by Jason Wilson
This was the receiving station for the Duga-3 over-the-horizon (OTH) radar, which picked up the signal emitted by a transmitting station 60 kilometers away. Fidel scratches a globe in the sandy soil to demonstrate how the radar worked: it bounced its signal three times, hopscotching between the earth and the ionosphere, to reach all the way over the North Pole and deep into North American airspace—allowing operators to detect an ICBM launch up to 10,000 kilometers away. This was the last gasp of the pre-satellite era, and mostly effective; false positives nearly caused global thermonuclear war only about two times—three, tops.
The Duga is nicknamed “the Russian Woodpecker” for the staccato interference it caused in short-wave ham radios and other broadcasts. One day in 1976, hams in North America turned on their radios to find this mysterious new chattering lurking at the edges of their signal. Nobody knew exactly what the Woodpecker was for, and conspiracy theorists believed it was some form of Soviet mind control. But one thing was clear: it drove ham radio operators nuts. They issued formal complaints to the USSR government, and bought “Woodpecker mufflers” in an attempt to filter out the noise. It finally went silent when the Duga radar was turned off for good in 1989.
While long since decommissioned, the radar installation has been open to visitors only since 2013. And now, as we stand beneath it and gape up, it fills our entire field of vision. Like all of the best examples of the Soviet aesthetic, the Woodpecker makes you feel very, very small. It’s more than 30 stories high and stretches nearly 700 feet—as far as the eye can see toward the horizon. It looks like a wire frame for a giant dam, rising up from the middle of a forest. Its precisely located nodes and crisscross support cables create mesmerizing optical illusions.
Gazing up at this rusting masterpiece of Cold War technology feels like touring the Colosseum: a boldly ambitious, epoch-defining achievement of engineering that now stands as an artifact of a toppled civilization.
The Sarcophagus
At a certain point in the day, the nervous gallows humor of visiting a nuclear wasteland on your vacation gives way to the somber humanity of the tragedy. For me, this happens on our surreal drive along a cooling canal toward the Chernobyl power plant. We drive closer. And closer. And—gulp—closer. And soon, we’re pulling into a parking lot across the street from Reactor No. 4.
When the reactor exploded on the night of April 25, 1986, the superheated nuclear fuel inside Reactor No. 4 began melting right through the floor. Liquidators drained the cooling pools located below the molten core, to avoid a steam explosion. Coal miners were brought in to build a protective barrier that would prevent the core from reaching the water table deep below—which could cause another massive explosion and widespread contamination. Helicopter pilots flew thousands of sorties to dump lead, sand, and boric acid onto Reactor No. 4, smothering the meltdown. And radioactive debris was carefully removed and disposed of. Workers were exposed to levels of radiation that were permanently injurious after just a 40-second shift.
To prevent another meltdown, the USSR embarked on the largest civil engineering project in history: building a concrete “sarcophagus” to safely encase the volatile reactor core. Over the course of six months, a quarter million workers reached their recommended lifetime limit of radiation exposure as they put the sarcophagus in place. Meanwhile, scientists inspecting the meltdown site discovered what’s known as “the Elephant’s Foot”—a petrified column of molten radioactive material that is considered the most lethal object in the world.
Chernobyl had a pan-European impact. Radioactive rain fell in the Scottish Highlands, and the South of France saw an increase in the rate of thyroid cancer. But even as it’s easy to fault the Soviets for allowing the accident to occur in the first place, you have to credit them for saving Europe from something far worse. Ultimately, the cleanup was a success, the worst of the radiation was contained, and further meltdowns were forestalled—all at a cost of somewhere around $18 billion.
Not only did the Chernobyl incident—which is sometimes called “the final battle of the USSR”—contribute to bankrupting the already shaky Soviet economy. It also forced Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev to live up to his recently issued pledge of glasnost (openness). As details of the accident became public, it eroded trust among Soviet subjects and cast severe doubt on the USSR’s much-touted technological achievements. While the fall of the Soviet Union had many causes, Gorbachev himself cites Chernobyl as one of the key dominoes to topple during that critical period.
The original sarcophagus has more recently been itself covered by another, more modern sarcophagus. Designed and built in conjunction with a French company, the new sarcophagus has an elegant arch and a shiny shell that seems designed to instill confidence—a stark contrast to the rusty original. Costing $2.5 billion and taller than the Statue of Liberty, the new sarcophagus was built a few hundred yards away, then slowly moved into place—the largest metal object ever moved by humans.
The meltdown site, now encased in matryoshka stacking dolls of sarcophagi, has surprisingly low levels of radiation. Standing at the monument honoring those who lost their lives in the accident, directly in front of the sarcophagus, my dosimeter shows that I’m absorbing about a third as much gamma radiation as I would on a long-haul flight. And yet, it’s still above the recommended safe levels for long-term exposure. The soundtrack of a visit here is the high-pitched chattering of dosimeters—like the insistent ticking of a stopwatch, reminding you not to linger.
But work is not done: The next challenge is to dismantle and safely dispose of the inner sarcophagus, to prevent a future collapse. And the long-term goal is to remove the plant entirely. Someday—2065, they hope—this will simply be an open field.
Workers at the facility do shifts—two weeks on, two weeks off—and wear badges that monitor how much radiation they have absorbed. If they hit their annual limit, they’re done until next year. We’re told that the French workers appreciate the safeguards . . . while the Ukrainian ones, eager for a steady paycheck, would prefer the limits to be increased.
As if to emphasize the safety of the site, we have lunch in the humble canteen for Chernobyl workers, in a building a short walk from the meltdown site. We’re told the cafeteria ladies—who pile our plastic trays with mountains of hearty food—don’t like having their photo taken. Checking my dosimeter while eating my borscht and chicken schnitzel, I see that the radiation here is no higher than in Kiev.
The Ghost City of Pripyat
The grand finale of our tour is just a couple of miles from the plant: Pripyat, an entire city trapped in a postapocalyptic time warp, and now completely overtaken by nature. Pripyat seizes travelers’ imaginations. It’s what you picture when you imagine visiting Chernobyl.
Founded along with the plant in 1970, the planned workers’ town of Pripyat showcased the ideal Soviet lifestyle. This was as good a place to live as you’d find in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Because of the importance of the plant, Pripyat was directly supplied by the Soviet government, making its shops unusually well stocked. At the time of the accident, Pripyat had just completed work on a new amusement park and sports stadium, and was laying out plans to expand the city across its little river bay. From a dock below the trendy café in Pripyat’s town center, you could hop on a public hydrofoil and zip downriver to Kiev faster than driving. The mid-1980s was a prosperous time, with no inkling of the lurking disaster, much less the impending collapse of the Soviet Union. Having a good job at Chernobyl and a flat in Pripyat was a blissful existence that many Ukrainians aspired to.
The 50,000 people of Pripyat (including 17,000 children—the median age was 26) were perhaps the cruelest casualties of the accident. While the firefighters, miners, pilots, soldiers, and scientists who threw themselves into the radioactive cauldron did so with heroism, and more or less knowingly, the civilians of Pripyat were simply not told that they needed to leave until it was too late.
After 36 hours of cover-up and obfuscation,
the authorities finally gave the order to evacuate Pripyat. And when it happened, it happened all at once. One night, as irradiated firefighters were slowly dying in the Pripyat hospital, the ballroom in the town’s big hotel was hosting a wedding party. The next morning, 50,000 people were carried away from their toxic hometown, in a column of buses 10 kilometers long, within a matter of hours. They were told to turn off the lights, close the windows, and bring along a few supplies for this “temporary” evacuation. They were told they’d be back in three days. They were told many things. But the truth is that nobody will ever live in Pripyat again.
Most of the people of Pripyat survived the initial exposure, but were sentenced to a life of creeping, unpredictable health problems—which, thanks to the cruelly insidious nature of radiation poisoning, are now reverberating well into the next generation.
We set out to explore the forests that have filled in the empty space between buildings. Concrete apartment blocks, standing in formation like platoons of rigid soldiers, are tattered and dilapidated. Just inside the entrance of one, a hand-lettered directory lists each family that resided here, circa 1986.
The apartments are still sort of furnished, with dribs and drabs of vintage furniture. But the wallpaper is peeling off the walls in crooked rolls, and the appliances have been looted of their copper wire. Fidel tells us these apartments are a popular place for squatters to sneak in and hole up for a weekend bender. (Apparently, Ukrainian partiers know how to turn their self-destructive tendencies up to 11.)
At the town’s fancy café, once cheery mosaics and stained-glass windows are shattered and scattered around the hauntingly still interior. The indoor swimming pool—recently made famous by one of the first-person shooter video games that have found inspiration in Pripyat—is filled with black muck. The local cinema, which was named for Prometheus, the god who brought fire to humans, is decisively closed for business.
We walk through an open field of sturdy trees and dense brush. Only after Fidel points out the faint echoes of a grandstand do we realize that we’re crossing the center line of a soccer pitch—in the middle of what was Pripyat’s sports stadium.
Inside a school, a few tattered notices hang on bulletin boards, locker doors gape open, and long-forgotten homework litters the muddy floor. In one room, someone has assembled the creepy dolls into macabre little tableaus—as if this nauseating site needed to have a fine point put on it. A teddy bear wearing a toddler-size respirator mask toasts a doll that winks one dead eye from under wispy, matted hair. It’s a postapocalyptic island of misfit toys.
In the town amusement park, which was slated to open just weeks after the accident, stands the icon of Pripyat: its Ferris wheel, a perhaps too-on-the-nose symbol for innocence lost. It looms above Pripyat like a rusted skeleton—childhood joy filtered through a grotesque prism of Cold War nuclear paranoia. The abandoned bumper cars (which, Fidel warns us, are likely “contaminated”—there’s that word again) are welded by rust to the mossy floor.
The most notorious corner of Pripyat is the former hospital, where those first responders were treated for radiation sickness—pointlessly, yet humanely. While heroically extinguishing the initial fire, they were not told about the meltdown, and took no special precautions. They noted a metallic taste in their mouths, and a tingling sensation on their faces. Coughing and vomiting came next. And soon it was clear: they had absorbed a lethal, delayed-reaction dose of radiation. They had just enough time to come to the hospital, strip off their gear in the basement, and climb into their deathbeds.
Today, that basement—and those clothes—remain irrevocably contaminated. Jackets and boots sit in heaps, right where they were dropped more than 30 years ago, too dangerous to move—or even get close to. Although it’s strictly off-limits, there’s a cottage industry of amateur YouTube daredevils who sneak into the basement for a selfie with a summiting dosimeter. Having traveled extensively in Eastern Europe—with its brutal, war-torn history—I am used to hearing a guide say, “That building over there? In the basement, many people were killed.” But this is the first time I have been told, “That building over there? If you stay in the basement for too long, it’ll kill you.”
The Liquidators
As we pass through what was the main square of Pripyat, Fidel calls us over to a humble memorial of photographs pinned to a wall. Scanning the faces of those who lost their lives at Chernobyl, we hear their stories:
The middle manager who showed up to deal with the crisis on his day off, even though he was stinking drunk. Fortunately, his high blood-alcohol level helped insulate him from the worst of the radiation (he survived for decades).
The plant worker who stayed as long as he could to help, until he was removed to a hospital for his final days. His wife refused to leave his bedside—until she, too, was doomed to radiation poisoning.
And the firefighters who initially responded to the meltdown, sacrificing their lives in those critical first hours to prevent a catastrophe that could have been far worse. Perhaps it’s hyperbole, but local authorities insist that if the liquidators had not acted so quickly—had they allowed the meltdown to worsen—it could have tainted much of the European continent. Imagine all of Europe carrying dosimeters for each hike in the woods.
At this poignant moment, I consider all of the reasons why a traveler would want to visit Chernobyl. Is it simply gruesome rubbernecking at human tragedy? For some, yes. But it’s also an opportunity to learn about one of the most dramatic events of the late Cold War era. It’s a chance to gain a better understanding of the actual risks of nuclear power—and the unexpected safety of a cleaned-up radioactive site. You see old Soviet bloc towns trapped in time, in their native state, untouched by the modernization and westernization of the post–Cold War world. And you see how rapidly and without hesitation nature overtakes a depopulated civilization.
But standing there, looking into the eyes of the people who contained that first horrible wave of radiation, I think of yet another reason: to honor the memory of those who died to make this area safe for future generations. People may no longer be able to live long-term in certain parts of the meltdown zone. But we don’t have to stay half a country away, either—wondering nervously when the next meltdown will come. At Chernobyl, it’s humbling to see how human ingenuity can bring about horrifying problems. But it’s also inspiring to see how it can solve them.
BROOKE JARVIS
Paper Tiger
from The New Yorker
Andrew Orchard lives near the northeastern coast of Tasmania, in the same ramshackle farmhouse that his great-grandparents, the first generation of his English family to be born on the Australian island, built in 1906. When I visited Orchard there, in March, he led me past stacks of cardboard boxes filled with bones, skulls, and scat, and then rooted around for a photo album, the kind you’d expect to hold family snapshots. Instead, it contained pictures of the bloody carcasses of Tasmania’s native animals: a wombat with its intestines pulled out, a kangaroo missing its face. “A tiger will always eat the jowls and eyes,” Orchard explained. “All the good organs.” The photos were part of Orchard’s arsenal of evidence against a skeptical world—proof of his fervent belief, shared with many in Tasmania, that the island’s apex predator, an animal most famous for being extinct, is still alive.
The Tasmanian tiger, known to science as the thylacine, was the only member of its genus of marsupial carnivores to live to modern times. It could grow to six feet long, if you counted its tail, which was stiff and thick at the base, a bit like a kangaroo’s, and it raised its young in a pouch. When Orchard was growing up, his father would tell him stories of having snared one, on his property, many years after the last confirmed animal died, in the 1930s. Orchard says that he saw his first tiger when he was 18, while duck hunting, and since then so many that he’s lost count. Long before the invention of digital trail cameras, Orchard was out in the bush rigging film cameras to motion sensors, hoping to get a picture of a tiger. He showed m
e some of the most striking images he’d collected over the decades, sometimes describing teeth and tails and stripes while pointing at what, to my eye, could very well have been shadows or stems. (Another thylacine searcher told me that finding tigers hidden in the grass in camera-trap photos is “a bit like seeing the Virgin Mary in burnt toast.”) Orchard estimates that he spends $5,000 a year just on batteries for his trail cams. The larger costs of his fascination are harder to calculate. “That’s why my wife left me,” he offered at one point, while discussing the habitats tigers like best.
Tasmania, which is sometimes said to hang beneath Australia like a green jewel, shares the country’s colonial history. The first English settlers arrived in 1803 and soon began spreading across the island, whose human and animal inhabitants had lived in isolation for more than 10,000 years. Conflict was almost immediate. The year that the Orchard farmhouse was built, the Tasmanian government paid out 58 bounties to trappers and hunters who presented the bodies of thylacines, which were wanted for preying on the settlers’ sheep. By then, the number of dead tigers, like the number of live ones, was steeply declining. In 1907, the state treasury paid out for 42 carcasses. In 1908, it paid for 17. The following year, there were 2, and then none the year after, or the year after that, or ever again.
By 1917, when Tasmania put a pair of tigers on its coat of arms, the real thing was rarely seen. By 1930, when a farmer named Wilf Batty shot what was later recognized as the last Tasmanian tiger killed in the wild, it was such a curiosity that people came from all over to look at the body. The last animal in captivity died of exposure in 1936, at a zoo in Hobart, Tasmania’s capital, after being locked out of its shelter on a cold night. The Hobart City Council noted the death at a meeting the following week, and authorized £30 to fund the purchase of a replacement. The minutes of the meeting include a postscript to the demise of the species: two months earlier, it had been “added to the list of wholly protected animals in Tasmania.”