Through Saturday and Sunday, despite the frantic efforts at Chernobyl, the evacuation of Pripyat’s entire population, the extensive casualties, and the plume of radiation advancing into Finland and Sweden, no public announcement issued from the Kremlin. In his memoirs, Gorbachev implicitly blames the government commission for the delay, writing that its reports “consisted mainly of preliminary fact-finding, with all kinds of cautious remarks but without any conclusions at all.” Whether or not Gorbachev was misled, a better measure of the Soviet government’s initial response is that sometime on Sunday, the editors of Izvestia, the government-controlled newspaper, were ordered to suppress a story about the accident. Kiev went unwarned. So did Minsk. So did Europe. “In those first days,” a village teacher in Byelorussia wrote later, “there were mixed feelings. I remember two: fear and insult. Everything had happened and there was no information: the government was silent, the doctors were silent. The regions waited for directions from the oblast [i.e., province], the oblast from Minsk, and Minsk from Moscow. It was a long, long chain, and at the end of it a few people made the decisions. We turned out to be defenseless. That was the main feeling in those days. Just a few people were deciding our fate, the fate of millions.”
Curiously, a U.S. spy satellite had passed over the Chernobyl complex on Saturday morning only twenty-eight seconds after the explosions and had imaged it. American intelligence thought at first that a missile had been fired, reports health physicist and Chernobyl expert Richard Mould. When the image remained stationary, “opinion changed to a missile had blown up in its silo.” Consulting a map corrected the mistake. By Sunday the British government had been informed, but neither the United States nor Britain warned the public.
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The RBMK reactor was a dual-use design. It was developed in the 1950s as a production reactor to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons, then adapted for civilian power operation in the 1970s; Like its graphite core, its pyatachok was punctured with multiple channels from which irradiated fuel rods could be removed via an overhead crane while the reactor was operating. If the military needed plutonium, on-line refueling would allow fuel rods to be removed early to maximize their bloom of military-grade plutonium. *5 A safety containment structure around such a reactor, which would probably have prevented an accident like the one at Chernobyl, would have also greatly reduced its military value. Military needs thus competed with civilian needs in the choice of the RBMK design when the Soviet Union decided to greatly expand electricity production with nuclear power in the early 1970s; a competing light-water reactor design, the Soviet VVER, was safer but less suitable for the production of military-grade plutonium.
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Blix emphasized twice that he had not gone to Moscow to “scream” at the Soviet leaders but to help them. Certainly the rest of the world was screaming by then, with minimal but measurable quantities of Chernobyl radionuclides falling out around the world and particularly on Western Europe; the Chernobyl fallout was roughly equivalent to the fallout from a twelve-megaton nuclear explosion (the explosions themselves had been equivalent to about thirty to forty tons of TNT). Blix’s statements did help, and in exchange for them he extracted historic agreements from Gorbachev to make available timely information about the accident and its aftermath. “The Soviet authorities agreed,” he said later, “to provide daily information on radiation levels from seven measurement stations, one close to Chernobyl and the other six along the Western border of the USSR.” They agreed as well to participate in a post-accident review meeting and to increase cooperation in the field of nuclear safety. “It is sad, but a common experience,” Blix concludes, “that only big accidents or other setbacks will provide the necessary impetus to move governments and authorities to act.”
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Why should it matter whether people were killed by fire or blast? The answer began to emerge only in the 1980s, when a few independent scientists looked into the neglected subject of mass fires from nuclear weapons. As one of them, Theodore Postol, found, even a very limited attack on enemy industry “might actually result in about two to three times more fatalities than that predicted by the government for the [all-out] anti-population attack” if mass fires were included in casualty predictions. Two to three times the 285 million Soviet and Chinese dead that SIOP-62 predicted based on blast damage alone would raise that number close to 1 billion.
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