Ablaze: The Story of the Heroes and Victims of Chernobyl Read online

  However, as the third part of the story will make clear, it is difficult to see how any Russian, Belorussian or Ukrainian writer could approach the subject with detachment, and even in the West many writers on either the environment or the former Soviet Union are inspired by a partisan zeal. I embarked upon the project with no axe to grind and have done my best to report what happened, leaving it to the protagonists of the different points of view to speak for themselves.

  Radiation

  Radiation is emitted by unstable atoms from many different sources, including sunlight, granite, and the human body. It can cause harm when its waves and particles penetrate living tissue. There are five types of ionizing radiation:

  1.Alpha particles do the most damage but can be stopped by paper, glass or skin.

  2.Beta particles cause less damage but penetrate living tissue to a depth of around ten millimetres, leading to beta ‘burns’.

  3.Neutrons, uncharged particles of about one quarter of the mass of alpha particles, are penetrating and damaging, but the circumstances in which people are likely to be exposed to neutron radiation are rare.

  4.Gamma radiation comes from electromagnetic rays and can be blocked only by thick slabs of concrete or heavy sheets of lead.

  5.X-rays, which result from bombarding a metallic surface by energetic electrons, are otherwise similar to and behave like gamma rays.

  Atoms regain their stability over a period of time: their radioactivity ‘decays’. This period is different for the various radioactive elements or isotopes and is measured by their ‘half-life’ – the time it takes for half a given sample to decay. In ten ‘half-lives’, virtually all the radionuclides will have decayed. The radionuclide iodine 131 has a half-life of around eight days. Strontium 90 and caesium 137 have half-lives of thirty years. Plutonium 239 has a half-life of 24,360 years.

  When ingested or inhaled, different radionuclides are retained in different parts of the body. Iodine accumulates in the thyroid gland, but if the gland is saturated with stable iodine at the time of irradiation or soon after, the radioactive iodine will pass through the body. Strontium replaces calcium in the bones.

  The original unit used to measure radiation exposure was a roentgen, after Wilhelm Roentgen, who discovered X-rays at the end of the nineteenth century. The amount of radiation to hit the human body is measured in a unit called the rad (radiation absorbed dose), but different types of radiation vary in their biological effects: for example, alpha particles are twenty times as damaging as gamma radiation. The unit devised to reflect this is the rem (roentgen equivalent man): for gamma radiation, 1 rad = 1 rem, while for alpha radiation, 1 rad = 20 rem.

  New units are now in use. 1 gray (Gy) equals 100 rads and 1 sievert (Sv) equals 100 rems. Since most people involved in the story of Chernobyl used the older units, I have used rads and rems. When sieverts or millisieverts are used in direct quotations, I have inserted the equivalent in rads or rems in brackets.

  The same is true when it comes to measuring radioactive contamination of the soil and food. The new unit of measurement is the becquerel (Bq); the old unit is the curie (Ci). I have used the old unit because it is commonly employed in the affected areas. A becquerel is one radioactive disintegration per second: a curie is thirty-seven billion disintegrations per second.

  Radiation damages human health in two distinct ways.

  1. Non-stochastic, whereby the severity of the effect varies with the size of the dose, and the likelihood of that effect is high once a threshold dose is exceeded. Over 100 rems, a patient is liable to succumb to radiation sickness with nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea and changes to the blood. The consequences of larger doses are described in the text. The ‘median acute lethal dose’ of radiation, whereby 50 per cent of those exposed would be expected to die within thirty days, is estimated at between 300 and 400 rems. The longer the period over which the dose is received, the less its effect. However, a relatively low whole-body dose measured in rems can accompany a high localized dose to, say, a child’s thyroid measured in rads.

  2. Below 100 rems, though there may be some blood changes and slight nausea, the dangers are mainly stochastic – that is, it is the probability of the effect occurring rather than its severity that varies with the size of the dose. A small dose for a larger number of people could lead to the same number of casualties as a large dose for a small number of people. The latent period between radiation exposure and the onset of radiation-induced diseases varies from a few years for leukaemia to a few decades for cancer.

  PART ONE

  THE NEW CIVILIZATION

  This fundamental transformation of the social order – the substitution of planned production for community consumption, instead of the capitalist profit-making of so-called ‘Western Civilisation’ – seems to me so vital a change for the better, so conducive to the progress of humanity to high levels of health and happiness, virtue and wisdom, as to constitute a new civilisation.

  Sidney and Beatrice Webb

  The Truth About Soviet Russia

  (1942)

  I

  1

  In the summer of 1942, when the Soviet Union was allied with the United States and Great Britain in a pitiless war against Germany, a young Russian physicist named Georgi Flerov, on leave from the front, travelled to the Tatar city of Kazan. Here were the government ministries and scientific institutes that had been evacuated from Moscow and Leningrad. Anxious to catch up on any developments in nuclear physics, Flerov went to the library of the Soviet Academy of Sciences to read the scientific journals from abroad. He found the journals that, despite the war, had reached Russia, but not the articles he had expected. The papers describing the work in progress of Western scientists like Joliot-Curie in France, Rutherford in England or Fermi in the United States were not to be found: there was no mention whatsoever of any research in Flerov’s field of nuclear physics.

  Flerov realized what this meant. The research had been classified: the Americans were developing a nuclear bomb. He at once wrote a letter to Stalin similar in tone to that which Albert Einstein had written to Roosevelt in 1939. Flerov warned his leader of the theoretical potential for mass destruction inherent in an atomic weapon and urged him to seek the advice of the nation’s most distinguished physicists.

  Stalin heeded his warning, deciding that the Soviet Union too must develop a nuclear bomb. The scientist he chose to supervise the project was Igor Kurchatov, who in the 1930s, at the Leningrad Physical Technical Institute, had been the first Soviet physicist to achieve nuclear fission. Although not yet forty when Stalin summoned him to Moscow, Kurchatov had grown a long black beard while recovering from pneumonia in Kazan. Besides his talents as a physicist, Kurchatov had other qualities that appealed to Stalin. He was a Russian, not a Jew, and, if not a Communist, he could show a pedigree of a proletarian kind: his great-grandfather had been a serf who, after being lost to an industrialist in a game of cards, was sent by his new master to work at an iron foundry on the River Sim in the Urals.

  To marshal the resources for such a huge undertaking, Stalin appointed as overall director of the atom bomb project the Georgian chief of his secret police, the NKVD, Lavrenty Beria. The terror inspired by his NKVD would ensure the project’s secrecy and concentrate the minds of those called upon to provide the resources. Beria also controlled many of the resources himself – the uranium mines worked by prisoners, and the huge network of gulags where many of the best physicists were to be found. In the terrible purges of the 1930s, when anyone with a bourgeois background was a potential enemy of the people and professionals in the tens of thousands were incarcerated on any pretext whatsoever – a chance remark, an unfortunate friendship or the anonymous denunciation of an envious colleague – many eminent physicists had been arrested and transported to labour camps in Siberia. For example, at the Institute of Physics in Kharkov, where vital research in nuclear physics was being done, both the head of the atom-splitting department, Leipinski, and a professor of theoreti
cal physics, Lev Landau (whom Flerov had mentioned in his letter to Stalin), had been arrested.

  Beria’s solution to the problem was not to order the release of the imprisoned physicists but to build camps within camps where the secret work could be done. Thirty thousand metres of tarpaulin were allocated to make tents for the physicists, and fifty tons of barbed wire to fence them in. A special ministry was formed with an anonymous name to conceal its secret purpose – the Ministry of Medium Machine Building. It was headed by an energetic engineer, Efim Slavsky, who had joined the Bolsheviks under Lenin and had fought in the cavalry under Semyon Budenny in the civil war. Under his direction, everything asked for by Kurchatov was wrung out of an economy shattered by war. An experimental reactor was built in a secret laboratory in the woods outside Moscow, where there were flats for the physicists and a villa for their director, Kurchatov. Forty kilometres from Moscow a whole town was devoted to the nuclear project, including a camp for German physicists Captured in the closing months of the war. It was a town with no name, unmarked on maps and roadsigns. By the same token Kurchatov’s name was never mentioned; his code name was Borodin, while to his friends he was simply ‘The Beard’.

  On 14 July 1945 Stalin met Churchill and Truman at Potsdam, a suburb to the west of Berlin. Two days later, the Americans successfully detonated the world’s first atomic bomb in the New Mexican desert at Alamogordo. On the 24th, Truman told Stalin that the United States had a new weapon of extraordinary destructiveness. Stalin showed no special interest, but that night he cabled Beria to hasten the development of a Soviet bomb. When he returned to Moscow he demanded weekly progress reports from Beria. In August he learned that the Americans had not only built an atomic bomb but were prepared to use it – obliterating the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and bringing the war in the Pacific to an end.

  An acute sense of urgency spurred on Kurchatov and his team. Whatever personal misgivings any may have had about Stalin or the Communist system, there was a real fear that the struggle against the Germans might be followed by a war with the Americans. The development of the bomb became the top priority of the Soviet state. No expense was to be spared, and the authority of Kurchatov, as scientific director, became greater than that of a minister. In the autumn of 1946 he was authorized to hire up to thirty-seven thousand workers to speed up the construction of the facilities he required. Where labourers were lacking, convicts took their place. Five thousand prisoners were transported from prison camps in Siberia to work on the facilities at Mayak, near Chelyabinsk in the Urals. Where zeal was lacking, Beria used terror.

  It was a style that others would emulate. Even Kurchatov, cultivated and humane though he was, made maximum use of his good standing with Stalin when dealing with recalcitrant government ministers. With his scientific colleagues, Kurchatov was more easygoing. They could argue with him – even lose their tempers, leave the room, slam the door – with no adverse repercussions. Although rumoured to be anti-Semitic, he had several Jewish scientists on his team. He employed one, Boris Dubowski, to take charge of safety at the town with no name south of Moscow, even though Dubowski had no formal qualifications, and he personally sought Stalin’s authorization to allow Dubowski to travel to Chelyabinsk. Another Jewish physicist who had a sharp sense of humour was allowed to mock and mimic the most eminent ministers and academicians.

  Although Kurchatov directed the project, he was assisted by a team of top physicists like Khariton, Kikoyin, Kapitsa, Tam and Tam’s ablest pupil, Sakharov. He also benefited from the intelligence provided by the Soviet agent, Klaus Fuchs, in the United States. On 25 December 1946, in his secret laboratory on the outskirts of Moscow, Kurchatov and his team achieved their first chain reaction. However, they were still some way from a bomb. For this they required plutonium, a product of the fission of uranium. This plutonium could only be produced in sufficient quantities in the atomic reactor being built at Mayak.

  2

  For the design of this reactor, Kurchatov had turned to one of the country’s leading engineers, Nikolai Dollezhal. A small, unassuming man, Dollezhal was typical of the ‘bourgeois specialists’ whom the Bolsheviks had employed to develop the industrial capacity of their Communist state. He came from a professional family in the Ukraine. His grandfather had been a Czech engineer employed by an Austrian company to build a bridge over the Dnieper for the railway from Kursk to Odessa. Nikolai was baptized into the Orthodox church, sang in the church choir as a boy and spent his holidays on his Russian grandmother’s crumbling, neglected estate. His interests, like those of his parents, were in music and literature, not politics: the dramatic events of 1917 passed him by.

  Graduating from the prestigious Technical University in Moscow – formerly the Imperial College – in 1923, he worked in the power and chemical industries as both a designer and an engineer. He never became a Communist: although frequently invited to join the party, he always made the excuse that he could not claim to be a Marxist since he never had time to read Marx. Arrested in 1930 on suspicion of complicity in the ‘Industrial Party’ conspiracy, which was to lead to the first of Stalin’s show trials, Dollezhal was released for lack of evidence and went back to work in the power industry in the Ukraine.

  By 1945, Dollezhal had moved to Moscow. He was a member of the government’s technical advisory council and director of an institute that he had founded to design machinery for the chemical industry. It was in this capacity that he was approached by Kurchatov and invited to join his team.

  The two had met before at a game of tennis in Leningrad in the 1930s. Now the task at hand was more serious: to design a reactor that would produce plutonium for the bomb. This was to be not just the primary but the only purpose of the design Kurchatov was asking for, which also had to take into account what could be produced by Soviet industry at the time. Both zeal and terror could extract extraordinary achievements from human beings, but time was short; they could not wait to develop technologies to match the optimum design.

  Within these constraints, and with astonishing speed, Dollezhal planned a reactor to meet the requirements of Kurchatov and his team. With the resources provided by Slavsky’s Ministry of Medium Machine Building, the reactor was built in the utmost secrecy at Mayak. On 10 June 1948 it was commissioned. A little over a year later, in July 1949, the first Soviet nuclear explosion took place at Ustyurt in the desert of Kazakhstan. Three months later, on 23 September 1949, they successfully detonated the first Soviet atom bomb. ‘Now,’ said Kurchatov, ‘we have our atomic sword and can start thinking about peaceful uses for the atom.’

  3

  From the first years of the twentieth century, when it had been discovered that by splitting the atom mass could be converted into energy, it had also been understood that heat generated by this nuclear fission could be converted into electrical power. A decade before, this had been only a theoretical possibility; now, with a functioning reactor at Mayak, it became a practical one, which Kurchatov tackled with his usual zeal.

  No one at this time stood higher in Stalin’s estimation. Kurchatov was not only given every decoration worthy of his achievements, including the first Order of Lenin ever awarded, but also had bestowed upon him the material rewards reserved for the favoured few. Besides the spacious house in the woods by his secret laboratory, called the ‘Forester’s Cabin’, he was now given a villa in his beloved Crimea. Dollezhal, too, was rewarded with a dacha – a pleasant house in the woods of Zhukovski outside Moscow, where he found among his neighbours the composer Shostakovich, the cellist Rostropovich; and the physicists Flerov, Sakharov and Tam. Kurchatov was a frequent visitor, often playing with Dollezhal’s daughter in a little hut in the garden: he had no children of his own. There they would also discuss Kurchatov’s plans to turn the nuclear sword into a nuclear ploughshare, not just to generate electricity but to drive submarines, icebreakers, locomotives and even aeroplanes.

  In 1949 Kurchatov sought Stalin’s approval to build an experimental nuclear
power station at the town with no name south of Moscow where the captured German physicists were held. Dollezhal was part of the scientific team; he designed the turbines while Kurchatov himself chose the reactor. It was a graphite-moderated, water-cooled model similar to that which was already up and running in Kurchatov’s own laboratory and at Mayak. The project was approved, but Stalin did not live to see it function. He died in 1953, and in December of the same year Beria and his closest associates were shot.

  Kurchatov did not fall with his erstwhile patrons; quite to the contrary, he was both liked and admired by Nikita Khrushchev, who subsequently came to power. The experimental nuclear power station at the town with no name – the first in the world – went on line on 27 June 1954. There was no fanfare for this achievement of Soviet science and technology because the whole Soviet state remained in the grip of the obsessive secrecy of Stalin’s time. It was only two years later, after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress, that Kurchatov was named as the founding father of Soviet nuclear power. Borodin could now drop his mask; ‘The Beard’ became familiar outside his small circle of colleagues and friends. The laboratory outside Moscow was named after Kurchatov, and the secret city was finally given a name: Obninsk. When Khrushchev, with Bulganin, paid a state visit to Britain in 1956, Igor Kurchatov went with them and spoke to British scientists about Soviet nuclear power and the bright future for the peaceful atom.