Twenty years ago, a nuclear meltdown at the Chernobyl reactor complex in the Ukraine unleashed radioactive fallout across Europe and gave long-standing debates over the safety of nuclear power a newly salient reference point. There continues to be disagreement on the death toll and long-term effects of the nuclear disaster, but it is clear the effect on common perceptions of and attitudes towards nuclear power has been dramatic. Chernobyl remains a traumatic event not just for those who lost loved ones during the disaster itself, or who were forced to abandon homes contaminated with radioactive caesium and iodine for millenia to come, but also for people thousands of kilometers away -- such as the many Germans who were confused by contradictory claims, warnings and reassurances as they feared for their children and themselves.

On Wednesday, German newspapers take the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster as an opportunity to evoke the fear and confusion that swept Germany in 1986. But they also link the disaster to topical issues such as international terrorism and the conflict over Iran's nuclear program and attack the Soviet bureaucracy now 15 years gone.

It's this last approach that right-wing daily Die Welt opts for, reminding its readers not just of the Chernobyl disaster, but also of a narrowly averted meltdown at a reactor outside St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) in 1975. It took Chernobyl, the commentator argues, to make Soviet authorities act on the dangers posed by their nuclear technology -- by abolishing themselves, ultimately: "The catastrophe sped the rise of glasnost and perestroika, as Mikhail Gorbachev himself has acknowledged," the commentator writes, suggesting that the most important political effect of the Chernobyl disaster consisted in "many people realizing that their government cared more about secrecy than about their health." Then all is well now that the Soviet government has been punished for its hubris? Far be it for the commentator to advocate a phasing out of nuclear power in Germany; the ongoing development of nuclear reactors is not up for debate. It's not a matter of avoiding the risks inherent in nuclear technology, but rather of finding "the best possible combination of risks." To drive home this point, the editorial closes with a comparison between the Chernobyl disaster and the crash of a "badly constructed airplane." Some people may have died in the crash, but surely this should not lead to "all air traffic being banned."

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany's leading conservative daily, approaches the topic of Chernobyl with its familiar blend of pompous rhetoric and moralism, discovering in the disaster a "confirmation of the darkest cultural pessimist prophecies" and one of many "storms" that "modernity and its humanist values" have had to endure. Like nuclear power itself, "the Enlightenment" has come through safe and sound -- but what is the "great moral lesson" to be learned from it all? In order to answer this question, the commentator ventures into the depths of our "collective memory," discovering there a "machinery of remembrance and conflict" that he suspects has been set in motion by "the most varied interests," perhaps even by an "invisible hand." The endless debates over Chernobyl's death toll are simply tasteless, the commentator argues, what with their reducing "every single radiation victim" to an "abstract number." But such debates have also seen the reactor meltdown's "ideological explosive force" instrumentalized for purposes of "blackmail," as in the Ukraine's repeated demands for financial loans to aid in the administration of the disaster zone. Of course, it's quite alright to be nitpicky when money is at stake; after all, "Germany has invested ten times as much money into the disaster area as Russia."

"Nuclear power? No thanks!" This old slogan of Germany's anti-nuclear movement provides the title for an editorial piece in the center-left daily Berliner Zeitung. "Today," the commentator writes, "some people make fun of the helpless, panicked and sometimes absurd reactions of those who were stricken with fear in May 1986," when the radioactive cloud released by the explosion of Chernobyl's reactor no. 4 drifted across northeastern Europe, "but people then were right to be afraid, because the fairy tales about our ability to control nuclear power, proffered by corporations and politicians with all the arrogance and naivety of those years, were suddenly stripped of all credibility." In other words, "nuclear power advocates will never again be able to claim that they are defending a safe technology." If anything, the commentator argues, international terrorism has made nuclear reactors a greater threat to security than before: "Who or what is to prevent a group of resolved and well-informed terrorists from taking over a nuclear reactor and deliberately causing a meltdown?" Such scenarios raise the question of whether it even makes sense to draw a strict distinction between the civilian and the military uses of nuclear power, as is frequently done in the ongoing debate over Iran's nuclear program. For the commentator, the issue is clear: "The civilian and the military use of nuclear power cannot be reasonably separated," he writes. The claim is intended as a criticism not just of Iran, but also of the United States, and specifically of the "schizophrenia" of a political strategy that "calls for other countries to use nuclear power for civilian purposes only, but doesn't exclude the use of nuclear weapons to enforce this." The editorial concludes by approvingly citing German Environmental Minister Sigmar Gabriel's suggestion that nuclear technology has become obsolete in the 21st century.