The Crime of Chernobyl- The Nuclear Gulag

by Wladimir Tchertkoff

  The truth, only the truth, everything I’ve just explained to you, that any of these children could tell you. Tell other people what you see and what you hear, and shoot. Film it. Let this truth resound round the whole world! I don’t want to say bad things. I belong here in this village. I grew up here. I teach the children here. I don’t want to paint everything black. I know people are doing a lot. But the way it’s being done is crazy, it’s impulsive and chaotic. It’s not solving the real problem.

  This is definitely the end of my teaching career. It doesn’t matter.

  In 1998, I was sent to the Chernobyl territories again by Swiss television and I went to find Alla Tipiakova. I found only her daughter and family who were living in Kiev. I left them a cassette recording of her voice, her face. Alla Tipiakova did not lose her job, but her life. Some time after she delivered this desperate message, she died of cancer. But she left us with this lamentation, this painful whisper, which is still ringing in our ears.

  Barely five days after the explosion of reactor number 4 at Chernobyl, the physicist Bella Belbéoch wrote an article that appeared on 1st May 1986 in the journal ‘Ecology’. “Over the next few days we can expect an international conspiracy on the part of experts minimising the number of victims that will be caused by this catastrophe. The pursuit of civil and military programmes will impose on all countries a tacit complicity that will override ideological or economic conflicts”. 1

  1 Quoted in Tchernobyl, une catastrophe, Bella and Roger Belbéoch, Editions Allia, Paris 1993; Tokyo 1994.

  In the autumn of 1990, when I made my first visit to the contaminated areas of Ukraine and Belarus to make a documentary about the accident at Chernobyl, I knew very little about nuclear physics, radioactivity or the interests of the nuclear industry. I did not have the expertise of a physicist like Bella Belbéoch. But one of the privileges of our profession is that we learn a lot in the course of our inquiries. In fact the very ingenuousness of a fresh approach can sometimes shed light on questions that have become too familiar to the experts.

  Our duty is to inform. Before I present the testimonies and documents recorded for the five documentaries I made between 1990 and 2002, and the material uncovered over a period of five years when I was passing on information on a daily basis between independent scientists and doctors from the East and West, I will present the crucial pieces of evidence that might have helped Alla Tipiakova understand why the children in her class had been abandoned by the rich countries of the West. Neither destiny nor providence can be blamed for the fate suffered by these children. The responsibility is entirely and exclusively human.

  Chapter II

  MEDICINE AND THE NUCLEAR ESTABLISHMENT

  Everything to do with the disaster at Chernobyl, its causes and its consequences, must be made public. We must have the absolute truth.

  ANDREI SAKHAROV, May 1989

  I’m going to speak frankly, because life is short.

  ANDREI SINIAVSKY, A Voice from the Choir

  Humankind made the leap into the nuclear age some decades ago, but still does not understand the multiple consequences on human health of chronic exposure to low level radiation, or about the toxic effects of artificial radioactive substances that have been disseminated in large quantities into the environment by both civil and military nuclear activities.

  The chronic incorporation into the organism of radionuclides, by millions of people (caesium-137 only disappears after three centuries) condemned to feed themselves with radioactive food, is a completely new phenomenon resulting from the Chernobyl disaster, of which humanity has no experience. The same can be said of Gulf War Syndrome in Iraq and of the health problems experienced by the Serbian and Albanian populations in Yugoslavia where tonnes of uranium-238 (described as “depleted” but having a half-life of four and a half billion years) were dropped. If research on these matters has been undertaken in secret by the scientific establishment, it has so far been reluctant to share the benefits of its findings with the planet’s populations.

  Why has the World Health Organisation (WHO) done nothing in the territories around Chernobyl? Why has it handed over its radioprotection work to the promoters of nuclear power plants? Public opinion is largely unaware of the conflict of interest between the two specialist United Nations agencies directly responsible for managing the consequences of the Chernobyl catastrophe on the health of the contaminated populations.

  An agreement signed between WHO and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1959 prevents WHO from acting independently in the nuclear domain without the IAEA’s consent. The IAEA, made up of physicists, not doctors, whose main objective is the promotion of the nuclear industry around the world, is the only specialist United Nations agency that reports directly to the Security Council. It imposes its diktat on WHO, whose objective is “the attainment of all peoples to the highest possible level of health”.

  Today, the two agencies still only recognise as a consequence of the accident at Chernobyl the deaths of 44 firemen in the first hours following the disaster, (two from trauma and one from heart failure), 203 cases of acute radiation exposure and 200 easily avoidable thyroid tumours. The UN predicts a total of 4000 deaths that could be verified as resulting from exposure to radioactivity from the accident.2 In contrast, the Office of the United Nations for Humanitarian Affairs shares Kofi Annan’s view that estimates 9 million as the total number of people affected in the long term by radioactivity and confirms that the tragedy of Chernobyl has only just begun. Kofi Annan, not being a scientist, was sharply reprimanded by the director of the Scientific Committee of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), whose task it is to evaluate radiation doses world wide, their effect and the risk they carry.

  2 Joint WHO/ IAEA/ UNDP communiqué, 5th September 2005. The previous day, the official death toll from the accident was still being put at 32 by the three agencies.

  These facts and contradictions erupted at the international conference in Geneva in 1995, and then at the conference in Kiev in June 2001, that we filmed.3 Here we witnessed the fury of the nuclear agencies and of their accomplices from the former Soviet Union on hearing the revelations of researchers and doctors in the field about the radiological causes of the health catastrophe in the contaminated territories. The data and recommendations for radioprotection presented by independent scientists to protect hundreds of thousands of contaminated children were cast aside with disdain and arrogance. They refused to discuss it.

  3 At this conference the chief medical officer for the Russian Federation stated that nearly 30% of the liquidators listed in their medical-dosimetric register were ill and about 10% had already died. This official register brings together information on the 184,175 liquidators. Estimates of the total number of liquidators, who were summoned from all parts of the Soviet Union to construct the sarcophagus and decontaminate the area, vary between 600,000 and 800,000 young men in good health (the associations defending the rights of the liquidators put forward the figure of a million). Their average age was 33 in 1986. Information about the disaster at Chernobyl was a state secret during the first four years (the last years of the USSR) and the doses of radiation that they received were systematically minimised, so official figures today can only be wrong, by default. The survivors of this army were dispersed over the 11 time zones of the former Soviet Union, many are untraceable statistically and, thanks to the disinformation from both the Kremlin and the UN nuclear agencies, they do not know why they are ill or what is causing them to die so young. The official numbers registered by the Russian Federation allow us to estimate that the total number of liquidators who are ill is between 200,000 and 300,000 and that some 60,000 to 80,000 have already died.

  A deliberate scientific crime has been going on for twenty-eight years at the heart of Europe, sanctioned at the highest level, against the background of disinformation and general
indifference of the technologically advanced Western civilisation. In order to preserve consensus about the nuclear industry, the nuclear lobby and the medical establishment are knowingly condemning millions of human guinea pigs to experience new pathologies in their bodies in the vast laboratory of the contaminated territories of Chernobyl. The dictator Lukashenko, safeguarding his own position, is simply the local administrator of policies that emanate from the Permanent Members of the Security Council of the United Nations. (United States, France, Great Britain, China and Russia) and are “legitimised” by the experts at the agency in Vienna. Europe is an accomplice, investing millions of euros in the programme CORE (Cooperation for the Rehabilitation of Conditions of Life in the areas of Belarus contaminated by Chernobyl), set up in 2003. This “humanitarian” programme, whose covert aim, according to one of its administrators, is “to occupy the territory”, has formulated no scientific projects concerning the health of the contaminated inhabitants. It shares the same objective, as we shall see later, as that expressed by the United Nations agencies responsible for the atom, in agreement with the Soviet Union, from the first days following the accident. “The ‘consensus’ report of the United Nations on Chernobyl published in February 2002 broadly reflects the proposals put forward by the nuclear lobby: the economy of the contaminated territories needs to be revived, the local people given help to ‘develop’ them and even to recolonise them. These optimistic proposals are not based on any measures of the levels of radioactivity in people or in locally-grown food produce. ‘Chernobyl is over.’ ‘It is the economic crisis and stress that are responsible for the problems encountered by the inhabitants.’ They need to be reassured and to resume normal life again”. (Solange Fernex in The Ecologist, February 2003.)

  The influence of the military-industrial nuclear mafia over the health of the population started, as we will see, in the 1950s. If we compare two documents published by WHO, one in 1956 and the other in 1958, we can see quite clearly the change in direction taken by this specialised United Nations institution before its final submission to the nuclear lobby in 1959. The first document is a seriously worded warning against the choice of developing nuclear power, presented by a group of distinguished genetic scientists, one of whom was H.J. Muller, who received the Nobel Prize in 1946. The second document is a report of a study group analysing “questions of mental health (for the population) posed by the use of atomic energy for peaceful purposes”. Representing France in this study group was Dr M. Tubiana, a cancer specialist at Villejuif.

  First document 1956: “...genetic heritage is the most precious property for human beings. It determines the lives of our progeny, healthy and harmonious development of future generations. As experts, we affirm that the health of future generations is threatened by increasing development of the atomic industry and sources of radiation...We also believe that new mutations that occur in humans are harmful to them and their offspring”. (WHO, Genetic effects of radiation in humans. WHO Study Group Report, Geneva 1957).

  Second document from 1958: “However, from the mental health point of view, the most satisfactory solution for the future peaceful use of atomic energy would be to see a new generation of people who would have learnt to accommodate ignorance and uncertainty and who, to quote Joseph Addison, an English poet of the 18th century would ‘sit astride the hurricane and direct the storm’”. (Technical Report No 151, page 59, WHO, Geneva 1958.)

  How apt a programme for Chernobyl, on which Professor Michel Fernex, a keen observer of WHO’s abandonment of the nuclear issue, comments in measured terms. “This justification for keeping people in ignorance illustrates the contempt in which the world’s people are held, that goes against the letter and the spirit of the Constitution of the World Health Organisation”.4

  4 “La catastrophe de Tchernobyl et la santé” (The Chernobyl disaster and health) in Chroniques sur la Biélorussie contemporaine, L’Harmattan, 2001.

  Chapter III

  THE ATOMIC TRAP

  1. THE ACCIDENT

  I do not know Grigori Medvedev, Chief Engineer at the Chernobyl nuclear power station from its inception, on a personal level, but I read his book5 while at the site of the tragedy itself during my first visit to Chernobyl. I was sent there in 1990, to make a documentary about the disaster and try to help people to understand the situation four years on. Uncover the facts, understand myself and help others to understand why the subject was mired in deception, and the victims involved in protracted misery. Medvedev, who wrote the book, and Volodymyr Tykhyy, a young Ukrainian physicist who gave me a copy of the Russian edition, provided the key. They helped me to get closer to what had happened, and what was still going on, in the villages, among the liquidators who were ill, in the health centres where children with leukaemia and heart problems were receiving care. I read and reread “The Chernobyl notebook” in between pre-shooting and shooting. I spent my nights reading and then, because I spoke Russian, I was able to decline the kind invitations made to journalists by the Soviet television companies of Ukraine and Belarus, and instead went to meet people and find out about the real situation first-hand. It was autumn 1990 and together, perestroika and Chernobyl were driving the USSR towards implosion. Every day I saw new people, new places and situations; I had first hand contact with people who were trapped and looking for a way out.

  5 “Cahier de Tchernobyl ” (The Chernobyl notebook), published in France with a preface by Andrei Sakharov under the title “ La vérité sur Tchernobyl ” Albin Michel 1990.

  Everything about the first hours of the accident has been recounted in Medvedev’s book. It is described in masterly detail, minute by minute, from both a technical and a human point of view: the dramatic struggle to control the fire and its immediate effects in the days following the explosion, the slow grinding cogs of the Soviet bureaucracy, the errors made by the scientists and designers of the reactor, the censorship, the lies and the pressure exerted by the hierarchy. But curiously, Medvedev makes no mention of one aspect of the disaster at Chernobyl: that is the possibility of a nuclear explosion that Soviet nuclear scientists were afraid might happen, during the ten days of the fire. Unlike the physicist Vassili Nesterenko who I interviewed for the first time in 1998, during my second visit to Chernobyl.

  From 1977 to 1987, Nesterenko was the director of the Institute of Atomic Energy at the Academy of Science in Belarus, of which he is a member. Holder of over 300 scientific patents in nuclear physics and in radiation safety, he had access in the Soviet era, to towns that were forbidden to others for military reasons. He invented and built a mini reactor that could be transported by helicopter and used to set off intercontinental missiles, to counterbalance the mobility of American submarines. He flew over the burning power station at Chernobyl and came up with the idea of injecting liquid nitrogen under the foundations of the reactor in order to put out the fire. This idea was put into action a few days later by a team of miners, in a hellhole of fire and radiation. Badly irradiated himself, it is incredible that he was still alive. He was the only surviving member of the four passengers of the helicopter. From the first moments following the accident, he told the Soviet authorities that they needed to protect the population. No-one listened to him. Accused of sowing panic, removed from his post as director, he was subjected to pressure from the KGB and survived two attempts on his life.

  Nesterenko knows what radioactivity is and he adores children. He saw them evacuated in their thousands, snatched from their mothers’ arms and thrown into train carriages at Gomel railway station. Watching the scene brought back his own childhood in rural Ukraine, under German occupation. He told me how the Wehrmacht, withdrawing from his village because they were under attack from the Red Army, gathered up the women and children in front of the tanks, hoping to protect themselves with this human shield. He saw the same terrified children, exhausted from hours of travelling, arriving at his Institute near Minsk. It was not the Nazis that were pushin
g them through.

  He began to measure the levels of radioactivity emanating from their bodies. When he saw the dosimeter needle blocked at the far end of the scale, he knew he would never again use his scientific skills in the service of a technology that could produce such a disaster. It was at that precise moment that he decided he would never work in that scientific area again unless it was to help the victims.

  In a recent interview, Nesterenko confirmed that the Soviets had feared that if the fire had not been put out on the 8th May 1986,6 there might have been an atomic explosion of such power that it would have rendered Europe uninhabitable. French scientists have cast doubt on this hypothesis, claiming that it was impossible. I asked Nesterenko to give a scientific explanation for the Soviet physicists’ fears. He replied on the 17th January 2005.

  6 Interview with Galia Ackerman in “Les silences de Tchernobyl”, Autrement, 2004.