Down with Big Brother (28 page)

Gorbachev’s talk about “new thinking” angered the Kremlin old guard. “What kind of new thinking?” spluttered the octogenarian Boris Ponomarev, who had been in charge of the party’s foreign policy department for a quarter of a century. “We already have the right thinking. Let the Americans change their thinking!”
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W
HEN
G
ORBACHEV LOOKED
into Reagan’s eyes in Geneva, he still saw the face of world imperialism. He resented the president’s attitude of moral superiority and eagerness to subject him to long lectures on human rights. “I felt that my interlocutor was so weighed down by stereotyped thinking that it was really difficult for him to reason soberly,” he complained.
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He had little time for small talk and was put off by Reagan’s penchant for telling anecdotes and jokes and his lack of knowledge of detailed arms control issues. After their first meeting he made a comment to his chief foreign policy aide that suggested he did not believe that Reagan was up to the job. “He would make a very pleasant next-door neighbor, but a president …”
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At the same time, Gorbachev understood that Reagan was politically strong and had the overwhelming support of his own people. He concluded that Reagan was a person with whom it was possible “to do business,” the very phrase that Mrs. Thatcher had used about Gorbachev himself two years before.
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Soviet fears of a nuclear first strike by the United States faded after the Geneva meeting. Gorbachev accepted Reagan’s assurances that he was not a warmonger intent on the physical destruction of the rival superpower. He achieved his primary goal going into the summit, a joint statement proclaiming that “a nuclear war cannot be won—and must never be fought.”
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The Soviet leader took such rhetoric seriously. When military aides came to him a few weeks later with a routine contingency plan for the outbreak of nuclear war, he brusquely pushed them away. “Up until now, we assumed in our planning that a war [with the United States] is possible. But now, while I am general secretary, don’t even put such plans, such programs on my desk.”
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The antinuclear sentiments of both leaders were soon strengthened by a man-made nuclear catastrophe that seemed to fit right in with the biblical prophecy of Armageddon that had impressed Reagan so much: “A great star fell from the sky, flaming like a torch; and it fell on a third of the rivers and springs. The name of the star was Wormwood; and a third of the water turned to wormwood, and men in great numbers died of the water because it was poisoned” [Revelation 8:10]. The Ukrainian word for “wormwood” is
Chernobyl
.

CHERNOBYL
April 26, 1986

S
UMMER HAD COME EARLY
to the picture book villages around the Chernobyl nuclear plant in northern Ukraine. It was that magical time of year when, with scarcely any warning, the rivers unfreeze, the snows melt, and the countryside turns a deep shade of green. Spring had been compressed into a few fleeting days, giving local residents barely enough time to unseal their windows, pack away their heavy winter coats, and plant a new crop of vegetables. The scent of pine trees and apple blossoms filled the air. Day and night fishermen lined the banks of the cooling pond of the power plant, casting their nets for the young fish that teemed in the warm wastes.

Carved out of the primeval forest, Chernobyl was known as a good place to raise a family. Recreational facilities were excellent. The dormitory town of Pripyat, where most Chernobyl employees had their apartments, was cleaner and better planned than most Soviet industrial communities. The glittering white power plant was a pleasant contrast with the pollution-spewing industrial dinosaurs that enveloped many urban areas in clouds of black smoke. Dominating the surrounding woodlands, the power plant seemed almost as benign as the meandering Pripyat River. Its four reactors emitted no odor, and scarcely any noise, other than a barely discernible hum. Nobody worried about environmental hazards. For years the Soviet government had assured everybody that nuclear power was perfectly safe.

As he paced up and down the control room of Reactor No. 4, Chernobyl’s deputy chief engineer felt tired and irritable. Anatoly Dyatlov had been on duty for more than twelve hours. His subordinates had messed up a routine experiment to see if the reactor could operate under electricity generated by its own turbines, allowing the power in the reactor to fall to unacceptably low levels. There had been some discussion about terminating the experiment prematurely, but Dyatlov ordered it to continue. Soon the ordeal would be over, and he would be able to go back to bed.

The first explosion came in the form of a heavy thud, at 1:23 a.m. It was followed by a series of tremors, like an earthquake, and a mighty whoosh of steam. Then another deafening bang from somewhere deep inside the building shook the plaster off the ceiling and extinguished the overhead lights. It sounded to Dyatlov as if a huge gas tank had exploded. Others thought that the building was under attack by terrorists or even that war with the United States had finally broken out. The dozen or so engineers in the control room strained to read their instruments by the light of the emergency circuits.

“Everybody to the reserve switchboard,” shouted Dyatlov.
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Seconds later he countermanded his order. Darting from one control panel to another, he realized that what had happened was not a minor accident but something much more terrible. Computer readouts showed that the turbine pressure was zero. In other words, steam from the reactor was no longer turning the turbines that generated electricity. Pressure in the water channels was also zero, meaning that cool water was no longer being pumped through the reactor. Most alarming of all, the instruments showed that the power in the reactor was increasing wildly when it should have been decreasing.

“I thought my eyes were coming out of my head. There was no way to explain it,” Dyatlov recalled later.

In Chernobyl types of reactors, nuclear fission is controlled by lowering dozens of neutron-absorbing graphite rods into the reactor core. Normally the rods are lowered mechanically, but in an emergency they can also be lowered by gravity. To Dyatlov’s horror, neither procedure seemed to work. For some reason, the rods had jammed in their sockets, about a third of the way down. The reactor was out of control.

The foreman in charge of the reactor rushed into the room. Pale and panic-stricken, Valery Perevozchenko was probably the first person to appreciate the scale of the catastrophe because he had seen it begin. He had been standing on a galley above the reactor lid, a huge metal circle made up of 1,661 pressurized steel tubes, each containing 770 pounds of nuclear fuel. The engineers referred to the lid colloquially as the
pyatachok
(five-kopeck
piece). Without warning, the
pyatachok
seemed to come alive. Viewed from above, it looked as if 1,661 steel cans were popping open simultaneously, in response to some inexplicable force beneath.
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Seconds after Perevozchenko ran out of the hall, a terrifying blast ripped off the
pyatachok
, leaving a gaping hole in the roof of the reactor hall.

No one believed the foreman when he announced that the reactor had exploded. According to the textbooks, this was technically impossible. Dyatlov was still thinking of ways to control the nuclear reaction. He turned to two trainees, who had been observing the experiment, and ordered them to attempt to pull the graphite control rods down by hand. Protective clothing was nowhere to be found, so the trainees rushed off without respirators or masks. After they left, Dyatlov realized that he had probably sent two young men to their deaths for no useful purpose. If the control rods would not come down mechanically or by gravity, there was no way to bring them down manually. He ran after them, but it was too late.
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They had already disappeared into the smoke-filled inferno. By the time they returned, half an hour later, both had received lethal doses of radiation.

The fishermen along the banks of the reactor pool also had a grandstand view of the explosion. They saw a pillar of flame and red-hot chunks of nuclear fuel shoot up into the dark sky, accompanied by a thunderclap that sounded like a sonic boom. Without knowing what was happening, the fishermen had just witnessed a radioactive release equivalent to ten of the atom bombs that had been dropped on Hiroshima. They continued to watch, entranced, as teams of firefighters battled the blaze from the half-destroyed roof of the turbine hall. The temperature was so high that the roof seemed to melt under the firemen’s feet. Radioactive debris littered the entire area, emitting a sinister glow. As soon as one fire was put out, others started.

As dawn approached, the fishermen could see that the men up on the roof were sluggish and disoriented. Soon they began to feel nauseated. Their skin turned black, and they felt a burning sensation inside their chests. They were suffering from “nuclear tan.”
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Unable to do anything in the control room, Dyatlov decided to survey the damage. In the turbine hall he was greeted by a scene of unimaginable devastation. Flames were leaping up through huge holes in the ceiling. Water was spurting in different directions, spilling over the machinery. There was a constant clicking sound from short circuits. Great chunks of roofing had fallen onto the floor, puncturing oil tubes that immediately exploded into flames. The air was thick with radioactive dust, which created a burning feeling in the chest and lungs and a tightening of the skin.

On one of his sorties out of the control room the engineer came across a worker from the reactor hall, Anatoly Kurguz, who had been singed by radioactive steam. The whole of his body was covered in blisters, and he was in terrible pain. Dyatlov could see the blisters hanging down from his face, like pieces of dead flesh. He ordered Kurguz to report to the medical unit in the administrative building. It turned out that the first-aid station was closed, one of many signs of the hubris of Chernobyl managers. Neither Dyatlov nor anyone else had any idea how much radioactivity had been released by the explosion. Their Geiger counters were capable of measuring only relatively modest levels of radiation and were already flickering off the scale. More powerful instruments had been locked away in safes, on the assumption that they would never be needed.

When Dyatlov inspected the damaged reactor, he discovered that two entire walls of the building were missing. By this time he was feeling nauseated, having exposed his body to destructive beta and gamma rays. He grabbed some computer printouts and took them to the administrative building, where the plant director, Viktor Bryukhanov, was on the phone to Moscow. The director was insisting that the reactor was intact and the fire under control. Dyatlov was too sick to argue with his boss. He felt as if there were nothing left of his insides. He mumbled something about a fault in the shutdown mechanism and left the room. He spent the rest of the night throwing up, alongside his companions from the control room.

A turbine engineer by profession, Bryukhanov knew little about nuclear power. His real skill lay in knowing how to please the bosses, while making sure that his subordinates received their annual bonuses for “fulfilling the plan.” Ever since his appointment as the first director of the Chernobyl plant in 1970, at the remarkably young age of thirty-five, he had been under constant pressure to meet plan targets. He had pushed ahead with the construction of new reactors, ignoring warnings about sloppy building practices and violations of safety procedures. Four years earlier a small explosion had occurred in the core of Reactor No. 1, releasing some radioactivity into the air. Bryukhanov’s main concern then had been to hush up the incident and repair the damaged reactor as quickly as possible. The following year he had succeeded in commissioning the fourth unit three months ahead of schedule, an achievement that earned him the title Hero of Socialist Labor.

Anxious to salvage his reputation as an efficient manager, Bryukhanov reported that Reactor No. 4 was still functioning and radiation levels at the plant were “within normal limits.” He based this claim on the fact that the
Geiger counters were incapable of registering more than one thousand microroentgens per second, a relatively modest amount. When a civil defense worker finally unearthed a much more powerful instrument and took measurements showing catastrophic levels of radiation, the director refused to believe him.

“There’s something wrong with your instrument. Fields that high are impossible,” he snapped. “Get that thing out of here, or toss it in the garbage.”
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N
UCLEAR ACCIDENTS CAN OCCUR
anywhere, but Chernobyl was a uniquely Soviet catastrophe. It was the almost inevitable consequence of the rapacious attitude toward nature that was an inherent part of the Soviet system of economic development. In the revolutionary mind-set, nature was subordinate to man. “We cannot wait for favors from nature,” Soviet propagandists liked to proclaim. “Our task is to take them from her.” In the end nature was bound to take its revenge, one way or another.

“The Russian soil was able to support the Communists for fifty years. It can’t put up with them much longer,” said Adam Michnik, one of the intellectual forces behind the Polish Solidarity movement, referring to Chernobyl and a host of other man-made disasters. “In Poland, in August 1980, it was human beings who went on strike. In the Soviet Union we are witnessing a strike of inanimate objects.”
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