The Crime of Chernobyl- The Nuclear Gulag

by Wladimir Tchertkoff

  26 Taylor, 1971.

  27 ECRR, op. cit., extract abridged.

  Since 1955, the ICRP has received its scientific expertise from the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), a body set up by the UN General Assembly to evaluate radiation dose, its effects and the risks it poses worldwide. This committee, which brings together eminent scientists from 21 countries, does not itself establish norms or make recommendations, is the source of information about radiation, providing the basis on which the ICRP and the corresponding national commissions establish norms and recommendations, in particular those who have developed a nuclear industry.

  These two organisations constitute the scientific and technical arms of WHO’s policy in the nuclear field. But WHO itself is not independent, being subject to veto from the IAEA, in any initiative which might damage the agency that promotes the development of nuclear power stations. The agreement between the WHO and the International Atomic Energy Agency, adopted on 28 May 1959, states in Article 1 that “Whenever either organization proposes to initiate a programme or activity on a subject in which the other organization has or may have a substantial interest, the first party shall consult the other with a view to adjusting the matter by mutual agreement”, and in Article 3, that “The International Atomic Energy Agency and the World Health Organization recognize that they may find it necessary to apply certain limitations for the safeguarding of confidential information furnished to them”.

  2. THE AGENTS OF SCIENTIFIC IGNORANCE AT CHERNOBYL

  WHO ARE THEY?

  The driving force behind the whole diabolical sequence of events that transformed an accident into a catastrophe, and that catastrophe into a never-ending tragedy can be located in this pact between the WHO and the IAEA. A tragedy directed by a small number of individuals who, day by day, decide the fate of millions of people28.

  28 Yves Lenoir, “Tchernobyl, l’optimisation d’une tragédie”, Bulle Bleue, Amis de la Terre, CEDI, Environnement sans frontière, 1996.

  Eminent specialists, scientists and experts, UN officials who deal with the nuclear industry and its consequences, are co-opted, as we have seen, from national nuclear authorities and public institutions responsible for radioprotection, whose own directors have generally come directly from those very authorities. The power vested in these individuals gives them authority beyond question (other than by their peers) by virtue of their scientific competence as experts from these international organisations. Professor Leonid Ilyin, for example, pillar of the nuclear establishment in Moscow, who headed the Soviet delegation in 1986 and 1987 at the various conferences of the IAEA and UNSCEAR on Chernobyl, was himself a member of the ICRP.

  It is worth noting at this point that WHO extended the official immunity offered to UN officials to its expert advisers. The enjoyment of this “immunity from legal process of any kind […] in respect of words spoken or written and acts committed by them in the performance of their duties” is reinforced in a special annexe detailing the privileges granted to experts within the organisation, which stipulates that this immunity from legal process shall continue to be accorded notwithstanding that the persons concerned are no longer employed on missions for the United Nations (author’s italics). It is understandable that international officials or experts mandated by international bodies need special protection during the performance of their duties. On the other hand, the fact that legal action can never be taken against them, leaves the organisation (WHO) with no meaningful control a posteriori—a situation which goes against any principle of law or democracy. The three experts, Pellerin, Waight and Beninson, who were sent in official capacity to the areas contaminated by radioactive fall-out following the accident at Chernobyl, need never lose any sleep even though they deliberately and powerfully put at risk the lives of hundreds of thousands of people29.

  29 Yves Lenoir, op. cit. See p. 71 of this book.

  WHAT DID THEY DO AND HOW?

  They did not go and listen to Alla Tipiakova’s children nor to the despairing doctors treating them. They did not follow Anatoli Volkov’s advice: “It’s here that people need to work, to listen, to see the people’s suffering… ”

  They went to the aid of the Soviet nuclear establishment. Without studying the real situation in the “huge laboratory” that so delighted the French professor, and without conducting any research, they explained Chernobyl in terms of Hiroshima. From afar, on the basis of abstract mathematical models, they extrapolated from the effects of the atom bomb on the bodies of Japanese survivors.

  It took five years, between 1986 and 1991 to bring the Soviets round to their point of view. Their collaboration was needed to make the lie acceptable. It was no easy task and was achieved in stages through the period of perestroika and the dissolution of the USSR, up to the publication of the “International Chernobyl Project”, a group of international experts directed by the IAEA, whose final report, presented in Vienna in May 1991, would claim that the radiation has no effect on the health of the population.

  3. THE POLITICAL CONTEXT WITHIN THE SOVIET UNION

  At this time the Soviet Union was going through the most turbulent and arguably the most dangerous period of its entire history: the Western powers feared that this great nuclear power would implode. Thanks to the initial opening up under Gorbachev, a freedom of expression, unknown since 1917, existed alongside the secret and brutal activities of an all-powerful KGB. While articles of the penal code severely punishing “anti-Soviet propaganda” were still in force, “informal” associations and improvised newspapers opposed to the regime were tolerated. The campaign for the first “democratic” election of the first Soviet of deputies of the people of the USSR, set in motion by Gorbachev, lasted four months, from December 1988 to 26 March 1989. It was accompanied by an incredible verbosity and a profusion of publications, discussions, associations, fears and hopes. Publication of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago was finally authorised; yet photocopying was still against the law for the general public, and there were no telephone directories. Neither served any purpose in a police state where freedom of thought and private initiative had been abolished. After seventy years of repression, bureaucracy and official deceit, collective passivity and apathy had paralysed society. While the West was going through its third if not fourth technological revolution, the Soviet Union was on the brink of economic and social collapse: 35 million Soviets “worked” full time queuing in front of empty shops in the most resource rich country in the world, while the State mafia plundered what was left of the economy at every level—in the villages, towns, cities and regions—by means of an alternative black market, through systems of privilege and favour, and through rackets and murder. Faced with this crisis of self destruction, the majority of the ruling Communist party members, following Gorbachev’s lead, finally agreed unwillingly, to recognize that the true, the primary wealth of the country resided in its people, the individual human being, trampled underfoot for three generations. The more forward thinking members were fearful that it might be too late, and all of them wanted to remain in power. We know that in August 1991, the system collapsed, almost without a shot being fired, the masses recovering themselves from the rubble, free to survive in misery while the state’s financial treasures disappeared through the back door to the Cote d’Azur, Switzerland, the Bahamas and other off shore havens.

  Once the diarchy of the Cold War had disappeared and the Soviet and post-Soviet Ministries of Health were subdued, the nuclear lobby in the West emerged victorious, with sole responsibility, the master and promoter of the crime of non-assistance to people in danger for the twenty eight years since Chernobyl.

  For the record, and to set the historical facts against scientific artifice, I will make use here of the chronology of the subjugation of science to the Western nuclear powers, recounted bitterly and in meticulous detail by Bella Belbéoch in “Western Responsibility in the Heal
th Consequences of Chernobyl disaster in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia”. 30

  30 B.Belbéoch, “Radioprotection et Droit nucléaire. Entre les contraintes economiques et ecologiques, politiques et ethiques” sous la direction d’Ivo Rens et Joel Jakubee, SEBES Ed.Georg, 1998, p. 247–261

  4. STAGES OF SUBMISSION TO THE LIES

  Much has been written and in great detail about the lies told by the Soviet government31. This is not new, given that the country’s leaders have always lied to their people, starting with the original lie in 1918, when Lenin promised “soviets, peace and land”, continuing with the massacre of sailors at Kronstadt in 1921—under orders from Lenin and Trotsky, when the Soviets were finally stripped of their power—and up to the Chernobyl disaster.

  31 Alla Yaroshinskaya—Tchernobyl, vérité interdite Arte-Éditions de l’Aube, 1993.

  “Recently, Savchenko, former Minister of Health of Belarus, replying to the Supreme Soviet Commission investigating the veil of silence in the years following Chernobyl, reported that they had been summoned by Prime Minister Ryzhkov, who told them, “It’s not secret, it’s top secret, all doses and all information about the Chernobyl tragedy”. That’s the whole approach. That is why no dose measurements were made, or if they were, they had to be minimised without fail. The lies and the silence were ordered from above”. 32

  32 The liquidator Anatoli Borovsky in Nous de Tchernobyl, TSI 1990.

  It is much more interesting now to focus our attention on the lies told by the free and democratic West which condemns, at Chernobyl alone, millions of disinformed peasants and their descendants to suffering and to a terrible death from the effects of radiation.

  Four months after the catastrophe, an international conference is organised by the IAEA in Vienna (25–29 August 1986) to analyse the consequences of the Chernobyl accident. The key figures are D. Beninson, President of the ICRP and Argentina’s Director of Atomic Energy, and M. Rosen, Director of Nuclear Safety at the IAEA.

  Working group meetings take place behind closed doors and no journalists are admitted. Discussions are tough. There is too great a discrepancy between the Soviet predictions and the figures that the West find acceptable. V. Legasov presents a voluminous document consisting of a general report and 7 annexes.

  The stumbling block for the West is Annex 7, consisting of 70 pages, devoted entirely to “Medical and Biological Problems”. In the absence of any measurements of individual dose or medical data, the Soviets have predicted, using abstract mathematical calculations, an extra 40,000 cancer deaths among the 75 million inhabitants of European Russia.

  Equally abstractly, and equally in the absence of any measurements of individual dose or medical data, the West decides this figure is too high—a trial of strength which had absolutely nothing to do with science, since Chernobyl was an absolutely unique event in the history of science and anyway, only four months have elapsed since the disaster, during which time no real research nor any systematic measurements have been undertaken.

  At the press conference the next day, August 26th, Dan Beninson, chairman of the study group on the health consequences of Chernobyl says that the Soviet figures are “extremely overestimated”. Morris Rosen, Director of the Safety Division at the IAEA, puts the upper limit at 25,000 deaths, still without any objective data.

  And the dispute is not over. Two days later, the limit has been reduced to 10,000 and for Beninson 5,100 at most, even though he still has no scientific information at his disposal to make this claim. But Beninson is president of the ICRP and his opinion carries weight: according to him, Soviet figures are too high because the levels of internal contamination by radioactive caesium have been “overestimated”.

  Since this international conference, Annexe 7 has disappeared from circulation. Very few people ever saw it. Since then, neither Soviet nor Western experts ever referred to it again. It is as if it never existed.

  Over the following months a number of official reports are churned out and relayed by the press. In a European Community document (COM, 607, October 1986) experts claim that the internal radiation dose has been overestimated by a factor of 10, and the director of the IAEA who made a five-day visit to the USSR in January 1987 (five!) announces that “the first post-accident assessments of health effects were too pessimistic and should be decreased by a factor of 5 to 7”.

  On 8th October 1986 Le Monde writes: “The accident at Chernobyl has increased the audience and credibility of the IAEA, as M. Gerard Errera, the governor for France says […] In the days following the accident at the Ukrainian nuclear power station, the IAEA,—through its Director-General—showed a clear determination to manage the situation […] There need be no doubt that from now on, even greater emphasis will be placed on nuclear safety”. Thus, WHO is sidelined.

  The juggling of the figures, which had started in Vienna, and had no scientific basis, now intensifies. In order to be credible and arrive at the same conclusion, the downward revision needs to come from the Soviets themselves.

  In May 1987, during a conference organised by WHO in Copenhagen (13–14 May 1987), A. Moiseyev asserts, in abstract terms again, that “the positive trend in the radiological situation” allows a reduction in the collective external dose by a factor of 1.45 and in the collective internal dose by a factor of between 7 and 10.5 in relation to initial estimates. We know, that at the same time, a significant quantity of milk from farms in Belarus, containing well over the accepted limit of caesium-137, was withdrawn from local consumption and mixed with clean milk from areas further away. We also know that this “democratisation” of dose, by increasing the number of individuals contaminated by low level radiation, does not change the final outcome, statistically.

  In September 1987 at the IAEA headquarters in Vienna, L. Ilyin and O. Pavlovsky present yet another dishonest report on the radiological consequences of the accident entitled “Data analysis confirms the effectiveness of large scale interventions to limit the effects of the accident”. It states that 5.4 million people including 1.7 children received prophylactic iodine to protect their thyroid against radioactive iodine. This is completely false. One of the reasons why Professor Nesterenko33 was removed from his post as director of the Institute for Atomic Energy at the Academy of Science in Belarus was precisely because he had called for a massive programme of iodine prophylaxis, which in order to be effective, should have been dispensed in the hours immediately following the accident. His recommendation was rejected; he was accused of sowing panic, and was removed from his post.

  33 See Part Two, Chapter I. p. 82 and following pages.

  According to Ilyin and Pavlovsky’s report, there has been no increase in morbidity in children, no difference in the health of children in contaminated and control regions and, for the first time, the syndrome of “radiophobia” is invoked to explain the overall increase in morbidity among inhabitants of contaminated areas. One wonders what sort of “radiophobia” is experienced by a foetus that has miscarried, a newborn baby, or a child.

  Finally, it is apparent that the statistics in the report have been crudely manipulated: the effective dose is calculated on the basis of a seventy year life span for the whole population of the USSR (278 million inhabitants), whereas Annexe 7 in 1986, considers only the contaminated population of the European part of the USSR, i.e., 75 million people, and this results in a collective dose which is 18 times lower.

  In April 1988, at the conference in Sydney, Ilyin re-evaluates slightly the dose that he had previously divided by 18 (report by Ilyin and Pavlovsky). But at its General Assembly in 1988, UNSCEAR decides to “average” Ilyin’s two doses and reduce the dose provided by Legasov in “Appendix 7” from 1986, by dividing it by 9. Two years after the Vienna conference, as Bella Belbéoch commented “Beninson must have been pleased. Ilyin and Pavlovsky were both signatories to Annexe 7. So this is really a criticism of themselves”. Already the victim of perse
cution in Moscow, Legasov committed suicide, four days after Ilyin’s announcement at the Sydney conference.

  In September 1988, in order to avoid large scale and costly evacuation programmes, the USSR Council of Ministers rules on the criteria for “safe residence” and “safe life” and adopts Ilyin’s theory of a permissible limit of “35 rem over seventy years”.

  The rem is a unit of measurement of absorbed dose of radiation which expresses the biological damaging effects of radiation on the body. In order to evaluate the biological impact of radioactivity, the absorbed dose is assigned a coefficient which describes the destructive efficacy of radiation on living tissue. Alpha particles (α), which are very efficient, have a coefficient 20 times higher than beta particles (β)—or gamma rays (γ)34. Over millions of years, biological mechanisms have adapted to constant low level background radiation, composed of rays from the sun and the cosmos and traces of radioactive isotopes that were present in rocks when the earth was formed, and at very low levels, in the potassium consumed by living organisms. Far more important and destructive are the effects of artificial, radioactive emissions produced by the nuclear industry and dispersed across the planet in enormous quantities by military weapons testing, nuclear power stations and the Chernobyl accident. During the first acute phase when the reactor was on fire and during the first weeks when the “sarcophagus” was being constructed, levels of radiation were still very high. Today, the radioactivity is not in the form of immaterial background radiation but consists of radioactive particles released into the environment, and then ingested through food or inhaled. Once inside the body, they begin their destructive action on the cells.