It's OK, my binoculars are not Radioactive

An old story this, but one I've told so many times it would be a sin of omission not to record it here.

I own a pair of binoculars, fairly good quality and high magnification. They were very useful in viewing last week's eclipse (-:

These binoculars are Russian, and I bought them in a street market in Warsaw (Poland) in 1997.

The street markets in Warsaw are incredible. They are of a scale that I've not seen anywhere else. Both in size and range of items available.

A lot of vendors come across the Ukranian border in trucks loaded with goods of every description, some undoubtedly illicit. It was from such a vendor that I bought these binoculars.

In the Ukraine there's a little place called Chernobyl.... this is the site of one of the most memorable events in modern history. However there are some interesting and not-so-well-known consequences of the nuclear accident. One of which involves a town called Pripyat, which was near to the reactor. This town was evacuated after the accident and an exclusion zone built around it, due to the radioactive dust contaminating the environment.

This didn't stop the looters though, who systematically stripped the place of anything of value. Some of these items made their way across the border in trucks to be sold to unsuspecting customers at street markets.

In Poland in the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident it became quite common for people to carry portable Geiger-counters. These were often employed at street markets, much to the ire of the vendors.

This peculiar state of affairs lasted for much longer than would be expected. So this is how I came to be at a street market in Warsaw haggling over the price for a pair of binoculars with a Russian vendor in 1997.

I had borrowed a geiger counter for the day and had already determined the binoculars were "clean" before deciding to buy them. However when I casually started checking the radioactivity level of some of the vendor's other items, he angrily grabbed my hand in an unmistakable gesture of denial.

Doubtless he was counting on people buying in good faith without checking first, so the sound of a screaming geiger counter wouldn't exactly be the sort of advertisement he wanted!

So, ten years later I still have the binoculars. Whenever the occasion arises for me to pass them to someone, I always tell them that they're perfectly safe and not at all radioactive. This assurance is usully closely followed by the retelling of this story...


Footnote: Check out Elena Filatova's site - she has a travelogue with photos of a motorcycle tour through the Exclusion Zone. It's fascinating reading