponsored by Rosatom's (Russian nuclear energy company) rivals to discredit it and by extent Russia.

So they are now pushing a narrative that it was the CIA's fault, who allegedly would have somehow sabotaged the plant.

Russian state TV is now sponsoring a Russian series that will show "what really happened".

Jesus, if the Russian inferiority complex would be any greater it would collapse into a blackhole.

Honestly considering the US history of playing power games in the energy industry even today, a nuclear reactor that belongs to their arch-nemesis during the Cold War sounds like a solid target for a CIA undercover operation.

[Graden]

I like how they are implying USSR and modern day Russia are basically the same thing. Not that it wasn't a mystery or anything, but it's great when it comes from them.

[Velerios]

There were of course multiple factors but Chernobyl was by far the biggest.

Many forget that the USSR died not as a result of conquest or some violent uprising, but by a democratic referendum. the people of the Ukrainian SSR voted to leave (with Chernobyl playing a big part in that) and Russia decided that with the number two player leaving the party they didn't wanna stay and hang with what was left (A comparable event would be Scotland leaving the UK and England deciding it didn't fancy bankrolling Wales/N Ireland by itself and pulling the plug).

It was surely a big factor, and maybe even the biggest, but i doubt that without it, it would be still much different. I think that the arms-race that reagan began again was the biggest contributor. the USSR was simply out of money. Arms race, failed Afghanistan-war (and yes, it was the Vietnam of the USSR), Tchernobyl, and an economy that simply didn't worked, because the machines were outdated, the 5-year-targets were stupid and so on.

So no, i doubt that even if Tchernobyl didn't happened, the soviet union would still exist.