Russia’s Nuclear Propaganda Targets Australia
Grigory Pasko has brought to my attention to a recent issue of VESTNIK ATOMPROMa, a Russian “magazine about the nuclear industry”, which has been published by an enigmatically named Federal state unitary enterprise «Firm of commercial advertisement and scientific-technical propaganda» only since April 2007. Clearly, the real organization behind the magazine is the historically extremely secretive Rosatom – Russia’s Federal Agency for Atomic Energy, formerly known as Minatom. The cover of issue No.5, dated September 2007 (available online on Rosatom’s website), sports a full-page photo of Rosatom head Sergei Kiriyenko having an intense discussion with his boss, Vladimir Putin, against a backdrop of the Russian and Australian flags. The cover story, entitled “The Australian Success of Russia”, naturally has nothing but praise for the controversial Australia-Russia Nuclear Cooperation Agreement, which we’ve been discussing here on the blog for several months already. The article actually shows several photos of the environmental devastation caused to Aboriginal lands by the giant open-pit operation at Rio Tinto’s Ranger site in the Northern Territory, but you’d never guess from this breezy text, a single paragraph of which simultaneously manages to suggest that the dirt-poor Aboriginals are wealthy and to belittle their religious beliefs as mere childish superstition standing in the way of human progress: