Ukraine nuclear disaster

Do you remember – I was going to say about six years ago but I looked it up and it's almost exactly ten years ago – I did a talk about it at the time, one morning in July 1976 we woke up to read that in meteorological stations and observatories around the world, the seismographs had registered an earthquake somewhere of an intensity that few of the experts could match in their memory of modern times.

So, long before 1976, an expert in Sweden or Edinburgh or Tokyo or California could tell where an earthquake was happening and this one was pinpointed in the Chinese industrial city of Tangshan between Peking and the sea. Peking was also badly shaken. The Chinese admitted that it was a severe earthquake but declined all foreign aid which was offered from several countries at once. They had the experts, the medical know-how, the rescue resources to handle it. Beyond that they would not go.

Westerners began to guess at casualties as high as 100,000. The Chinese were mum. Such guesses were simply Western or bourgeois propaganda.

I remember remarking at the time that for any country under any system of government, this was an odd exercise of pride. Earthquakes do not recognise political ideology. Eventually the catastrophe slipped out of the headlines and then out of the news. Westerners and Japanese scientists went on saying that it was as bad as anything that had been known in at least a dozen years. I believe the Chinese put out a casualty figure of several thousands. The possibility that things were very much worse was reinforced by reports from visitors and foreign embassies. One report, reluctantly confirmed later by the Chinese, was that millions – millions – of the people of Peking had camped outdoors for weeks.

I don't know if we ever had a final official casualty figure from the Chinese government but years later they blandly settled for 242,000. In one almanac I've consulted, the figure is put at 660,000. In another at 800,000 but since these are English and American almanacs, no doubt you can put down the more alarming figures to bourgeois propaganda. However, a quarter of a million is appalling enough and it has remained a mystery to this day why the Chinese didn't come clean at the start and actively seek outside help.

I think their silence is more of a mystery than the silence or, shall we say, the reticence, of the Soviet government about the disaster in the Ukraine. A nuclear power plant is, after all, a work of man and as far as we can think back, the Russians have always maintained that in scientific matters of any kind, they are perfectly capable of equalling, if not surpassing, any expertise of the West.

The failure of a nuclear reactor is about as bad an admission of human defeat as we can show on this planet and we've seen, enumerable times in the past, it's not a quirk of the Soviet system that the government should clamp down on any information about its failures. It is an essential discipline of the system.

As a former Soviet official put it the other night, the government is not, as it is in democracies, only one source of information, it is the sole source. Its view of the stability of the state dictates that there shall not be different and competing views of the facts. If you allow that you will get newspapers competing for different points of view and, pretty soon, you'd get political parties and people arguing and eventually taking to the streets and so on. To the Soviets, that would mean the end of a stable society.

I suppose, like many of you, I have, in the past several days and nights, been flooded with the comments of every sort of expert – American, French, English, Swedish, Austrian, German and Russian – Russians here, who are either European or American experts on Communism or defectors. I don't mean, of course, just political experts, but physicists and medical men and radiologists, including the inspectors who went about cleaning up the American nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, which, by the way, the Russians brought up this week in an English-language broadcast from Moscow to show, I guess, that even the vaunted American safety system is not foolproof or expert-proof.

They didn't mention that while there was a large evacuation of people from the neighbourhood of the reactor, there were no casualties. Nor – the main point of difference – that the federal government gave out elaborate details of the accident at once, that the Senate instantly started an open investigation, that science reporters went to the place and wrote what they chose.

The one thing the Russian broadcast did stress was that there were, almost immediately, protest marches in Pennsylvania and in many other places close by nuclear reactors. You see, they were saying, the American people don't trust their government, whereas we have had no protest marches and they're not going to either.

I suppose we could go on for weeks guessing at the reasons for the extraordinary restriction of news from Moscow, apart from recognising that it is a function of their system. I think we can say that, for once, staying with the system will turn out to be a blunder, especially for the international reputation of Mr Gorbachev who came in promising much more open disclosure of the way his government was working or wasn't working.

As Senator John Glenn, the former astronaut, said the other night, 'Open disclosure has gone down the drain and it's going to make it all the harder to attempt an arms agreement or to trust it'.

Why should the usual, old-fashioned, tight-lipped performance be a mistake? Because, I suggest, this is one kind of disaster that the rest of the world is perfectly capable of measuring, and has done so, not just the well-known fact that a graphite fire burns and burns and is almost impossible to put out, not just careful guesses about the number of casualties which are everywhere at brutal variants with the official Russian figure. But the thing that first rankled the Swedes and then outraged nations on the outside, whether they are inclined to be pro or anti-Soviet, is that this was one disaster which, unlike an earthquake, can seriously affect the lives of millions of people outside the centre, the Soviet Union.

In other words, the fatal blunder which, as I talk, is being stubbornly maintained, is the refusal to tell the truth about the likely amounts of radiation in the clouds that were spewed into the atmosphere and carried by the winds, first north and west and then, in an atmospheric shift, to the south and east, and then where?

When time allows the disaster to fade away, we may then expect the Russians to follow the usual epilogue to a disaster in which they were involved. Do you remember the South Korean airliner that was off course in the Pacific and was shot down September 1983? First, the Russians said nothing. Then, they indignantly denied that they had played any part in the accident but, what they evidently forgot, there were satellite pictures of the secret strategic base towards which the plane was approaching, there was salvaged tapes of dialogues between the Korean crew and two control towers, which revealed what surely a pilot in dire trouble would not invent, that he'd been challenged by a Russian plane.

It took six days for the Russians to concede that they had, indeed, shot down the plane. They maintained to the end and, I imagine, to this day that the Korean airliner was a disguised American spy plane craftily using hundreds of innocent Korean travellers as covers.

One consequence of the whole thing, which is unpleasant to talk about but it happened, is the rocketing performance in Chicago this week of the commodity market. Prices for wheat and maize, for sugar beet and for cattle, suddenly went the limit when the news came through about the movement of the clouds across the Ukraine and up towards Poland. The boys on the commodity exchange figured that the summer crops of Eastern Europe might be contaminated or have to be destroyed and that the Russians winter wheat might also be affected.

This country has many, many millions of tons of surplus grain and the calculation is that Eastern Europe, Russia included, may need them.

On the contrary, last Tuesday, the stock market registered the biggest drop in one day in history – 42 points. For an hour or two in the evening, investment experts played the old record which recites that any steep decline in the stock market is a healthy shake-out of a market grown too fat, but pretty soon it was seen that the stocks which had taken the steepest dive were public utilities and especially industries that use nuclear power. Those stocks fell as much as 60 points.

A sober-faced Wall Streeter said that the nuclear power business faces a grim future. It was inevitable, indeed, if there had been no disaster in the Ukraine, the industry was facing a grim future. It has been seven years since the Three Mile Island accident which never came to a meltdown, which was under control by the evening when, however, government experts picked up and announced some signs of radioactivity in the neighbourhood air caused by vented steam.

There were no casualties and the medical teams believe it is very unlikely that even one person will reveal, years from now, a cancer but the public outcry across the whole country was enormous and the sit-downs at sites chosen for more plants went on and on.

By that time, there were about a hundred plants licensed to produce nuclear power. Since that time, 87 applications have been refused by the government.

The Ukraine disaster only aggravates here a storm of controversy about nuclear reactors that has been going on for seven years. That's what comes of telling the people all the facts, all the time.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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