Alan Durning writes:

In spring 1986, as a wet-behind-the-ears research assistant at a Washington, DC, think tank, I spent my first year after college studying the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl.

The catastrophe’s consequences were immediate: death, displacement, downwind irradiation for hundreds of miles, and an unprecedented quasi-military cleanup that cost more than $100 billion. I assembled and summarized for my supervisor piles of news reports and research papers, and I knew what the experts said the Chernobyl disaster would mean for the world, one being a huge downshift in commercial nuclear power for a generation.

But no one studying the accident then anticipated that the disaster might serve as the final straw that would break the back of the country’s Communist rule. Yet looking back in April 2006, the final Communist head of state Mikhail Gorbachev wrote, “The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl . . . was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later.” The disaster, with its continent-spanning fallout of invisible death-dealing particles, semi-random hotspots and safe zones, and weeks of government cover-ups and minimization, evaporated what little trust Soviet residents still had in their leaders. Gorbachev’s attempts at transparency (glasnost) and reform (perestroika) were doomed. Chernobyl proved to a critical mass of Soviet people that the entire system was a cruel farce.

Fast-forward to spring 2020. The coronavirus pandemic is all too obvious in its consequences: death, economic collapse and recession, and an unprecedented global health crisis. But what will be the long-term effects? What consequences are still to come? What will we see when we look back 20 years from now, like when Gorbachev reflected on Chernobyl?

In 1986 no one could foresee the end of Soviet communism. And I do not mean to imply that this pandemic will topple any particular regime, though such outcomes are certainly possible. My point is that the reach of disastrous events is long and unpredictable, both for better and for worse. The bubonic plague, according to historian Barbara Tuchman, led to the Renaissance. The Great Depression gave birth to both the social safety net in the West and to fascism in Europe.

So we can assume that the pandemic will bring changes—possibly big ones—that we’re probably not thinking about right now. I will hazard some guesses (more hypotheses than predictions) of what’s to come. [Continue reading…]