Voices from Chernobyl

I'm not a literary person, I'm a physicist, so I'm going to give you the facts, only facts. Someone's eventually going to have to answer for Chernobyl. The time will come when they will have to answer for it, just like for 1937. It might be in 50 years, everyone might be old, they might be dead. They are criminals! We need to leave fact behind us. They will need them. On that date, April 26th, I was in Moscow time business. That's where I learned about the accident. I called Nikolai Slyunkov, the General Secretary of the Central Committee Belarussian Communist party, in Minsk. I called once, twice, three times, but they wouldn't connect me. I reached his assistant, he knew me well. "I'm calling from Moscow. Get me Slyunkov, I have information he needs to hear right away. Emergency information." I'm calling over a government line, but they are already blocking things. I soon as you start talking about the accident, the line goes dead. So they are listening, obviously! I hope it's clear who's listening----the appropriate agency. The government willing the government. And this is despite the fact that I'm calling the first Secretary of the Central Committee. And me? I'm the director of The Institute for nuclear energy and the Belarusian Academy of Science. Professor, member correspondence of the academy. But even I was blocked. It took me about 2 hours to finally reach Slyunkov. I tell him: "It's a serious accident. According to my calculations"----and I'd had a chance by then to talk with some people in Moscow and figure some things out----"the radioactive cloud is moving toward us, toward Belarus. We need to immediately perform an iodine prophylaxis of the population and evacuate everyone year the station. No man or animal should be within a hundred kilometers of the place." "I've already received reports," say Slyunkov. "There was a fire, but they've put it out." I can't hold it in. "That's Allied! It's a blatant lie! Any physicist it will tell you that graphite burns at something like 5 tons per hour. Think of how long it's going to burn!" I get on the first train to Minsk. I don't sleep the whole night there. In the morning I'm home. I measure my son's thyroid----that was the ideal dosimeter then----it's at a 180 micro-roentgen per hour. He needed potassium iodine. This was ordinary iodine. A child needed two to three drops in half a glass of solvent, an adult needed 3 to 4. The reactor burned for 10 days, and this should have been done for 10 days. But no one listened to us! No one listen to the scientists and the doctors. They pulled science and medicine into politics. Of course they did! We shouldn't forget the background to this, what we were like that, but we were like 10 years ago. The KGB was working, making secret searches. "Western voices" we're being shut out. There were a thousand taboos. Party and Military secrets. And in addition everyone was raised to think that the peaceful Soviet atom was a safe as peat or coal. We were people chained by fear and prejudices. We had the superstition of our faith.

Tell me , lady , how could it be that I wouldn't be born ? Where would I be ? High in the sky ? On another planet ?

You can't say that we covered everything up right away, we didn't even know the extent of what was happening. We were directed by the highest political strategy. But if you put aside the emotions, and the politics, you have to admit that no one believed in what had happened. Even the scientists couldn't believe it! Nothing like it had ever happened, not just here but anywhere in the world. The scientists who were there at the plant study the situation and made immediate decisions. I recently watched the program, "Moment of Truth," where they interviewed Aleksandr Yakovlev, a member of the Politburo, the main ideologue of the party under Gorbachev. What did he remember? They also, the ones up top, didn't really see the whole picture. At a meeting of the politburo, one of the generals explained: "What's radiation? At the testing grounds, after an atomic blast, they drink a bottle of wine and that's that. It'll be fine." They talked about Chernobyl like it was an accident, an ordinary accident. What if I declared then that people shouldn't go outside? They would have said: "You want to disrupt May Day?" It was a political matter. They did have asked for my party card! Here's something that happened, I think, it wasn't just a story. The chairman of the Government Commission, Scherbin, comes to the plant in the first days after the explosion and demands that they take him to the reactor. They say, no, there is chunks of graphite, insane radiation, high temperature, the laws of physics, you can't go. "What laws of physics! I need to see everything with my own eyes. I need to give a report tonight to the politburo." It was the military way of dealing with things. They didn't know any other way. They didn't understand it that there really is such a thing as physics. There is a chain reaction. And no orders or government resolutions can change that chain reaction. The world is built on physics, not on the ideas of Marx. But if I say that then? Tried to call off the May Day Parade? In the papers they write that the people were out in the street while we were in underground bunkers? I stood on the tribune for 2 hours in that sun, without a hat, without a raincoat. And on May 9th the Day of Victory, I walked with a veterans. They played the harmonica, people danced, drank. We we're all part of that system. We believed! We believed in the high ideals, in victory! We will defeat Chernobyl! We read about the heroic battle to put down the reactor that had gotten out from under man's control. A Russian without a high ideal? Without a great dream? That's also scary.

My first reaction was to call my wife, to warn her. But all our telephones at The Institute were bugged. Oh, that ancient fear, they've been raising us on it for decades. But they don't know anything at home. My daughter is walking around with her friends after a music lesson at the conservatory. She's eating ice cream. Do I call? But that would lead to unpleasantness. They won't allow me to work on classified projects. But I can't take it, I pick up the phone. "Listen to me carefully." "What are you talking about?" my wife asks loudly. "Not so loud. Close the windows, put all the food in plastic. Put on rubber gloves and wipe everything down with a wet cloth. But the racking a bag and threw it out. If there is laundry drying on the balcony put it back in the wash." "What happened?" "Not so loud. Dissolve two drops of iodine in a glass of water. Wash your hair with it." "What----" But I don't let her finish, I put down the phone. She should understand, she works at the Institute herself. At 15:30, we learned that there'd been an accident at the Chernobyl reactor. That evening on the way back to Minsk on The Institute bus we rode for half an hour in silence, or talking of other things. Everyone was afraid to talk about what had happened. Everyone had his party card in his pocket. There was a wet rag in front of my apartment door----so my wife understood everything. I came in, threw off my jacket, and then my shirt, my pants, strip down to my underwear. And suddenly this Fury took hold of me. The hell with the secrecy! The sphere! I took the city phone directory, and my daughter's address book and my wife's, and began calling everyone one by one. I'd say: I work at the institute for nuclear physics. There's a radioactive cloud over misc. And then I'd tell them what they needed to do: wash their hair, close their windows, take the laundry off the balcony and wash it again, drink iodine, how to drink it correctly. People's reaction was: thank you. They didn't question me, they didn't get scared. I think they didn't believe me, or maybe they didn't understand the importance of what was taking place. No one became frightened. It was a surprising reaction. That evening my friend calls. He was a nuclear physicist. And it was so careless! We lived with such belief! Only now can you see with what belief. He calls and says that, by the way, he's hoping to spend the May holidays at his in-laws near Gomel. It's a stone's throw away from Chernobyl. And he's bringing his little kids. "Great idea!" I yelled at him. "You've lost your mind!" That's a tale of professionalism. End of our faith. But I yelled at him. He probably doesn't remember that I saved his children. [takes a break.] We----I mean all of us----we haven't forgotten Chernobyl. We never understood it. What do savages understand about lightning? There's a moment in Ales Adamovich's book, when he's talking to Andrei Sakharov about the atom bomb. "Do you know," says Sakharov, the father of the hydrogen bomb, "how pleasantly the air smells of ozone after a nuclear explosion?" There's a lot of romance in those words. For me, for my generation----I'm sorry, I see by your reaction, you think I am celebrating something terrible, instead of human genius. But it's only now that nuclear energy has fallen so low and been ashamed. But for my generation----in 1945, when they first drop the atom bomb, I was 17 years old. I loved science fiction, I dreamed of traveling to other planets, and I decided that nuclear energy would take us into the cosmos. I enrolled at the Moscow Energy Institute and learned that the most top secret department was the nuclear energy Department. In the 50s and 60s, nuclear physicists were the elite, they were the best and brightest. The humanities were pushed aside. Our teacher back in school would say, in three little coins there is enough energy to fuel an electrical power station, your head would spin! I read the American Smith, who described how they invented the atomic bomb, tested it, what the explosions were like. In our world everything was a secret. The physicists got the high salaries, and the secrecy added to the romance. It was the cult of physics, the era of physics! Even when Chernobyl blew up, it took people a long time to part with that cult. They'd call up scientists, scientists would fly into Chernobyl on a special Charter plane, but many of them didn't even take their shaving kits, they thought they'd be there just a few hours. Just a few hours, even though they knew that a reactor had blown up. They believed in their physics, they were of the generation that believed in it. But the era of physics ended at Chernobyl. Your generation already sees the world differently. I recently read a passage in Konstantin Leontiev in which he writes that the results of men's physics chemical experiment will lead a higher power to intervene in our Earthly affairs. But for a person who was based on their Stalin, we couldn't imagine the possibility of some Supernatural power. I only read the Bible afterwards. I married the same woman twice. I left and then came back----we met each other again in the same world. Life is a surprising thing! And mysterious thing! Now I believe. What do I believe in? I believe that the three dimensional world has become crowded for mankind. Why is there such an interest in science fiction? Men is trying to tear himself away from the earth. He is trying to master different categories of time, different planets, not just this one. The apocalypse----uclear winter----in Western literature this has already all been written, as if they were rehearsing it. They were preparing for the future. The explosion of a large number of nuclear warheads will result in enormous fires the atmosphere will be saturated with smoke. Sunlight won't be able to reach the Earth. And this will ignite a chain reaction----from cold to colder to colder still. This man-made version of the end of the world has been taught since the industrial revolution of the 18th century but atom bombs won't disappear even after they destroyed the last warhead. There will still be the knowledge of atom bombs. You merely asked, but I keep arguing with you. We are having an argument between generations. Have you noticed? The history of the atom----it's not just the military secret and a curse. It's also our youth, our era, our religion. Fifty years have gone by, just 50 years. Now I also sometimes think that the world is being ruled by someone else, that we with our cannons and our spaceships are like children. But I haven't convinced myself of this yet. Life is such a surprising thing! I loved physics and thought that I wouldn't ever do anything but physics. But now I want to ride. I want to ride to, for example, about how men does not actually please science very much----he gets in the way of it. Or about how a few physicists what changed the world. About a new dictatorship of physics and math. A whole new life has open up for me.