Who Knows How Many Will Die?

By Janice Castro

The people of Pripyat had no way of knowing that their small Ukrainian town was dying that morning as they gazed at the ruddy glow over Chernobyl reactor No. 4 some 2 1/2 miles away. It was a bright spring Saturday, April 26, 1986. A townsman came in from sunning himself on a roof, exclaiming that he had never seen anything like it, he had turned brown in no time at all. He had what would later be known as a nuclear tan. A few hours afterward, the man was taken away in an ambulance, convulsed with uncontrollable vomiting. Soon many of his neighbors were coughing, throwing up and complaining of headaches and a metallic taste in their mouth.

During the night, in the worst nuclear power disaster ever, a catastrophic series of explosions had shattered the reactor, blowing the roof off the containment chamber. Firemen had extinguished the initial fire but could not quench the combustion of the molten core that was now spewing 50 tons of radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere. Despite the lush beauty of the springtime scene, everything for miles around was drenched with lethal radiation.

The full story of the Chernobyl disaster and its aftermath may never be known. Soviet officials have managed to keep most of the details secret. But in The Truth About Chernobyl, nuclear physicist and former Chernobyl chief engineer Grigori Medvedev gives a searing account of the accident. His book, published in the Soviet Union two years ago, will be released in English this week by Basic Books to coincide with the disaster's fifth anniversary.

Medvedev, who helped investigate the disaster, interviewed dozens of plant officials and workers, many of whom later died of radiation poisoning. One sobering conclusion: it could easily happen again (the Soviet Union has 16 other reactors of the Chernobyl design). And in the U.S.? Because America has no such reactors, and because the accident resulted from a breathtaking level of ineptitude, ignorance and criminal negligence, Americans have little reason to fear a similar occurrence.

Many key plant managers and technicians at Chernobyl knew nothing about nuclear technology. Patronage held sway over professionalism when it came to filling top jobs that carried prestige and good pay. The accident, ironically, occurred during a safety exercise, when incompetent managers exposed the core, depriving it of vital cooling water.

What Medvedev calls the "conspiracy of silence" that had cloaked the Soviet nuclear power program in secrecy and lies for 35 years added to the human and environmental cost. In a country where nuclear accidents had never been reported, the pressure to cover up the monumental disaster at Chernobyl was enormous. Plant managers misinformed government officials, insisting that the reactor was intact. Even as the radioactive cloud was spreading over thousands of square miles of Europe, Soviet bureaucrats were still denying the accident. At the same time, Moscow bosses quashed early requests by Chernobyl officials to evacuate the area, dooming many compatriots.

The scene Medvedev describes in the hours after the explosions is straight out of Dante. While fire fighters, engineers and others heroically exposed themselves to massive doses of radiation as they tried to contain the damage, Chernobyl's bosses moaned, wrung their hands and did little else. Meanwhile, all night, as the reactor core blazed, local residents calmly fished in the cooling pond just outside, watching the spectacle, oblivious to the danger.

No one had any way of estimating how much radiation exposure the Chernobyl workers suffered, since all the measuring instruments at the plant had gone off the scale. Nor did Pripyat doctors know much about treating radiation sickness. The windows at the clinic were left open as the fire roared a few miles away. The fallout was wafting in like sunlight, settling over everything. The doctors themselves were being poisoned: patients were emanating radiation.

The damage still grows. The Soviet government has compiled a registry of 576,000 potential health victims who may contract cancers and other diseases ) as a result of radiation exposure. But some top officials think at least 4 million people will be affected, most in the western U.S.S.R. but some as distant as Germany and Sweden. Radiation levels remain extremely high in parts of Belorussia, the Ukraine and the Russian republic.

Former Olympic gymnast Olga Korbut, who won three gold medals at the 1972 Munich Games, still lives in her Belorussian hometown of Minsk, 180 miles from Chernobyl. Part of the region is heavily contaminated with radiation, and she tells of how children learn about nature at special exhibits. "This is a bird," says the teacher, showing them plastic models. "This is a tree." In an area long known for its wild mushrooms, berries, flowers and the beauty of its forests, the children are no longer allowed to go into the woods.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: From a telephone poll of 1,000 American adults taken for TIME/CNN on April 10-11 by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. Sampling error is plus or minus 3%. "Not sures" omitted.

CAPTION: How likely is it that a nuclear power accident like Chernobyl will occur in this country?

With reporting by James Carney/Moscow and Jerome Cramer/Washington