The word “liquidation” was nothing more than a martial euphemism. The reality was that radionuclides could be neither broken down nor destroyed—only relocated, entombed, or interred, ideally in a place where the long process of radioactive decay might pose a less immediate threat to the environment. This was a task on a scale unprecedented in human history, and one for which no one in the USSR—or, indeed, anywhere else on earth—had ever bothered to prepare. Yet now it was also subject to the routinely absurd expectations of the Soviet administrative-command system. When General Pikalov,
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