Ghosts of a nuclear city
QUESTION What is the story of the deserted town near Chernobyl which features in the video for Life Is Golden, the new single by Suede?
Life is Golden is the first official single from Suede’s forthcoming eighth studio album The Blue Hour. The video used footage of the Ukrainian ghost town of Pripyat, 60 miles north of the capital of Kiev, on Ukraine’s border with Belarus. it was filmed by documentary- maker Mike Christie.
Pripyat was founded on february 4, 1970. it was the Soviet Union’s ninth ‘nuclear city’, built to serve the Chernobyl nuclear power facility, known as the V.i. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant during the Soviet era.
Pripyat was built in tandem with the nuclear power station’s construction to house the workers and families of the Chernobyl plant. it was completed in 1977 and contained more than 13,000 apartments, almost 100 schools, a hospital, and a central administration.
The town’s architecture was typical of Soviet modernism. Generic concrete streets and prefabricated apartment blocks were offset by flashes of colour such as the stained-glass windows of the Prometheus cinema, or the city’s muchphotographed amusement park, including a ferris wheel that is still intact.
Pripyat was devastated by the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster, when the explosion of Reactor 4 on April 26, 1986, caused the direct deaths of 31 people and spread radioactive clouds across europe.
Pripyat has lain empty since being evacuated in the aftermath of the disaster. Olivia Edwards, Oxford.
QUESTION Why did the French entomologist Antoine Magnan argue a bumblebee’s flight is aerodynamically impossible?
THE theory that a bumblebee’s flight was aerodynamically impossible emerged in the Thirties. The story goes that during a dinner party, an aerodynamicist, in discussion with a biologist, did a quick calculation about the insect’s flight. They assumed a rigid, smooth wing, estimated the bee’s weight and wing area, and calculated the lift generated by the wing.
Not surprisingly, there was insufficient lift. Some accounts associate the story with the German physicist Ludwig Prandtl (1875-1953); others identify the Swiss gas dynamicist Jacob Ackeret (1898-1981).
in 1934, french zoologist and aeronautical engineer Antoine Magnan ( 1881- 1938) included the following passage in the introduction to his book Le Vol des insectes: ‘i applied the laws of air resistance to insects, and i arrived with Mr St Lague at the conclusion that their flight is impossible.’
Magnan was actually referring to a calculation by his assistant Andre Sainte-Lague, and commenting on the fact that he had applied the same fixed-wing aerodynamics to the bumblebee and had concluded that flight was not possible for such a system.
So the urban legend was born that became the basis of an inspirational poster which carries the absurd quote: ‘According to the theory of aerodynamics, as may be readily demonstrated through wind tunnel experiments, the bumblebee is unable to fly. This is because the size, weight, and shape of his body in relation to the total wingspread make flying impossible. But the bumblebee, being ignorant of these scientific truths, goes ahead and flies anyway — and makes a little honey every day.’
The problem of insect flight was solved following some brilliant work by Danish scientist Torkel Weis-fogh (1922-1975), a professor of zoology at Cambridge University in the Seventies. He explained that an insect’s wing works by encouraging air to flow over it in such a way that when the air leaves the rear edge of the wing, it moves downwards. The resultant eddy produces an upwards thrust on the wing.
Dr Ken Warren, Glasgow.
QUESTION Was Adolf Hitler’s policy of lebensraum — colonising other countries — influenced by Andrew Jackson’s treatment of American Indians?
WHILE Hitler was writing Mein Kampf (My Struggle), he discovered the word
lebensraum, meaning ‘living space’, and adapted it to his own purposes. it provided justification for the Nazis’ territorial expansion into Central and eastern europe. People deemed to be part of inferior races, within the territory of lebensraum expansion, were subjected to expulsion or destruction. Some modern historians have linked
lebensraum to ‘Manifest Destiny’, a phrase coined in 1845. This expressed the philosophy that drove the tough Democrat president Andrew Jackson’s westward expansion in the 1830s.
Manifest Destiny held that the United States was destined by God to expand its dominion and spread democracy and capitalism across the North American continent.
Tracing the path of Manifest Destiny across the West would highlight destruction of indian tribal culture, expulsions, and confinement of indians to reservations. it was often brutal.
One of the most heart-breaking examples is the Trail of Tears, in which Jackson used the force of the American government to expel the Cherokee Nation from their home in the south-east and relocate them to the west. Nearly 4,000 people died.
Such similarities have led to historians directly comparing the two. Pulitzer-Prize winning biographer John Toland goes as far as to state that Hitler was inspired by the indian reservation system.
‘ Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of english and United States history,’ Toland wrote in his book, Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography.
Archie D. Wiseman, Seaham, Co. Durham.
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