Ramifications of Chornobyl catastrophe (05/04/86)

Ramifications of Chornobyl catastrophe

JERSEY CITY, N.J. - "The nuclear disaster at Chornobyl has major implications and undermines the credibility of the Gorbachev regime."

That's how a noted expert on the Soviet Union assessed the political fallout from the accident at the Soviet nuclear power plant in Ukraine.

Prof. Bohdan Bociurkiw, a 1984-85 fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a professor of political science at Carleton University in Ottawa, said the credibility of the Gorbachev regime - both domestically and internationally - has been dealt a serious blow by last week's disaster.

Dr. Bociurkiw, during a telephone interview with The Ukrainian Weekly on May 1, pointed out that the extraordinary Soviet effort to restrict information about the nuclear accident flies in the face of promises of openness made by General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev during the 27th Soviet Party Congress.

Mr. Gorbachev, in his keynote speech at the congress, said:

"Extensive, timely and frank information is evidence of trust in the people, respect for their intelligence and feelings and of their ability to understand events of one kind or another on their own."

Prof. Bociurkiw expects the relations between Moscow and its neighbors will sour because of its early silence about the accident. He added that the authorities in Poland likely received much more information about the effects of the nuclear disaster than officials in Ukraine.

The handling of the Chornobyl accident, Dr. Bociurkiw said, brings to mind the vague Soviet coverage of the 1965 earthquake disaster in the Uzbek capital of Tashkent, when TASS admitted to only four fatalities. In the days following the Tashkent disaster, the Soviet people were shocked to discover that the number of people killed by the earthquake were much higher: more than 8,000 people actually died in that disaster.

"This, along with the misleading Soviet coverage of the South Korean airline incident exposes the Soviet predilection for lying," Dr. Bociurkiw said.

After the smoke clears from the Chornobyl accident, Dr. Bociurkiw believes Moscow will make strident attempts at "searching for a scapegoat" for internal purposes. In an attempt to maintain face before its own people, the Kremlin leaders will likely point an accusing finger for the embarrassing mishap not at themselves, but towards the management of the Chornobyl power plant, and possibly the Soviet ministry responsible tor energy, Dr. Bociurkiw said.

The nuclear accident may very well provide the Kremlin with an excuse to conduct a long-awaited leadership shake-up in Ukraine, Dr. Bociurkiw believes. Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, the first secretary of the Communist Party in Ukraine, will likely be the first victim of a leadership purge, he said, especially since the Ukrainian leader is depicted as a leftover from the Brezhnev era.

"The people who were in charge locally will also be among the first victims of any reprisals from the Kremlin," Dr. Bociurkiw added.

Although details about the causes of the disaster are unavailable, Dr. Bociurkiw said the management of the Chornobyl plant probably dragged their feet in sending word of the disaster to Moscow.

"Given what we know about the way things work in the Soviet Union," Dr. Bociurkiw said, "we can speculate that the management of the nuclear reactor did not inform Moscow about the accident immediately." Similarly, the Kremlin likely deliberated extensively about what to do about the accident before it divulged the most basic information to the world, he said.

Management of environmental and nuclear accidents is nothing new to the leadership of the Kremlin, according to evidence published by Western and East European researchers.

Almost as striking as the Chornobyl nuclear accident is information contained in a 1984 top secret CIA and Pentagon report that provides evidence of serious deficiencies in Soviet safety standards at nuclear power plants. The confidential report, first revealed by columnist Jack Anderson, asserts that thousands of Soviet people have died as a result of accidents at nuclear power plants and weapons complexes and on nuclear submarines.

Said the report: "The Soviet nuclear power industry is plagued with manufacturing deficiencies and poor workmanship."

It went on to say that the Soviets often cut corners on safety "to eliminate delays in their trouble-plagued nuclear program."

The report says there have been nearly a dozen plant shutdowns. A reactor in the Ukrainian city of Rivne, for example, went "critical" in 1981; another at Shevchenko was shut down after pipes and turbines were found to have faults.

The CIA report notes that at least three major accidents have occurred in the Soviet Union since the 1950s.

The worst happened in the late 1950s in the Urals when an explosion in tanks of radioactive wastes spread Strontium 90 and other deadly elements into the air. As a result of the accident, in which radioactivity nearly 1,000 times higher than bomb fallout resulted, 30 villages were evacuated. Several hundred square miles were contaminated and three lakes were poisoned for some 300 years. Hundreds of people are believed to have died during the explosion, and hundreds of others died from long-term effects.

It was reported that among the victims were death squads of prisoners sent on hopeless clean-up missions. The Soviets now use the area to train troops for nuclear war.

In 1983, a large earthen dam holding back a huge pond of liquid waste near the Ukrainian city of Drohobych burst and sent millions of tons of concentrated saline brine into the Dniester River, causing a serious pollution crisis. Although reports of serious contamination in water supplies in the region had been circulating in Moscow for weeks, news of the spill were not confirmed until a published interview with a government minister indicated that a major disaster had occurred.

Nikolai Vasilyev, the minister of land reclamation and water resources, told a Soviet interviewer that the Drohobych dam burst "because of errors in design and construction. He added that although no lives were lost, the spill disrupted water supplies to millions of people, killed hundreds of tons of fish, and deposited a million tons of mineral salts on the bottom of the 30-mile-long reservoir.

Almost a year later a huge gas explosion outside the Ukrainian city of Ternopil fueled a wall of fire so intense that a silhouette of the city could be seen for miles away. There was no mention of the explosion by any of the official Soviet news agencies.

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