The Age of Radiance (59 page)

Chernobyl was merely the fourteenth most lethal nuclear accident in USSR history, with the other thirteen kept classified until the empire fell. A far worse incident, for one example, happened in the south Urals, on September 29, 1957, when cooling equipment for nuclear waste at the Mayak Plutonium Facility malfunctioned, the waste ignited in fire and exploded, irradiating 270,000 people and fourteen thousand square miles of land with remarkable vigor—2 million curies. As the plant’s employees had already spent the previous seven years disgorging 2.75 million curies of waste into the Techa River, today, a half century later, the territory remains one of the most radioactive regions in the world.

The United States has had its own trouble spot in Rocky Flats, Colorado, a fusion-bomb trigger plant that suffered a series of plutonium fires in 1957, 1965, and 1969, then was discovered to have been lackadaisical with leaky waste drums. Federal officials were forced to shut the plant down in 1989.

The Soviets have never released official mortality figures for the Lenin Station’s two-week atomic fire. Onetime foreign minister and Georgia president Eduard Shevardnadze famously said of the disaster that it “tore the blindfold from our eyes and persuaded us that politics and morals could not diverge.” It was a financial catastrophe—hundreds of thousands relocated, billions paid for liquidation, and Belarus and Ukraine still spending around 5 percent of their yearly federal budgets on Chernobyl victims. The cost is so high that the majority of Belarusians opposed the dissolution of the USSR and to this day want to reunite with Russia. Belarus Radiobiology Institute director Yevgeny Konoplya:
“We are the great guinea pigs of modern times. We are getting to prove for the world what radiation can do to humans. We have suffered from the policies of a country that no longer even exists. We have suffered from lies. And we have suffered from other people’s belief in technology. We once had a beautiful country. What we have now is pain.”

From 1992 to 1995, Johan Havenaar, chief of emergency psychiatry at Utrecht University Hospital, oversaw a study comparing fifteen hundred residents of Gomel (previously Belarus’s most agriculturally productive region, but now with twenty of its twenty-one districts rendered infertile by Chernobyl), with fifteen hundred from nearby Tver, Russia, where no Ukrainian radioactivity has ever been found. The Belarusians said they were five times as sick as the Russians and argued that almost all of these illnesses were due to “the station”—Chernobyl. Forest administrator Volodya Ronashev, forty-eight years old: “My teeth are falling out, and I can’t see too well anymore. I used to be healthy. What else could it be but the station?”

The Dutch then gave the two groups of residents extended medical exams and found that their health was, physically speaking, nearly identical. Psychologically, though, the difference between the two groups was astounding. The Gomelites described themselves as weak and helpless victims with a predetermined, disastrous future. They tried to repair this by either being extremely careful and dramatically exaggerating any health worries, or freely eating the fruits, mushrooms, and animals from the state-warned contaminated zones while screwing, drinking, shooting up, and smoking like it’s 1999.

Chernobyl Forum radiologist Fred Mettler found that after twenty years
“the population remains largely unsure of what the effects of radiation actually
are and retain a sense of foreboding. A number of adolescents and young adults who have been exposed to modest or small amounts of radiation feel that they are somehow fatally flawed and there is no downside to using illicit drugs or having unprotected sex.” The pregnant of Gomel are so afraid that their children will be born defected that even today they have three abortions for every live birth—more than twice the rate of the rest of Belarus. Johan Havenaar: “These people are sick. It’s just not the type of illness they think. We have to realize that the psychological damage here runs very deep. And we need to treat that every bit as vigorously as we need to treat cancer.” Harvard physicist Richard Wilson: “It’s not too much to say that Chernobyl helped destroy the Soviet Union and end the Cold War. What it did to Belarus is hard to describe. But the worst disease here is not radiation sickness. Except for children, the physical effects are not easy to measure. The truth is that the fear of Chernobyl [radiophobia] has done much more damage than Chernobyl itself.”

The evacuated, meanwhile, seem just as miserable as anyone remaining behind in Gomel. The town of Slavutych was built solely to replace Pripyat; the major form of litter on the roads outside its housing projects are empty vodka buckets; its central square is a black-marble memorial to the station’s victims, where surviving relatives regularly gather to lay wreaths and light candles as a boys choir sings
Gospodi, Gospodi, Gospodi
—“my God, my God, my God.” Tamara Lusenko was one of those forced to move from her family farm to what she says is a prison: “If I knew it would be this bad, I would have chained myself to the gates back home. Is the danger really so bad there now? Isn’t it time we all went home?”

Despite everything, Ukraine continued running the other Lenin Station reactors for the next fourteen years. Eight times, the government decided to shut down the plant, and each time it reversed the decision, as it would destroy five thousand jobs in an economically cratered nation. Most of the remaining V. I. Lenin power plant employees have developed a special form of Slavic bravado.
“Radiation is good for you,” one said. “I work here so when I come home glowing, my wife will think I’m a god.” Another shrugged, saying, “Life itself is dangerous, my friend.” On December 15, 2000, before a coal-black statue of Prometheus (the Titan who stole fire from the gods and had an eagle eternally chewing his liver in punishment), Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma placed a wreath in honor of the dead and announced that the last Chernobyl reactor, Unit 3, would finally be shut down. Workers in jumpsuits protested with black armbands and unfurled banners, but forty-two hundred were laid off, leaving four hundred to maintain the site.

The government is now trying to revive the area economically by turning the Zone of Alienation into a tourist attraction—
visit the end of the world, circa 1986, for a mere $150 a day.
The ghost city Pripyat includes Soviet apartment towers listing in torpor, peregrine falcons nesting in high-rise balconies, schools sprouting stalagmites of mold, the ruins of an amusement park in faded kindergarten colors, black storks perching in the great oaks of the cemeteries, and in the harbor a graveyard of river ships—something like an atomic Detroit. While the town of Chernobyl has replaced its post office’s time and temperature display with a dosimeter monitoring radiation levels in different sectors of the Zone, VIPs can visit the control room of Reactor #4, with missing ceiling tiles, exposed wires and cables, and its walls covered in decontaminant, which has dried to the color of human blood. With sidewalks, roads, and building foundations sprouting in flora, every town in the Zone, like a clock of civilization running backward, is reverting to forest, becoming Soviet ruins like Cambodia’s Angkor Wat or Guatemala’s Tikal. But
KEEP OFF THE GRASS
has a whole new meaning here; after the massive decontamination effort of the liquidators, “it’s safe where we are,” Sergei Saversky, deputy chief of zone management, explained to a recent group of tourists. “Just don’t walk where you’re not supposed to.”

With the wilderness, comes the wild creatures. Contrary to expectations of nuclear winter and atomic desert, after the evacuation of ever-hungry people with their eternal agricultural war against predators, the Zone of Alienation’s 1,660 square miles became a wildlife sanctuary teeming with cormorants, cranes, herons, and sixty-six different species of mammals—bears, wild boar, wolves, red deer, roe deer, beavers, river otter, foxes, lynx, thousands of elk, and a surfeit of
barsuk
, the badger of central Europe. “Northern Ukraine is the cleanest part of the nation,” an Academy of Sciences official explained. “It has only radiation.” When the waterways were overrun with thousands of beaver, their woodworking dammed the canals that drained the fields, returning them to marshland, and becoming once again a home for otters, fish, moose, badgers, bear, boar, and waterbirds. Since so much of the Zone is forbidden to human trespass, two endangered species, bison and wild horses, were reintroduced here, and because no one remains to fish and eat them, catfish living in the station’s canals now grow to ten feet in length, their giant whiskers twitching in the air for the bread tossed by tourists.

It is a perfect illustration of the world without us.

The Zone’s other major business is science, with teams of radioecologists turning the region into an alfresco laboratory, studying the effects of radiation.
Yes, the plants and animals are thriving, but what is going on inside their cells, and what about their DNA? The findings are wildly mixed. University of Georgia geneticist Ron Chesser studies chubby, mouselike voles:
“Chernobyl represents a huge mystery, and scientists love mystery. . . . The mutation rate in these animals is hundreds and probably thousands of times greater than normal. . . . You wouldn’t want to keep one of those voles in your pocket for any length of time.” But except for enlarged spleens, the scientists have yet to find anything biologically wrong with their charming voles. Immediately after the disaster, an entire four-square-kilometer forest turned from pine green to deep red. When its birch and pine seedlings were grown elsewhere, they became bushes instead of trees, with giant needles and a feathery mien. A local population of dormice—the exquisite hamster and historic Roman empire delicacy—has been studied for fifteen years, and though 4–6 percent have genetic abnormalities, the population in general is healthy. Moose-bone leftovers from a wolf meal revealed fifty times the normal amount of radiation as late as 2010, yet studies comparing wolf populations in irradiated versus non-station-infected territories found no significant overall differences.

A University of South Carolina team investigating cobalt-headed barn swallows has found brains 5 percent smaller than usual, and vestigial albinism in 13 percent instead of the normal 4 percent. Yet, a colony of white mice seem to be developing a resistance to radiation that is passed on to their descendants, which could be of great benefit to humans. And from inside the still-burning Reactor #4 itself, one robot emerged covered in a black goo—radiographic fungus, growing ecstatically on the unit’s very walls.

A
FTER
his speeches as a presidential candidate repudiated the live-and-let-live détente of Nixon, Ford, and Carter in favor of hawkish Cold Warrior aggression, Ronald Reagan’s ascension to the Oval Office in 1981 alarmed the Kremlin. Then in the first days of his administration, CIA director William Casey reprised LeMay’s bear-baiting by throwing bombers over the pole into Soviet airspace until Russian radar took notice. Similarly, NATO fighter jets crossed over the empire’s Eurasian border every week, performed a variety of erratic maneuvers, and then vanished . . . until starting up all over again.

In May of 1981, after Reagan had been president for five months, KGB chief Yuri Andropov told his superiors he had information from the highest sources that the United States was preparing a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. After becoming premier, he ordered Soviet spy agencies KGB and GRU to work overtime for two years to uncover the details of this forthcoming assault. Instructed to look for alarming evidence, Soviet operatives found just that, only further terrifying an already frightened Kremlin. Tensions were so extreme that, when South Korea’s Flight 007 touched into Soviet airspace by accident on September 1, 1983, Moscow had it attacked, killing all 269 people on board.

After John Hinckley Jr. tried to assassinate him in the spring of 1981, Reagan said,
“[Cheating death] made me feel I should do whatever I could in the years God has given me to reduce the threat of nuclear war.” He would regularly discuss eliminating atomic bombs in private, but no one in his administration supported this, and the president did nothing about it in practice, either militarily or diplomatically. When he met with his political
comrade-in-arms Margaret Thatcher at Camp David on December 22, 1984, and told her about this goal, she was “horrified.” Thatcher was one of many who had come to believe that nuclear arms were what kept the Cold War cold, telling Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev three years later,
“Both our countries know from bitter experience that conventional weapons do not deter war in Europe whereas nuclear weapons have done so over forty years.”

On March 1, 1982, President Reagan watched the National Military Command Center rehearse a nuclear attack. A screen displayed a map of the United States, and as the missiles arrived, and the warheads fell, red dots bloomed, over and over, growing together into a bloody cloud—in a mere thirty minutes, America was no more. A book on the bestseller lists that year was Jonathan Schell’s
Fate of the Earth
, which foretold, “In the first moment of a 10,000 megaton attack on the United States, flashes of white light would suddenly illuminate large areas of the country as thousands of suns, each one brighter than the sun itself, blossomed over cities, suburbs, and towns. . . . The thermal pulses could subject more than 600,000 square miles, or one-sixth of the total land mass of the nation, to . . . a level of heat that chars human beings. Tens of millions of people would go up in smoke. . . . In the ten seconds or so after each bomb hit, as blast waves swept outward from thousands of ground zeros, the physical plant of the United States would be swept away like leaves in a gust of wind. . . . virtually all the inhabitants, places of work, and other man-made things there—substantially the whole human construct of the United States—would be vaporized, blasted, or otherwise pulverized out of existence. Then, as clouds of dust rose from the earth, and mushroom clouds spread overhead, often linking to form vast canopies, day would turn to night. . . . Shortly after, fires . . . would simply burn down the United States. . . . Then comes radioactive fallout, ultraviolet radiation, destruction of the ozone layer, extinction of species.”