To the Nuclear Lighthouse 

Excerpt From Earth Odyssey Mark Hertsgaard / Broadway Books 1998

Nuclear weapons are irrational devices. They were rationalized and accepted as a desperate measure in the face of circumstances that were unimaginable. Now as the world evolves rapidly, I think that the vast majority of people on the face of the earth will endorse the proposition that such weapons have no place among us.

-GEN. GEORGE LEE BUTLER,
former commander, Strategic Air Command

"I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds." The line of Hindu scripture that flashed through Oppenheimer's mind at the moment "gadget," the first test bomb exploded above the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945. Bhagavad-Gita Chapter 11 The Vision of the Universal Form Lord Krishna is beseeched by Arjuna to reveal His universal form showing all of existence.  Lord Krishna said: I am terrible time the destroyer of al beings in all worlds, engaged to destroy all beings in this world; of those heroic soldiers presently situated in the opposing army, even without you none will be spared. Bhagavad-Gita 11:32

As an example of the environmental contradictions of twentieth century industrial "progress," the city of Leningrad is hard to beat. For decades, Leningrad has ranked as one of the world's great cultural centers, boasting some of the finest art, theater, dance, and architecture to be found anywhere. But when I reached Leningrad in July 1991, I quickly learned that its water was absolutely unsafe to drink, thanks to a witch's brew of human and industrial waste that poured constantly into the Neva River. Much of the industrial waste was military-related; more than 70 percent of the factories in the Leningrad area belonged to the Soviet military, according to Alexei Yablokov, deputy chair of the Supreme Soviet's environmental committee and one of the nation's leading environmentalists. "The military is like a law unto itself," Yablokov told me. "It can pollute rivers and hold underground nuclear tests and nobody is held responsible because the rest of the government cannot discipline the military."

I arrived in Leningrad six weeks before the military-led coup against General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev that spelled the end of the Soviet Union. Days before my arrival, the citizens had voted to restore their city's original name of St. Petersburg, but the margin was close: 56 percent in favor, 44 percent against. Many senior citizens had clung to the old name in honor of loved ones who died defending Leningrad against Hitler's army during the ghastly nine-hundred-day siege of World War 11, when an estimated two million Russians perished after being reduced to eating glue and sawdust. Advocates of the name change, on the other hand, saw the new- name as a blow against the still ruling Communist Party and a reassertion of the glories of Peter the Great, the czar who had made his namesake city Russia's window onto Europe in the early 1700s.

The physical appearance of the city seemed as divided as the opinions of its citizens. Leningrad resembled nothing so much as a classic Rolls Royce that had deteriorated into a rusty, dented, filthy shadow of its former self. The grandeur of Peter's Winter Palace along the Neva River, the magnificent holdings of its Hermitage Museum, the stately stone buildings and canals that recalled Paris and Amsterdam all harkened back to the prosperous St. Petersburg of old. I was lucky enough to arrive in high summer, the season of white nights, when even at midnight there was enough light to read a newspaper outdoors. One night at about 11:30 I strolled down the main street, Nevsky Prospekt. The light was soft and luminescent, bright enough to appreciate the lines and proportions of the palatial buildings on both sides of the street yet dark enough to obscure the gaping holes, crumbling facades, and lack of paint that marred their elegance. For one enchanted evening, I felt I had been transported back to prerevolutionary St. Petersburg.

Yet the shabbiness and hard times of present-day life were inescapable. I was met at the train station by Vlad, a Russian photographer I had known in San Francisco who would be serving as my interpreter here. His friend Alex had access to a rundown, old jalopy (the windows no longer rolled down, the seats had lost their springs), and as we drove across town the city itself seemed in no better shape than the car. Buildings were caked with so many years of dust it was hard to tell what their original colors might have been. The streets were pocked with huge potholes and lined on either side by weeds and waist-high grass. Vlad took me to his parents' place, where I would be taking over his old room for a few nights.

His parents were factory workers who lived in a nine-story apartment building in the north of the city. The downstairs entrance was a plywood door that opened into an unlit vestibule that smelled powerfully of mildew and urine. The elevator was suffused with the same odor, but Vlad apparently no longer noticed it. During the very slow ascent of the elevator, it suddenly stopped with such a crash I was sure it had broken and left us stranded. But again, Vlad, Alex, and their friend Leonid were nonchalant. Vlad simply heaved open the elevator and we stepped into another dark, dank hallway, down which lay the door to the apartment.

Inside was cozier, thanks to a couple lovely old pieces of furniture and the great warmth of Vlad's folks, especially his father, who informed me with impassioned hand gestures that under no circumstances was I to drink water from the tap. This I knew already -- water pollution was the main environmental story I planned to investigate in Leningrad. Nevertheless, when he filled a glass from the tap, it was sobering to see the water's greasy texture and smell its metallic scent. Vlad's father emphasized that I should drink only from the green pitcher in the icebox, which contained water that had been boiled for ten minutes. He added that the building had been completely without water from five until nine o'clock that evening and, worse, that there would be no hot water at all until September 1, two months away. Also, the phone was out again. "Welcome to Soviet Union," Vlad said to-me with a smirk. "Is interesting country."

On our way downtown the next morning, Leonid and I stopped into a neighborhood food store. Dust coated the front door and windows so thickly one could not see through them. Inside, most shelves were empty; the only product available in any quantity was bread. In one corner were half a dozen five-kilogram bags of potatoes, one of which Leonid purchased. That afternoon, while walking the city, we passed through a private vegetable market with ample, fine-looking produce, but prices were five times the normal rate and Leonid was too proud to let me buy him anything. A few blocks later, we found ourselves on a street where peddlers stretched on for an entire block. Mostly desperate pensioners, they had on offer a pathetic range of items: pencils, an old hallway mirror, some empty bottles, a pair of very worn lady's shoes. Capitalism had only begun to arrive in Russia, and already the bottom was falling out for the lower classes.

I spent a week in Leningrad interviewing environmentalists, city council members, engineers, scientists, high party officials, and average citizens about the state of Leningrad's water and its larger ecological situation. Everyone knew that the city's water was unsafe; the media had widely reported it. But except for the boss of the local Pepsi Cola bottling plant, who told me he regularly took colas home for his family, most people drank the water anyway. "What else can I do?" asked Dimitri, a twenty-year-old student of English with curly dark hair and a bright, ambitious intelligence. "It's the only water we have. I try to boil it first, but that's not always possible." And even boiling the water eliminated only bacteria, not industrial toxins.

Leningrad drew its water from the Neva River, which was fed by Lake Ladoga, approximately fifty miles to the north. Ladoga was the largest lake in Europe. In olden days its purity was so renowned that sea captains would insist on stowing Ladoga water aboard before long journeys. Now, however, the lake was ringed with scores of paper mills and other factories that discharged vast amounts of heavy metals, acids, and chlorine. The Neva was further polluted while passing through Leningrad by the city's approximately two thousand factories, only 10 percent of which treated their waste before discharge. Human waste from the hundreds of thousands of households in Leningrad also poured into the Neva, generally without benefit of prior treatment. Drinking water was treated before being distributed to homes and offices, but with limited effect. The Neva still contained concentrations of olgino (a stomach bacteria) that were ten thousand times higher than the legal limit, according to a study by the city council.

Compounding all these problems, a massive dam was being built across the Gulf of Finland twelve kilometers from downtown Leningrad, supposedly to protect the city from floods but also to provide a ring road for auto traffic. A colossal boondoggle of centralized planning that originated during the Brezhnev era, the dam would interfere with the Neva's traditional self-cleaning method of exchanging water with the gulf. Environmentalists pointed out that the dam would act like a cork in a bottle, stopping up the Neva with its pollutants and rendering the gulf a fetid swamp.

Despite its poisonous water and highly contaminated air, Leningrad did not rank among the ten most polluted cities in the Soviet Union. Competition for that honor was stiff in a country where two-thirds of the drinking water did not meet health standards, air pollution in over one hundred cities exceeded legal limits by a factor of ten, a chemically saturated river somewhere in the country burst into flames once a month, and 20 percent of the population (about forty million people) lived in areas that scientists had labeled zones of ecological "conflict," "crisis," or "catastrophe."

After a week in Leningrad I took the train to Moscow, where I stayed with a friend of Vlad's named Kiril. A twenty-five-year-old former prison inmate who thought nothing of beating up his downstairs neighbor to get him off their shared telephone line, Kiril happened to be the grandson of the man who served as Josef Stalin's ambassador to the United States immediately after World War II. One day, when I tried to present Kiril with the U.S. $20 he said he needed to pay for a license to marry his live-in girlfriend, his pride was so wounded that he angrily turned on me: "Take back the money, Mark, or you will become my enemy!" Still, he generally liked me, and he even agreed to let me use the English typewriter he had inherited from his grandfather, an ancient Royal manual whose y and z keys were transposed but otherwise functioned well enough. Typing up my notes one morning while Kiril and a buddy were out muscling in on a land deal, I wondered about the messages that had been typed on this machine decades before by the ambassador, an official who must have been privy to some of the most sensitive aspects of U.S.-Soviet relations at the dawn of the Cold War. If only typewriters could talk!

Part of the reason Kiril treated me decently, I realized, was that I represented a possible entree to the United States, a country he yearned to visit. He was ashamed of the Soviet Union, a place he ridiculed as backyards, ugly, and poor. Alas, this was not an entirely unfair characterization. This was my first visit to the USSR, and I was frankly astonished. Combine the appalling environmental degradation with a stagnant economy, poor living standards, and the shoddy technology everywhere on display, and it was difficult to regard the Soviet Union as much of a superpower. Throughout my five weeks of travel there, I often found myself thinking, "This is the place we were supposed to be so afraid of during the Cold War?"

Yet Americans had legitimate reason to fear the Soviet Union during the Cold War, for Soviet leaders, like American leaders, had their hands on the most deadly technology of the twentieth century. If the automobile was the most economically important technology of the century, nuclear fission was the most important technology, period, because it raised the question of whether there would be any human life beyond this century. Unlocking the atom's secrets was arguably the single most fateful step Homo sapiens sapiens had taken in their two-million-year pursuit of technological mastery over the natural world. By discovering how to produce nuclear reactions, humans were exploiting the very forces that generated sunshine and made life on earth possible in the first place. These were powers that earlier humans had ascribed to gods, a point not lost on the atomic bomb's chief designer, physicist Robert Oppenheimer. At the moment the first test bomb (or "gadget," as its creators called it) exploded above the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945, a line of Hindu scripture flashed through Oppenheimer's mind: "I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds."

Within a month, Oppenheimer's creation had incinerated two Japanese cities and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. But Hiroshima and Nagasaki were by no means the only cities devastated by the technology that, in Einstein's famous phrase, changed everything except our way of thinking. As I was soon to see, on the western edge of Siberia was another city that carried the scars of its nuclear pasta city called Chelyabinsk. .

The express train from Moscow took thirty-six hours to plod across the featureless Russian plain to Chelyabinsk, a dusty industrial city with a million inhabitants. I awoke a few hours before arrival, when the train finally began lumbering up the shallow inclines of the southern Ural Mountains. Green, stony hillsides dotted with graceful white birch trees broke the visual monotony for the first time since Moscow, but the relief was temporary. Chelyabinsk lay just over the rise, at the edge of the vast steppes that stretched on to the Pacific.

Fifty miles north of the city was an industrial complex whose Cold War code name was Mayak. Translated, Mayak means "lighthouse" an ironic name, considering the place had not existed on Soviet maps for more than forty years. (Chelyabinsk itself was still officially closed to outsiders when I got there in July 1991. Covering almost eighty square miles, the Mayak complex had recently been called "the most polluted spot on earth" by a team of visiting foreign scientists, a judgment Mayak officials did not dispute. Built by forced labor shortly after World War 11, Mayak had been the Soviet Union's primary nuclear weapons production facility from 1946 until November 1990, when the last of its five plutonium reactors was shut down. Mayak was, in short, the heart of the Soviet nuclear production apparatus.

As such, Mayak was the site of perhaps the biggest nuclear catastrophe in history after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. There had been three nuclear disasters at Mayak whose damages were comparable to, and probably worse than, the reactor meltdown in 1986 that made Chernobyl a household name around the world. The difference with the Mayak disasters was that they never became media events. On the contrary, they were kept secret-not only from the outside world but from the Russian people, including hundreds of thousands of local residents who were exposed to massive amounts of radiation. In a striking case of Cold War duplicity and doublethink, the news from Mayak was suppressed by both the KGB and the CIA, each of which apparently feared an informed populace as much as it feared the enemy arsenal. (The CIA learned about the accidents in the course of normal intelligence gathering but declined to publicize them. Thus, when I reached Chelyabinsk in 1991, the three Mayak nuclear disasters still remained largely unknown to all but a handful of international nuclear policy experts.

Astonishingly enough, the first Mayak disaster was not an accident at all but the result of deliberate policy. From 1949, when the Mayak complex produced the Soviet Union's first nuclear weapon, until 1956, Mayak officials poured their nuclear waste directly into the nearby Techa River. Tens of thousands of people living downstream received average doses of radiation four times greater than those subsequently received at Chernobyl. For the twenty-eight thousand people most acutely exposed, average individual doses were fifty-seven times greater than at Chernobyl. Nevertheless, only seventy-five hundred people were ever evacuated from their homes, and people were not forbidden to use the river water until 1953, four years after the contamination began.

The second, and most terrible, Mayak disaster took place on September 29, 1957, when a nuclear waste dump exploded, spewing seventy to eighty metric tons of waste into the sky. The waste facility had been constructed in 1953 as an alternative to more river dumping. When its cooling system malfunctioned, the waste began to dry out and heat up, eventually reaching the unearthly temperature of 350 degrees Celsius. The resulting explosion was equivalent to seventy to one hundred tons of TNT-enough to blast a thick concrete lid off the tanks and hurl it twenty-five meters away. The total amount of ejected radioactivity measured twenty million curies -- ten times more than had already been dumped in the Techa River. Ninety percent of the radioactivity fell immediately back to earth, but the remaining two million curies formed a plume half a mile high that spread across the Chelyabinsk region, severely contaminating air, water, and soil. All the pine trees in a twenty-square-kilometer area died over the next eighteen months. Approximately 272,000 people were exposed to average doses of 0.7 rems of radiation, the same amount that 750,000 Chernobyl victims would experience in 1986.

The third Mayak disaster occurred in 1967, and again nuclear waste was the culprit. In 1951, after Mayak officials realized they could no longer dump waste in the Techa River but before they built the storage facility that would explode in 1957, they began pouring waste into Lake Karachay, a natural lake within the Mayak complex; since Karachay had no outlets, this measure, it was assumed, would keep the waste from contaminating the regional water system. However, in 1967, a cyclone swept across the drought-exposed shores of Lake Karachay and whirled its deadly silt high into the air and across the surrounding landscape. Five million curies of radioactivity ,were dispersed over fifteen thousand square miles; nearly half a million people were affected.

My guide in Chelyabinsk was Natalia Miranova, a tenacious, red-haired woman in her forties who had fought to win medical treatment and protection from further danger for her neighbors; her efforts had recently won her election as the people's deputy to the regional Supreme Soviet. I had met Natalia at an academic conference in the United States a few months before; now, she had kindly come to meet Vlad and me at the Chelyabinsk train station. Joining her was Valodya Ishkvatov, whose crinkly eyes and flat, honey-colored face reminded me that I was now on the Asian side of the Soviet Union. Valodya served as our driver over the coming days, and like many other locals, he had been personally affected by the Mayak disasters.

When the Mayak waste dump exploded in 1957, Valodya was a boy of eight, living along the Techa River with his parents and three brothers and sisters. His father worked at a large orchard next to the river where pears and apples were grown. Valodya's family was not evacuated until a year after the explosion, and even after evacuation his father kept working in the orchard; every day, he walked the five miles from the nearby village where the family had been forced to take shelter in a farmer's barn. The orchard was kept in production, and its fruit sold throughout the Soviet Union, until 1964, when the government ordered the trees to be burned.

Valodya, who now looked perhaps fifteen years older than his actual age of forty-one, said that all six members of his family were among the sixty-six thousand victims of the Mayak disasters upon whom the government had kept health records. But he had no confidence in those records. Many times that number of people had actually been irradiated, he pointed out, and he added that his own family's case illustrated how the official records substantially underestimated the number of victims.

"Neither I nor my older brother and sister were willing to undergo the spinal operation that is used to test for radiation sickness," he told me through Vlad. "When it's done improperly, you never walk again, and none of us trusted the local doctors enough. So in our records each of us is listed as not having radiation sickness, even though each of us has had all kinds of symptoms. I myself had to have a growth [the size of a golf ball removed from my neck a couple of years ago." His mother and baby brother suffered still worse fortune. The brother was cursed at birth with an overlarge head and shrunken chest, and since then he had been plagued ceaselessly, by severe migraines and arthritis. The mother died at sixty after suffering for years from a variety of ailments associated with radiation sickness, including a weakened heart, high blood pressure, and fatigue.

The complete death toll of the Mayak nuclear disasters will never be known, and bookkeeping errors are but the most banal reason why. More far-reaching and despicable was the outright deceit practiced by Soviet authorities. Until 1989, Chelyabinsk health officials were prohibited from even acknowledging the existence of radiation sickness, much less admitting that it had been killing local people for forty years. Instead, they had to diagnose patients as suffering from ABC disease, a code name handed down from the Ministry of Health in Moscow that carried the grotesque translation "weakened vegetative syndrome."

"It was unpleasant, but I had to conform," said Dr. Mira Kossenko when I asked how she felt about lying to her patients for so many years. A slim, serious woman who now headed the clinical department at the Institute of Biophysics in Chelyabinsk, Kossenko added, "When they asked me what was wrong with them, I simply told them there was something wrong with their blood. It was a complex moral situation. We did our best to treat the people who came to us. But talking about radiation sickness was considered to be revealing a state secret, and I would have served seven years in prison."

Instead, other innocents were conscripted. On my first day- in Chelyabinsk, Natalia took me to the local children's hospital. Nearly all of the approximately thirty children on the leukemia ward were bald, thanks to the radiation therapy that, in a perverse twist, was now being applied in a last-gasp attempt to save their stricken bodies. The kids ranged in age from fifteen down to one. At night, their mothers slept beside them on cots. When a dozen of the mothers gathered in the playroom late in the afternoon to speak with me, the mother of one sad-faced, heavyset girl could not stop sobbing. Her daughter, who looked about ten, reached over and stroked her mother's arm to comfort her. This unleashed a deep, aching wail from the mother that drove her from the room. The mother's peers looked on with sympathy, dread, and a couple forced, painful smiles. They knew what the children did not: the doctors expected 75 percent of these children to be dead within five years, and some of them much sooner than that.

Not all these children's cancers were necessarily the result of atomic contamination, of course. But the doctors had concluded that some, and perhaps many, were. A study that Mikhail Gorbachev had ordered of the ecological situation in Chelyabinsk (which I will refer to as the Gorbachev report) concluded the same. Nevertheless, for three years in a row Moscow had told the doctors that there were no funds to buy even such basic medical equipment as blood cell separators, which would cut the leukemia ward's death rate significantly.

"The problem is that all the assistance goes to Chernobyl," Dr. Leva Zhukovsky told me. "Our mothers understand better than anyone the pain of the mothers in Chernobyl whose children have leukemia. We only want the public to know that our children are dying, too."

Soviet authorities tried to cover up the Chernobyl accident as well. Just as in Chelyabinsk, doctors were ordered not to diagnose Chernobyl patients as suffering from radiation exposure; the total amount of radiation Chernobyl unleashed was also considered classified. The deception began during the very first moments of the accident, when engineers who reported that reactor number four had suffered a catastrophic meltdown were ignored by the Chernobyl plant's director, who went on to assure Moscow that the situation was under control. (The engineers who investigated the blue-hot remains of the reactor were rewarded for their honesty with lethal doses of radiation that killed them within ten weeks.) The blast had released fifty tons of radioactivity into the sky. Although the fallout drifted across western Europe and eventually was detected as far away as Point Reves, California, the bulk of it contaminated fifty thousand square miles of prime farmland in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. Five million people were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation, but only 135,000 were evacuated from a so-called exclusion zone that extended in a thirty-kilometer radius from the plant. Food grown in the irradiated areas continued to be consumed as well.

In Moscow, some top officials apparently wanted to stonewall the outside world, but that was impossible. Radiation monitors in Sweden and elsewhere had registered alarming readings after the blast, and foreign governments were demanding answers. Gorbachev, who had announced his policy of glasnost only three months earlier, now had to live up to it; sixteen days after the accident, he went on television to admit that "a misfortune has... befallen us" at Chernobyl. But even Gorbachev's remarks grossly understated the crisis; he was relying on reports from officials at the site and throughout the Soviet system who were continuing to censor information. Andre Pralnikov, a journalist I met in Moscow who had infiltrated the Chernobyl site days after the accident, told me that cleanup specialists told him that there were "at least three Hiroshimas" worth of radioactivity inside the ruined plant. That estimate turned out to be much too low; Chernobyl actually released about two hundred times as much radiation as Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Pralnikov did not include such information in the reports he smuggled out of Chernobyl, however, "because it would have been no use. My editor [at Izvestia] would have taken it out, because he would have known that, if he didn't, the official censor above him would have."

Although they could not entirely suppress the truth about Chernobyl, Soviet authorities did succeed in sowing long-lasting confusion about the accident's true scope and consequences. They had help, especially from the pronuclear International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of the United Nations. The IAEA's report on Chernobyl, published in 1991, declared that the accident had not caused any physical health problems for the local population, only psychological ones. Critics pointed out that the IAEA had reached this astonishing conclusion on the basis of information provided almost entirely by the Soviet government; among its most egregious errors, the agency had simply ignored the two groups of people exposed to the largest doses of radiation-the tens of thousands of people who had lived within the plant's thirty-kilometer "exclusion zone" and the eight hundred thousand so-called liquidators who cleaned up after the accident.

Nevertheless, the same argument -- the danger of radiation is all in people's heads -- resurfaced five years later on the front page of the New York Times in a story by reporter Michael Specter titled "10 Years Later, Through Fear, Chernobyl Still Kills in Belarus." One had to wonder whether Specter and his editors read their own newspaper. After all, the Times had recently published two stories reporting that the World Health Organization, after a more independent and rigorous investigation than the IAEA's, had reached very different conclusions about Chernobyl's effects. The WHO found that thyroid cancers among children in Belarus had become 285 times more common in the years after the accident. Illnesses of all kinds had increased 30 percent, and 375,000 people remained displaced or homeless. Nor was it clear how much additional suffering lay ahead, for no one was bothering to monitor the health of the eight hundred thousand workers and soldiers who, as liquidators, had endured the most concentrated exposures to radiation. Moreover, many kinds of cancer, such as leukemia, can take years to manifest; the very high incidence of thyroid cancer (a rapid metastasizer) suggested that the ultimate number of deadly cancers could likewise be very high. Dr. John Gofman, professor emeritus of biophysics at the University of California at Berkeley, estimated that Chernobyl would eventually cause between 50,000 and 250,000 cancer deaths in the former Soviet Union, plus an equal number in the rest of the world.

So it was no wonder that the world paid a lot of attention to Chernobyl. By contrast, while Chelyabinsk had also suffered grievously, its travails were too little known to attract much international concern, a fact that exasperated some of its defenders. "Please do not compare Chelyabinsk with Chernobyl, because [Chelyabinsk] is a much different and far worse problem," pleaded Alexander Penyagin, the people's deputy who represented the Chelyabinsk region in the national Supreme Soviet in Moscow, where he showed me a draft of the Gorbachev report. "Because of glasnost, nobody could sweep Chernobyl under the rug. But the disasters at Chelyabinsk were top secret until just two years ago [1989]. They continued for many more years and they released far more radioactivity than Chernobyl did."

Penyagin went on to assert that the Mayak disasters were one hundred times worse than Chernobyl, hyperbole that seemed beside the point. There was quite enough suffering to go around in both Chelyabinsk and Chernobyl without having to pit one against the other. According to the Gorbachev report, Chelyabinsk was the cancer capital of the entire Soviet Union -- no small achievement, given the dreadful state of Russia's environment and public health. Again, the Mayak disasters were not the only reason. Chelyabinsk was also a major agricultural area with extensive chemical use, as well as an industrial nerve center with a long military history. The region had produced weapons for Russian leaders since the time of the czars, and it played an especially critical role during World War II. In 1941, after the Germans overran the Soviet Union's western border, the Soviets transferred their entire metallurgy industry -- factory by factory, machine by machine -- from Ukraine to the relative safety (behind the Urals) of Chelyabinsk. But the factories had not been improved upon since, and the environmental consequences were devastating.

Since Chelyabinsk factories had no air purification filters, they had released some 391,000 tons of pollutants in 1990, giving Chelyabinsk some of the most polluted air in the Soviet Union. Drinking water also contained "very high levels of pollution," the Gorbachev report stated -- five to twenty times as much iron and forty to sixty times as much copper as it should have. It is hard to be healthy under such conditions, and the people in Chelyabinsk were not. You could see it in their faces -- drawn, pasty, permanently fatigued -- and you could track it in the health statistics. Both morbidity and mortality rates jumped during the 1980s. Growth in diseases of the blood circulation system increased 31 percent. Bronchial asthma increased by 43 percent; congenital anomalies, by 23 percent; and gastrointestinal tract illnesses, by 35 percent.

Even the bland bureaucratic language of the Gorbachev report could not wholly mask the severity of the crisis in Chelyabinsk: "An extremely unfavorable ecological situation has developed, which is made worse by the lack of proper medical services. An especially critical situation exists in the zones of ecological tension" (extraordinary phrase!) "where about 80 percent of the population reside."

I toured one of these zones of ecological tension on my second day in Chelyabinsk. We headed out early in Natalia's creaking, rust-holed Lada, Valodya at the wheel. Leaving the city behind, we passed spacious green cow pastures, golden cornfields swaying in the breeze, and countless stands of the shining white birch trees that dominate the Ural landscape. Once we turned off the main highway, we had to share the road with horse-drawn hay carts and slow down to avoid geese crossing our path. After about an hour, we pulled up to the seven-thousand-hectare Neva state farm, which produced meat, milk, potatoes, and feed corn. We were greeted by Nikolai Chvelev, a squat, energetic man with a farmer's ruddy complexion and an eyewitness's memories of what it felt like to live along the Techa River in the 1950s.

Nikolai Chvelev was now the top man at the Neva farm, but in 1954 he was a twenty-one-year-old soldier who had fallen in love with a local girl while stationed in Chelyabinsk. He told me he and his fellow recruits were brought to the Techa one day in 1954 and told not to swim in it. But because they were not told why the river was off limits, and because there did not look to be anything wrong with the water, they sometimes disobeyed these orders, especially on hot summer days. Local people also continued using river water for drinking and cooking. Not until the second disaster, the waste dump explosion in 1957, did people begin to suspect that something was seriously wrong.

"A lot of rumors circulated, but people were afraid to ask too many questions. At the time, you could get thrown in jail for that," Chvelev recalled. "My brother-in-law worked for the police, and he told me privately what little he knew: that some kind of accident had happened at the complex. Only then did we stop swimming in the river. For two weeks after the explosion, the water in the river was black, but after that it became clear again. The dairy where my wife worked was kept in operation until 1959. She and her coworkers didn't know what `radiation' meant, and they weren't told anything by the authorities, so they saw no reason to stop producing milk, except on the days when the water was black."

After a hearty lunch of beef, noodles, and vodka (!) in the Neva communal dining hall, Chvelev and I hopped in his truck and headed for a far corner of the farm, where the Techa flowed past. It was a glorious summer afternoon, breezy and warm, and as we bounced across sun-splashed fields brimming with pink and white wildflowers, all notions of ecological disaster seemed impossibly remote. Radioactivity, after all, cannot be seen, felt, smelled, tasted, or heard; although I knew better, it seemed inconceivable that something so deadly could be lurking amid so much natural beauty-.

Pulling to a halt a quarter mile from the river, Chvelev estimated that we were about eighteen miles downstream from the site where nuclear waste was originally dumped in the Techa. At the truck, the dosimeter Natalia Miranova had brought registered approximately 25 micro-rontgens, close to the normal background level of 20 micro-rontgens. I hiked ahead with Vlad to scout photo opportunities while Natalia changed her shoes for the walk to the river. A couple of minutes later, I heard her behind me calling out numbers from the dosimeter. As Vlad translated them, they rose steadily the closer Natalia got to the water: "61, 64, 67, 64, 73." By the time she stood a few feet from water's edge, the dosimeter read 98. She reached down and placed it at the very edge of the water and again we watched the readings climb -- first to 120, then 140, 160, and finally to a peak of 221.

That day, ten times the normal background radiation level seemed very high tome. But the next day I traveled farther downstream, to the village of Muslyumova, and suddenly a reading of 221 seemed tame indeed.

Muslyumova lay twenty-two miles downstream from the Mayak complex as the crow flies, fifty miles as the fish swims. On our way there, Valodya pulled the car to a stop about half a mile short of the village, next to a pasture where cows were lazily munching grass in the sun and white geese were splashing in and out of the river. At water's edge, the dosimeter read 445-twenty times the normal background level.

The road into Muslyumova was little more than a dirt path. We stopped on a bluff and looked across the Techa, one hundred feet below, to rows of low, wide houses on the other side of the river. A barbed wire fence, its rusted strands disintegrated into a tangled mess, was strung along the edge of the bluff, a pathetic remnant of the official effort to dissuade residents from going near the river. Peering through the fence, I saw- a boy of nine or ten wading into the river from the far bank, fishing rod in hand.

Natalia and I walked down to the water's edge. Here along the river's flood plain, nearly all the dosimeter readings were very high-500s and 600s. Natalia held the device over a piece of dried cow dung. The meter shot up to 850, a reflection of the fact that radioactivity becomes more concentrated as it passes through the food chain.

We returned to the top of the bluff, where I was surrounded by a group of about twenty local residents, mainly women whose small children darted behind their mothers' skirts to' stare at the man with the notebook who was, they said, the first journalist ever to visit their village. A young woman of about twenty-five emerged as the group's spokesperson. She delivered spirited answers in a calm but authoritative voice and even spoke a little English; it was no surprise to learn she was one of the village schoolteachers. She claimed that the people of Muslyumova were told how dangerous the river was only a year and a half ago and that this warning came not from local authorities, who continued to insist that the villagers could safely remain where they were, but from local environmentalists and a team of visiting foreign scientists. I inquired about the children's health.

"They often have a hard time holding their pencils," she replied. "They tire very easily and complain of pain in their joints. During the spring and autumn, every fourth or fifth child suffers from chronic nosebleeds. Almost all of them have low red blood cell counts."

A man behind me broke in to say that the village had voted recently in favor of evacuation, but the government had refused to help. Tests last spring, he added, had shown that half the local livestock had leukemia, since they still drank from the river. The teacher explained that a well had been dug two years ago to supply the villagers with drinking water, but it did not provide enough for the livestock as well.

"What makes you think the well water is any safer than the river?" I asked.

She shrugged. "We don't really know. The local sanitary station checks the water, and they tell us it's normal, but they never give us the actual readings, so we don't have much faith in them. Still, we must hope that it is a little safer. What other choice do we have?"

As deadly as the Techa River was, it did not pose the greatest immediate environmental danger in Chelyabinsk. There was a place inside the Mayak complex where an adult male could die from radiation in less time than it takes to read a morning newspaper. If he stood on the shore of Lake Karachay, next to the pipe that had poured hundreds of millions of gallons of nuclear waste into the lake since 1953, he would encounter a "radiation exposure rate [of] 600 rontgens per hour, sufficient to provide a lethal dose within an hour," according to Thomas Cochran, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, D.C. Cochran had been part of the team of foreign scientists invited to the Mayak complex in 1989, and it was he who wrote that it was "the most polluted spot on earth." Now, in 1991, Lake Karachay remained in perilous condition; indeed, a repeat of the 1967 accident, or worse, could happen at any minute.

Since 1951, Lake Karachay had accumulated an awesome 120 million curies worth of radioactivity and absorbed nearly one hundred times more strontium 90 and cesium 137 than was released at Chernobyl. Moreover, although Mayak officials had assumed that waste dumped in the lake would be isolated from the regional water system, this had not proven to be the case. Dr. Cochran's team documented that 93 percent of the radioactivity in the lake had filtered down into the soil beneath, and 60 percent of it had reached the underlying water table. From there, it had already migrated half a mile away from the lake.

The danger was not only that Lake Karachay's radioactivity would infect the water table through groundwater migration; there was also a danger that the lake would be struck by another natural disaster like the cyclone that caused the 1967 incident. Despite years of decay, the radioactivity remaining in Lake Karachay amounted to seven Chernobyls' worth of strontium 90 and cesium 137. Thus, another cyclone could bring nightmarish results. And the risk was real. Driving back to town one afternoon, Natalia and I came upon an entire grove of flattened birch trees, their splintered trunks a stark testament to the power of local windstorms. In addition, running beneath the Mayak complex were a number of geological fault lines, which could flush irradiated water across hundreds of miles via underground channels during an earthquake.

I wanted to see Lake Karachay for myself, but the Mayak authorities refused to allow me inside the complex. Back in Moscow, Alexander Penyagin, the people's deputy for Chelyabinsk, had secured a promise during a long-distance phone conversation with the Mayak director, Mikhail Fitisov, that I would be able to visit the site. That promise evaporated, however, when Fitisov refused to return my calls in Chelyabinsk.

Instead, I had to be satisfied with an interview with Eugene Ryzkhov, who had worked at Mayak for thirty-five years, mainly as an engineer, before joining the public' affairs department a few years ago.

Ryzkhov lived up to the stereotype of press flaks the world over: unctuous smile, slippery claims, unswerving devotion to the official line. He blamed the shutdown of Mayak's five production reactors on the political fallout of the Chernobyl accident, denied that residents of the

Techa River area ran a significantly higher risk of getting cancer, and ridiculed as "crazy" the suggestion that contaminated villages like Muslyumova be evacuated. At the end of our interview, I asked him whether, back in the 1950s and 1960s, he and his Mayak colleagues had ever tried to warn the public of the terrible dangers he and I had spent the last two hours discussing.

"No," he said. "We were raised not to do that. We worked at a secret military enterprise. Besides, I was only a rank-and-file engineer."

"Do you regret not having warned people?"

"I think my colleagues and I have our regrets that we were unable to prevent the disasters. But life has taught us a great lesson. And for the last twenty years, the overall radiation level here hasn't gotten worse, it's gotten better."

"But do you regret the deception?"

"It wasn't deception. We obeyed the rules of the system in which we lived .... It was impossible to do otherwise without being a dissident. My work in containing the problems was objectively useful to people. I did my duty. I have nothing to regret."

The doctors at the Institute for Biophysics in Chelyabinsk were more troubled by their participation in the Mayak cover-up. Perhaps seeking to exorcise their guilt, Mira Kossenko and her colleagues Marina Degteva and N. A. Petushova had authored a study that is now regarded as one of the definitive analyses of the health effects of the Mayak nuclear disasters. After guiding me through the intricacies of their research, Kossenko and Degteva took me on a tour of their hospital, where patients were housed four to a room on plain single beds. There were none of the tubes, monitors, and other apparatuses that clutter Western hospital rooms, and my escorts were clearly embarrassed to show me lab equipment that, even to my untrained eyes, looked remarkably out of date. Dr. Kossenko explained that the hospital had always been underfunded. "When this [hospital was built [in 19571, the authorities were reluctant to set up a large facility because they thought local people might draw conclusions about what kind of complex Mayak really was. And of course this was a military secret .... I'm only able to talk about this now because the regime of secrecy was lifted two years ago."

'The recitation of this history led me to suggest to the two doctors that, until 1989, their institute had engaged in rampant medical deception of the very people it was supposed to be healing. I worried for a moment that my bluntness had insulted them. Dr. Degteva shifted some papers on her desk, then lifted her gaze and looked me in the eye. "Da, " she murmured gloomily, before adding, in English, "just like Hanford."

Located in a remote area of Washington State, in the northwest corner of the United States, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation was constructed during World War 11 to build the world's first nuclear weapon. And Dr. Degteva was right. The parallels between what happened in Chelyabinsk over the years and what happened at Hanford are nothing short of eerie.

In Hanford, too, the immediate postwar climate fostered a mentality in which production took precedence over safety. And so, in 1945, Hanford officials released 340,000 curies worth of radioactive gases into the atmosphere, without warning the local populace, apparently because it was the simplest way to get rid of the waste. Later, Hanford officials also elected to pour nuclear waste directly into the nearest waterway. As a result, the mighty Columbia became the most polluted river in the United States. Soil was also contaminated. According to the Brookings Institution study, Atomic Audit, "between 1946 and 1966, in excess of 120 million gallons of liquid wastes were intentionally discharged from the Hanford tanks directly to the ground." [Emphasis in original.]

Nor were Hanford officials any more forthcoming about the risks of their secret actions than their counterparts at Mayak were. The 1945 venting of gases was not made public until 1986, when environmentalists near Hanford forced the release of nineteen thousand pages of official documents. By then, the Hanford complex had also discharged approximately- eight trillion liters of low-level liquid radioactive waste directly into the soil, making the complex arguably the most polluted site in the United States.

The Hanford experience was not an aberration. The U.S. government knowingly understated the health and ecological risks of nuclear weapons production throughout the Cold War. In the 1950s, the government assured the public that nuclear testing in the Pacific posed no more health dangers than a chest X ray. The crew of a Japanese fishing boat found out differently when they encountered a radioactive cloud from one of the tests and immediately fell ill; one crew member died before reaching home port two weeks later. Residents of Utah and Nevada were likewise told "not to worry if their Geiger counters went crazy" during a detonation at the Nevada test site, advice that led many people to go outside and watch the blast and receive dangerously high doses of radiation. When ranchers sued after their sheep began dropping dead, the Atomic Energy Commission went so far as to lie to a judge and pressure witnesses not to testify in the case.

The government also used citizens as guinea pigs to test the effects of nuclear weapons. In an episode that U.S. Secretary of Energy Hazel O'Leary, in 1993, likened to the Nazi experiments of World War 11, approximately 250 experiments were conducted in the United States between 1944 and 1973 on an estimated one hundred thousand individuals, including hospital patients who were injected with plutonium and pregnant women who were given radioactive pills. Thousands of American soldiers were ordered to march through the mushroom clouds of atomic test blasts. Not until 1988 did the U.S. Congress grant these "atomic veterans" compensation for the resulting health damages. In 1990, compensation was also offered to those who had lived downwind from the Nevada test site, as ,A,-ell as to uranium miners, who toiled in what analysts called probably "the deadliest part of nuclear weapons production."

In short, the U.S. and Soviet experiences with atomic energy during the Cold War were often more alike than not. Secrecy and cutting corners in one country were used to justify secrecy and cutting corners in the other. Each nuclear establishment acted like a state within a state whose officials sometimes seemed to have more in common with their adversaries than with their fellow countrymen and women. The two nuclear establishments even used the same vocabularies, as when U.S. military planners recommended creating "reeducation" programs to "correct" the thinking of American citizens worried about nuclear fallout.

The starkest example of this shared mind-set was the cloak of secrecy the CIA and KGB draped over the second Mayak disaster, the 1957 waste dump explosion. For twenty years, the two intelligence agencies declined to inform the rest of the world about an accident of cataclysmic scope and consequence, even though this meant, for the CIA, foregoing the chance to score points in its propaganda campaign against the "Red Menace."

Secrecy and sacrificing innocents are part of most wars, but they took on new meaning during the Cold War because of the unique nature of nuclear technology. During World War II. a lapse in security might have endangered a given infantry unit or tactical maneuver. But during the Cold War, any such lapse could endanger the entire country, for the arms race led both superpowers to accumulate enough firepower to destroy each other many times over. As Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev remarked in 1962, any additional weapons would "only make the rubble bounce." Because the range and speed of nuclear weapons made defending against them impossible, each side based its security on a stated willingness to answer any attack with a crushing counterblow -- the doctrine of "mutual assured destruction" that was as terrifying as its MAD acronym suggested. The two countries, and the larger world, were constantly poised minutes from doomsday. Further complicating matters, Great Britain (in 1952, France (in 1960, and China (in 1964 also exploded nuclear weapons, followed in the 1970s by India, Israel, and South Africa. The nuclear genie was out of the bottle.

Robert Oppenheimer compared the taming of the atom to man's fall from grace in the Garden of Eden. The creators of the bomb had "known sin," wrote Oppenheimer, "and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose." Acquiring such unprecedented power was cause for celebration in other quarters, though. When the defeat of Hitler erased the original rationale for developing nuclear weapons, Einstein urged that the Manhattan Project be halted; the White House ignored him. Although officials in the Japanese government had signaled a readiness to surrender, the American military insisted on using the bomb not just once, in Hiroshima, as a sort of demonstration blow, but twice, needlessly leveling Nagasaki and killing additional tens of thousands of civilians. After the war, some of the scientists who had helped develop the bomb urged that it be placed under international control, but they too were dismissed by Washington officials who saw a nuclear monopoly as a means of projecting American power around the world. President Harry Truman, the man who decided to drop both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, apparently assumed the U.S. nuclear monopoly would last for ever. Meanwhile, commercial interests looked forward to exploiting atomic energy to produce electricity they premised would he "too cheap to meter."

Talk about playing the sorcerer's apprentice! Few of the early nuclear champions realized how little then actually knew about this technology, which, after all, had been developed very rapidly under wartime conditions. Their ignorance proved costly; the old rule of thumb about the commensurate costs and benefits of a revolutionary new technology was soon validated once again. Nuclear fission represented the greatest power humans had ever tapped, but the associated costs and challenges were no less monumental. The embrace of atomic energy not only threatened the end of human civilization, it condemned humanity to environmental and health injuries that would take decades if not centuries to heal, and it saddled us with waste disposal responsibilities that for all intents and purposes will last forever.

The damages at the Hanford and Mayak facilities only- begin to tell the story. There are hundreds of sites around the world where aspects of nuclear weapons production have been undertaken, from uranium mining to plutonium reprocessing to weapons testing to waste storage. At virtually all these sites, the soil and water have been polluted and human health compromised, often severely. The most reliable and comprehensive account of the damage is found in Nuclear Wastelands, a handbook compiled under the auspices of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, whose work was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. "A kind of secret low-intensity radioactive warfare has been waged against unsuspecting populations," the book argues. "Destruction before detonation is the hallmark of nuclear weapons production."

The precise number of casualties attributable to nuclear weapons production is impossible to determine, not least because the official secrecy, deception, and disregard of individuals' welfare practiced at Mayak and Hanford has long been the norm at nuclear facilities the world over. Even in the United States, whose laws give citizens considerable freedom to uncover official wrongdoing, much remains unknown. For example, only in 1997 did government health officials announce that nuclear blasts at the Nevada test site near Las Vegas in the 1950s had caused between ten thousand and seventy-five thousand thyroid cancers, mainly among children. Many of these cancers might have been avoided had the military located its test site on the Atlantic coast, where prevailing winds would have swept the fallout over the ocean. But the Nevada site was chosen because it was more convenient and secret -- the military already owned it.

The United States and the other nuclear states conducted approximately nineteen hundred nuclear weapons tests between 1945 and 1990, an average of one test per week. The 518 tests that were conducted in the atmosphere are calculated to cause 2.4 million cancer deaths worldwide beginning in 1949. (Nearly half a million of those deaths would occur before the year 2000.) The Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 reduced the damage by moving tests underground (a precaution France and China ignored until 1974 and 1980, respectively). But even underground tests posed enormous hazards. After all, nuclear test sites amounted to unlicensed nuclear waste dumps, and poor ones at that, since their ability to contain radioactivity had been compromised by the force of the blasts themselves.

One nuclear disaster zone is found at the top of the Kola Peninsula in northwestern Russia, near the border with Norway and Finland. The harbors of Kola were home to the Soviet Union's Northern Fleet during the Cold War and now contain enough radioactive materials to rival Chelyabinsk. For decades, Soviet authorities treated the sea surrounding Kola as a waste dump, casting used submarine reactors, spent fuel, and other nuclear debris into one of the world's richest fishing areas. By 1991, when the dumping stopped, the waters contained two-thirds of all the nuclear waste ever dumped into the world's oceans. Seventy nuclear submarines on Kola still await decommissioning, each containing large amounts of enriched uranium. Thousands of spent fuel rods in corroded containers likewise continue to leak radioactive pollution into the sea.

But at least no nuclear warheads were compromised at the Kola Peninsula (as far as we know). In 1986, a Soviet submarine sank off the coast of Bermuda while carrying sixteen nuclear missiles and thirty-four warheads. "Those warheads are still sitting on the bottom of the ocean, as are approximately fifty more warheads from other Soviet accidents all over the world's oceans," said William Arkin, a nuclear weapons expert with The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, in a 1997 interview. Noting that what happened in the Soviet Union before 1986 "is still a deeply buried state secret" Arkin added that "there are undoubtedly scores more of such accidents that we don't know about. Since the United States Department of Defense acknowledges that there were thirty-two nuclear-weapons-related accidents in the United States alone prior to 1980 (`accidents' being a technical term, rather than the thousands of `incidents' that have occurred), one can only imagine how many accidents the Russians have experienced."

Future accidents, either in Russia or the United States, can by no means be ruled out. An internal report by the U.S. Energy Department's nuclear safety director warned in 1993 that there was a "high" likelihood of disaster at U.S. nuclear weapons plants because of deteriorating equipment, poor management, and worker sabotage. Government experts first admitted in 1985 that tanks containing fifty-seven million gallons of nuclear waste at the Hanford complex were not only leaking but could well explode, just as Mayak's waste tank had in 1957. In Hanford's case, the danger arose from an accumulation of hydrogen gas in the tanks. Officials have since begun "bleeding" hydrogen from the tanks on a regular basis, which they claim reduces the likelihood of explosion to "low." Outside experts are less sanguine. "There continues to be some risk of explosions-the Department of Energy says it's low, but the truth is, we don't know enough to quantify it-both at Hanford and at the Savannah River nuclear production facility in South Carolina, especially now that Savannah River has begun reprocessing again," said Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research and one of the editors of the Nuclear Wastelands study. Meanwhile, the storage tanks at Hanford have continued to leak, with radioactive material contaminating an acquifer of ground water 230 feet below the complex.

Cleaning up the environmental mess left behind by nuclear weapons production will be a long, difficult, extremely expensive job. In the United States alone, the Department of Energy expects the job to take another seventy-five years and cost $200 billion. A study by Stephen I. Schwartz of the Brookings Institution estimates the cost at $365.1 billion. Because the crisis is so much more dire in the former Soviet Union -- more ecosystems were more severely polluted there -- the job will cost much more and take far longer to complete there. "It is hard to quantify how much the Soviet cleanup will cost," Makhijani said, "partly because nobody has a good idea about what to do there. How do you dispose of the one hundred million curies of radioactivity in Lake Karachay There are no good answers."

As the episodes recounted in this chapter show, nuclear waste has been an Achilles' heel since the earliest days of nuclear production. It was always considered tomorrow's problem, something to deal with after more urgent tasks-producing a bomb, catching up in the arms race, introducing nuclear-generated electricity had been achieved. Finding a solution to the waste disposal problem is complicated by the fact that many radionuclides -- most important, plutonium -- are not only extremely toxic but have half-lives of thousands of years; thus, they must be isolated from ecosystems and human contact for a period of time equal to the known length of human civilization. And the amount of waste that must be managed is huge and growing. To date, humans have produced some seventy thousand nuclear weapons. The consequent waste products include an estimated four hundred thousand metric tons of depleted uranium, three billion curies of high-level plutonium-related waste, and one hundred to two hundred million metric tons of uranium mill refuse. Ironically, these figures will increase as post-Cold War disarmament proceeds and more and more nuclear weapons are dismantled. Of course, civilian power reactors also produce nuclear waste. In fact, 95 percent of the waste now in existence (if measured by radioactivity rather than mere volume came from commercial nuclear power stations.

Devising an acceptable method of waste storage has been a major logistical problem for both the civilian and military wings of the nuclear industry. In the United States, the government finally approved an underground repository for military waste in 1998. Despite opposition from environmentalists, the Energy Department plans to bury some five million cubic feet of radioactive debris 2,150 feet below the desert near Carlsbad, New Mexico, in a complex called the Waste Isolation Pilot Project. But no such remedy is in sight for the waste generated by nuclear power stations. As a result, some electric utility companies may have to shut down their nuclear reactors earlier than expected because they are running out of room to store the waste they produce. For years, the civilian industry has been pushing the federal government simply to declare victory over the problem and open a permanent nuclear waste disposal facility. The industry has pinned its hopes on a government project to build a storage facility- deep within Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Unfortunately, it turns out that Yucca Mountain sits above thirty-two active geological faults. Government scientists have also discovered that rainwater leaks from the top of the mountain into its core, raising the danger that any nuclear waste stored there would eventually reach the larger ecosystem. Such uncertainties have delayed the opening of a permanent disposal facility, originally scheduled for 1998, until well into the twenty-first century.

Ten-thousand-year time spans may humble those impressed by the fragility of human institutions and the limits of our vision, but nuclear industry officials are undaunted; they have long been confident that they can isolate their waste products from the environment for as long as necessary. After the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania in 1979, I interviewed scores of these men for my book Nuclear Inc.: The Men and Money Behind Nuclear Energy. Even then, the lack of a solution to the waste problem was threatening the industry's prospects, and I frequently asked its leaders how they planned to overcome the obstacle. John West, vice president of reactor manufacturer Combustion Engineering's nuclear division, told me that the real trouble was not that there was no solution to nuclear waste but that there were too many solutions and the dithering federal government, as usual, could not make up its mind which one was the best.

"I have a vulgar analogy," West confided. "It's kind of like you have a blond, a brunette, and a redhead, real glamorous gals all lined up for action, and you can't decide which one you'd like to go to bed with. They're all good."

And if the industry's certainty about nuclear waste storage turned out to be wrong, so what? "To me, it's the craziest thing," another top executive told me, referring to the many governors, legislators, and average citizens who had declared their states off limits to nuclear dumping in the late 1970s. "Neither they nor their descendants are going to be there at the time when anything could conceivably go wrong. If you do a halfway decent job of disposing of nuclear waste, it's at least a few hundred years before anything could go wrong, and they won't even be there then."

And the nuclear industry wonders why people don't trust it.

Yet, there is cause for hope. This book would have struck a decidedly gloomier tone were it not for the remarkable breakthroughs in nuclear weapons negotiations that have occurred in recent years -- not just the cutbacks agreed to by the United States and the former Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s but also the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty signed by 158 countries in 1996. Since nuclear weapons cannot be reliably deployed without first testing them, an effective test ban would block new weapons development and a return to the arms race. There is even talk of abolishing nuclear weapons altogether, a cause being championed by some of the very men who used to have their fingers on the nuclear trigger, including Gen. Charles A. Horner, leader of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, which protects the United States and Canada from nuclear attack. "The nuclear weapon is obsolete," said Horner in 1994. "I want to get rid of them all."

Nuclear war is the ultimate environmental danger, the single greatest threat to continued habitation of the planet, and for decades it looked like humanity was heading for it as surely as a heat-seeking missile locked on to its target. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 was the most serious flashpoint, but there were at least eleven other occasions when the United States threatened to use nuclear weapons, including during the Vietnam war in 1969 and 1972 and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. (How many times the Soviets and other nuclear states made similar threats is not publicly known. And the superpowers were not the only loose cannons. In May 1990, war nearly broke out between India and Pakistan during a quarrel over a disputed border region. U.S. officials monitoring the conflict termed it an even more dangerous episode than the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The risk of global nuclear war seemed especially great in the early 1980s. Both superpowers were feverishly expanding arsenals that already bulged with overkill capacity. In the United States, Reagan administration officials spoke openly about fighting and winning a nuclear war. "With enough shovels" to dig their bomb shelters, Americans would survive a nuclear war, one official declared in a remark that horrified the vaunted Reagan public relations apparatus. Reagan himself said he could imagine a nuclear war being limited to Europe. He also "joked" about bombing Russia and demonstrated a frightening ignorance of basic nuclear facts. In 1982, he told a press conference that nuclear missiles launched from submarines were not that dangerous because they could always be recalled after launch. Belligerent rhetoric emanated from the

Soviets as well, and among strategists on both sides brinksmanship was the order of the day. When the Soviets insisted on deploying SS-20 missiles, the United States and its NAT() allies contended that this justified their own deployment of new cruise and Pershing missiles. It was bad enough that both superpowers' arsenals boasted ever larger numbers of ever more powerful weapons. But the more worrisome trend was the sharp decline in battlefield reaction time. Cruise and Pershing missiles could strike targets within six minutes of launch. That left opposing military commanders precious little time to decide whether what they saw on radar screens was a genuine attack that had to be countered or a mere computer error to be ignored.

With the hair trigger stretched so taut and U.S.-Soviet relations so embittered, the outbreak of nuclear war, whether by accident or design, was a real and present danger. Political activists capitalized on popular fear to catalyze massive public opposition to the arms race. Millions of people marched through the streets of Western European capitals in the spring and summer of 1981 to demand a nuclear-free Europe. In June 1982, nearly a million demonstrators filled New York's Central Park as part of a national movement to "freeze" the arms race.

But there was no substantive shift in official policies until Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet general secretary in March 1985 and began making one unilateral concession after another. That July, he announced an eighteen-month moratorium on Soviet nuclear weapons testing, which he later extended three times. In January 1986, the Soviet leader announced a plan to rid the world of nuclear weapons entirely by 2000. The Reagan administration repeatedly rejected Gorbachev's initiatives, calling them "nothing but propaganda." Yet Reagan had spoken in general terms of his wish to eliminate nuclear weapons, a desire Gorbachev seized upon during their talks in Reykjavik in 1986. Gorbachev revived his proposal for nuclear disarmament in Reykjavik, but Reagan rejected it, since it would have prohibited development of Reagan's beloved Strategic Defense Initiative -- space weapons.

No such foot-dragging was possible when Gorbachev, however, later accepted the Americans' long-standing call for the withdrawal of all Euromissiles from Europe. The result was the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty- of 1987. The treaty obliged the Soviets to eliminate far more weapons than the Americans would, but Gorbachev accepted the imbalance, explaining that "parity" had no meaning in an age of massive overkill. Indeed, insisting on strict numerical balance between the superpowers' arsenals only blocked progress toward disarmament. This was revolutionary new thinking, and it ended up transforming the world.

If the INF Treaty marked humanity's first step back from the nuclear abyss, the second came in 1991, when the two superpowers signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START. By then, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Gorbachev's calm acceptance of the end of the Warsaw Pact military alliance, and his demobilization of hundreds of thousands of Soviet ground troops had proven to all but the most intransigent Cold Warriors that a fundamentally new era had begun. START was lauded as the first nuclear treaty that would actually reduce arsenals rather than manage their continued growth. There was less to START than met the eye, however. During the nine years it had taken to negotiate the treaty, the superpowers' arsenals had grown by about the same number of weapons as START would eliminate. START thus turned out to be a classic case of running to stand still; it merely maintained the nuclear status quo.

The momentum of the arms race was not decisively reversed until the START 11 Treaty was signed in 1993. Under the terms of START 11, each nation had to reduce long-range nuclear warheads to approximately thirty-five hundred-about one-third as many as each had had in the late 1980s-by 2003. For the first time in more than four decades, the United States and the former Soviet Union would be dismantling more nuclear weapons than they were building.

To reverse the drill for death known as the nuclear arms race was a genuinely historic achievement, a stirring victory for humanity and its future. There were many lessons in the victory, but perhaps the most basic was never to give up hope. At certain moments in history, despite the darkest of outlooks, conditions can change enormously,' and all but overnight-a heartening reminder as one ponders how to defuse the more gradual environmental crises that cloud humans' future.

No sooner had the nuclear hair trigger relaxed, however, than a bland complacency overcame many citizens and policymakers. Few seemed to appreciate how close they had come to catastrophe, how lucky humanity had been to dodge the nuclear bullet, or how much further

they still had to go to secure a truly safe world. After all, what if Gorbachev had not come to power and launched his unilateral initiatives'. Amid the self-congratulations and relief that followed the Cold War, the nuclear arms race and the era it had defined were regarded as a sort of bad dream, best forgotten amid the cheer and possibility of the new morning.

Some of the men who labored inside the nuclear system knew better. George Lee Butler, a retired U.S. Air Force general who directed the Strategic Air Command from 1992 to 1994, warned that humanity was in danger of lurching "backward into the dark world we so narrowly escaped without thermonuclear holocaust." Butler was one of sixty top military officials from around the world who released a statement in December 1996 urging a redoubled commitment to nuclear disarmament and abolition. The statement received virtually no coverage by the mainstream news media, at least in the United Statesa symptom of the very complacency the former warriors were trying to puncture.

The generals may not have known it at the time, but the world had come distressingly close to an accidental nuclear war just two years earlier, long after the end of the Cold War had supposedly turned Americans and Russians into trusting friends. On January 25, 1995, the Russian military confused a scientific research rocket launched from the Norwegian Arctic island of Andøya for a NATO missile, even though Russia had been warned in advance of the launch. Calling the episode "the most serious in the history of nuclear weapons," Peter Pry, a former CIA officer, revealed that the Russian military "made all the preparations for starting a nuclear war except making the decision to launch." President Yeltsin went so far as to consult the secret codes used to order a nuclear strike before the situation was clarified.

"No major change in the U.S.-Russian nuclear equation has occurred-not in war-planning, not in daily alert practices, not in strategic arms control, and maybe not even in core attitudes," nuclear weapons expert Bruce Blair said in The Gift of Time, a stud- of the prospects for nuclear abolition written by Jonathan Schell. Schell, whose 1982 book on the dangers of the nuclear arms race, The Fate of the Earth. had sparked great public debate and anti-nuclear activism, argued in The Gift of Time (1998) that nuclear abolition was an idea whose time had come, not least because the current nuclear situation remained so dangerous. "No issue that could justify even the smallest of conventional wars divides the two former super-enemies," wrote Schell, "yet each nation's nuclear arsenal is still poised on a hair trigger to blow the other to kingdom come several times over, and no plan that would fundamentally alter this state of affairs is even on the drawing boards."

The size of the remaining arsenals makes accidental war a grave hazard. Presidents Yeltsin and Clinton agreed in principle in 1997 that a START III treaty would reduce long-range missiles to no more than twenty-five hundred apiece by 2007, but there was a big catch. START III could not be negotiated until the Russian parliament ratified START II, which was no sure thing. Even before NATO's decision in 1997 to expand eastward into Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, a move despised by Russians of virtually all political stripes, ratification of START II had been blocked by communist and nationalist deputies who resented what they saw as America's high-handed ways in the aftermath of the Cold War. But the Americans had little room to criticize Russian foot-dragging; the U.S. Senate had not gotten around to ratifying START 11 until 1996. And even under START II, both Russia and the United States would still wield more than enough firepower to obliterate human civilization.

The political and economic turbulence in Russia gave rise to perhaps the most harrowing nuclear hazard of the post-Cold War world: the so-called loose nukes problem. How to keep nuclear weapons and materials from falling into the "wrong" hands had been a concern since the dawn of the nuclear age. Now, with so many weapons being dismantled at the very time state authority was crumbling in the former Soviet Union, vast amounts of warheads and weapons-grade material were suddenly becoming vulnerable to theft or diversion onto the black market.

It takes about fifteen pounds of plutonium to make a Hiroshima-strength bomb. There were four hundred thousand pounds of plutonium lying around in the former Soviet Union in 1991, plus 2.4 million pounds of enriched uranium. Often this material was poorly guarded. In 1996, U.S. government investigators were able to wander into the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow without even showing identification. There, they discovered a cache of nuclear materials guarded by a single unarmed policeman. In a land where organized crime now made a mockery of the rule of law, such laxness courted disaster. In June 1997, U.S. agents posing as drug traffickers arrested two Lithuanian smugglers in Miami who promised to sell them surface-to-air missiles and tactical nuclear weapons, and the smugglers proved they could deliver on the deal. In his 1996 book, Avoiding Nuclear Anarchy, Harvard professor Graham Allison documented six cases in which stolen nuclear materials were smuggled out of Russia before foreign security forces intercepted them. How man` smugglers have gone undetected is, of course, not known.

Imagine the horror if the terrorists behind the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 (or the recurring bombings in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, and other global hot spots) had relied on nuclear rather than conventional explosives. Professor Allison is convinced such a tragedy is only a matter of time, and he is not alone. Theodore Taylor, a former nuclear weapons designer at the U.S. Los Alamos National Laboratory, told the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1995 that the proper setting of its minutes-to-nuclear-midnight clock depended on what definition of "doomsday" one used. If doomsday meant a nuclear World War III, Taylor was optimistic enough to choose 11:30 P.m. If, however, doomsday meant "the time remaining before nuclear terrorists kill more than 100,000 people, I would set it at two minutes to midnight."

The collapse of the Russian economy magnifies the peril, for it is not just theft of nuclear materials by outsiders that poses a danger; an inside job, by workers impoverished and disgruntled after months without wages, would have the same effect. In the years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, more and more of its people have been reduced to penury and desperation. The shock transition to capitalism implemented by President Yeltsin at the insistence of the International Monetary Fund and Western governments has caused industrial production to fall nearly 50 percent, while driving a quarter of the population below- the official poverty line. "A large twentieth-century middle class is being transformed into nineteenth-century subsistence farmers, who must grow on tiny garden plots [the food they need to survive but can no longer afford to buy-," reported Russian specialists Katrina vanden Heuvel and Stephen F. Cohen in August 1997.

Some Russians responded to their situation with sardonic humor: "We know now that everything the Party, told us about communism was false. And everything they told us about capitalism was true." Others, less resilient perhaps, succumbed to drink, despair, and suicide. Which returns us to Chelyabinsk. In October 1996, Vladimir Nechai, the director of the Chelyabinsk-70 research laboratory, killed himself after leaving behind a note expressing shame at the government's failure to pay the salaries of his staff. The world could scarcely ask for a more penetrating wake-up call on the vulnerability of nuclear materials in Russia. Nechai's suicide made news in the West for a day or two, then dropped from sight.

Humanity has made extraordinary progress against the threat of nuclear destruction in recent years. The reversal of the U.S.-Soviet arms race so unexpected for so many years-is the most encouraging political development of our time. But there is still a long way to go before we are out of the nuclear woods.

The greatest immediate danger arises from the hair-trigger status of the approximately ten thousand nuclear warheads that remain in each of the American and Russian arsenals. To lower the risk of accidental war, Russia and the United States could revamp their nuclear doctrines by taking their forces off "launch on warning" alert status and by making "no first strike" pledges. They could also shrink their arsenals to as close to zero as possible, and redouble efforts to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons to other nations. Although the United States has begun to work with Russia to improve security at some Russian nuclear facilities, insufficient funding has delayed completion of the project until 2006 at the earliest. In a world increasingly fractured by violent ethnic and religious disputes and by state and individual terrorism, the availability of large amounts of nuclear-weapons-making material is a recipe for catastrophe. Numerous attempts to steal plutonium and sell nuclear weapons on the black market have already been made; they need succeed only once.

Above all, Russia and the United States must make clear by both word and deed their commitment to the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons. This applies especially to the United States, the world's sole remaining superpower. Unfortunately, American policymakers show few signs of embracing this goal. Although President Clinton has signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, Congress has yet to ratify it. More disturbing, the Department of Energy has continued to conduct so-called "sub-critical" nuclear tests, which the department claims are allowed under the test ban treaty because the resulting nuclear reactions are contained short of full explosion. Numerous other countries and independent experts dispute that claim. They point out that sub-critical tests enable a nation to continue designing new nuclear weapons-precisely what the test ban treaty is intended to prevent. If that is not the American goal, they ask, why is the United States planning to spend $45 billion over the next ten years on its Stockpile Stewardship Program, assembling a vast collection of lasers, supercomputers, and other equipment designed to develop nuclear weapons?

India in particular has accused the United States of hypocrisy for urging nuclear have-not nations to remain that way while the United States refuses to agree to a specific timetable for nuclear disarmament. This was India's rationale for not signing the test ban treaty, and it was trotted out again in May 1998, when India carried out five underground nuclear weapons tests, including one test of a "thermonuclear," or hydrogen, bomb. Within days, India's neighbor and rival Pakistan responded with three nuclear tests of its own, raising tensions in Asia to a frightening pitch. The United States and other nuclear weapons states responded with economic sanctions and calls for India and Pakistan to foreswear further weapons development. But such pressures seemed doomed to ineffectuality as long as the nuclear weapons states insisted on maintaining their own arsenals. The Indian and Pakistani tests changed the world; no longer could the traditional weapons states decide among themselves who else could join the nuclear club. From now on, it seemed the only way to limit the club's membership was to close it down altogether.

The nuclear era of human history is only beginning. If traveling in Africa teaches one to look to the deep past before gauging our species's environmental prospects, traveling to Chelyabinsk shows that imagining the distant future the world our offspring may one day inherit-is no less important. The Cold War may be over, but the plutonium it left behind, and the knowledge of how to use it, will last forever. Nearly 80 percent of the 2.4 million cancer deaths expected to result from atmospheric nuclear testing will occur after the year 2000. Vast swaths of land, including the areas around the Chernobyl and Mayak nuclear complexes, will be uninhabitable for centuries. An enormous quantity of nuclear waste will remain so radioactive it must be insulated from human contact for millennia. Contrary to the assurances of nuclear power executives, humans have yet to discover whether this can be accomplished. Meanwhile, existing stocks of plutonium remain susceptible to weapons diversion, yet both civilian and military plutonium production continues.

The nuclear danger will persist and intensify until the so-called plutonium economy of nuclear weapons and power production is dismantled, according to Arjun Makhijani. "We do not need to spend lots of money" on this task, Makhijani told me. "It's a matter of billions of dollars a year, compared to the $4 trillion we have already spent to build nuclear weapons. Four steps are needed: detach nuclear warheads from their delivery systems to minimize the risk of accidental nuclear war; vitrify encase in glass or ceramic all existing plutonium to make it less usable in weapons; convert all highly enriched uranium into low-grade uranium, for the same reason; and stop producing plutonium, everywhere."

The last step may be the most controversial, for it has important economic implications. It means not only closing weapons production plants but also prohibiting plutonium use in civilian power reactors; such a move would limit the role of nuclear energy as a major energy source in the twenty-first century. France closed its Super-Phoenix plutonium breeder reactor, which accounted for 50 percent of the world's breeder capacity, in 1998. Japan, another great champion of civilian plutonium use, is rethinking its program after serious accidents at the Monju breeder plant in 1995 and the Tokai reprocessing facility in 1997. Nevertheless, the global nuclear industry has not given up its dream of a plutonium-fueled future, and it still has plenty of political muscle, as its post-Chernobyl behavior demonstrates.

It seems incredible, but there are fifteen nuclear power reactors still in operation in the former Soviet bloc that are at least as dangerous as the reactor that exploded at Chernobyl in 1986. The plants lack not only emergency core cooling systems, which can head off a reactor meltdown, but containment vessels, which, in the event of a meltdown, are supposed to keep any fallout from reaching the atmosphere. These and many other inadequacies led the United States and other Western nations to press for these reactors to be shut down; in 1990, economic aid was

pledged toward that end. But Russia refused to shut the plants, claiming that their electricity was irreplaceable. The West relented to Russia's insistence, which apparently stemmed more from the ambitions for the Russian nuclear program than any shortages of electricity. The unsafe plants could, in fact, be closed without disrupting local economies, according to William Chandler of the U.S. Department of Energy: "Demand for electricity in Russia has fallen since 1990 by twice as much as all the electricity that Russia's unsafe nuclear reactors now produce," he said in 1997.

But instead of pressing to close the unsafe plants, Western governments are underwriting training programs and other marginal efforts to upgrade their safety, as much as that is possible without adding emergency cooling systems and containment vessels, a technical and financial impossibility. The winners under this deal are the Russian nuclear ministry, along with Westinghouse, Mitsubishi, Électricité de France, and the other nuclear companies gobbling up the Western subsidies. The losers big surprise are the people who live near these plants, which, as Chernobyl demonstrated, means people throughout the European continent.

Did Chernobyl teach us nothing? Even in the aftermath of the worst nuclear power accident in history, commercial pressures are allowed to mock public safety. Meanwhile, Chelyabinsk is offered but a pittance to clean up its mess and forestall the accident-in-waiting at Lake Karachay. In effect, it is being written off, by both the West and the Russian government, as a sacrifice zone, a place too polluted to ever be salvaged.

Some people in Chelyabinsk suspected all along that this would be their fate. I remember saying good-bye to Valodya, the Tartar who had cheerfully driven Natalia Miranova and me around Chelyabinsk. Valodya had been fascinated by the idea of my global journey -- to travel around the world as one's job seemed incredible to him. Hands clasped, we were saying our farewells when Valodya asked earnestly whether I would ever return to Chelyabinsk. I tried to deflect the question, noting that I had many other countries I had to visit first. Yes, he persisted, but if you could come back, would you want to? I didn't want to lie, but I couldn't tell the truth. I looked at the ground in silence. Sensing my embarrassment, Valodya clapped me on the shoulder and said, "It's okay, Mark. We know not to expect things in Chelyabinsk. But you are always welcome here."

 

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