Lebanon:  ‘The explosion’ may be Lebanon’s Chernobyl

Update:  The Lebanese government has said that the devastating port explosion that, according to the latest figures, killed at least 135 and injured nearly 5,000, with damages preliminarily estimated at between $3 and $5 billion, was caused by the ignition of 2,700 tons of ammonium nitrate stored in a warehouse at the Beirut port that arrived in 2014.

There were numerous and even public warnings about the danger caused by the storage of these chemicals, but no action was taken. That is likely to exacerbate long-simmering popular dissatisfaction with the elites who rule the country.

The catastrophe occurred as Lebanon already faces an economy in almost complete collapse, protesters demanding political change, a spike in COVID-19 cases, and increased tensions between Israel and Hezbollah.

Chernobyl moment:  While many have quickly reached for comparisons to the United States' dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the Beirut blasts are more aptly compared to the meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, as Ali Hashem explains: a disregard for safety and egregious mismanagement by authorities in a broken political system resulting in an apocalyptic and probably avoidable disaster. Mikhail Gorbachev, who was general secretary of the Communist Party at the time, said that the Chernobyl catastrophe in 1986, “even more than my launch of perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later.”