ANN COULTER’S NEW BOOK, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, hit the bookstores yesterday and is certain to be a bestseller. Many of you will have yet to receive your copies (provided you actually spent money on this drivel); however, an excerpt of the first chapter of the book was published at townhall.com Tuesday. It should give you an idea of what a howler this book is.
Ms. Coulter is brilliant at harpooning (and lampooning) the left. This time it appears though that she has decided to lump science in with liberals as a target for her scorn; and whereas her research in previous books was fairly thorough, this time she seems to have turned her research and writing over to others with less stringent standards. Take for instance these broadsides about Chernobyl:
“Now it turns out even Chernobyl wasn’t as bad as people thought. In a feat of Soviet engineering, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine exploded in 1986, sending chunks of the reactor core flying into nearby farms and igniting a fire at the reactor that burned for ten days. It was the worst nuclear disaster in history—finally giving us a nuclear power plant that killed more people than died in Teddy Kennedy’s car. But as the New York Times reported in September 2005, “Nearly 20 years after the huge accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, a new scientific report has found that its aftereffects on health and the environment have not proved as dire as scientists had predicted.” Instead of tens of thousands of cancer deaths from acute radiation exposure, there were 4,000. Only 50 deaths were directly attributable to the explosion. There has been no increase in leukemia, birth defects, or fertility problems in the surrounding area.
“And, I mention again, this was in the Soviet Union. Soviet engineers couldn’t make Jell-O. They’d show up at the World’s Fair and stare at a flush toilet like it was a rocket ship. They turned half of Germany into an inefficient manufacturing center. Do you know how hard that is? It’s like botching a train wreck. Of course the Soviets screwed up nuclear power! Instead of taking the environmentalist hamstrings off the muscular American economy so we can split atoms, drill, mine, and strip the Democrats want to preside over our state-managed descent into hell.”
These remarks were made in regard to liberals’ dislike of nuclear power. I agree with Ms. Coulter that nuclear power is an important source of energy for the United States and the government should remove administrative barriers to the building of new nuclear plants. However, trying to downplay the horrors of Chernobyl to support this position plays into the liberals’ beliefs that conservatives are heartless bastards who could care less about others and the environment as long as the conservative profits.
Besides, her comments are more than a bit misleading.
Ms. Coulter’s remarks imply the damage done by the disaster at Chernobyl was not as bad as “liberals” made them out to be. However, parsing her comments and some internet research show Ms. Coulter (or the fellow who wrote this section for her) is being a bit disingenuous.
First off, she references an article in the New York Times, which strikes one as odd considering the vitriol that paper has suffered at Ms. Coulter’s hands in the past. Note the phrasing, “…have not proved as dire as scientists predicted.” Ms. Coulter evidently sees this as “not dire at all.” She then goes on to pooh-pooh the predictions of tens of thousands of cancer deaths from acute radiation exposure, pointing out there were only 4,000 such deaths. Note the phrasing: “acute radiation exposure.” That exposure would have come immediately after the disaster when firefighters and rescue workers were working desperately to contain the disaster. The number of those dying directly of acute radiation exposure was less than 30, which fits in nicely with the claim that only 50 deaths were attributable to the explosion. Those dying from cancers associated with radiation exposure … well, that’s a different story.
The highest cancer death toll for Chernobyl this researcher can find is 32,000. However, that figure comes from Greenpeace, and as such should be taken with a grain of salt. Let’s assume, for a moment, the 4,000 figure quoted by Ms. Coulter is correct — that figure is still much higher than one would find in a similarly-sized population. But, that’s not the entire story. The incidences of cancer in Chernobyl survivors have increased exponentially. Thyroid cancer, for instance has increased “200 fold” in regions exposed to Chernobyl fallout. Some 90 percent of these cases are curable, so they evidently escaped Ms. Coulter’s notice.
As for her contention that “[t]here has been no increase in leukemia, birth defects, or fertility problems in the surrounding area,” she is on shakier ground. As has been pointed out, thyroid cancer has spiked among Chernobyl survivors and their descendents. As for leukemia, EnvironmentalChemistry.com offers the following:
At the moment few republics are reporting a rise in leukemia, a condition which would have been expected to increase. It is possible that the actual rise in incidents of the disease is masked by the mass resettlement into other unaffected areas after the accident. This may have resulted in skewed results since any increase in the rate of leukemia would be averaged over a larger population of individuals, many of whom had not been exposed.
So, while Ms. Coulter might be technically right, she omitted just enough information to give the reader the wrong impression of the “reality on the ground.” She also doesn’t take into account cancers that might develop years or decades after exposure, which is often the case with radiation exposure. It gets a bit worse when it comes to her claims that there have been no increases in birth defects:
The incidences of birth defects have increased in heavily contaminated areas. A condition known as “minisatellite mutation” in the Mogilev district of Belarus is “unusually high.” (EnvironmentalChemistry.com)
Finally, we come to Ms. Coulter’s denigrating comments about Soviet engineering. It is true the Soviet Union had a rather loose view of safety. However, to portray Soviet engineers as so inept as to be unable to make Jell-O and so primitive they were enamored of indoor plumbing is, well, stupid. Yes, the Soviet Union was the “bad guy.” It was the boogey-man of the West for decades; how could this be if they were a bunch of backwoods hicks?
They were so scary because they weren’t the buffoons Ms. Coulter portrays them to be. The Russians managed to field an effective combat jet before the West (yeah, yeah, I know it was a knock off of German designs — but they still managed it before the U.S.). They also launched a satellite before the West (Sputnik, anyone?) and put the first man into orbit. Staring in awe at a flush toilet? Please, Ms. Coulter, don’t insult our intelligence.
Further reading:
Deaths aren’t the only fallout from Chernobyl. A good chunk of farmland is out of production for many lifetimes. If this happened near a populated American city it would make the economic cost of katrina look like piggy bank stuff.
Actually, if the quote from Ann Coulter is correct, it shows that she can’t read. The figure of 4000 deaths comes from the IAEA/UN/WHO report released last year. HOWEVER, this is not the number of people who actually died due to Chernobyl, but the number of PREDICTED deaths. Just one more example of how fast and loose she is with the facts.