BRENT CARBAJAL: My
name is Brent Carbajal.
I'm the Dean of the College of
Humanities and Social Sciences,
and we sponsor this
series of lectures.
We try to do one of them
every academic quarter.
We're very pleased to
see many people here
from the community and
some from the University
and probably some of
Professor Vajda's students
and colleagues.
So welcome, welcome
to all of you.
This is a series of lectures
that is sponsored from a fund
that we have in
the college called
the Dean's Fund for Excellence.
That fund helps us
support a number of things
that we wouldn't be able
to support otherwise,
and I just wanted to let you
know that through that funding,
through the gracious
contributions of our donors,
through the support of the
city, the use of this facility,
and TV, we're really,
really pleased to do this.
So, again, welcome.
I think we're going to have
a very interesting talk.
It's my pleasure to
introduce our speaker,
and I'm doing this very
informally because I know him
quite well.
This is Professor Ed Vajda.
He is the Director of the
Linguistics Program at Western
Washington University.
He is a Professor of Russian
in the Department of Modern
Classical Languages.
Professor Vajda took his
PhD in Slavic linguistics
from the University
of Washington.
Thankfully came here,
has been here since 1987,
has been an excellent
colleague and faculty member.
I wanted to say a few things
about just his experience
because tonight
we're going to hear
a kind of a different
side of Ed's experience.
But in terms of academics
and scholarship and teaching,
I just want to
say Ed is perhaps,
and I'm not absolutely
sure of this
but, he is perhaps the
only faculty member
at Western Washington
University who
has won both the prestigious
Elich Teaching Award
and the Olscamp research award.
Professor Vajda is world
known for his scholarship
on linguistics.
He has published, I
believe, 5 books, somewhere
in the neighborhood of 40
refereed articles, literally
hundreds of reviews,
presentations.
This is a man who is constantly
inquiring, constantly studying,
constantly writing, constantly
speaking, in a good way,
and we're just really
thrilled to have him.
So I'm not going
to say much more.
You know what the
topic of the talk.
There's the title.
I'll just thank Professor
Vajda for being willing to talk
with us this evening.
Sit back and enjoy,
and remember that we'll
have some time for
questions afterwards.
So, thank you.
EDWARD VAJDA: Thank you, Brent.
And thank you for
coming tonight.
The topic I'm going to
speak on is actually
one of the most
important events that
happened in the 20th century.
It's also still the worst
environmental catastrophe
that's befallen the earth
in a time of mankind,
and it is also unfortunately
one that is often
forgotten since it is dropped
out of the headlines almost
a quarter of a century ago.
The Chernobyl nuclear
disaster happened
on the border of what is
today independent countries
of Ukraine and Belarus.
And you can see that on the map.
It released several hundred
times the amount of radiation
that was released by the
Hiroshima atomic blast,
and it had political
repercussions
that I will argue that was
important for the beginning
of the end of the Soviet Union.
It also had repercussions
in my own life, which I'll
tell you about as we go along.
Because I am not really
a qualified historian
nor a specialist on nuclear
energy or on the environment.
Most of the things that
I'll be talking about I
am not a specialist in.
I'm a linguist who studies
languages of Eurasia.
But my story happened to
connect with Chernobyl.
As it occurred, I was
in Moscow at the time,
and I actually wound up being in
the office of CBS News helping
cover the story during
the time that it
was happening for reasons that
I'll explain as we go along.
So, from an outsider's
perspective,
I have an unusual
perspective on the events
that happened during April
1986 and early May in 1986.
What is not generally
known and what
was not discovered and
revealed until quite a bit
after the Soviet Union
collapsed was that, as
bad as Chernobyl was, it could
have been much, much worse.
There was a danger in the weeks
after the original explosion
of an even greater
explosion to follow,
which was averted by heroic,
self-sacrificing moves
by the Soviet authorities
and by hundreds of thousands
of people who prevented
this second explosion
from happening.
And I'll tell you
about that also.
The entire story starts deep
in the Cold War, and in fact I
myself am a child of the Cold
War like very many of you who
in the audience.
A world that was divided
into the east and the west
with constant fear
of possible warfare,
though neither side
at all wanted a war,
and in fact it never occurred.
Everything that
happened, however,
was twisted into the
framework of right
or wrong, good and
bad, ours and theirs,
and this is something that
I knew from early childhood.
My own family background is
partly from Eastern Europe.
That interested me in
languages of Eastern Europe.
And I became interested
particularly in Russian
because I was
interested in bridging
that gap that seemed to exist
between the East and the West,
seemed to exist between
English speakers
and speakers of Russian.
Very few Americans at that
time, in the 1970s, early 1980s,
were really fluent
in Russian, and I
wanted to become one of them.
And so, in 1980, very
beginning of 1980,
I went for an entire half
a year and spent all winter
in the city of St.
Petersburg, which was then
called Leningrad, as a student.
And I didn't speak any
English when I was there.
Basically by the
time I was done,
I was so fluent in Russian
that people mistook me
as a native speaker.
That was also right after the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
The Soviet Union had sent
hundreds of thousands of troops
into Afghanistan.
And one of the
things that struck me
in the early months of
that war was one incident
where a Soviet soldier
defected to the US embassy
in Kabul, Afghanistan.
And no one in the US
embassy could any Russian,
and no one could
communicate with that person
until someone was flown in.
And I thought, this is
not a good situation
and I wanted to be able
to speak with people who
knew both English and Russian.
So I learned Russian in
this very cold environment
in a, not baptism by
fire, but maybe by ice.
And then in the
1980s, I was a student
at the University of Washington.
I taught full time as a graduate
student TA and earned my way
through the master's
and PhD, but I also
led tours every chance I got
for travel agencies as well
as the University of
Washington to not only Moscow
and Leningrad, but to all sorts
of other areas of the Soviet
Union at that time.
And I came to learn a great
deal about the country and about
the people during these trips.
And my big trip was the year
before I finished my degree.
I was writing my dissertation.
I got a scholarship
that enabled me
to spend almost
a year in Moscow,
and this was just as the
transition was occurring
to the new Gorbachev
regime, and no one
knew exactly what to
expect from that regime.
I lived in Moscow State
University building.
That little star is that is much
larger than my room actually
was at that time.
604 zone D. It was
a very cozy room,
and I spent a lot of time
working on languages,
Russian language and also
other languages of Eurasia.
I won't go into
the details of that
because I might lose
my audience if I do.
But that is what I was
doing in 1985 and '86.
Because I was part of a
group of American students,
probably about 10 or 12
of us, and they elected me
group leader, which meant that
because of my Russian language
skills I was a liaison with the
administration of Moscow State
University, but also with
the archival administration
upon which many of the
members of my group
depended for research materials.
My research was not threatening
to the Soviet authorities.
No one cared about
conjugating verbs.
But if you were studying
dissident writers
or some other
political topics, it
was very difficult
to get information.
And I have a naturally
diplomatic personality,
and I was able to get something
for everybody in the group
by working together with
the Soviet authorities.
I also often visited
the US embassy,
which is on Chaikovsky Street,
old US embassy in Moscow,
and I was the liaison
from the embassy.
Because I was group leader,
I had the only telephone
in my room, and I often got
calls from the US embassy
with questions.
I would also go there
for lunch because it
was the best fast food
in Moscow at the time.
There was no McDonald's
or anything else.
So I got a chance
to meet and become
part of a group of journalists.
I was introduced to the son of
the then-editor of the New York
Times, Andy Rosenthal,
who worked together
with one of my former
students from the University
of Washington.
Carol Williams and I often
had lunch during busy schedule
with journalists.
And as a result of that, I
was contacted by CBS News
during 1985 and
'86 and interviewed
on a number of
occasions, a few of which
went on the national US TV
having to do with Soviet life.
The reason why news media
organizations like CBS
had to stoop to talking to
linguistics graduate students
to find out things
about the Soviet Union
was that the Soviet system, ever
since Stalin had consolidated
his power in late 1920s, was
based on secrecy and control
of information.
And many things had occurred
in the country that had not
become public knowledge
to the population
or to the world at large.
Even natural disasters
like earthquakes
were never reported in
the newspapers at all
during the Soviet period.
And there had been
up to this point
been 13 major nuclear accidents
and numerous minor accidents
in the country.
None of them made their
way into the press
or were officially admitted to.
The worst one
happened in 1957-58,
when improperly stored nuclear
waste material exploded
and spread across
the countryside.
40 square miles of
the area near Kyshtym
in Western Siberia still
uninhabitable today.
You can't even go
through the area
without endangering your life.
None of that was in my
mind towards the end
of my stay in April 1986.
I was finishing my
dissertation research.
I was also in the most
interesting and enjoyable part
of it.
I was down in the
Caucasus mountain region
in the Republic
of Georgia, which
is famous for it having produced
its most famous son, Joseph
Stalin.
I was there learning Georgian,
studying the university
Tbilisi, and I was with my
colleague Kevin Tuite, who
went on to become a world famous
specialist in Georgian language
and Caucasus studies.
He's at the University
of Montreal now.
He's my roommate.
And this was an extremely
enjoyable period of time.
I was able to learn
Georgian quite well.
It has a 33-letter alphabet,
completely different
than Russian.
And very, very different
language, culture, and heritage
entirely.
And I was finishing
up my stay in Georgia
and traveling back to Moscow
on April 26, Friday, April 26,
1986.
And I was bringing
back two prize bottles
of Georgian wine, the best
wine in the Soviet Union, which
was hard to get even in Moscow.
And I had little--
I had no knowledge whatsoever,
like almost no one else
in the world, that
about 800 miles
to the west of where
I was traveling,
the world had just
experienced its worst ever
nuclear disaster.
And the disaster, as
I mentioned earlier,
occurred on the border
of Ukraine and Belarus.
It was in a nuclear
power plant that had just
been in operation
a couple of years,
and the nuclear
power plant is always
called the Chernobyl reactor,
Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
But Chernobyl is a
town located close by.
The actual name of the power
plant and the reactor that
blew up was the Vladimir
Lenin Nuclear Power plant,
but it's never
referred to that way.
And this was a huge nuclear
complex of four units.
It was the fourth unit that
exploded in the morning, April
26, 1:23 AM.
And this actually was a
very prestigious place
to live and work if you
were a Soviet citizen.
Nuclear physicists were
a prestigious class.
Everybody who lived in
the town of Pripyat,
all 45,000 to 50,000
of the residents,
were family members or
workers of the Chernobyl
nuclear complex.
And they had special
privileges, special stores
where they had
goods that were not
readily available in other
parts of the Soviet Union.
So, this was an elite
area and an elite group
of people that were in the
vicinity of the reactor.
Now, I am no nuclear physicist,
but very superficially I
can explain that the Chernobyl
nuclear reactor number four,
it had a 1,661 uranium rods.
There were also 211
boron control rods
that could be raised
between the uranium rods
to slow down the reaction
that was producing electricity
by heating water into steam
and having the turbines turned.
So this was a huge amount
of electricity produced
by this nuclear reaction.
Now, ironically, it
was a safety test
that was being conducted
early in the wee
hours of that morning that
led to the catastrophe.
And the safety test
being conducted
had to do with
trying to find a way
to shorten the time needed--
if there was a
shortage of electricity
to run the turbines
that would get
water moving
through the reactor,
there are backup diesel pumps.
But there was about 57-second
lag time between the time one
would stop and the
other would kick in.
And that was deemed
unacceptable,
and tests were mandated
by the Soviet Union
in order to try to
shorten that gap.
And these tests and the fear
of this catastrophic shortage
of energy that would cripple
nuclear plants actually
came about during 1981,
when the Israeli Air
Force destroyed Saddam Hussein's
nuclear reactor in Iraq.
And it set off a great deal
of fear in the Soviet Union
that NATO or some other force
might also in some similar way
compromise electricity or
the nuclear power plants
like Chernobyl.
So these tests were mandated.
Tests should have been conducted
before the power plant was even
online, but like many
things in the Soviet Union,
there was a rush to get
things completed during a time
frame of a plan that
had been set forth
by the central government.
The senior party
official who oversaw
the building of the
reactor, Viktor Bryukhanov,
had received awards
because he was
able to finish the job on time.
But the only reason that
he was able to do this
is because he used
substandard materials.
The roof was supposed
to be made of materials
that wouldn't burn, and
there was no such materials
available.
So he managed to get some
materials that would do,
but they actually
turned out to catch
on fire in this catastrophe.
The other official that was in
charge of the plant, Nikolai
Fomin, who lived in
Pripyat, he was actually
a very senior party
member who was
in charge of the plant
because of his party status.
He had not had nuclear training.
He was actually an
engineer that knew more
about hydroelectric plants.
He was the one who
ordered the safety test.
Now, there was one
thing that really
was at the heart of
this catastrophe,
and that is in the nuclear
system in the Soviet Union,
things were even kept secret
from nuclear scientists
themselves and many people
in the nuclear industry.
And during the 1970s, it
had been discovered already
that there was a
design flaw that
made a certain
aspect of the running
of this kind of nuclear
power plant dangerous.
And that is that
the boron control
rods were tipped with graphite
at the very ends of them,
and the graphite was fine if
the boron rods were actually
in the reactor or water
itself, but if they
were completely removed
and had to be reinserted,
the graphite upon
reinsertion into the water--
even though you're
putting in the boron rods
to slow down the reaction
and cool off the reactor--
for a very small
moment of time produces
a huge surge of energy.
So if the boron rods are
completely out of the reactor
and the reactor is
at very low speeds
and they have to
be put back in, it
can create potential
for a steam explosion.
The people that
were at the plant,
inside the plant for the
night shift beginning
and 12:00 AM in
April 26, did not
know this about the
nuclear power plant,
even though they were
important people at the plant.
The shift foreman, Alexander
Akimov was usually in charge,
but today he had above
him Anatoly Dyatlov,
who was an important
senior nuclear engineer who
came from Siberia.
He had a distinguished record
but also some nuclear accidents
that had occurred on
his watch that were not
deemed to be his fault. He
outranked Akimov in the control
room, and it was he who was
really pushing for this test
to be conducted no
matter what, because he
was going to get a promotion
if this was able to be done.
And so Dyatlov and
Akimov began to argue
about exactly how much
kilowatts of energy
the plant should be reduced to
in order for the safety test
to begin.
The specifications
said from 700 to 1,000,
but Dyatlov wanted to
do it is as low as 200,
and he got his way.
Unfortunately, by 12:28
AM because of an accident,
the reactor output was
reduced almost to nothing,
even lower than what
Dyatlov had wanted.
And, as a result
of that, Dyatlov,
gave the order, in order
to start up the reactor
a little bit more to get
up to even the low amount
that he wanted, he had
made the fateful decision
to completely remove the boron
rods with their graphite tips
from the reactor, which
meant that there was actually
no control that was actually
in the reactor at the time.
Now, safety alarms.
Some of the alarms, some
of the safety equipment
had been disabled.
Others were not, but
when they began going off
it was because the
steam level even
with a low amount of
operation of the reactor
began to cause a serious threat.
Steam began to build
up in the reactor.
And for a while, nothing
was done about this,
but at 1:19 they decided,
because of this increased
level of steam the
sensors were showing,
that there should be
much more water put back
into the reactor.
But when the water flow was
put back into the reactor,
because the reactor was
even more overheated already
than the sensors indicated, it
produced an even greater amount
of steam, an even greater
amount of pressure.
One of the technicians in the
noble plant was walking past
the pile of the reactor and saw
that the 350-kilogram safety
caps--
this is kind of a
re-enactment of them--
that were atop the
uranium rods were actually
bouncing several
feet up into the air
because of the steam
pressure that was already
built up in the reactor.
And he ran with breakneck
speed to the control room.
There's no cell
phones at that time
to warn them that
this was going on.
It never occurred ever before.
And at 1:23 AM, that
fateful decision
was made, because of what looked
like a runaway surge of steam
in the reactor, to put
those boron control
rods in the reactors.
It's like you see the
light getting too bright,
you want to turn
the off switch off.
When you turn the
off switch off,
you expect the light to go out.
But suppose you have an off
switch that actually increases
the amount of light by
100% for a few seconds
before it turns the light off.
That's exactly what
this reactor was.
And so when the boron rods
were put back into the reactor,
the graphite tips
reacted with the water
and there was a
momentary surge of energy
into the already overheated
like a steam kettle with almost
no water in it reactor,
and it caused an explosion
that disabled the ability
of those boron safety rods
to get farther down
into the reactor.
And as a result of
that, within a second,
there was an explosion
that ripped open
the core of the reactor.
It threw the 1,000-ton cover
of the reactor hundreds of feet
into the air and off of the side
and the worst nuclear disaster
of history has just occurred.
And when this
explosion occurred,
over 100 times the amount
of radiation released
by the Hiroshima
blast was immediately
hurled into the atmosphere.
This was just the beginning
of the radiation dispersal.
And every hour after
that, something
like 30,000 radioactive units,
which is called roentgens,
were spewing out
into the atmosphere
because the graphite inside
of the reactor being exposed
to air caught fire and
burned, burned so hot
that it actually melted
the metallic parts
of the inside of the reactor.
And it produced
enormous amount of heat.
Enormous amount of
radioactive particles
are going actually thousands
of feet into the air
and contaminating the clouds
that are above the reactor.
And, to give a
perspective, it is
thought that if every year
a person has up to two
of these units
exposure, it is not
in any kind of danger
of their health.
If you get 400 of
these units, it
is considered the lethal
dose that will kill you.
But look how much is coming
every hour out of this reactor,
uncontrolled.
I should mention
that whoever took
this photograph and some
also footage that was inside
of the plant, this is
released from KGB archives
long after the collapse
of the Soviet Union,
must have received such a
massive dose of radiation
that they couldn't possibly
survived more than two weeks
after taking these pictures.
The first journalists that
were on the scene, Igor Kostin,
who's become famous as a
chronicler of Chernobyl,
not only at the
time but afterwards,
he from a helicopter took
with a telephoto lens
this photograph that you
see and several others.
But even though he was very
far away from the reactor,
the radiation was so intense
that it destroyed his camera
after about 12 photographs.
And as you can see,
it was developing
the film when he was taking it.
He got out of there and didn't
stay and didn't get closer
to the reactor.
Now, unfortunately,
during the night,
a fire brigade had been
called, and they did not know
what type of fire had occurred.
The roof of the
reactor was burning.
And they spent hours trying
to put this unusual fire out,
pouring tons of water on it
that did no good whatsoever.
Most of these people became very
ill with radiation poisoning.
Two of them died that
night, and the fatalities
followed afterwards.
The only people who
actually saw the explosion,
there were two fishermen
who were there,
and they also
watched it all night
like some kind of huge
fireworks display,
until towards the early morning
they became violently ill,
and they also in
the next few weeks
died of radiation exposure.
But the firemen didn't
have any equipment on
or any protective
gear like the ones
that you see here
later on trying
to trying to clean things up.
Now, of course news
of this explosion
came to Fomin, the director,
and also Bryukhanov,
who is the architect
of the plant,
and he asked how much radiation
was being released there.
And the radiation counters
only went up to 500.
It was actually
thousands and thousands
of this that was being released.
And he said that this
was not that dangerous,
that it could be contained.
He talked to
Gorbachev on the phone
and said that the
reactor was safe.
There'd been some small
accident, not really even
an explosion, and that
the reactor in fact
was safe enough.
Just like Russian samovar, you
could put it on Red Square.
So Gorbachev does not
receive any information
about the severity of what
has actually occurred.
And in fact these men themselves
didn't quite understand,
because this accident
completely dwarfed anything
that had ever happened before.
The 50,000 residents
of Pripyat, some rumors
started circulating
that an accident had
happened during the night.
No information
was given to them.
There was enormous
amount of radiation
that was going into
the city at this time.
The population was completely
uninformed and unprotected.
The radiation also
travels across Europe,
and it gets so high
within two days
that in Sweden nuclear
physicists think
they have had an accident
at their own reactor
and they shut it down.
And reports start coming
in to Gorbachev from abroad
that there must have been
some kind of nuclear accident,
asking what has happened.
Gorbachev received
no information
that there was a
severe accident,
and he was afraid that the
Western propaganda would
use a small incident in order
to blow it up into something
that was embarrassing.
There was a few unofficial news
media reports based on hearsay
that was incorrect,
that there had been
a severe enormous
nuclear explosion there,
2,000 to 4,000 people
had been killed by it.
That, of course, wasn't true.
But this irritated the
upper Soviet government.
In fact, however,
there was so much
radiation that was spewing
out of the reactor,
most of it going to northern
and western Europe not to Moscow
during these first
few days, that reports
continued to stream
into the Soviet Union
asking what had happened.
Gorbachev demands
more information
from the local authorities who
are not giving the information
that they have, and he actually
has to ask the KGB in the West
to monitor what Western
scientists are saying
about the levels of radiation.
He also sets up a
commission and sends people
to the site to find out
what's really happening
during this period of time.
A US satellite photo, which you
can't really see in this photo,
shows that there had been a
destroyed partial destruction
of unit four of the
Chernobyl nuclear reactor.
So within two days,
the United States
was aware that this is where
the accident had occurred.
Gorbachev at this
point admits in private
that this had been an accident,
but they're still assessing
the severity of the accident.
He himself did not know at
that time how severe it was.
Now, because there was this cat
and mouse game constantly going
on between the Soviet
Union and the west,
the Soviet Union tried to
prevent Western authorities
finding out information
that they could
use for propaganda purposes.
And so CBS News found
itself in a position
where its translator
simply pretended
to be sick and not work.
He took along a May
Day holiday, and one
of the world's premier
news organizations
in the center of Moscow
on one of the big stories
of the 20th century had
no one in their office
who could speak any Russian.
They couldn't talk
to ordinary Russians.
They couldn't even understand
the Soviet news broadcasts.
And so I got a call.
They asked me to come to work.
And so I did.
I was hearing rumors
in the dormitory.
There were some
students who came back
on a train that thought
they had been irradiated.
People had been
listening to BBC,
and no one knew anything
that was going on.
And I thought to myself,
well, in the middle
of a crisis like
this, it's probably
good to work in a
news organization.
You might find out things first.
So I agreed, and I went and
spent most of the next week
in the CBS News office,
and probably in that
week as I slept to about
two days worth of sleep
during this period of time.
And I began to help
set up interviews,
help translate with
Soviet citizens.
I tried to find
people who had been
in Ukraine or in the area
who had come back to Moscow.
One of my former Russian
teachers, Karen Black,
had been in Kiev.
I wasn't able to get
in touch with her.
But there were some French
students at Moscow State
University who had indeed just
come back from Kiev, Ukraine,
and we managed to get them
into the CBS News office,
and they were put on national
US TV talking about what
they had and had not seen.
But they hadn't seen anything.
They didn't know anything
was really wrong in Kiev.
This was my boss
during that week,
who's now a famous
journalist in Washington, DC,
for CBS News, Wyatt
Andrews, a fantastic newsman
even then when he
was a young man.
I worked very closely with
him as his personal translator
during all of this
period of time,
and I also began to monitor
the Soviet news broadcasts
and tell him what
was actually being
said by the Soviet
authorities, which was
an important part of the story.
May Day, and the evening the
Soviet news channel Vremya
normally broadcasts in this
important communist holiday,
International Workers Day, big
displays of Red Square Moscow
May Day parade, and the Palace
Square Leningrad May Day
parade.
That was always what was
on TV in that evening.
But, as I watched
Vremya that evening,
I was amazed to see that
Moscow wasn't shown.
Leningrad wasn't shown.
Instead, all of the
towns and cities
in the immediate
vicinity of Chernobyl,
all their May Day parades
were being shown on TV.
All of these hundreds
of thousands of people
were out in the open in
all of the small towns,
and everyone who was
watching this broadcast
across the Soviet Union
could see for themselves
that all of these places near
Chernobyl were perfectly fine.
There was no explosion.
There was nothing wrong.
Nothing was said on the
news about Chernobyl,
but the message to the
population was clear.
Everything is fine.
Unfortunately, it wasn't.
There was an enormous amount
of radiation coming out
of the sky.
The winds had
shifted, and, in fact,
a huge amount of radiation
fell on those May Day parades
in Kiev.
I myself was fooled into
thinking that this might not
be as big of a story as what we
were thinking because the May
Day parade in Kiev even
had Shcherbitsky, the First
Secretary of the
Ukrainian Communist Party,
there with his
grandchildren in the parade.
But in fact, all of these
people were getting radiation
on top of them, untold amounts.
They themselves did not
really understand possibly
the risks that was
happening at this time.
Since that time, however, those
news videos of the parades
have all disappeared
from Soviet archives.
They were destroyed.
And the First Secretary
of the Ukrainian Party
committed suicide later
after this happened.
Now, Gorbachev finally
sent one of the world's
top nuclear specialists,
high-ranking party member
academician Valery Legasov.
He had sent him to
Pripyat, to live
there, to monitor, and to
give direct reports to him
exactly what was happening.
And when Legasov got there,
when he began to take readings,
he was astounded
at what he found.
He just couldn't believe
the radiation levels
were 60,000 times
normal in areas
even a mile away from the plant.
And it was extremely dangerous.
The people who were
living in this town
had already received two
days worth of this level
of radiation, and if they had
stayed there a day and a half
longer, they would
have all died.
And so Legasov immediately
realized how severe
this was, even though
he didn't quite
understand what was causing
this amount of radiation
to continue to be released.
He ordered the evacuation
of the whole region.
He forced everyone to leave.
The people were given two
hours notice to get on buses.
They were told that this was
a temporary evacuation just
for prophylactic,
but they in fact
were never allowed to return.
They were not allowed to take
hardly any of their belongings.
And once there were
videos of this evacuation,
and there was so much radiation
in the air at the time,
that it was exposing the film.
And the film has what looks
like fireflies in it because
of the radiation.
These people are already
dangerously contaminated.
No study has been
done to show them
of long-term effects of
their health after they left.
But this was the right
decision to take,
and it should have been
taken a lot earlier.
The people were
entirely evacuated
from what came to be
called the exclusion zone.
Legasov and his people
stayed in this zone
even though it was
highly dangerous.
They stayed behind sealed
rooms as much as possible,
but they really had to
find out what was going on
in the Chernobyl plant.
They sent in liquidators.
In fact, the word in
Russian, likvidator,
is a word that was
invented for people
who were brought in to clean up
the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
It was not a word that even
existed in the language.
And eventually, over
500,000 of these people,
twice the size of
Napoleon's army,
we're going to go through
Chernobyl, and all of them
are going to be affected
with their long-term health
in some way by this exposure.
The reactor was still burning.
Some of the local
communist authorities
told Legasov that
maybe they should just
let it burn itself out.
And Legasov tried
to explain to them
that it was releasing
every few hours more
radiation in the atmosphere
than had been released
by all the nuclear tests since
the beginning of the Cold War.
And so they decided
that they had
to make a very severe
attempt to close off
this huge amount of
radiation that's being
exposed into the atmosphere.
Downwind from Chernobyl,
all of the forests
turned completely red.
It was destroyed by that
initial wave of blast and heat
that had come from the reactor.
And it's called the Red Forest.
It's the most polluted
area in the world today.
You can see it in
this photograph.
Legasov realized that
this had to be contained,
that this column of highly
radioactive particles
had to be stay staunched
from the reactor,
And he made a decision to
drop 6,000 tons of sand
mixed with boric acid,
which would help slow down
the spread of radiation.
And that was to stop this
rising column of radiation.
No one could get
anywhere near the plant.
They had to use hundreds
of helicopter crews flown
in from all parts
of the Soviet Union.
Crews were brought
in from Afghanistan
and flew dozens of missions.
The temperature,
even a few hundred
yards above the reactor, was
over 200 degrees Fahrenheit.
It was dangerous to be there
even for minutes of a time,
there was so much radiation.
But all of these helicopter
crews had to do this in order
to stanch the huge column.
And it began to work.
The sand melted and
fused, and a lot
of the radiation
that was spewing
high up into the
atmosphere was staunched.
One of the helicopters
actually hit into a crane
and crashed very
close to the reactor.
All of the people were
killed in that helicopter.
And probably, although
there's no statistics,
most of the people who
were in this operation
had their lives cut short
by health damage that
was caused by their exposure
to this amount of radiation.
The helicopters themselves
were so polluted
that they had to be left at
Chernobyl and never used again.
By May 2, after May
Day, the operation
was successful enough
that there was no longer
an enormous plume of radiation
coming out of the plant.
It had been
partially plugged up.
But, it was not possible to
get anywhere near the plant.
It was astronomical
readings of radiation.
And Legasov, who's a
really high-qualified
nuclear physicist, realized
that the temperatures that they
were recording in this
area must be hot enough
to melt the core of the reactor,
which was going to melt down
into the concrete underneath the
reactor and below the reactor,
and underneath there were
enormous amounts of water
from the firemen trying
to put the fire out.
And there were
also chambers that
had had water for safety
purposes in this area.
And Legasov realized that he
had to get the temperature down
of this magma before
it melted and went down
into the water level.
And so, there's a
decision to drop
lead, which absorbs and
reduces the high temperature,
onto the reactor.
And some of this lead
goes into the atmosphere,
and it's found in people who
are victims of this tragedy.
But it succeeded in reducing
the heat level significantly
and helping to seal off the
top of the reactor even more.
But, the uranium and graphite
mixture was still too hot.
It was still melting.
It was melting down
towards water chambers.
If 1,400 kilograms of this
enormous many tons of mass
were to meet the water
that was pooled just
below these concrete
layers of Chernobyl,
the Soviet scientists
including Legasov
believed that it would set off
a huge nuclear explosion that
was three to five megatons
that would have vaporized all
of the nuclear material
that was in the other three
intact plants that were next
door to reactor number four.
And it was estimated that
it would kill immediately
the population of Kiev and
Minsk, the capitals of Belarus
and Ukraine, and make a large
portion of Eastern Europe
uninhabitable for all
for many human lifetimes.
And so a huge effort began
to try to get this water out
of here, to try to get
the temperature down
in order to stave
off this catastrophe.
Thousands of trains were
ordered to Minsk, to Kiev,
to evacuate the population on
a moment's notice if necessary.
This never was necessary
because of the attempts
that were successfully
made by the Soviets
during this period of time.
By May 2, Legasov had provided
enough information to Gorbachev
that he realized how
catastrophic the situation was,
that it was worse than
anyone had thought
and potentially even
worse than that.
And he began to provide
information to the West.
Gorbachev began to
provide information.
The attitude of the entire
Soviet government changed.
There was even a
photograph of Chernobyl
with the plume airbrushed
out that was put on Soviet TV
that evening, admitting that
the accident had occurred.
Not talking about the
severity and the dangers,
and even the West wasn't warned
about the actual worst case
scenario, but the
Soviet government
was at least
forthcoming about that.
And the severity even becomes
known to the top officials.
People realize they've
been irradiated.
Iodine pills are beginning
to be distributed to people,
but for many people
it's too late.
They've absorbed in their
thyroid glands very much
radioactive iodine 131.
In fact, the people
that were in Pripyat,
there's so much radioactive
iodine in the air
that they could actually
taste metal in their mouths.
So some of these
precautions are very late.
The Soviets invite an
American specialist
from Los Angeles,
Richard Gale, to Moscow
to give bone marrow
transplants to some
of the first
victims of Chernobyl
who had been flown to
Moscow's hospital number six.
These people were
almost all going to die,
but there was an heroic
attempt to save them.
And the CBS News was running
after Richard Gale trying
to get an interview with
him when he was going
from his hotel to the hospital.
I wasn't needed for that because
everyone could speak English.
And, in fact, I wasn't
needed for much of anything
after that because the Soviet
news translator suddenly
appeared again when
everything changed on May 2,
and I basically ended my
work for CBS at that time
and I went back to being
a graduate student.
So that was my one week at CBS.
Now, for many
people in the world,
it was thought that the worst
of the Soviet nuclear accident
was being contained, that it
was not anymore a great threat.
But in fact for
weeks and weeks, it
was touch and go whether
that second explosion was
going to happen.
Eventually, over 500,000
liquidators come in.
All of them expose themselves to
dangerous levels of radiation.
There's been no studies on
the long-term effect or even
the casualties of this huge
group of people, many of whom
willingly sacrificed their
lives for this tragedy
not to get bigger.
For instance, miners
were brought in.
They excavated a huge area
underneath of the Chernobyl
nuclear reactor, to
pour enormous amount
of concrete inside
of there to make
it even harder for that
melting mass of radiation
to go deeper down.
People also went into the
water chambers, divers,
to open manually some of the
hatchways to drain this area.
And that was successful, but
they lost their lives doing it.
It was extremely important for
this concrete to be poured,
even though it's really
a temporary solution
in the long term of
things, because even
after the water had been removed
from this immediate area,
if the radiation continued
to go deeper and deeper,
there is an enormous
aquifer that
is quite a bit below Chernobyl
that is the main water
supply of Moscow and most of
the European part of the Soviet
Union.
It would have been
permanently polluted,
and also the Black
Sea would have.
I don't have statistics how
much of if at all this pollution
went into this deeper area,
but the main catastrophe
was avoided during
this period of time.
Ironically, the miners who
were deep in this shaft,
they had to work very
brief periods of time
because even under the ground
it was dangerous radioactive.
It was 130 degrees in
where they were working.
They couldn't wear
any protective gear,
but when they came
out of the mine shaft
that was when they
really had to run
because it was so dangerous
levels of radiation
that even 10 minutes
exposure on the ground
would probably kill you.
There were pieces of graphite
for many hundreds of yards
around the plant that were so
highly radioactive that if you
came in contact with them for
even more than a minute that
was a death sentence.
And all of this still
had to be cleaned up.
So, the liquidators were
fitted with lead vests.
They were fitted with
all sorts of uniforms.
And in some of the worst parts
of the Chernobyl accident,
they weren't able to work
for more than a minute a day.
They had to run in, do
a tiny job, and run out.
And what would
have taken one man
one hour took 60 men one hour.
And they're all exposed to very
dangerous levels of radiation,
even with these kinds of
equipments that they had.
The worst was on the
roof, the roof that
had enormous amount of the most
highly radioactive materials,
that had been burning.
There was an attempt to
send robotic instruments
to try to get rid of these
chunks of radioactive material
that was on the roof, but
that the radiation was
so high that the robotic
instruments malfunctioned
and couldn't work.
And they had to send people
in to do this, volunteers.
And this picture shows, actually
here, as it is being taken,
the radiation is so intense
coming up from the roof
that it is actually
developing the film
as the picture is being taken.
All of the equipment that
these 500,000 liquidators used
was so polluted that it
can never be used again.
But, within half a year, accrued
steel and concrete sarcophagus
has been built over
the entire plant.
Almost all of the
radiation at that point
seemed to have been
contained inside
of this huge sarcophagus.
It's been estimated that the
life of this sarcophagus,
it was built in 1986,
is about 30 years,
and then is dangerous for
more radiation to be leaking.
But in fact,
measurements that have
been taken near the
base of this sarcophagus
are also very, very high
radiation even today.
And inside the
nuclear sarcophagus
is still this highly
radioactive mass,
astronomical readings
of radiation that
can only be taken by machines.
And this part of it
that would have created
that huge nuclear explosion
because this was a water
chamber has been named
the Elephant's Foot.
Pripyat, the huge zone,
eventually 130,000 people
were permanently evacuated
from these areas.
It has never been
repopulated again.
It's still a dead zone.
The people who forced
the evacuation also
tried to kill all of the
animals that was in this zone,
including pets that were
left behind by the people.
And it is still an
area that is not
considered to be livable,
although people go into it
and stay, but they have
to monitor the radiation
when they do so.
And so here's the
Pripyat ghost town
that nature is taking over.
Some of the vegetation in this
area has grown enormously,
and in fact all across
Europe after this first year
of Chernobyl there
was unusual growth
of vegetation in many areas.
Everything was abandoned at
that moment as it was left,
and this area in fact has become
one of the most untouched areas
for nature, even though it has
so much radiation in pockets
of it that is actually
very, very dangerous.
You don't know where it
is highly radioactive
and where it doesn't
happen to be radioactive
because it just
happens, where did rain
fall from those radioactive
clouds above Chernobyl
in those first few days?
Sometimes it didn't
fall right close by.
It fell even outside of
what is the exclusion zone.
So there are highly radioactive
areas farther away than this,
and then there are
areas here inside
that aren't so radioactive.
There is a huge amount of debate
over exactly how much radiation
came out of the plant,
where exactly it went.
The prevailing winds took it
at first far away from Moscow.
They took it to the west.
Places like northern Scandinavia
were the worst polluted.
There are reindeer
pastures that you still
can't use in parts of
northern Sweden, Finland.
Parts of southern Bavaria,
Germany, were polluted,
and some of the
mushrooms in the forest
there still is not
healthy to eat.
The little island of Corsica
in the Mediterranean,
part of France, had
high levels of radiation
and had some of the same
cancers that later showed up
in the area around Chernobyl.
So it was really unpredictable
where this radiation went.
Stories started circulating
that the name Chernobyl, which
is Ukrainian and the
Russian name is Chornobyl,
is an ancient name
for this region that
was a thousand years old.
It means wormwood, which is
a plant, artemisia in Latin,
that grows in this
general vicinity.
People notice that in the
Revelation of the Bible
there was the prophecy
of the star named
Wormwood that destroyed
so much of the regions.
And many people made the
connection with Chernobyl.
The unofficial death
toll 25 years later,
actually the
official death toll,
is only the 59 people
who immediately died
of the radiation
exposure or were
incinerated by the beginning
of the initial blast.
And that is all that has
officially been admitted to.
There are highly-varying,
not even statistics,
estimations of how many lives
have been cut short by cancers
and other kinds of
maladies that were
caused by nuclear pollution
both in the region
and across the world.
And it's not possible
for me to give anything
but hearsay and
wildly-varying estimates.
But a lot of specialists
don't believe
that the effects
were as catastrophic
as people originally thought
as far as concerns worldwide.
However, there was one
effect that was immediately,
obviously connected
with Chernobyl,
and that is that the people
around the area and in areas
that were heavily contaminated
didn't take precautions like
taking iodine pills that pack
your thyroid gland with iodine
so the radioactive iodine 131
cannot get in to your thyroid.
They came down with
thyroid cancers.
And this was very
prevalent in the air that
was contaminated by Chernobyl.
And in places in
southern Belarus and also
northern Ukraine, the incidence
of thyroid cancer in children
is 50 times above normal.
There has also been all sorts
of deformities in species that
were exposed to this radiation.
There are many, many
pictures, I won't
show you very many of them, of
very strong deformities that
were caused by cesium
137, it's believed
that these were caused by
in the region of Chernobyl.
And there are also human
casualties, human deformities,
many types that were similar
to what was experienced
in the animal population.
And no study,
statistical study, has
been done on the human
populations and the effect
on the next generations
in this area.
The Soviet Union had to
blame somebody for this.
One of the key elements
of the catastrophe
was the secrecy that enveloped
everything in the country.
And even people in
the nuclear agencies,
even people in the nuclear
control room at Chernobyl,
did not realize the dangers
of those graphite tips.
They themselves did
not even understand
the dangers of the equipment
that they were using.
The Soviet Union did not
admit this to the West,
or to the outside.
What they did focus
on was the error
and mistakes and cover-ups
that were done leading up
to the disaster and immediately
after by key people who
happened to not die of
radiation poisoning.
Fomin actually escaped
town with his family
and did not get
radiation sickness.
He was accused of negligence.
Dyatlov, who was
in the control room
when the blast
occurred and received
five lifetimes worth
of radiation, almost
a lethal dose, was
not killed by it,
and he also was sentenced
with Fomin and Bryukhanov
off to 10 years hard labor.
Fomin went insane.
Dyatlov actually
survived long enough
to be pardoned after the
Soviet Union collapsed,
and he died of a
heart attack in 1995.
Valery Legasov,
who's in many ways
one of the heroes, who
realized the catastrophe, who
took measure sometimes with
a lot of human sacrifice,
but often with volunteers
for human sacrifice,
not necessarily
always, to contain
what could have been
a greater accident,
he was tasked with to
explain to the United Nations
and to a commission in
Vienna what had happened.
And he was only
able, only allowed,
to tell half of the story,
the story of human error
of individuals who didn't live
up to what they were supposed
to do.
But he didn't tell
the other half.
And that haunted him.
Two years after Chernobyl
he committed suicide.
But, Chernobyl had
a very big effect
on the politics of the
country because the people
in the Soviet Union who
wanted more openness, who
didn't like the secrecy, who
thought it produced stagnation,
they including Gorbachev
got the upper hand,
because the hardliners
lost their nerve.
They lost their
nerve to continue
with this type of system.
And Gorbachev's program of
Glasnost gains great momentum.
Most people don't realize that
glasnost was not something
invented by Gorbachev.
It was invented by the czars
after the defeat in the Crimean
War in the 1860s to liberalize
the politics of the country
then.
And the czars did that because
they wanted to maintain power.
For them, it
succeeded for a while.
Gorbachev did the same
thing for the same reasons.
And he became wildly popular in
the West as a result of that.
And he had sincere desires to
help and improve and change
the country and prevent
these types of things
from happening again.
But, the tug of
war that continued
to exist between hardliners
and more liberal reformers
continued to escalate and
damage the economy, as well
as Chernobyl was
an enormous burden
economically on the Soviet
Union, huge amount of money.
Gorbachev estimated that
it was about a quarter
of a trillion current
US dollars that
would have been spent as a
result of this catastrophe.
And this leads to a coup attempt
to remove Gorbachev from power
to prevent him from doing
any more liberal reforms.
The coup attempt fails, and it
is the end of the Soviet Union.
The reformers entirely take over
and even shove Gorbachev aside.
He was not reforming
fast enough.
The country dissolves into
15 independent countries.
Many people, in retrospect,
feel that the Chernobyl
nuclear disaster and the
political repercussions,
many of which were
psychological and others
of which were economical, was
one of the very big things that
pushed the country to
this cascade of events
that led to its collapse.
Now, my story ended
in a sense on May 3,
when I went back to
being a graduate student,
finishing less than a month
at Moscow State University.
During this period
of time, I decided
that I'd had enough
of radiation,
I had enough of Europe.
We still didn't really
know what was going on.
I had planned to leave
by train through Europe,
but that was very
close to zones that I
believed were
radioactive, and so I
left on the exact opposite way.
I left on the
Trans-Siberian Railroad,
and I wound up going
to Mongolia, China,
and even to Tibet, where I
got my first taste of altitude
sickness.
But, that trip actually
changed my life
because it was the first taste
that I had of inner and north
Asia.
And instead of becoming a
specialist in the Caucasus
region, that I was
thinking of doing,
I actually wound up becoming
a specialist in inner
and North Asia as I am today.
And that was the
beginning of it.
Ukraine and Belarus
are independent today.
They are still dealing with
the effects of Chernobyl.
The governments
of these countries
had nothing to do with
the government that
was in charge during the
disaster and the few years
afterwards.
There is an aging
Chernobyl sarcophagus.
A huge amount of
money and effort
and a dangerous work and
ingenious calculation
is going to be needed to
continue to maintain this
and to improve
the security here.
It has been estimated by
some that a new Chernobyl
sarcophagus that will have to be
built elsewhere and transported
on rails to this area is
going to be necessary to help
with the long-term security
of this still highly
radioactive and
dangerous remnant
of this nuclear disaster.
