The magazine article “The Nuclear Tourist” by George Johnson is about a tour he went on to the Chernobyl site. Johnson describes his visit to the deserted city of Pripyat, a model Soviet city and now slowly being reclaimed by nature. Johnson highlights the otherworldly nature of abandoned buildings like a dry swimming pool, gymnasium with rotting floors, and amusement park with its iconic Ferris wheel. He notices the irony in the dark history of the site and its current status as a tourist destination, where tourists are free to wander without the protective measures that are the norm in the United States. The paper also touches on the general concept of nuclear tourism, where people are drawn to sites of unimaginable devastation for the purposes of curiosity and to bear witness to the devastation caused.
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