What is the number of casualties from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster? Historian Kate Brown's important book grew out of apparent frustration with the controversy surrounding the accident. Brown was frustrated with the position of United Nations agencies—often repeated in the media—that only thirty-one to fifty-four died as the result of the accident, most of them emergency responders. The only recognized effect for the general population was an increase in nonfatal thyroid cancer in children. She was also frustrated with the assertions that we might never know the actual death toll.

Brown asked “why we don't know more” and set out to add to our knowledge using two main sources.Footnote ¹ She went to see Soviet medical records in the archives in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, focusing on the three years immediately after the accident, 1986–1989. Brown also studied the archives of the UN agencies who, starting from 1989, sought to provide an assessment of Chernobyl health impacts. The book is, first and foremost, an argument against the UN estimates of the fatalities of Chernobyl and its health effects for the public. What Manual for Survival describes is the production of ignorance similar to the cases of tobacco smoke or global warming as described by other historians.Footnote ² The book relies on Soviet medical records to claim that UN agencies did not report the full scope of Chernobyl's consequences and to show what was left out.

The focus of my review is on issues of the production of ignorance and knowledge. First, I consider in more detail how Manual for Survival helps us better understand the consequences of Chernobyl: what the consequences were, the role of the UN agencies in assessing them, but also the place of the accident in the history of the production of knowledge (and ignorance) about radiation risks. Second, I focus on what it takes to know the actual scope of Chernobyl's consequences. I consider some challenges and conceptual issues that the book raises from the perspective of science and technology studies (STS) and studies of the production of ignorance.

Brown's important contribution to our understanding of Chernobyl's consequences is her use of archives and her description of the role of UN agencies. As a historian, Brown went to the national and county archives in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia to look at declassified medical records produced in the three years after the accident (the period when the Soviet authorities minimized, silenced, and classified everything about Chernobyl and before it became the subject of much public attention). In the archives Brown found evidence describing signs of radiation sickness among the general population and much documentation of the increases in morbidity in the affected areas: “People suffered not just from cancers but also from diseases of the blood-forming system, digestive tract, and endocrine, reproductive, circulatory, and nervous systems.”Footnote ³

Manual for Survival makes a convincing case for the credibility of Soviet records. In the years immediately after the accident, local bureaucrats and doctors did not have access to information about the extent of the fallout in their areas or about radiation medicine. The Soviet system also provided many disincentives for reporting anything except good statistics. What Brown describes is a kind of blind experiment where, discouraged from reporting and without knowing the overall picture, local doctors and officials were still alarmed enough to report what they observed, though their reporting was limited to documents classified “for office use only.”Footnote ⁴Manual for Survival calls our attention to the multitude of these records and summarizes them, describing the immediate and massive impact of the fallout on the health of people in the affected areas.

Using the archives, Brown also confirmed many rumors that circulated in the region after Chernobyl. It reminds me of how Svetlana Alexievich, 2015 Nobel Prize Laureate and the author of Voices from Chernobyl, described her experience of conducting oral histories in the affected areas: “I often thought that the simple fact, the mechanical fact, is no closer to the truth than a vague feeling, rumor, vision.”Footnote ⁵Manual for Survival confirms, for example, that the Soviet authorities made the radioactive clouds rain over rural areas of Belarus, or that the contaminated meat was mixed with clean meat into sausages. The sausages were distributed everywhere in the former Soviet Union, except for Moscow. The book provides indirect evidence of the fallout from the nuclear weapons testing in the Pripyat swamp in the south of Belarus, the fallout that predated the Chernobyl fallout. Brown builds on that point by arguing that Chernobyl was not an isolated accident, but “an acceleration on a time line of exposures.”Footnote ⁶

Brown also used archives to lead her into the present-day life of people in the affected areas. She found a petition requesting the “liquidator” (clean-up worker) status for 298 workers from a wool factory in Chernihiv, went to the factory, asked to see the production line, and eventually found women who used to process contaminated wool and could share their stories. Brown followed two biologists to the Chernobyl Zone of Alienation and a forester to the Pripyat swamp, where locals still gather berries with high levels of radionuclides. She tried to go to the Gomel΄ Meat Factory that produced post-Chernobyl sausages with mixed meat. Manual for Survival is packed with action. Brown's storytelling skills are masterful, and they help her bring the reader to the main part of her argument, about the role of the UN agencies in assessing the consequences of Chernobyl.

The production of ignorance about Chernobyl was not just a Soviet or post-Soviet problem. For the period after 1989, Manual for Survival focuses primarily on the UN archives and western experts. 1989 was the year of the “explosion” of media and public attention to Chernobyl: the publication of radiation maps, mass protests, and Belarusian scientists’ resistance to adopting the Soviet “concept of radiation protection.” To overcome that resistance, Soviet leaders invited help from UN experts, starting with a delegation of three pro-nuclear experts of the World Health Organization and then the International Chernobyl Project led by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The UN experts used the Life Span Study of survivors of the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When extrapolations from that knowledge did not fit with the local data, the experts dismissed the local data, relying on “a well-known toolbox of tactics familiar from controversies surrounding lead, tobacco, and chemical toxins.”Footnote ⁷ To engage more with the local data would mean to open up to dealing with the much larger fallout from the Cold War testing of nuclear weapons, as well as consequences of routine nuclear accidents in the west. This broader framing helps us understand the stakes of the production of knowledge and ignorance about Chernobyl.

The book also raises conceptual questions, important for evaluating its significance in terms of studies of the production of ignorance. First is the challenge of relying on archives, especially Soviet archives. Records from the Soviet period include conflicting accounts, partial truths, and fabrications. The Soviet government, as Brown observes, “lied not just to the world but also to itself.”Footnote ⁸ Navigating declassified records, Brown had to choose sides, and she gave credit to the accounts that reported more than perpetually good news. The state also had the power to shape our memory by limiting access to particular records. I would have appreciated more of an account of how different availability of archives (such as the inaccessibility of KGB archives in Belarus and Russia or inaccessibility of the archives of the Belarusian Institute of Radiation Medicine) affected Brown's research.

Second and most important is the question of institutions and local research. From the STS perspective, the production of ignorance is not just a question of the deliberate suppression of knowledge but also of the conditions for the production of knowledge, including institutes and knowledge infrastructures that would sustain adequate and consistent production of knowledge about the delayed effects of radiation exposure over a period of time. In other words, whether we “will ever know” the number of victims of Chernobyl and how confident we can be in that assessment depends on what kinds of knowledge infrastructures had been created and sustained to generate that knowledge.

With few exceptions, the scope of Brown's research does not include the work of Belarusian and Ukrainian experts or the work of local research institutes established in 1987–92. Manual for Survival describes difficult conditions that affected local Chernobyl-related science in 1989–91 and after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and that description fits with my own research. Economic circumstances were desperate; people knew more about radioactive contamination and tried to leverage “Chernobyl” to survive; political struggles affected what research was done. In short, the kinds of knowledge produced by the local Belarusian and Ukrainian scientists—once they got an opportunity to study the consequences of Chernobyl in the last years of the Soviet Union—were necessarily messy, partial, and complicated.

For Belarus alone, four state-owned research institutes and dozens of departments and laboratories in other institutes were established in 1988–91. Vassily Nesterenko's independent Institute of Radiation Safety, “Belrad,” was established in 1990 and made an unparalleled effort to make data on the consequences of Chernobyl more publicly accessible.Footnote ⁹ My own research documented the historical transformation of these knowledge infrastructures in Belarus. I argued that the historical transformations of these knowledge infrastructures (and their increasingly limited research agenda) contributed to the public invisibility of Chernobyl in Belarus and the production of ignorance about its consequences. But if the goal is to push beyond describing why we know so little and to press for a more definitive record of the consequences of Chernobyl, then it is important to account for the content of the local research done in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia after 1989. We have glimpses of that research in, for example, the volume compiled by Vassily Nesterenko, along with co-editors Alexey Yablokov and Alexey Nesterenko.Footnote ¹⁰ Brown describes it as “the chief challenge to the UN assessments,” yet that local research remains largely outside the scope of her work.Footnote ¹¹ My point is not that describing Belarusian or Ukrainian science on Chernobyl would give us definitive answers. I simply call attention to the significant effort made in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia to study the consequences of Chernobyl, even if my own earlier work argues that that effort was eventually thwarted. I believe that local research and experience of treating victims after 1989 are no less important than declassified Soviet accounts. From that perspective, it is interesting what the archives of the local institutes would tell us about Chernobyl's health effects, radiation as a health risk factor, and mitigating the consequences of a nuclear disaster of that scale.

Kate Brown is an incredible storyteller. The power of her descriptions gives her a bigger audience than most academic books have. As a historian, she opens for us the dramatic story of the Soviet archives and the immediate aftermath of Chernobyl, but also the story of the international efforts to minimize the assessment of its consequences. Manual for Survival is a courageous, far-reaching work that fits with the work of Robert Proctor on tobacco or Naomi Oreskes on global warming. My only concern is that this book should not be read in ways that would follow the trajectory of international assessments elevating certain Soviet reports and overlooking the local Belarusian and Russian research.