‘Do you agree that there is no reason to arrive at any conclusions concerning long-term genetic changes on the basis of the time elements in our study?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Thank you.’
‘I think you will know the answer to recessive genetic changes,’ concluded Mettler, ‘seven generations from now.’
Abel Gonzalez, an Argentinian from the International Atomic Energy Agency, was unhappy with the result of this exchange. ‘I feel that Dr Nauman’s intervention,’ he said, ‘could leave us in a state of uncertainty on the genetic impact of the accident, and this is something with which I personally do not agree. It is not true to say that we cannot draw any conclusions about hereditary effects. We know a lot about genetic effects already. We know that in all the epidemiological studies we have done (with only one exception, which we can discuss separately) there is no statistical evidence of hereditary effects. We know that the hereditary effects we are looking for have a very low probability of occurrence and a tremendously high background rate.’
4
With growing dismay, the Western scientists who had worked so hard on the Chernobyl project saw a haemorrhage of trust in their findings. Not only were their reassuring conclusions about the likely genetic effects doubted, but the criteria they had established for relocation were questioned. ‘I have a moment ago received an unofficial translation,’ said Dr Gonzalez, ‘of an article from Izvestia of the day before yesterday which I believe is very relevant to today’s discussions. It states that … a new Soviet law was published that would establish the following limits for the relocation of people living in areas affected by radiation. It seems that (a) obligatory relocation with full compensation for loss of property should be considered when the average dose exceeds 5 millisieverts (0.5 rem); (b) the population in areas with doses exceeding 1 millisievert (0.1 rem) could stay on or be relocated upon request, also with full compensation for property loss; and (c) people in areas with less than 1 millisievert (0.1 rem) per year would have special status and be entitled to some bonuses and compensation without relocation.
‘I ask myself what the consequences of this law would be if the USSR authorities decided, for instance, to control radon exposure in dwelling houses, following a similar policy. The average global dose for radon assessed by UNSCEAR is in the order of 1 millisievert (0.1 rem), and I can imagine that in the cold climate of northern USSR, with airtight houses, the levels can be higher than that.’
Other contributors confirmed the absurdity of the new Soviet measures. ‘There are many countries where a large proportion of the population receives much higher doses than 5 millisieverts (0.5 rem) per annum from radon and its daughters. Governments and populations affected by this radon irradiation do not bother about the situation.’ Yet under the new Chernobyl law, 5 millisieverts (0.5 rem) was now considered the level for mandatory relocation, which, as Dr Belayev from the Kurchatov Institute put it, amounted to ‘a violation of human rights’.
There were also other far more lethal causes of pollution. ‘I would like to add something concerning cost and benefit,’ said Professor Jovanovich, a Yugoslav-American from the department of physics at the University of Manitoba. ‘We understand what cost is and we understand benefit as a benefit to the health of a population. Whenever I, as a nuclear physicist, come to a gathering like this, we always talk about the nuclear physics, about the radiation; we never talk about the air pollution. Yet two weeks ago, at an international conference in Anaheim, it was reported that air pollution in American cities has accounted for an estimated sixty thousand deaths a year, making it among the nation’s top killers. This is not a crackpot report and it is nothing new … Now if I have ten billion dollars or ten billion rubles and want to improve the health of the population, I have to decide whether to spend that money on relocating people because of the one hundred millisieverts or on cleaning up smokestacks. We should not forget that we live in a real world, and that there are other technologies more dangerous to the health of populations than nuclear power, including the Chernobyl accident.’
Professor Hedemann Jensen, a Danish physicist, spelled but the view of the international experts in unambiguous terms. ‘Our conclusions are very firm. We say that there can be no justification on radiological protection grounds for the adoption of a more restrictive policy if consideration is limited to the cost and risk reduction alone.’ A bluff Scotsman, Dr Ken Duncan, at one time chief medical officer of the British Radiological Protection Board, emphasized that it had been established beyond all doubt that any further expenditure on resettlement or compensation was a waste of resources. ‘People say, emotionally, and so much emotion comes into this, that you cannot put a monetary value on human life. In one sense you cannot and in another sense you must, because people also say you cannot spend too much on health. What absolute nonsense! You could spend the country’s whole resources on health and you would be very much worse off at the end. Only the doctors would be very much better off.’
What the scientists faced over Chernobyl, however, was not so much an epidemic of hypochondria as a widespread mistrust of science. ‘It is customary for doctors and scientists,’ said Duncan, ‘when they are faced with the unpleasant publicity which this field often attracts, to turn round and savage the nearest media person, whoever it may be. It is not entirely fair to blame journalists, broadcasters and people of that sort because they have been given a pseudoauthority by pseudoscientists in very many cases … There is a great burden of responsibility on scientists to speak only in scientific terms. Not reputation, not money, but only honesty matters.’
‘Mankind has fallen into the trap that mankind itself has set,’ said Ilyn’s colleague from the Institute of Biophysics, Dr Buldakdv. ‘Experts know that, among the various harmful factors, the radiation factor is perhaps the least harmful. But this is not known to the public at large, who do not want to reconcile themselves to the fact that for fifty years they have been fed falsehoods. They hold on to their firm belief that any radiation that is slightly higher than the background is fatal. It is very difficult to make them change their minds … It is very difficult for us to prove … what nobody wants to believe.’
Besides this philosophic irony, that there could be superstition within a science, there was also the historic irony that the party line in the Soviet Union, which in 1986 had been to play down the gravity of the accident, was now to exaggerate its consequences. Thus the Ukrainian minister for Chernobyl, Georgi Gotovchits, rejected the findings of the International Chernobyl Project. He said, ‘We feel that some of the basic conclusions that have been drawn concerning the radiological consequences of Chernobyl are too optimistic and could therefore be deleterious not only to the cleanup plan but also to nuclear safety problems in general.’
This reversal in attitude was both baffling and frustrating for the Western experts who had worked so hard in an attempt to arrive at the truth about Chernobyl. For three years after the accident, the Soviets had refused to allow any scrutiny of the measures they had taken. Finally they had agreed, and the Western experts who had set about the task were prepared to discover ideologically inspired mendacity in the findings of scientific apparatchiks like Ilyn and Israel. ‘We were told,’ said an alert and eloquent physicist from Salzburg, Dr Steinhäusler, not to ‘believe the figures you are given; don’t trust the published map … that was the situation in March 1990. Then one is confronted by people who are worried or frightened, who do not dare eat and drink what they produce, and this is happening in an area covering tens of thousands of square kilometres and involving hundreds of settlements. And behind you, there are seventy-one colleagues who are trying to find the truth, who are asking themselves, “Is this map, given to us by our Soviet colleagues, correct? Are the milk and food data correct? Do they know how to measure? Do they know how to analyse? Is it safe for those people to live in that area?” The only way to answer these questions is to go out and measure, to go to the laboratory and find out
how they do it, ask them to collaborate with you, give them unknown samples to measure, which is about the hardest test you can give a scientist. Our Soviet colleagues did this, and then put all the data together. The end result was [that] the maps are correct. They are not perfect; they could not be perfect. They were made under enormous time pressure and with constraints. I wish I could say that we could have done better, but I don’t think we could.
‘Our report is not a whitewash, with everything clean and perfect. Anyone who reads the technical report or reads the recommendations and conclusions does not have to read between the lines. It is stated quite clearly where there are areas that need improvement … But the main conclusion does not change. It is: Yes, our Soviet colleagues know what they are doing.
‘How does this help the people in the settlements who asked us, “Can we eat the food? Can we drink the water?” I don’t think it helps them if we state repeatedly, against the facts of measurement, that food is contaminated, soil is poisoned, water cannot be drunk, when the measurements clearly indicate the contrary. In most of the water measurements, for instance, we could not detect any radioactivity. Not because we used unsuitable equipment, but because there isn’t any … This has to be stated and spelled out very clearly. We can help these people not by reviving their fear but by believing in the measurements our Soviet colleagues made and that have been officially corroborated. This is the only way we can give these people back the trust that they need.
‘There are indeed problems in the environment that we did not want to cover up, or make less of, such as the aquatic environment, which has a long-term potential [as] a problem, and we have indicated this. Radioactivity does not disappear overnight; it is in the sediment. We have stated this, we have measured it, and our Soviet colleagues know it. It can show up in fish and in other components of the aquatic environment. We did measure radioactivity in food, but we made it quite clear that commercially available food is under very good control. It is privately produced food, food collected – against official advice – that is dangerous. Soviet scientists cannot eliminate caesium from mushrooms grown in forests, and neither can anyone else. They can only tell people not to eat mushrooms.
‘In summary, I would say that the environment does show radioactive contamination. Our technical report does not diminish the levels, but puts them into perspective and on an objective, numerical basis that the outside world can scrutinize and check. That is the only way science can progress, not by rumours and certainly not by frightening people in the affected areas. Finally, I think it is very unfair to a large segment of the scientific community – in this case, our Soviet colleagues and the other one hundred and ninety-nine members of the team – to suppose that we have been trying to cover up facts or whitewash the situation. We have not. We have been trying very hard to give a true picture, and I think our Soviet colleagues have been trying to do the same.’
5
Unfair it may have been, but to the enemies of the Communist party in the Soviet Union it was a small measure of injustice when compared to what they had suffered over the past fifty years. Even as the five hundred scientists were conferring in Vienna, the campaign was under way for the presidential elections in Russia, the first time in their history that the Russian people had ever been asked to choose a leader. The democrats’ candidate was Boris Yeltsin, the Communists’ Nikolai Ryzhkov.
As he always had been, Ryzhkov remained the most acceptable face of the old regime; nevertheless he epitomized that regime to all those who loathed the Communist system, and it was he who had led the Politburo commission in the aftermath of Chernobyl. In the impassioned atmosphere of the election – the extraordinary historic chance that few had thought they would ever live to see, to show through the ballot box what they thought of the system – it was asking too much of a long-oppressed people to agree with Dr Steinhäusler that ‘our Soviet colleagues know what they are doing’. Ryzhkov had led the government’s efforts; Ryzhkov was a criminal and therefore must have been both morally and scientifically wrong.
Chernobyl was not an overt issue in the Russian presidential election, but just as the ecological movement had proved to be the wooden horse in which the anti-Communists had penetrated the walls of the Soviet Troy, so the charge of a cover-up on Chernobyl had become the clarion call with which a small band of democratic intellectuals had aroused the otherwise docile and conservative country people in Russia, Belorussia and the Ukraine.
On 12 June 1991, little more than a fortnight after the end of the conference in Vienna, the Russian people delivered their verdict on the Communist regime. Standing against five other candidates, Yeltsin won an absolute majority on the first ballot with 57 per cent of the popular vote. The percentage of people who voted for Ryzhkov was only 16.9.
XIV
1
After his defeat in the Russian presidential elections, Nikolai Ryzhkov retired from political life. Yegor Ligachev had preceded him; after being overwhelmingly rejected as deputy secretary general at the Twenty-eighth Congress of the Communist Party in July 1990, he had announced his retirement to his native Siberia.
But their departure did not mean that the conservative forces in the party and government had been routed. Mikhail Gorbachev, with a new team of conservative ministers, could still call upon the vast coercive forces of the ministries of defence, the interior and the KGB. Few imagined that the heirs to Bolshevism would give up their inheritance without a fight.
The powers of patronage remained with the Central Committee, so those who did not earn their living either as people’s deputies or as radical journalists had to beware of biting the hand that fed them. Nonetheless, the election of Boris Yeltsin revealed a dramatic change in people’s attitudes towards the Socialist system: and this same liberation from the ideological outlook that had been instilled in them in nursery school, secondary school and college, in the Pioneers, the Komsomol and the party, had affected many of the protagonists in the tragedy of Chernobyl.
Lubov Kovalevskaya, whose article in Literaturnaya Ukraina about the shortcomings in the construction of the nuclear power station had been published shortly before the accident, had been acclaimed as a prophet by the media in the West. Reporting on conditions in the zone in the years following the accident, she had become profoundly disillusioned about nuclear power as such. She wrote, ‘The consequences of the Chernobyl tragedy are irreversible and eternal. Mankind will have to adapt itself to the post-Chernobyl condition. No rescue operations can prevent genetic contamination of the environment, change in blood formulae, genetic code, landscape, traditions and culture, degradation and insanity of nature and man as a part of it. The world is one indivisible whole.’
Lubov also expressed commonly held doubts about the impartiality of the International Atomic Energy Agency: ‘The aim of the organization is to develop the nuclear power industry, so it is interested in covering up not only the problem of plutonium control but also acute problems of the nuclear power industry.’
In 1989, when all information about nuclear matters was finally declassified, Lubov was able to describe the way in which the state’s security apparatus had controlled the dissemination of information about the disaster, and she exposed corruption in the charities set up to mitigate its effects. ‘It is well known,’ she told Radio Free Europe in 1990, ‘that Glavatom [the State Committee for the Use of Atomic Energy] took sixty-five million rubles from account No. 904 and transferred it to its own account.’
Unlike many of the radical democrats and Greens, however, Lubov Kovalevskaya did not drop one party line merely to adopt another. With no need to court their votes, she had the courage to tell former nuclear power station workers in the Chernobyl Union that they were partly to blame for the accident because they had failed to speak out against the corruption and inefficiency in the management of the station. She had an ambiguous relationship with Shcherbak and Green World. He had given her a creditable role in his book, but she saw his Green World movement deve
lop a self-seeking intolerance of its own. In her view, it exploited the Chernobyl tragedy to promote its own nationalist agenda.
Sometimes those who answered the telephone at Green World refused to speak Russian – unless the caller was interpreting for a Western correspondent offering hard currency for an interview or some sensational statistics. As a Russian living in Kiev, Lubov found it increasingly difficult to get her work published; it was often returned with the recommendation that it be translated into Ukrainian. She was obliged to work for Raguda, the only Russian-language magazine left in Kiev, which was run by hard-line Communists who were inevitably unsympathetic to her point of view.
Like many others in the wake of Chernobyl, Lubov’s disillusion with the Communist system led her to doubt what she had been taught about religion. She had been baptized as a child, but to confirm her return to religious belief she was baptized again in the Cathedral of St Volodomyr in Kiev. Valentina Brukhanov went to the same church to pray quietly for her imprisoned husband. Both actions were symptoms of a widespread return to religious belief in the Ukraine. On the first anniversary of Chernobyl, in the village of Hriushiw in the Ukraine, a twelve-year-old child had a vision of the Virgin Mary. The accident was seen as an act of God, and even as a punishment for the atheism of the Bolsheviks. In Ukrainian, ‘chernobyl’ was the word for a species of the bitter plant wormwood, mentioned in Chapter 8, verses 10–11, of the Book of Revelation: ‘The third angel blew his trumpet and a huge star fell from the sky, burning like a ball of fire, and it fell on a third of all rivers and springs; this was the star called Wormwood, and a third of all water turned to bitter wormwood, so that many people died from drinking it.’
Ablaze: The Story of the Heroes and Victims of Chernobyl Page 38