Keyword – Radio Free Europe

Kékesdi-Boldog, Dalma:

How Hungarian radio and Radio Free Europe communicated the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. A comparative analysis

On 26 of April 1986 1:23 AM a fatal nuclear accident occurred in the Soviet Union. Reactor No. 4 of the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Nuclear Power Plant exploded, and harmful radioactive fall-out effused. The accident threatened most of the population of the Eastern Block, but the people – including those in Hungary – could not receive appropriate information about the threat because of the Cold War context and authoritarian media policy. Based on archival sources, this paper explores how the Chernobyl case was managed on Hungarian Radio an the Hungarian broadcasts of Radio Free Europe. It focuses on what was aired about the Hungarian nuclear radiation level and what health protection recommendations were issued in Hungary.

Keywords: Chernobyl disaster, Hungarian information policy, Hungarian Radio, Radio Free Europe, soviet/ communist media system