The Dead Hand (42 page)

Reagan wrote in his diary, “As usual the Russians won’t put out any facts but it is evident that a radioactive cloud is spreading beyond the Soviet border.”
³⁵

Vladimir Gubarev, the science editor of
Pravda
, who had good contacts in the nuclear establishment, heard of the accident soon after it happened and called Yakovlev, Gorbachev’s close adviser and champion of new
thinking. But Yakovlev told him to “forget about it, and stop meddling,” Gubarev recalled. Yakovlev wanted no journalists to witness the scene. But Gubarev was persistent, and kept calling Yakovlev every day. Yakovlev finally authorized a group of journalists to go to Chernobyl, including Gubarev, who had a physics degree but also wrote plays and books. He arrived May 4 and returned May 9. His private report to Yakovlev depicted chaos and confusion. One hour after the explosion, the spread of radiation was clear, he said, but no emergency measures had been prepared. “No one knew what to do.” Soldiers were sent into the danger zone without individual protective gear. They didn’t have any. Nor did helicopter pilots. “In a case like this, common sense is required, not false bravery,” he said. “The whole system of civil defense turned out to be entirely paralyzed. Even functioning dosimeters were not available.” Gubarev said, “the sluggishness of local authorities is striking. There were no clothes, shoes, or underwear for victims. They were waiting for instructions from Moscow.” In Kiev, the lack of information caused panic. People heard reports from abroad but didn’t get a single word of reassurance from the leaders of the republic. The silence created more panic in the following days when it became known that children and families of party bosses were fleeing. “A thousand people stood in line in the ticket office of the Ukraine Communist Party Central Committee,” Gubarev said. “Naturally, this was perfectly well known in the city.” When Gubarev returned to Moscow, he gave Yakovlev his written report. It was passed to Gorbachev.
³⁶

Gorbachev finally spoke about the disaster on May 14, two and a half weeks after it happened, in a nationally televised address. He looked “like a man bereaved,” recalled Angus Roxburgh, the BBC correspondent. “His face showed that he knew he had lost credibility.” His speech dodged the reasons for the catastrophe, and advanced the line that people had been alerted “as soon as we received reliable initial information.” Gorbachev seemed to lose his cool entirely at some of the wild accusations that spread in the West while the Kremlin had bottled up information, such as early reports of mass casualties in the thousands. He also took umbrage at criticism of his sincerity as a reformer. The United States and Germany “launched an unrestrained anti-Soviet campaign,” he complained.

In the weeks after Chernobyl, Gorbachev began to shake off his early
inertia. At the Politburo meeting July 3, his fury boiled over at the nuclear establishment.

In Gorbachev’s anger after the disaster, he did not turn the spotlight of blame on the Soviet party or the system itself. Rather, he responded by blaming individuals and finding scapegoats, including the plant operators, who were later put on trial. Gorbachev wanted to shake off the lethargy of the system, not challenge its legitimacy. Yet the inescapable truth was that Chernobyl offered a glimpse of how the Soviet Union was rotting from within. The failures, lassitude and misguided designs that led to the disaster were characteristic of much else. “The great glowing crater at Block 4 had revealed deep cracks in the state,” Volkogonov said. “After the Afghan fiasco, which Gorbachev condemned but which dragged on for another four years, Chernobyl was the next bell tolling for the system.”

Gorbachev’s emphasis on
glasnost
, or openness, grew significantly when he finally came to grips with what happened at Chernobyl. The word
glasnost
eventually became a signature of his reforms, along with
perestroika
, which referred to the idea of rebuilding society, politics and the economy. At the July 3 Politburo meeting, he declared, “Under no conditions will we hide the truth from the public, either in explaining the causes of the accident nor in dealing with practical issues.” He added, “We cannot be dodging the answers. Keeping things secret would hurt ourselves. Being open is a huge gain for us.” Shevardnadze’s assistant Sergei Tarasenko said Gorbachev and Shevardnadze were shamed by the way the radioactive cloud floating over Europe had revealed what they failed to announce. “For the first time, they understood that you cannot cover up anything,” Tarasenko said. “You can say, ‘Nothing happened there,’ but with radiation you cannot hide it. It will go in the air, and anyone will know it is there.”
³⁸
Shevardnadze wrote in his memoirs that Chernobyl “tore the blindfold from our eyes and persuaded us that politics and morals could not diverge.”
³⁹

Akhromeyev, the chief of the General Staff, recalled that Chernobyl changed the entire country’s view of nuclear danger. “After Chernobyl, the nuclear threat stopped being an abstract notion for our people. It became tangible and concrete. The people began to see all the problems linked with nuclear weapons much differently.”
⁴⁰
This was especially true for Gorbachev. In his televised address, he said Chernobyl showed “what an abyss will open if nuclear war befalls mankind. For inherent in the nuclear arsenals stockpiled are thousands upon thousands of disasters far more horrible than the Chernobyl one.” Gorbachev’s words struck some as hollow at the time he spoke, a propaganda diversion from the real crisis of what had just occurred and his bungled response. But once again, as with the January 15 proposal to eliminate nuclear weapons, propaganda reflected what Gorbachev believed. He may well have asked himself, if there were no working dosimeters at Chernobyl, if soldiers lacked proper uniforms, if operators were relying on crossed-out instructions, what would happen to a city hit by a nuclear weapon? The smoldering Chernobyl site held portents more grave.

“In one moment,” he told the Politburo on May 5, “we felt what a nuclear war is.” In a secret speech at the Foreign Ministry on May 28, which was only published years later, Gorbachev implored the diplomats to make all possible effort “to stop the nuclear arms race.”
⁴¹

Thirty-one people were killed as direct casualties of the Chernobyl accident. Twenty-eight died in 1986 due to acute radiation syndrome,
two more from injuries unrelated to radiation and one suffered a heart attack. While it is much more difficult to determine long-term cancer mortality from the contamination, one estimate is that up to four thousand additional cancers may have resulted among the six hundred thousand people exposed to higher levels of radiation, such as liquidators, evacuees and residents of the most contaminated areas.
⁴²

Reagan never lost his antipathy to Soviet communism, but now, in early summer of 1986, he wanted to do business with Gorbachev. Reagan mentioned in a letter to Gorbachev that “we have lost a full six months in dealing with the issues which most merit our personal attention.” Suzanne Massie, the author and cultural expert, came to give Reagan her impressions from a recent visit, and reported “the Soviet Union was on the road to collapse,” recalled Shultz, who attended with the president. “There were shortages of everything, and people now realized they had to turn to free enterprise. Chernobyl was of great symbolic importance, she felt: it showed that Soviet science and technology were flawed, that the leadership was lying and out of touch, that the party could not conceal its failures any longer. Chernobyl means ‘wormwood,’ a reference to bitterness and sorrow from the Book of Revelation. There are many biblical allusions in Russia now.”
⁴³
While the shortages had been a feature of Soviet life for years, Massie’s description dramatized the situation for Reagan and clearly left a deep impression on him. “She is the greatest student I know of the Russian people,” he wrote that evening.
⁴⁴

On May 14, the same day as Gorbachev’s televised speech about Chernobyl, Shultz had a long talk with Reagan. He planted a small seed that would grow large in the months ahead. “The Soviets,” he said, “contrary to the Defense Department and the CIA line, are not an omnipotent, omnipresent power gaining ground and threatening to wipe us out.

Shultz urged Reagan to begin to think about what he would give up at the bargaining table. “This is the moment when our bargaining position is at its strongest.” Shultz wanted to signal to the Soviets that Reagan would trade limits on his Strategic Defense Initiative for deeper cuts in offensive weapons, like ballistic missiles, but Shultz was opposed at every turn by Weinberger, the defense secretary, who urged Reagan not to even hint at compromise of his dream.

On June 12, Weinberger surprised everyone. At a small, secret meeting in the White House Situation Room, Weinberger made a radical proposal. He suggested that Reagan should ask Gorbachev to eliminate
all ballistic missiles
. These were the guns of the nuclear age, the fast-flying, no-return, nuclear-tipped weapons that Reagan worried about after he visited Cheyenne Mountain in 1979. It was a radical idea that would go right to the heart of Soviet military strength—the Soviets were most powerful in land-based missiles like the SS-18, while the United States forces were stronger at sea. “Everyone was astonished,” Shultz recalled of the Weinberger proposal. Reagan just smiled. He reflected in his diary that night that the proposal would show whether the Soviets are “for real or just trying for propaganda.”

Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a nuclear weapon had never been used in combat, but hundreds of explosive tests shook the Earth. Kennedy and Khrushchev halted all tests in the atmosphere, in outer space and in the oceans with the 1963 limited test ban treaty, but underground explosions were frequent. The 1974 threshold test ban treaty limited underground tests to less than 150 kilotons, although it was never ratified. Testing was a subject of constant suspicion; the United States carried out its own secret tests and accused the Soviets of violating the treaties.

When Gorbachev announced a unilateral Soviet moratorium on testing in 1985, marking forty years since Hiroshima, he challenged the
United States to follow suit. Gorbachev hoped the moratorium would crimp research for Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Tests would be needed to develop an effective nuclear-pumped X-ray laser. “If there is no testing, there will be no SDI,” Chernyaev wrote.
⁴⁶
Reagan refused to go along with Gorbachev’s moratorium, saying a test ban could not be effectively verified. Thus, the dispute over “verification,” whether or not a test ban was being observed, became both a scientific and political issue. Reagan had a second reason for refusing to go along with Gorbachev: American designers wanted to test a new generation of warheads that would be able to survive the radiation effects of a nuclear blast.
⁴⁷
Gorbachev’s moratorium was brushed off as propaganda. From 1949 until the start of the moratorium, the Soviet Union had carried out 628 nuclear explosions, 421 of them at the remote Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan in Central Asia. The United States had carried out its 978th test, code-named Jefferson, just days before Chernobyl.
⁴⁸

By the spring of 1986, Gorbachev was under pressure from the Soviet nuclear weapons establishment to resume testing. His peace overture, the unilateral moratorium, had borne no results. “It is hard to tell when the new thinking will arrive,” he lamented in a meeting with advisers. “But it will come, and maybe unexpectedly fast.”

In those exhausting days, Velikhov, the open-minded physicist, once again showed the way. His contacts in the West proved critical. Velikhov knew of Americans outside the U.S. government who were skeptical of Reagan’s policies and who were independent thinkers. One of them was Frank von Hippel, a physicist and professor of public and international affairs at Princeton University, who was chairman of the Federation of American Scientists. The group was founded in 1945 by atomic scientists concerned about control of the technology they had helped create, and von Hippel practiced what he called “public interest science,” attempting to influence government policy. In the early 1980s, he was caught up in the nuclear freeze movement and sought to provide an analytical basis for some of its initiatives. He had met Velikhov several times at conferences, and they enjoyed brainstorming together.
⁴⁹
Riding together in the back of a bus at a conference in Copenhagen, Velikhov suggested to von Hippel: perhaps independent, nongovernment scientists from the United States could help demonstrate the feasibility of seismic verification, which had deadlocked the superpowers?
⁵⁰