(9-26 Appunti atomici - English version)
It is true. Public opinion falls in love, from time to time, with Shahed drones, ballistic missiles, remotely guided robots, Patriots, interceptors, all of them brilliantly intelligent — as Mario Giro has been writing these days. Perhaps hoping that, by whatever means, on whatever front, we might finally put an end to this slow drip of destruction, deaths, prisoners and mutilated bodies, on Ukrainian, Russian, Iranian, Palestinian soil, and on so many others about which we know little.
But no. Alessandro Arduino has published La guerra è cambiata — Droni, IA e mercenari (Einaudi, 2026) precisely to explain that, despite the overwhelming advance of technology, “war will never be short, never economical, never without victims.” After a very long experience in defence, working with institutions in the United Kingdom, NATO, and spending 22 years in China, in academies and university institutes, the author regularly writes for international media and, in Italy, for La Stampa.
The hope of aseptic conflicts is an illusion. Men on the ground — there are mercenaries too, increasingly drawn from the desperate of the earth — cannot be dispensed with. Wagner, the best-known name among private warriors, now does business in Africa. Arduino explains that “the mercenary is more than a soldier: he is an obstacle to peace, because peace would mean his end.” He cites The Prince, where Machiavelli already wrote that mercenaries are unreliable, fight only for money, and are always ready to sell themselves to the highest bidder.
Drones and robots are also the “immaterial collaborators” of border defence, an area in which Ukraine has made giant strides. But their objective is almost always to bring destruction and death beyond their own defences, to terrorise, even simply through the metallic sound of aircraft approaching. This is how the 2020 war between Azerbaijan and Armenia ended in just forty-four days, with Armenian troops thrown into panic by the mere buzzing of approaching rotors.
At the end of August, Domani published an extensive article in which Michelangelo Cocco monitors China’s progress in artificial intelligence. Dominance is near, overtaking within reach. Certainly because of the enormous population pool from which to draw brilliant minds, with the help of millions of increasingly specialised companies. But above all, I would add, also thanks to the far-sighted and rigid planning under which, under the government in Beijing, AI is studied from primary school onwards.
There is a decisive precedent, as Arduino also recounts. When Xi realised that the Russian army, whose efficiency his ally Putin had been boasting about, was becoming bogged down in a chronic defeat on Ukrainian soil, he considered carrying out an assessment of the Chinese troops, of the real condition of the armed forces of the Middle Kingdom, which until then had been more or less organised along lines similar to Moscow’s, with comparable equipment of heavy vehicles, missiles, weapons and technology that today we would call rudimentary. There were purges too: “the heads of numerous generals began to fall” and, immediately afterwards, a powerful drive towards hi-tech and information technology renewal got under way, producing in short order the usual, carefully planned Chinese leap forward.
Today, Cocco writes, the advantage of AI developed in Silicon Valley over its Eastern rival would be measurable “no longer in months, but in weeks, perhaps only days”: a mega-model with 10 trillion parameters, to revolutionise its civilian and military uses.
Meanwhile, in six months of war against Iran, President Trump’s United States has spent 37.5 billion dollars; another 70 would be needed, though no one really knows what for: perhaps to save face. The statements coming from the occupant of the White House are schizophrenic: without missiles he is forced to contemplate a truce, then he bombs, then he considers a ground campaign, actually!, those boots on the ground that the MAGA world really does not want; hence “we have other people who would do it for us,” he declares to reassure his base. Does he mean mercenaries? In short, “grotesque illusions of war,” as I have read several times.
The nuclear threat that was not there, as US intelligence explained to the tycoon with reference to Iran, is instead far more realistic if we try to enter Putin’s mind. This is a personal conviction of mine, formed by putting together a series of clues. However often I hear Lucio Caracciolo — editor of the magazine Limes — reiterate that it is ridiculous to think that the tsar is aiming for Europe, I do not find this hypothesis fanciful at all (not in order to conquer it with lowered lances, obviously, but rather to disintegrate it as a liberal entity and make it more akin to himself). As in the familiar fairy tale — sometimes with the frog as protagonist, sometimes the turtle — it is in the scorpion’s nature to sting the little creature carrying it on its back so that it does not drown; and they will die together.
Putin, beyond the conquest/reconquest of patches of land in the Donbas, beyond the attacks on civilians as far as Kiev (Kyiv, according to the Ukrainian spelling), is at the head of a country that is economically crumbling. Since the Ukrainians are striking the production centres vital to the Kremlin regime, with drones over Moscow but above all against the refineries, Russia now has a deficit of six trillion roubles, queues at petrol stations, young people fleeing so as not to be conscripted.
On July 15, a lucid article by Nina Khrushcheva appeared in the newspaper Domani. (Yes, Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union whom we remember, was her great-grandfather.) Nina lives, teaches and writes in the United States; in Russia she is considered a foreign agent. As I have heard the political scientist Dario Fabbri say more than once, Putin’s Russia conceives of itself only as an expanding Empire.
In my eyes, she is far more authoritative than certain national pro-Russian scribblers, frankly overexposed and by now tiresome. Khrushcheva maintains that “if pushed into a corner, the tsar will also be willing to resort to extreme solutions. Including the nuclear one.” “Putin invaded Ukraine ... to demonstrate that he could force Zelensky and the West to recognise Russia’s power on its own terms.” Not one step backward, as Stalin used to say, whatever the price. And we are seeing it.
Then, with a certain insistence, Marta Serafini in Corriere della Sera on August 17 presents, together with a map prepared by The Economist and the Institute for the Study of War in Washington, the incursions into Europe, on the eastern side, with attacks, sabotage, assassinations and attempted assassinations carried out by the Russians. The eastern side, but also Italy, Great Britain, France, Spain. The grey zone of the war, as Serafini writes, is skilfully kept beneath the surface, for now; but it needs to be updated every day.
And indeed September opens with the Russians’ hybrid attack — according to Berlin — on Leipzig ...
****
Despite the steady drip of today’s bloody conflicts, because of Hiroshima — the US atomic bomb dropped on the Japanese city on August 6, 1945 — it is still the nuclear weapon that, in our collective imagination, represents the true quantum leap in warfare; as though everything else were merely a disjointed collection of skirmishes.
An imagination that also fears the civilian use of the atom, which has in fact created immense tragedies. It has been 40 years since the Chernobyl disaster, Chornobyl in Ukrainian, since that April 26, 1986. (I would regard the Soviet authorities’ delay in sounding the alarm about the catastrophe — 36 hours — as perhaps one of the remote, profound reasons for Kyiv’s staunch resistance to Russian aggression today, mindful of that guilty silence imposed by the regime, which caused a silent massacre. Not only the memory of the Holodomor.)
Forty years ago, once the radioactive cloud’s movement westwards had officially been acknowledged, reaching as far as northern Italy — I was in Milan — we were advised not to eat raw vegetables, to wash fruit thoroughly, no milk, no mushrooms, but instead to drink clay water — as my yoga teacher suggested as a defence against the invisible threat. I did. But down there — as so well told in the Netflix series about the disaster, as well as in other films and BBC documentaries — a very visible tragedy was unfolding. Two books, each with a particular perspective, focus on the life, death and vegetal rebirth of that devastated land, from which the surviving civilians fled (only to return, over the years, in small numbers).
Alessandra Pescetta, film director and visual artist, is the author of Chernobyl - Chornobyl Il canto della Foresta rossa(Exòrma, 2026), a collection of refined and powerful photographs of the nature of those places, together with a poem in which the forest itself speaks, as well as other texts and interviews. The Forest not burned, but petrified in an eternal rust colour, and frightening in its uniqueness. It is she, the community of trees itself, who speaks out and denounces: remembering the “liquidators”, the first men called in to contain the disaster at the price of their lives:
“...
“Cesium-137 and strontium-90 flow / between our bark and our marrow, / with the sap we slowly push them up to the buds. / But above all the pines, the pines: / chlorophyll shatters, phenols stain the needles. / We turn to rust.”
“And the first to fall at the power plant too, / wrapped in waxed sheets, / sealed inside zinc and lead coffins, / denied the embraces of their loved ones, / sink beneath layers of concrete / in the Mitinskoe cemetery / like little power plants that never go out. / ... / In Prypiat, at the heart of the Exclusion Zone, / his hands black with coal / have dug into the belly of radiation.”
The apocalyptic landscape of the torn-open Reactor 4, the workers who died just days after their intervention, with deep burns and radiation syndrome; the nuclear fire they tried to suffocate by flying over it to “drop sand, clay, lead and boron”: this was how it began. Then 400 miners arrived from Tula and the Donbas to dig a tunnel that would allow them to reach the burning core from beneath the damaged Moloch. In vain. Altogether, about half a million men were thrown into the fray.
And so the myth of the new Atomgrad of Prypiat collapsed, on the river of the same name, on the border between Ukraine and Belarus: four reactors and “a city designed from scratch to house the technicians and their families”. But all around it were 170 villages, 350,000 people who, in the wake of the tragedy, were evacuated in great haste.
Once the fire had been extinguished, tens of thousands of workers, without adequate protection, built at record speed — 206 days — the immense structure of the first containment sarcophagus, a shroud for the reactor, made of iron and concrete, materials liable to deteriorate. The surrounding area, within a radius of 30 kilometres, became the Exclusion Zone.
In 2010, the new Arch became necessary: “the largest mobile engineering structure ever built in the world, costing one and a half billion euros and supported by more than 40 countries. In November 2016, the entire structure was moved along rails until it covered the old sarcophagus. In 2019 it was officially handed over to the Ukrainian authorities. ‘The Arch is not merely a shell: it is a complex technological organism, equipped with ventilation systems, dust filters, humidity and radioactivity controls, robotic arms for the future dismantling of what remains of the reactor. It was designed to last a century’ but...
With the war, in February 2022 the Russians occupied the power plant; the technicians were taken hostage and then deported, including to Belarus, and many are still prisoners. Moscow’s troops remained there for little more than a month, but left mines covering 25 per cent of the area. On February 14, 2025, a Russian drone struck the covering and caused a fire. Immediate action was taken to make the Arch safe again, but it was not possible to restore its original airtight seal. It is certainly a new threat. A global one.
Seven hundred degrees of temperature for the explosion of the reactor, which released the light of 10,000 suns: this is what the Red Forest has withstood. With a lower degree of contamination, in 2016 an area of 206,000 hectares was established — 80 per cent of the Exclusion Zone — which, precisely, leaves the Forest outside. It is the Chornobyl Radioecological Biosphere Reserve, patrolled so that no uncontrolled human element can interfere with its natural evolution, and accessible to a limited number of scientists.
Today it is the largest expanse of wilderness in Central Europe, coming back to life in ways that we can only record and tell. “We have been seeds / we have slept / Yet we germinate / even at the wrong hour / because life / knows no truce.”
****
Vegetation is once again the protagonist, through which Chernobyl can always be remembered, but as though a protective screen were needed to mediate the impact of remembering the atomic explosion. More photographs — macro shots of seeds and shoots — to parcel out the immense disaster: details of vegetation photographed in the Exclusion Zone between 2011 and 2016, with the radiation level given in the captions. Michael Marder, philosopher of the environment, published Chernobyl Herbarium: Life after the Nuclear Disaster (Mimesis, 2021) in 2016, reflections accompanied by photographs by Anaïs Tondeur, a French visual artist.
Chernobyl, he notes, was a catastrophe of the Russian mentality, the collapse of a system of values, blown apart like the reactor itself. The radioactive wind invades the illusion of safety of wealthy countries. On April 26, 1986, Marder is travelling with his family from Moscow to Anapa, in the south, on the Black Sea. After already two days on board, the train is stopped in Rostov-on-Don: he watches the comings and goings at the station, the food stalls, fried chicken and cucumbers, passengers getting on and off through the window of his sleeping compartment, while 800 kilometres to the north-west Reactor 4 of an Atomgrad explodes.
The author is five years old, and the stay in Anapa has been prescribed by doctors to treat his severe seasonal respiratory allergies. The balmy climate, they thought, would help him. Three months on the shores of the Black Sea, then, outdoors, on the beach, breathing deeply, where “without my knowing it I would be exposed to dangerous amounts of radiation as a result of the fallout from Chernobyl.”
In Kyiv and Minsk, May Day demonstrations go ahead as usual, in the silence of the authorities, with radioactive levels 300 times higher than the maximum limit. The concealed truth began to emerge, Marder recounts, only when in Sweden, 48 hours after the disaster, readings were recorded at levels far above the threshold. “Until May 6 or 7, the newspaper Pravda had provided no accurate account of the accident.”
As the author explains and stresses, telling the story of Chernobyl is extraordinarily difficult: the fate of the Red Forest, the sacrifice of the 200,000 liquidators, the half-life of depleted uranium U-238 — 180 tonnes of it lie beneath the Sarcophagus — which is 4.5 billion years! All of this is one step away from the unspeakable.
The author recounts, reports, but enriches the text with many philosophical and spiritual reflections, and observations as acute as they are chilling. Why does the Red Forest not decompose? It has, as it were, fossilised because of the radiation that brought the process to a halt “through the eradication of microbes, fungi and insects responsible for recycling organic matter”; decomposition and decay, too, even death itself, can no longer occur in Chernobyl.
Page after page, the author develops his radical thought: the entire world is on its way to becoming Chernobyl, and we are already living after the end of a world, through a surrender of sovereignty to the atom.
“Far from ‘liquidating’ the lethal effect of radiation, the Sarcophagus merely covers it, and imperfectly at that. It inherits the obsession with concreteness from the very technological failures it seeks to neutralise. The funereal allusions of its original name must have seemed disturbing to the Soviet officials who renamed it Shelter Object, Covering Object ... And yet ... it was the term Sarcophagus that was mortally precise. Humanity has been digging its own grave for some time. ... The Earth itself is becoming a mass grave.”
****
Forty years since Chornobyl, and eighty years — on August 6, 2025 — since Hiroshima in 1945. On August 9 of that same year, the second Japanese city, Nagasaki, was also struck.
Alessandro Colombo, professor of international relations at the University of Milan, considers the US bomb dropped on Hiroshima “the first act of modern terrorism”. The terrorist act, he explains, has a victim — a city, a community, a place — but a different recipient. Striking Hiroshima was intended as a message to the Japanese government, reluctant to surrender at the end of the Second World War, by then already concluded. Nagasaki, three days later, was also devastated to demonstrate to the leaders in Tokyo — in some military factions still unwilling to surrender — that their Empire had no escape.
I think back to a visit to the United Nations Headquarters in New York, many years ago: what has stayed with me is the memory of a stone statue, along a corridor people passed through. A well-modelled human figure with a smooth surface, apparently not very interesting but, if you looked at its back, you could see that it was completely corroded: from that direction the nuclear wind had come.
Notes on Hiroshima is the journalistic diary of 1994 Nobel Prize winner in Literature Kenzaburō Ōe (1935–2023). It recounts his stay in the city struck by the bomb in 1963, on the occasion of a gathering of the peace movement, and several subsequent journeys. The subject of the reportage has a precise name: hibakusha, a relatively recent term in the Japanese language, literally meaning “those who were affected by the bombing”, a word that did not exist before 1945. The three characters that make up its ideogram mean to receive/to suffer, burst/explosion and person.
How many hibakusha were there? Difficult to establish at the time. Besides those who bore the scars of radiation on their bodies, it took years to verify and officially establish a connection between exposure to the atomic wind — since the bomb exploded in the air — and the increase in cases of cancer, particularly leukaemia.
The hibakusha were victims on many levels, a terrible story. Because of the physical damage, because they were manipulated by political forces, including pacifist ones, because of the marginalisation they suffered, because they were abandoned by the State and treated only thanks to private donations and care, above all thanks to the complete dedication of individual healthcare workers who had survived Hiroshima.
Among the figures the author describes, one stands out: Dr Shigetō Fumio, himself a hibakusha, whom Ōe defines, in the chapter devoted to him, as “an authentic man”. A specialist in radiology, he gradually came closer to and discovered “the aberrant truth”, later confirmed by the team of scientists who studied the syndrome several weeks afterwards: the bomb that had exploded was a uranium atomic bomb.
In The History of Medical Care for Atomic Bomb Patients in Hiroshima, we read the testimony of Dr Asakawa, when they were still working blindly:
“Many people with no kind of injury at all complained of feeling exhausted for no apparent reason. After some time, those same people began to suffer nosebleeds, stools mixed with blood, and subcutaneous haemorrhaging; finally, they died. Through blood tests ... I tried ... to observe the blood cells of some patients. ... Those patients had died because their white blood cell count was extremely low.”
Dr Shigetō, meanwhile, discovered that the X-ray films stored at the Red Cross Hospital had been exposed despite being hermetically sealed. Later, during one of his surveys of the city, he “picked up a roof tile on which the imprint of a tuft of shepherd’s purse was clearly visible”.
His worst fears had, unfortunately, taken shape. But it was to become a twenty-year struggle to establish the link between radiation and leukaemia, a battle fought by this doctor and by one of his brilliant pupils, Yamawaki Takuso, whose theories were boycotted by the institutional world, buried, silenced; he himself became the victim of political and media attacks.
The medical profession’s battle for scientific truth is, in my view, the hardest and densest part of this important diary, although it is written in a simple, measured style. Yet the accounts of human tragedies are anguishing: suicides, isolation, the fate of those disfigured by keloids following their wounds.
Kenzaburō Ōe writes again:
“But the most bewildering element in much of the writing that recalls that ill-fated summer morning twenty years ago is probably the silence of the citizens after the bombing.”
Men and women disfigured, children with their skin hanging in shreds, many suddenly blind, mute and motionless. One hundred and sixty-four hibakusha gathered their memories of suffering in Testimonies of the Atomic Bombing.
“One hundred and sixty-four hibakusha had dared to give voice to their lament despite their physical and spiritual pain, but the hand of the giant who held the power had silenced them.”
The author concludes in this way, in the final entry of the Diary, from 1965:
“I have decided to take part in the movement in support of the project for the White Paper on the damage caused by the atomic bomb. ... following the illuminating example of some great representatives of the people of Hiroshima, beginning with Dr Shigetō, an authoritative representative of men who are neither too desperate nor, still less, too hopeful, men who never surrender and continue on their way day after day. — January–May 1965.”
****
From the post-war period until the 1980s, Italy had a series of civilian nuclear power plants in operation for the production of electricity, managed over the years by Enel. The first was built in Latina, in 1963: it was the most powerful in Europe; it was immediately followed by the one at Sessa Aurunca, in the province of Caserta, then the most powerful in the world. Later came Trino Vercellese and Montalto di Castro, which, however, never actually entered into operation; the Caorso plant dates from 1981.
There were no serious accidents at Italy’s nuclear plants, but there was considerable alarm here too when, on March 28, 1979, in the United States, a partial meltdown of the core occurred at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, releasing radioactive substances. The plant was closed and dismantled, and the clean-up operations continued until 1993. Today, however, after its long period of dormancy, its reopening is being planned, to satisfy the voracious demand for energy generated by artificial intelligence.
In 1986, after the Chernobyl accident, a referendum was held in Italy to confirm or reject the nuclear option. Held in 1987, it marked the end of the country’s nuclear energy policy, and the plants were closed and decommissioned; radioactive waste was disposed of on Italian territory or in France.
A new referendum to confirm or reject that choice was held, together with other questions, in June 2011. But the triple tragedy of Fukushima — the earthquake, the tsunami and the nuclear accident — which had occurred only four months earlier, once again influenced citizens’ reaffirmation of No to this form of energy production based on the atom.
Today, however, as reported by Corriere della Sera on June 7 of this year (2026), in an article by Fausta Chiesa, “52% of Italians declare themselves in favour of or neutral towards nuclear energy, compared with 36% in 2019. Among young people under 35, the percentage of those open to the possibility rises to 63 per cent.”
And indeed, last June the government set in motion the parliamentary process which, within 15 or 20 years, or perhaps a little more, should lead to the operation of the latest-generation small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) — who knows whether they can be reconciled with the ever-growing problem of climate change, scorching temperatures and drought.
But, even without serious accidents at nuclear power plants, Italy too, in the Lombardy region of Brianza, has had “its Chernobyl”, and ten years earlier.
July 10, 1976 (50 years ago!), 12:37 p.m.: this was the moment of the notorious disaster at the Swiss company ICMESA, based in Meda, which manufactured herbicides and pesticides, and which that day suffered a serious failure in one of its reactors. Suddenly damaged, as the temperature rose far beyond the threshold, excessive pressure caused one of its safety valves to open, releasing into the air, through a chimney, a cloud of TCDD dioxin — one of its most toxic formulations — which the atmospheric wind carried, like an extremely fine, opalescent white powder, above all into the nearby territory of the municipality of Seveso, over an area of 50 square kilometres. A worker who intervened promptly prevented an explosion.
A disaster ranked by international monitoring bodies among the worst in the world, whose consequences were worsened by the company’s culpable silence — one week!, some sources write — before informing the local authorities of the true nature of the contaminating material.
Warning the population, with such a delay, not to go outside, not to eat local products and to wash themselves thoroughly did not prevent eye problems or the onset of chloracne — cysts and pustules on the face — in around 280 people, mostly children, whose photographs went around the world and are surely a clear and dramatic memory for those who followed those events.
An invisible cloud killed all the animals in the area, attacked trees and plants, forced 676 inhabitants of Seveso and 60 of Meda to evacuate, and led to the definitive demolition of hundreds of buildings. It became necessary to clear the woodland, remove the contaminated soil to a depth of 80 centimetres, and then cover it with new, uncontaminated soil.
The plan to destroy all the contaminated material in a newly built incinerator — the rubble from the houses and the factory itself that had been demolished, plants, animals, every poisoned possession, every tool used in the clean-up work — was rejected.
It was eventually decided to bury the waste in special containment tanks, made of concrete with multiple layers of lining: two 80,000-cubic-metre containers in Meda and 200,000 cubic metres in Seveso.
Today, above these two containment tanks, stands the Bosco delle Querce Nature Park, where the only tree to survive the radical clean-up grows: a 70-year-old poplar, 30 metres high, with a trunk diameter of 440 centimetres, eventually included among Italy’s Monumental Trees. In its shade, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the accident, a commemorative ceremony was held in the presence of Head of State Sergio Mattarella.
However, in 2021 journalist Alberto Giuliani wrote on www.rigeneriamoterritorio.it that monitoring carried out in 2019 had recorded the same quantity of dioxin in the soil as in 1976. Agricultural areas, the article continued, are poorly monitored; furthermore, it is unclear whether the containment tanks are still completely airtight.
Because of these grey areas, in July 2020 the Mayor of Seveso, Luca Allievi, resigned. Today, monitoring of the condition of the tanks is managed by the Lombardy Region, which guarantees their safety and the absence of leachate.
And that is all that can reasonably be done. To prevent the pervasive poison of dioxin, still present, from causing further damage.
****
Unfortunately, Japan is once again the setting for the other tragic chapter in the world’s civilian nuclear diary, alongside Chernobyl.
And indeed From Hiroshima to Fukushima — Japan and the Nuclear Nightmare (Edizioni Stilnovo, September 2020) is the in-depth work by Susanna Marino — professor of Japanese Language and Cultural Institutions — and Stefano Vecchia — journalist and writer — which, retracing the history of these two tragedies, unique in the world, addresses the fundamental knot of Japan’s ambivalent relationship with nuclear power.
At its “core” is the fear — confirmed every day by Donald Trump’s muddled and dangerous policies — of an opportunistic American disengagement from its alliance with Tokyo, while China increases its political weight in the region and North Korea grows into a threatening nuclear power.
This is also what Stefano Carrer, journalist for Il Sole 24 Ore, writes in the introduction to this short volume, having first served as an envoy and then, from 2013 to 2018, as the Milan newspaper’s correspondent from Tokyo. The reason why a Japan already so deeply wounded does not abandon the atom “is a military one”, he observes.
The obsession with Chinese and North Korean policies “pushes the Japanese establishment to see civilian nuclear power as a form of counter-insurance against the perceived volatility of American strategy. In practice, in Japan there is no certainty that, in a future crisis, the United States would be willing to risk Washington for Tokyo.”
Carrer, who died in May 2020, did not see this contribution published, and today it appears increasingly convincing.
On March 11, 2011, he was in the newsroom in Tokyo, where the earthquake could be felt distinctly: magnitude 9, its epicentre in the ocean 373 kilometres further north than the capital, along the coast where the Fukushima nuclear power plant was located.
The earthquake was classified as a global Level 7 event — the highest level for catastrophes, as in the Chernobyl accident — a quake so powerful that it shifted the Earth’s axis by 17 centimetres and permanently caused days to become 1.8 microseconds shorter. In all, around 20,000 victims.
I remember his reports at the time of the event, which I heard on the radio.
Then, after the tsunami swept into the Tohoku coast with waves averaging 13 metres, but reaching almost 40 in some places — came the unexpected accident at the plant’s reactors. Ironically, the violence of the mass of water damaged the cooling system, triggering a chain of critical failures.
The journalist, who set off amid a thousand difficulties to bear witness to the catastrophe from those devastated places, wrote hundreds of pieces for his newspaper from that moment onwards, and for years.
****
These poignant and profound articles on the Fukushima accident — unique in their kind, published over the years in his newspaper, Il Sole 24 Ore — I wonder why they were never published by the publishing house of the newspaper itself.
His sister Giuliana took care of it. In 2024 she edited and published them, producing the book independently and not for sale: Stefano Carrer, Fukushima (2011–2019). Diary of a Journalist in the Field. The Story of Fukushima, through the Reportages and Articles for Il Sole 24 Ore. The collection opens with a foreword by Vincenzo Petrone, Italy’s ambassador to Tokyo from 2008 to 2013 — who shared those frantic and terrible days with Carrer, establishing a bond of mutual esteem.
The volume contains 200 of these reports and, having been submitted to various national literary prizes and a number of Italian libraries, has received the extensive recognition that I wish to list below, without the need for further words. While still alive, Stefano had received the prestigious Umberto Agnelli Award for his work in Fukushima.
Umberto Agnelli Journalism Award, Italy-Japan Foundation, Kyoto, October 5, 2011. “For having recounted — from the very places where the disaster occurred — with professionalism, objectivity and great passion, the dramatic events that struck Japan on March 11, 2011.”
Here are the awards so far given to the collection of articles; we repeat the details:
**Stefano Carrer, Fukushima (2011–2019). Diary of a Journalist in the Field. The Story of Fukushima, through the Reportages and Articles for Il Sole 24 Ore, edited by Giuliana Carrer. Milan, May 2024.
Premio Firenze
Honourable Mention, Non-Fiction section — Centro culturale Firenze-Europa Mario Conti, Salone dei Cinquecento, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, December 14, 2024.
Premio Internazionale Città di Cattolica-Pegasus Literary Awards
17th edition — Special Critics’ Prize, Cattolica (RN), March 29, 2025.
XVI Concorso Letterario Franco Loi — Città di Grottammare
1st place, Special Rotary Club HPR Prize, Grottammare (AP), May 10, 2025.
Premio Accademico Internazionale di Letteratura Contemporanea Lucius Annaeus Seneca
9th edition, Commission President’s Prize, Non-Fiction section, Castello Svevo Normanno, Sannicandro di Bari, October 4, 2025.
Premio Poesia, Prosa e Arti Figurative 2025 — Accademia Internazionale “Il Convivio”
Diploma of Honour, Non-Fiction section, Alzano Lombardo (BG), October 26, 2025.
Premio Letterario Internazionale Santa Margherita Ligure — Franco Delpino 2025
48th edition, First Prize for Published Non-Fiction, Santa Margherita Ligure (GE), November 23, 2025.
Premio Letterario Internazionale Poesia, Narrativa, Saggistica SARZANAE
Associazione Culturale Poeti solo Poeti Poeti, 13th edition, Special Memory and Truth Prize, Non-Fiction section, Sarzana (SP), December 13, 2025.
Premio Letterario Internazionale Il Saggista
2026 edition, Non-Fiction section, fourth place. Castellana Grotte (BA), presented on May 14, 2026, at the Turin International Book Fair.
Premio Letterario La Ginestra — Firenze
Special Jury Mention, Non-Fiction section, Biblioteca delle Oblate, Via dell’Oriuolo 24, Florence, May 9, 2026.
Premio Letterario Internazionale Poetico e Narrativo “Cosenza, Città Federiciana”
18th edition, Posthumous Award, Cosenza, June 7, 2026.
This is the detailed citation for the SARZANAE Prize, among others.
Fukushima: The Truth Walking over the Rubble
Fukushima (2011–2019). Diary of a Journalist in the Field is not merely a collection of articles: it is a monument to civic memory. It is the account of a man who does not observe History from afar, but crosses through it with the force of his questions, the lucidity of his profession, the ethics of a witness.
Stefano Carrer, correspondent for Il Sole 24 Ore, does not write “about” Fukushima: he writes from Fukushima, with his feet in the mud, his camera covered in dust, his conscience alert.
From the very first pages, the editor carefully reconstructs the author’s human and professional context: a journalist capable of “wearing out the soles of his shoes”, travelling kilometres through destroyed villages, broken railway lines and coasts devoured by the tsunami, to recount what he saw with rigour and compassion.
His writing never takes on the tone of exaggeration, but the more difficult one of precision: data, testimonies, perspectives, contradictions — everything flows into a narrative that never gives way to emotion, yet is never without heart.
The diary opens with the earthquake of March 11, 2011, followed by the tsunami and the collapse of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. The author documents the sequence of events with surgical clarity: the power of the earthquake, the 38-metre waves, the automatic shutdown of the 11 reactors along the coast, the blackout of the diesel generators, the meltdowns of reactors 1, 2 and 3, the progressive evacuation extending as far as 30 kilometres.
His reports reveal a double tragedy: the visible one — the physical devastation, the smoke still enveloping the plant, the explosions, the displaced people — and the invisible one, made up of Tepco’s reticence, delays and omissions, whose late and contradictory communications increased distrust and panic.
As the editor recalls, Carrer was among the first to denounce the inadequacy of the management and the fragility of the safety system.
The strength of the volume lies in its “moving” perspective: Carrer does not remain in Tokyo, but immediately sets off northwards, by car, train and on foot, experiencing firsthand the uncertainty of interrupted roads, the freezing cold of hotels without water or electricity, the constant tremors that pass through the nights of survivors.
Unforgettable is the ramen restaurant which, despite having no running water, continues to serve noodles drawn from a well, because “life goes on”.
Unforgettable are the workers repairing railway tracks by the light of floodlights.
Unforgettable are the mothers stocking up at the konbini, the foreigners fleeing, the Japanese who remain with absolute composure.
Carrer observes, records, does not judge. His is a form of writing that illuminates without wounding, that recounts without intruding.
The work is not only reportage: it is also economic, political and cultural analysis. Carrer follows the fluctuations of the stock market, Tepco’s controversial role, government decisions, the debate over civilian nuclear energy and its connection with military strategy, a subject on which the author expresses himself with exemplary clarity:
“Military and civilian nuclear power are more closely intertwined than one might think, especially in a country that has suffered from it in concrete terms.”
The book thus becomes a great mirror: it reflects the fears, vulnerabilities and resilience of a nation that has known the atomic bomb and is now facing the nightmare of internal contamination, not imposed by an enemy but generated by errors, negligence and fate.
The diary is also a collection of portraits: Chiharu, Naoto Matsumura, the farmer left alone among abandoned animals, Mikiko, the factory workers, the communities starting over. They emerge as symbols of tenacity and care.
Carrer does not seek heroism, but ordinary resistance: the ability to begin again, moral discipline, industrious silence.
The work edited by Giuliana Carrer is a precious gift: it gives the reader back not only the precise analyses of a great professional, but also the soul of a man who believed in journalism as a responsibility towards truth and towards the people he encountered.
Fukushima (2011–2019) is a book that remains. It is testimony, memory, and at the same time a meditation on human limits, communication, power and public ethics.
A work that illuminates catastrophe without turning it into spectacle, that gives a voice to a people and to a journalist who carried that voice everywhere.
One of the highest testimonies of contemporary Italian journalism.
****
In the municipal library of Levico Terme (Trento), the scholar Luca Giudici comes across the volume on Fukushima, reads it in its entirety and writes a long, dense and thorough presentation of it for the online magazine Quaderni d’altri tempi (www.quadernidaltritempi.eu), in the January 2026 issue, in the Labirinti section, under the title Professione reporter nell’era del rischio globale — Una riflessione su giornalismo, energia e catastrofe. A sixteen-page analysis, remarkably acute and erudite, interspersed with several photographs taken from the volume itself, shot by Stefano Carrer during his journeys.
“...
“In the days following the catastrophe, most foreign correspondents left Tokyo for fear of nuclear contamination, taking refuge in Seoul or Kyoto. Only two Italian journalists remained, Pio d’Emilia, correspondent for SkyTG24, and Stefano Carrer for Il Sole 24 Ore. The job of a correspondent has always been this: to go where others cannot or do not want to go.” In this case, challenging “the invisible that contaminates”.
Presented to the magazine’s readers through its essential facts, Stefano’s journey to the places of the tragedy is explained and analysed by Giudici with surgical precision, going beyond the chronicle he is reading and extracting from it its human, philosophical, political and existential message: both regarding the nuclear tragedy itself and the mission of the reporter.
Many pages revolve around the concept of catastrophe: “Catastrophe has become the backdrop. We have learned to live with the impossible.”
And indeed, reading what he writes as I put together these Atomic Notes, some of his observations make me think of Chornobyl; wherever I read Fukushima, I could once again read Chornobyl:
“...But Fukushima is not an event. It is a condition. The catastrophe ... is what continues to happen, every day, ever since. It is the contaminated water that accumulates. It is the people who cannot return. It is the cancer that will manifest itself twenty years from now. It is the impossible decisions that someone will have to make a hundred years from now. We are already living in the catastrophe. We are not waiting for it, nor are we warding it off. We are inside it. And perhaps this is the hardest thought to sustain: that normality and catastrophe are no longer separate.”
“The victims of Fukushima are not equivalent to those of Chernobyl or Hiroshima. Every catastrophe has its own uniqueness, its own irreducibility. But at the same time, they are all connected: by technology, by economics, by the logic of domination.
Today, after Gaza, yet another station on this via crucis that is our apocalypse postponed through time, these reflections take on the faces of the more than two hundred and fifty journalists who have lost their lives there, embodying the same spirit that animated Stefano Carrer: the value of bearing witness.”
This same extensive presentation by Giudici is itself a testimony, and a deeply moving one, to the events of Fukushima and to the personality of the journalist who recounted them.
Once I told Stefano — who had returned to the newsroom in Milan in 2018 — that he had never really come back from Japan. And I was moved to read these lines by Luca Giudici, who never knew Stefano, in a paragraph of his long essay:
“The correspondent who does not return” — Stefano Carrer died suddenly on May 20, 2020, during a hike in the mountains around Como. He was 58. He did not die from the radiation at Fukushima, but in a certain sense, Carrer never really returned from Fukushima.
Eight years of reporting, eight years of returning to bear witness. Eight years documenting impermanence, precariousness, uncertainty. Carrer made the invisible visible. Eight years of reporting, repeating: look here, do not turn your head away, this is important.”
The mission of bearing witness also passes through images: the photographs Stefano took on his journeys to and in Fukushima, many of which appear in the collection of his writings, have, together with others, become a travelling exhibition, inaugurated in February at the Lambrate library in Milan, under the title From Hiroshima to Fukushima — Japan: A Reflection on Resilience.
And they will continue their task of bearing witness to what happened at other venues, soon in Meda, from October 10 to 17, 2026, and then elsewhere ...
****
I have kept a brilliant article by Piero Martin (Domani, March 3, 2026) on Iran’s nuclear programme — the final subject of these Atomic Notes — which is the issue that has finally disappeared from the pages of newspapers and from Trump’s proclamations, now focused on the conquest of the Strait of Hormuz, which, according to him, is not far off.
The very same US president, reconfirmed in office, had in 2018 — during his first term — thrown out the agreement with Tehran made by his predecessor Barack Obama (signed in 2015), which set limits on uranium enrichment in the shadow of the minarets; a dangerous step backwards by the bungling Trump, according to the ayatollahs, a decision equivalent to a “free-for-all” for the centrifuges that transform the metallic chemical element with symbol U, atomic number 92, from something suitable for civilian use into something potentially ready for the construction of a bomb.
Piero Martin is an experimental physicist who teaches at the University of Padua. He is also a journalist and an exceptionally engaging science communicator, with an appealing style of writing. He has more than a hundred publications to his name, as well as collaborations with institutions, research centres and international journals.
Science communication is his mission, with fruitful synergies with people such as musicians Vinicio Capossela and Massimo Donà, and appearances on television and radio (Superquark, Zapping, Radio tre scienza) as well as in the press.
I read in his biography, on the website of the University of Padua, that at this institution, “together with colleagues from the RFX consortium, he researches how to reproduce a piece of the sun in the laboratory, studying controlled thermonuclear fusion as a source of clean, CO2-free and unlimited electrical energy”: the new mythical frontier of scientific research, the philosopher’s stone.
He has also published L’era dell’atomo (The Age of the Atom, Il Mulino), Zerologia, and Trash. Tutto quello che dovreste sapere sui rifiuti (Trash. Everything You Should Know About Waste); an eclectic character, in short.
The article in the newspaper Domani, which addresses the question of Iran’s nuclear intentions, is entitled Quei tre maledetti neutroni. La sottile linea rossa della guerra (Those Three Damned Neutrons. The Thin Red Line of War).
And this is how the engaging piece begins:
“The boundary between war and peace is also a matter of yoctograms. The yoctogram is a rather tiny unit of mass: it is more or less the weight of a neutron, one of the two particles that make up the atom (the other is the proton, of similar mass).
On a human scale, it is a completely negligible amount of matter, considering that you need to put ten billion billion neutrons together to make the weight of a grain of rice.
And yet, there are three neutrons at the centre of the Iranian nuclear question, three microscopic particles that make the difference between one of the most common elements in the Earth’s crust — 500 times more widespread than gold — and the material needed to build an atomic bomb.
Between peace and war.”
The article then explains with exemplary clarity the difference between uranium-238 (99.2 per cent of all uranium extracted) and the much rarer uranium-235, lighter but far more threatening because it is the one needed for an atomic bomb.
U-238 has 92 protons and 146 neutrons; U-235 has 92 protons and 143 neutrons, and only the latter can sustain “a chain fission reaction, which is necessary for the release of nuclear energy”.
The brilliant scientific explanation then gives way to the necessary second part, which retraces the historical and political story of international relations concerning the nuclear programme.
After the trauma of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, US President Eisenhower, on December 8, 1953, delivered his Atoms for Peace speech at the United Nations, an appeal for the peaceful use of nuclear power among the countries allied with the United States, among which, at the time, was the Iran of Shah Reza Pahlavi.
Thus the first reactor in Tehran came into being.
With the Islamic Revolution of 1979 — the author continues — the international community began to suspect that, given how easily peaceful enrichment can be turned towards military purposes, Iran’s intentions might soon become highly bellicose; while Iran claimed, and continues to claim, the right to access nuclear energy for civilian purposes.
Having observed the troubled course of relations in this field, in 2025 the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, an organisation founded in 1945 to monitor the global risks threatening us, wrote, as Professor Martin concludes, that “the only practicable solution to prevent an Iranian nuclear escalation is the diplomatic one.”
****
The truth about Tehran’s enrichment of uranium for aggressive military purposes is in fact highly doubtful (at the beginning of these Atomic Notes, mention was made of the CIA’s recent and reassuring report to President Trump), heavily polluted by political interests in which Israel is at the forefront.
If the fears of the Jewish state, should it ever be threatened by an Iran possessing the bomb, are more than justified, inventing false evidence of such a threat is another matter altogether — especially after the traumatic revelation to the world that the weapons of mass destruction did not exist, with the vial of anthrax displayed before the whole world, which in 2003 became the cause of the US war against Iraq, with Bush as president, a war wanted by the hawks in Washington.
But “the theories of an alliance between Saddam Hussein’s fiercely secular Iraqi regime and the Islamic fundamentalists of al-Qaeda, and therefore of Iraqi involvement in ‘9/11’, did not hold up”.
All this is addressed in a book published in 2025 by Derive Approdi, L’Iran e la bomba, by Giorgio S. Frankel (an analyst of international affairs and independent journalist, who died in Turin in 2012, where he had also taught at the University).
The essay actually dates back to 2010 but, as Andrea Fumagalli notes in the foreword, “it seems to have been written yesterday”, indeed, today.
In fact, it is now, in the face of Donald Trump’s state of confusion, that it becomes clearer how the strong pressure from Israel — that is, from his friend Netanyahu — has driven the United States to bleed itself dry for a hybrid conflict, already expressed in its vague and contradictory intentions: shall we dismantle the plants, or overthrow the regime, help the population to rebel, or perhaps invade by land, or instead take Hormuz, let’s make a lot of money!
After the tragedies recalled here, the wars, the accidents, we stubbornly continue to seek not the diplomatic path but the most atrocious one.
This book already clearly outlines the decline of the United States — which we now read about every day — the rise of China and Israel’s haste to definitively attack Iran, something it could not do without US participation on the front line.
While Barack Obama had resisted Tel Aviv’s demands, with whom relations became chronically poor (as had also happened with Bill Clinton, “furious with the Israelis” over their interference in his policy of dialogue with Boris Yeltsin’s Russia), today’s tycoon in the White House has agreed to satisfy the desires of the Jewish lobbies.
Iran, however, an ancient civilisation — as has often been stressed — has the means, strategy and capacity for rational analysis.
Moreover, Frankel argues, observing objectively the geopolitical dynamics of recent decades, “for Iran, Israel is not among its main political and strategic priorities”.
International balances are shifting their centre of gravity towards Asia, towards China, as we know, and indeed Iran “has growing ties with the Asian powers, ... and the same is true of the Arab countries of the Gulf...”.
Nuclear power, in my opinion — however terrible the scenarios it suggests, and has concretely caused, may be in reality and on the emotional level — is “only” one link in a much more complex game of interests, of relations of power whose geopolitical, economic and financial ramifications often escape even attentive readings, and yes, ... they also often risk getting out of hand.
The end
