WALTER PINCUS
OPINION — The late Mikhail Gorbachev wrote for the 20th Anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster in April 2006, “Chernobyl opened my eyes like nothing else…One could now imagine much more clearly what might happen if a nuclear bomb exploded. According to scientific experts, one SS-18 rocket could contain 100 Chernobyls.”
With Russian President Vladimir Putin’s cavalier threats to the use nuclear arms and his Russian troops using Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant as a military base, I believe Gorbachev’s passing is a time to show how at least he, as a nuclear-armed leader, came to his senses when he realized the disastrous power he controlled through these weapons, thanks to the Chernobyl accident.
It began at 1:23 am on April 26, 1986. Reactor unit number 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power station, 62 miles north of Kiev, Ukraine, suffered a series of explosions. Operators were conducting an experiment at low power when an emergency shutdown accelerated a nuclear chain reaction causing a power surge which created a steam explosion. This not only ruptured the tubes containing low-enriched, uranium nuclear fuel, but also blew the 1,000-metric-ton cover off the top of the reactor.
A second explosion happened a few seconds later. Tons of nuclear radioactive materials from the reactor core shot into the atmosphere and for ten days, fires raged as radioactive fallout continued to be carried with the wind to far distances.
Two people were immediately killed with 132 emergency workers affected by high levels of radiation within the first 12 hours. Following the accident, another 237 people were exposed to radiation and heat and airlifted to hospitals, many in Moscow. Eventually, 150 people died.
The 30,000 inhabitants of nearby Pripyat were evacuated. An area of more than 77,000 square miles was contaminated with Cesium-137 of which, more than two-thirds affected Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. Rain influenced its distribution.
Thirty-two years earlier, similar, dangerous fallout of radioactive particles had occurred. It was after the March 1, 1954, U.S. H-bomb test dubbed ‘Bravo’ was detonated on an island in Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. The explosion, at 15 megatons, was three times the power expected, and it sent radioactive elements into the stratosphere where winds carried the fallout more than 120 miles. There, for hours, the radioactive particles fell like snow on Rongelap Atoll where 82 Marshallese Islanders – men, women and children – lived.
As we would later see with Gorbachev’s Soviet government, then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Chairman Lewis Strauss of the Atomic Energy Commission failed to tell the full truth initially about the radioactive fallout on the Rongelap Marshallese. Two weeks later, the Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon returned to port in Japan and the world read stories about the effects of Bravo’s radioactive fallout on 23 Japanese fishermen. It was only then that U.S. officials were forced to disclose what really happened to the Marshall Islanders.
News of the Chernobyl accident took two days to fully emerge. That was when, April 28, 1986, radioactivity monitors at Sweden’s Forsmark power station, located 800 miles north of the Chernobyl facility, went off. They later found that the reactors were triggered by employees who had walked outdoors in wet grass and then returned indoors to work. There, a chemist, whose job was to monitor radioactivity within the power station, examined his shoes and those of others and found radioactive elements unrelated to the Forsmark operation.
He first thought a bomb test may have been involved, but chemical analysis eliminated that possibility. The Forsmark’s station report later that morning to the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority in Stockholm had been followed by similar reports of radioactivity from other nuclear power stations in the country. Believing a nuclear power plant accident had taken place, a check showed the winds had been coming from the southeast. With evidence pointing to a nuclear facility somewhere in the Soviet Union, the Swedish Embassy in Moscow sought information from Soviet officials.
The answer came at 9 pm, April 28, 1986, when the Soviet Council of Ministers released an announcement through Russia’s Tass news agency that was also broadcast on Soviet television. It simply stated, “An accident occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant as one of the reactors was damaged. Measures are being taken to eliminate the consequences of the accident. Aid is being given to those affected. A Government commission has been set up.”
Tass followed with a report listing nuclear power mishaps in the U.S. including Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, a practice the New York Times noted was common when disasters occurred in the Soviet Union.
In the succeeding days, world attention focused on Moscow’s refusal to provide additional information. Much as Eisenhower and Strauss had done after Bravo, Gorbachev and the Politburo struggled to figure out what happened and how to react. There were also widespread concerns about the potential danger from other Russian-built, nuclear power plants, located elsewhere.
The first broad plan to control the situation had begun April 27. It was to have waves of Russian Air Force helicopters drop boron, dolomite, sand, clay, and lead on the burning Chernobyl reactor core in an effort to extinguish fires and limit the release of radioactive particles.
Between April 27 and May 10, over 5,000 tons were dropped, leading some Russian scientists to fear collapse of the reactor vault foundation and a total core meltdown. In his 2019 book, Midnight in Chernobyl, Adam Higginbotham described it as “the doomsday scenario of reactor accidents: the China Syndrome,” where a mass of nuclear fuel burns through the earth to China. That did not happen.
However, steps had to be taken to prevent toxic radionuclides from reaching the Pripyat River, a tributary of the Dnieper River which could poison not only local drinking water, but that of Kiev (population over two million) and also those in the Dnieper River basin (some 30 million people). To meet that problem, 2,000 troops were brought to the evacuated zone to create a five-mile ditch around the Chernobyl plant that went down about 100 feet to the impermeable clay layer, to control water flow toward the Dnieper River. They also built some 140 small dams and dikes to limit other runoff into the nearby Pripyat River in advance of expected spring floods.
Meanwhile, the lawns, parks, streets, roads, squares, roofs, homes, buildings and walls of urban, nearby Pripyat had become contaminated with radionuclides. Rain caused horizontal surfaces such as lawns, gardens and roofs to be highly contaminated. Under dry conditions, trees, bushes, lawns and roofs became more contaminated, according to later studies. High Cesium-137 levels were found around houses after rain carried the radioactive material from roofs to ground. Early evacuation of the Pripyat’s residents limited their external radiation doses.
Nonetheless, exposure to radioactive Iodine-131 fallout from Chernobyl would eventually cause an increase in the number of cases of childhood and adult thyroid cancer in Ukraine, Belarus, and a portion of Russia. That was because the radioiodine was rapidly transferred to milk that was commonly consumed, especially by children.
Fear became another issue. As stories and rumors circulated in Kiev, Communist Party members sent their children to distant summer camps and bought iodine pills for themselves as radioactive iodine levels in the tap water rose higher than normal. Ten days after the accident, Ukraine’s health minister publicly warned that residents needed to remain indoors as a precaution.
Higginbotham wrote, “Thousands attempted to escape the city. Men and women spent the night sleeping on the concourse to keep their places in line for tickets… Fleets of orange street-cleaning trucks soon appeared, to start what would become an incessant effort to wash hot fallout from the city streets…When the pharmacies sold out of stable iodine pills, people resorted to drinking tincture of iodine, intended for use as an external antiseptic, burning their throats. Lines outside liquor stores quadrupled in length as people sought protection from radioactivity with red wine and vodka, forcing the Ukrainian deputy minister of health to announce, ‘There is no truth to the rumor that alcohol is useful against radiation.’”
The cleanup work at the Chernobyl plant and in the surrounding area created an enormous amount of contaminated solid waste. “This [contamination of solid waste disposal] is probably the most significant, and most underreported, aspect of the consequences of the accident,” the IAEA’s International Chernobyl Project stated in a 1991 technical report.
18 days after the first Chernobyl unit exploded, and after the subsequent fires had been put out, Gorbachev first spoke publicly about the accident. In a televised 25-minute speech, most of which defended his government’s awkward handling of the situation, Gorbachev suddenly changed his focus and said, “The accident at Chernobyl showed again what an abyss will open if nuclear war befalls mankind. For inherent in the nuclear arsenals stockpile are thousands upon thousands of disasters far more horrible than the Chernobyl one.” He called for the U.S. to join his moratorium on testing and suggested another summit to deal with nuclear testing.
“Chernobyl made me and my colleagues rethink a great many things,” Gorbachev told the Politburo on July 3, 1986, according to Russian Historian Vladislav M. Zubok. He wrote, “The accident, its global discussion, and disastrous fallout across huge Soviet areas shattered the Soviet militarized mentality to the core…The lessons of Chernobyl called for the abrogation of secrecy and xenophobia, for fundamental rethinking of security in the nuclear age.”
In a broader sense, Zubok wrote, “For the first time, the Soviet leadership allowed the media to pursue serious public debates about nuclear dangers. The result was a surge of anti-nuclear sentiments in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev also immediately sensed that Chernobyl would increase anti-nuclear momentum in the West.”
It also led the Soviet leader to seek a breakthrough in arms control.
“The Gorbachev regime aims to re-create some sort of détente relationship with the United States to ease the burden of arms competition,” was a key judgment in a September 11, 1986, secret CIA report on Gorbachev’s policy toward the U.S. “It is focused on arms control (supported by a vigorous worldwide propaganda offensive) and on the prospect of U.S.-Soviet summits (exploited for leverage to moderate U.S. policies and encourage concessions on arms control),” the report read.
On September 15, 1986, Gorbachev wrote a letter to then-President Ronald Reagan, delivered by then-Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, in which he complained that after almost a year since their Geneva meeting, “there has been no movement” on arms control issues. Gorbachev suggested, “We have a quick one-on-one meeting, let us say in Iceland or London, maybe just for one day, to engage in a strictly confidential, private and frank discussion possibly with only our foreign ministers present.”
In Soviet archived notes from an October 4, 1986 meeting with his Reykjavik Preparation Group, Gorbachev showed how far his thinking had progressed. During a discussion of his proposal to remove all intermediate-range nuclear missiles from Europe, Gorbachev said, “Everyone understands that 100 missiles are enough to [blow up] all of Europe and a large part of the Soviet Union,” according to the notes.
Gorbachev went on, “The pivotal idea in the course of all talks must be: are we planning to go to war?! We, the Soviet Union, are not planning to go to war. That is why we are acting like this,” according to the notes.
At the two-day meeting at Reykjavik October 11-12, 1986, Reagan and Gorbachev both revealed their personal anti-nuclear-weapon sentiments, reaching a broad agreement on getting rid of all nuclear weapons over a ten year time frame. The staffs of both leaders then got them back to practical reality, although the session created the groundwork for strategic and intermediate-range nuclear agreements that would follow.
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Less than a month later, when Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze met in Vienna, the State Department memorandum of the conversation said the Soviet Foreign Minister described Reykjavik as “an extremely important meeting, that set a new stage, not just in Soviet-American relations, but as a world-scale event, making an advance toward a nuclear-free world. His assessment was that this was a major achievement for both the U.S. and the Soviet Union.”
Shultz later told The New Yorker’s John Newhouse, “Reykjavik was too bold for the world. It jarred people to think about no nuclear weapons. But we made more headway on limiting them there than in any two-day history of man.”
The arms control treaties that followed had their roots in Reykjavik. One outside influence on the American side held up initial momentum – the Iran-contra affair. It burst out in the press on November 25, 1986, with the disclosure that the Reagan administration had been secretly negotiating with Iran, selling American conventional arms to gain release of U.S. hostages held by Hezbollah terrorists. In addition, some of the funds received from Iran were used to buy arms to support contra rebels in Nicaragua, something barred by U.S. law.
On February 25, 1987, Gorbachev was given a staff memo analyzing his earlier meeting in Moscow with a delegation of influential U.S. Council on Foreign Relations members, including Henry Kissinger, Harold Brown and Cyrus Vance. The Soviet leader had raised with the group the question of whether, because of Iran-contra, President Reagan “was too weak for us to deal with,” meaning on arms control. The Russian memo suggested this was a time to push arms control against a weakened administration.
Two days later, February 27, 1987, a day after an American presidential commission on Iran-contra criticized the administration’s role in the affair, Reagan fired his chief of staff, Donald Regan, and brought in former Sen. Howard Baker (R-Tenn.) to be his replacement.
One day later, Gorbachev announced he would sign an intermediate-range nuclear arms agreement, separating it for the first time from a broader START arms control agreement. The New York Times, in its report from Moscow, wrote, “It was not clear whether the Soviet leader, by making his proposal, was trying to exploit Mr. Reagan’s vulnerability or to help him out by holding out the prospect of an arms accord.”
On September 15, 1987, during cocktails at the White House preceding dinner during a visit of Shevardnadze, Shultz mentioned how both leaders continued to use the phrase, “nuclear war could never be won.” Reagan noted how those words always drew strong applause, and added, “The vast devastation of any nuclear war would render life unlivable for the survivors.” To which Shevardnadze added, “Chernobyl had demonstrated this, and with only a small fraction of the total nuclear power available to the two superpowers.”
At the end of 1995, more than nine years after the Chernobyl accident, about 800 cases of thyroid cancer in children had been diagnosed, according to the IAEA report. At that time, only three exposed to Chernobyl fallout had died of cancer, with most having been treated with pills or surgery, just like the Marshallese.
In 1996, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) released a report, Ten Years After Chernobyl: What Do We Really Know?, which stated, “The Chernobyl explosion put 400 times more radioactive material into the Earth’s atmosphere than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.” Some 116,000 people were evacuated who lived within 18 miles of Chernobyl. That was increased later to 40 miles, and an additional 210,000 people were evacuated. The 1,660-square-mile exclusion zone still exists today.
Chernobyl was a lesson Gorbachev learned.
Putin’s nuclear threats and Russian troops’ use of Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant as a military base signals that Putin has not yet learned that lesson.
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