CIA Papers Released to Nader Tell of 2 Soviet Nuclear Accidents 

DAVID BURNHAM  / New York Times 26nov77

Washington,  Nov. 25 -- The Central intelligence Agency has made public 14 documents that describe two apparently separate nuclear accidents in the Soviet Union, one of which reportedly took the live: of hundreds of people.

The documents, made public in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by an antinuclear group established by Ralph Nader, appear to confirm a report of two nuclear accidents in the Soviet Union made public a year ago by Dr. Zhores A. Medvedev, an exiled Soviet scientist.

One of the CIA documents, however, said it was possible that reports and memos of the nuclear accidents may have been prompted by a top-secret test in which the Soviet Union allegedly exploded a 20-megaton device in the air over a mock village populated with goats and sheep, to test the hazards of such an explosion.

Though most of the documents were anecdotal in form and considerable information had been deleted from them, it appeared that the two accidents occurred at a vast nuclear facility near the city of Kyshtym on the eastern slope of the Ural Mountains between 1953 and 1961. One of the reports, dated March 25, 1977, quoted an unnamed source as telling the CIA that he had been told "hundreds of people perished and the area became and will remain radioactive for many years."

Affected Region Is Described

The source said that in 1961 he had visited the "strange, uninhabited and unfarmed area" where the accident reportedly had occurred. He described the region this way: "Highway signs along the way warned drivers not to stop for the next 20 to 30 kilometers because of radiation. The land was empty, there were no villages, no towns, no people, no cultivated land, only the chimneys of destroyed houses remained." Thirty kilometers would equal about 20 miles.

A former Soviet physicist, Leo Tumerman, who emigrated to Israel in 1972, described seeing virtually the same scene of desolation on an auto trip that he took through the Kyshtym area, in an account that appeared in the Dec. 9, 1976 issue of The New York Times. In it, Dr. Tumerman said he had been informed that he had passed through the site of the "Kyshtym catastrophie," named for a town in the vicinity, and that a nuclear disaster a few years earlier had killed and injured many years of people. He said he thought the year of the explosion was in the lace 1950's.

A second report, dated May 23, 1958, painted a portrait of a less serious nuclear accident: "Various Soviet employees and visitors to the Brussels fair have stated independently but consistently that the occurrence of an accidental atomic explosion during the spring of 1958 was widely known throughout the U.S.S.R." The Brussels World's Fair took place in 1958. The 1958 report added: "Rumors are common that many people were killed. However, the general accepted version is that only several score died."

Other reports described "a terrible explosion" that appeared to have occurred in either 1960 or 1961. The explosion was so great, the report said, that it made the ground and buildings shake. A short time after this explosion, it said, all the leaves on the trees in and around the blast area be completely covered with a heavy layer of red dust."

Hospital Filled With Victims

This report said that a woman had been in a hospital "at the time of the explosion," and she said that after the blast occurred she saw many people, brought to this hospital for medical attention. The hospital was eventually filled with victims of the explosion.

Mr. Nader, in an interview, questioned the agency's motives in not making the documents public at an earlier date. "Absent any other reason for withholding information from the public," he said, "one possible motivation could have been the motivation could have been the reluctance of the CIA to highlight a nuclear accident in the USSR that could cause concern among people living rear nuclear facilities in the United States."

In November 1976 Dr. Medvedev, a dissident biochemist, writing in the British weekly New Scientist, charged that hundreds of people had been killed and thousands suffered radiation sickness in 1958 when atomic wastes buried in the Ural Mountains exploded.