The Chernobyl disaster had only been publicized because the Soviet Union couldn’t hide it. If the USSR had its way, Chernobyl would have been tucked in that file of previously unreported Soviet disasters, like failed moon launches, humanitarian disasters, even another nuclear accident 29 years earlier. It was only when radiation readings rose throughout Scandinavia and meteorologists tracked back wind patterns did suspicion fall on the four reactor power plant 80 miles north of Kiev, a city the size of Chicago. Initially, reporting on Chernobyl was a challenge for NBC News. (Soviet Life had featured Chernobyl, ironically enough, in an article on the Soviet Union’s great nuclear safety record!) Then, a freelance “journalist” with exclusive video of the reactor on fire approached three of the four networks’ bureaus in Rome. Apologies abounded.
Ultimately, the Soviets opened up. There were reports on Soviet television and in Soviet newspapers and scientific journals. The eeriest part of the trip, no doubt, was watching the clean-up at Pripyat, the mini-city of 55,000 that surrounded the nuclear power plant. By Soviet standards, it was paradise. High rise towers with roomy apartments surrounded by parks, including an amusement park and a sports park that had been ceremoniously opened the morning of the accident but never used.
Two years after the accident, an army of clean-up workers were still carting away things like school desks from the local school, preparing to dismantle the steel cars from the ferris wheel at that park, all of it accompanied by classic music pumped out over an area-wide p.a. system…to help the workers avoid going crazy from the deathly silence of a city abandoned on a spring day two years earlier. The workers were from all over the Soviet Union, drawn by the double salary, the double pensions, good housing. They talked of drinking vast volumes of red wine, ostensibly as an antidote for radiation, but no doubt for more banal medicinal purposes.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640
(Via MSNBC)