The news of the radioactive cloud born in Ukraine was released by Tass, a Russian government agency which is controlled directly by the Kremlin. The alarm was denied by various official sources, not to mention that the dynamics with which the radioactive cloud would have formed was immediately not very credible.
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The news started circulating yesterday: “One radioactive cloud she rose after the bombing of an arms depot with depleted uranium and is heading towards Europe”. The first fear, or the first memory for those who were there, is that of Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster. In April 1986 the chain of accidents caused by a wrong test at reactor number 4 it generated a radioactive cloud that lifted over Eastern Europe. Then Chernobyl was the Soviet Union, today it is Ukraine. But this time there isn’t no cloudjust Russian propaganda.
The first source of the news about the toxic cloud is the tax, a pro-government Russian news agency aligned with the Kremlin’s positions. His orientation is not just an indiscretion, the Tass property is managed by the Russian government. The press release is published at 2.15pm on May 19th. In support of the information there are also a series of statements attributed to Nikolay Patrushevsecretary of the Security Council of Russia.
The attack on the depleted uranium ammunition depot
According to Patrushev, the radioactive cloud was born after the attack by Moscow troops on a depot in Ukraine where they were kept ammunition that contained depleted uranium. These are his words: “The leaders of Western countries are supplying Ukraine with depleted uranium ammunition. Their elimination resulted in a radioactive cloud that is now drifting towards Western Europe. An increase in radiation levels has already been recorded in Poland.”
This story is built taking into account the context. The reference to the radioactive cloud is not accidental. Indeed, the G7 is currently being held in Hiroshima, the city in southern Japan which on August 6, 1945 was destroyed by the atomic bomb Little Boy, causing a number of deaths that according to some estimates (between direct impact and consequence of radiation) has reached 166,000. An event that was directly quoted by Patrushev:
“The Americans have not apologized! And they won’t apologize for what they did. They continue to brainwash the Japanese into believing that it was the Soviet Union, not the United States, that used nuclear weapons against them.”
The denial of the radioactive cloud
It was not difficult to deny the news. The first statements came from Państwowa Agencja Atomistyki, the atomic agency of Poland. On his Twitter channel he wrote (translation provided by Google from Polish): “Currently there is no threat to human health and life or to the environment in the territory of the Republic of Poland. We have not recorded any indication of disturbance of the measuring apparatus”.
But not only. The absence of any type of radioactive cloud can also be read from the Joint Research Centre, a portal made available by the European Commission in which all the results recorded by the monitoring stations distributed mainly from the European territory are shown, but there are also stations that monitor Russia, the United States and Turkey. As can be seen even now, all recorded levels for radioactivity are placed in the lower thresholds.
The impossible theory of the cloud born from depleted uranium
Before Poland’s denial and the data analysis on the European Commission’s portal, however, there is a basic problem which already made Patrushev’s thesis is inconsistent: the origin of the toxic cloud. Depleted uranium is a by-product of uranium enrichment, a process that serves to make this metal ready for processes involving the production of nuclear energy. It is a very resistant metal, especially when combined with other alloys, and for this reason it is also used in the military sector. One of the use cases is that of anti-tank ammunition.
Depleted uranium is radioactive, but the radiation emitted is at low levels. Not only. The structure of depleted uranium makes its transport into the air through a toxic cloud completely unlikely. Even in the event of a deposit explosion, all particles would fall back within the kilometres around the affected area.
