If there was a defining moment that accelerated the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse, it occurred 40 years ago this weekend when technicians at the Chernobyl nuclear plant shut down the No. 4 reactor for a test of a safety upgrade that went horribly wrong.
The plant technicians failed to alert their nuclear directorate overlords in Moscow for 24 hours. It was later learned they tried to contain the cascade of power surges, fires and explosions themselves rather than call for help beyond the plant’s unprepared responders.
Another 48 hours passed before Moscow authorities released a public announcement, one so devoid of pertinent detail that foreign correspondents shrugged off the four-sentence dispatch as a token gesture of openness by the new Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev. Soviet viewers likewise saw nothing of concern in the vague disclosure.
“An accident has occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant as one of the atomic reactors was damaged. Measures are being undertaken to eliminate the consequences of the accident. Aid is being given to those affected. A government commission has been set up.”
I was the junior person in a four-correspondent Moscow bureau of the Associated Press and on duty alone the night of April 29 when the understated announcement led the 9 p.m. Vremya newscast. The exact words simultaneously churned out of the TASS news agency printer.
The TV anchor exhibited no sense of alarm. She read the announcement, turned over the page and began reading the next news item in her stack.
I wrote a short piece for the AP wire noting the cryptic disclosure of a Soviet nuclear accident. I’d had an inkling of a problem earlier in the day when a colleague in the AP Stockholm bureau messaged to ask if there were any Soviet nuclear facilities on the Baltic Sea coast, that workers at a Swedish nuclear plant across the sea had set off radiation alarms when they arrived for work on Monday morning. A thorough inspection showed the radiation wasn’t coming from their facility. I wrote in my short isn’t-this-interesting dispatch that it wasn’t clear if it could be related to the incident in Sweden.
By Tuesday morning, as clouds carried radioactive contaminants over Polish farmland and European cities, Western journalists had been jolted into action. Radiation was being detected across the continent. Accusations of a Soviet coverup flew from west to east for the Kremlin’s failure to alert even their Eastern European allies.
It was a frustrating and largely fruitless battle to shake out critical information about the disaster for weeks that dragged into months. A bone-marrow surgeon from Los Angeles, Dr. Robert Gale, flew in days after the accident to try to save the gravely injured firefighters who had been evacuated from the disaster scene to a Moscow hospital. At least 28 firefighters died in the first three months from Acute Radiation Syndrome. Estimates vary from dozens to thousands of plant personnel, local residents. Belarussians and Ukrainians who had been in the path of the radiation pall. More than 350,000 Soviet citizens living in the areas contaminated by the disaster had to be evacuated, the vast majority never to return to the only homes they’d ever known.
It was two months before I learned that most, if not all, of the firefighters brought to Moscow for treatment had died. Soviet federal police agents guarding the burial of victims in lead coffins at the Mitinskoye cemetery on the outskirts of the capital detained me and a Reuters correspondent for “trespassing” into what they deemed a closed security zone. Secrecy and coverup remained the twin strategies of the security forces to stave off tarnishing the Kremlin image.
The bungled response to the disaster dealt a severe blow to the credibility of Gorbachev’s nascent reforms. Glasnost, a Russian word meaning openness and transparency, had inspired Soviet and Western journalists to believe the Kremlin was serious about shedding a legacy of shrouding government failures.
Gorbachev’s ascension to the Kremlin leadership a year earlier had kick-started a stalled effort to halt the nuclear arms race, which was bankrupting the Soviet economy in the effort to match U.S. nuclear weaponry investments.
Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan met in Geneva in November 1985, the first U.S.-Soviet summit in a seven-year stretch of hostility and domestic political turbulence after the deaths of three Soviet leaders in as many years.
Months after the catastrophe and the aggravatingly slow drip-drip-drip of information on its consequences it emerged that the failure to alert federal authorities to the raging disaster rested with the plant administration, not a Kremlin coverup. It was still a time of Soviet authorities shooting the messenger when embarrassing failures in the hinterlands were brought to the central government’s attention.
The damage inflicted on the Soviet government’s credibility on nuclear safety and security couldn’t have come at a worse time. Gorbachev and Reagan had just engaged in a collaborative meeting at which both leaders expressed the desire to ease tensions between their countries. They committed to resume summit meetings and discussion of reducing and dismantling whole classes of nuclear missiles. Once unthinkable, a Soviet proposal to eliminate both sides’ entire nuclear arsenals was on the table for the next summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986.
Reagan had introduced his envisioned Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in 1983, dubbed “Star Wars,” a network of space-based lasers intended to shoot down Soviet missiles fired on the United States or its allies. The prospect of U.S. and Soviet stockpiles being unleashed on each other, the culmination of a dual threat of Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD, had become an overpowering fear gripping both Soviet and American citizens. Never before in the history of nuclear armaments had the prospect of turning back time and eliminating them been considered.
The Chernobyl disaster hardened the American “neo-cons” in their position that the Soviets couldn’t be trusted, that talk of giving up all nukes would make the United States vulnerable if the Soviets failed to fulfill their pledges of full nuclear disarmament. The incompetence displayed by the Moscow government in responding to the Chernobyl accident was a cautionary tale about the dubious reliability of the Soviets’ offer to wipe out the weaponry that could destroy each of the adversarial populations multiple times over.
On the advice of his skeptical national security advisers, Reagan refused to give up his plans for the “Star Wars” defense or to dismantle the intercontinental ballistic missiles that Washington and Moscow had poised to fire or respond to being fired upon.
At the U.S.-Soviet summit in Reykjavik six months after Chernobyl, negotiators pressed hard for agreement on the all-for-all elimination of nukes, including the long-range missiles both superpowers had deployed and poised to respond to an attack. Reagan’s space-based SDI was widely seen as unachievable but Reagan clung to it, derailing the only serious consideration of turning back the clock on the nuclear threat since it was birthed by the Manhattan Project. A less ambitious but nevertheless historic disarmament treaty was signed at the next summit in December 1987 in Washington that led to dismantling and strict verification of each side’s intermediate-range nukes, the first, last and only pact to destroy the weapons that could end the world as we know it.
It may have been delusional to think either superpower would have given up the ultimate deterrent to annihilation if Chernobyl hadn’t happened. But today’s depressing state of affairs between Russia and the United States provokes, at least for me, nostalgia for that time when embracing peace and relinquishing the quest for supremacy wasn’t so unimaginable.’
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