Melanie Arndt reflects on her experiences of growing up east of the Iron Curtain during the Cold War—specifically as a child in East Germany and later as a volunteer in Minsk, Belarus. Her experience volunteering in Minsk, where she helped care for “Chernobyl children” during their recuperation, made her aware of how Chernobyl became a crucial political issue 10 years after the reactor explosion, and how it helped break open Cold War barriers. Arndt concludes that the reactor explosion was not a “typical Soviet” disaster, but rather a problem rooted in the very nature of radioactivity itself.