Prisoners Cleaning Radiation
In the world of The Handmaid’s Tale, one of the biggest problems in society that lead to the cult’s political takeover is pollution. One of the missions of Gilead was to clean up the environment and un-do the damage done by mankind with toxic dumping grounds and locations of radiation spills. In the show, the clean carbon emissions by 78%, but it comes at the cost of women’s lives. The “un women”- mostly lesbians, radical feminists, and adulterers, are forced to clean up radioactive materials in a place called “the colonies”. They literally work themselves to death, as their bodies fall apart from radiation-related disease.
During the 1970s, prisoners in the Soviet Union were forced to do manual labor in uranium mines to gather enough material for their arsenal of atomic bombs. Obviously, prisoners were exposed to extremely high levels of radiation. The average lifespan of a prisoner in these mines was just two years. Everyday, train filled with new prisoners would arrive at the mines. They estimate there were roughly 5,000 men who died working there. It was common for prisoners to collapse, and die on the spot. Their overseers would smash their heads in if they fell, because they did not want anyone to escape by faking their death.
The prisoners who had the worst diseases were removed and studied by doctors in order for them to get more information about what would happen after dropping an atomic bomb. It was such a painful and awful experience, 12 prisoners made a suicide pact, blowing themselves up in the mines. A documentary was filmed about the experiences of the miners, called The Nuclear Gulag.