Gore visits Chornobyl (07/26/98)

Gore visits Chornobyl

by Roman Woronowycz
Kyiv Press Bureau

KYIV - United States Vice-President Al Gore became the highest ranking United States official to tour the Chornobyl nuclear complex, the site of the world's largest nuclear accident, when he traveled there on July 23.

The U.S. vice-president, along with Ukraine's Prime Minister Valerii Pustovoitenko and National Security and Defense Council Secretary Volodymyr Horbulin, made the 90-kilometer trip by helicopter from Kyiv for a two-hour tour of the grounds of the nuclear facility and the now-abandoned city of Prypiat, which housed a community of some 130,000 workers and their families prior to the April 26, 1986, explosion.

Today Prypiat is slowly decaying and will continue to do so for the next 30,000 years - the number of years predicted for the radiation contained there to dissipate.

The vice-president saw the entombed fourth reactor site from an observation post and walked through an abandoned amusement park in Prypiat, where rusting electric go-carts and a ferris wheel still stand.

After the tour, the vice-president returned to Kyiv, where he presented what his aides called a major foreign policy speech at the Chornobyl Museum in the Podil district of Kyiv.

"Today, for the first time, I saw Chornobyl. It looms as a menacing monument to the mistakes of the century now slipping away from us, a hulking symbol of human decisions unworthy of our children," said Mr. Gore during his 35-minute presentation.

The U.S. vice-president called on the Russian Duma to pass START II, after which the U.S. is ready to begin negotiations on further reductions in nuclear missile stockpiles.

He also called on Pakistan and India, countries that in May tested nuclear weapons in underground blasts, to sit down at the bargaining table and sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

"Pakistani and Indian children are playing, eating and laughing in those two countries, while the adults threaten one another with the possibility of nuclear war. Shall we betray those children, or choose instead to safeguard their future?" asked Vice-President Gore.

The speech was in fact a series of brushstrokes painting a picture on which Mr. Gore has expounded before: the need for the world to realize that it is interconnected physically and economically in today's high-tech age and that the children are its future.

At one point he wondered whether the Soviet Union and the Kyiv party bosses could have hidden the Chornobyl catastrophe from the world for five days if there had been widespread Internet usage in 1986.

He lauded Liubov Kovalevska, a newspaper journalist who in 1986 wrote a stinging critique of the safety at the Chornobyl facility a month before the catastrophe. The vice-president suggested that in an environment of open debate and free speech such an article might have been more effective.

He also honored the firefighters who died and the more than 800,000 clean-up workers who were on the front lines in the aftermath of the nuclear explosion.

He said the Chornobyl disaster is not "primarily about the cruelty of communism." Mr. Gore reserved that description for Stalin's forced famine of 1933, which killed 7 million people in Ukraine. "He called it collectivization, but it was murder," said the vice-president. Mr. Gore added that besides the Famine Memorial, located a few blocks from the Chornobyl Museum where he spoke, another monument to evil is found in Kyiv at Babyn Yar, site of Nazi executions of the residents of Kyiv, primarily Jews.

Mr. Gore both paraphrased and directly quoted biblical passages in presenting his message of a single world destiny. "The truth, as we have been taught, will set us free," said Mr. Gore. "The truth taught by Chornobyl is that we are all connected - forever," he added.

At another moment, alluding to the concept of peacemakers found in the Bible, he said "Join the peacemakers," noting, "Their ranks are growing everyday."

He named Ukraine as one of the peacemaker countries and, again quoting the Bible, said, "'And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks." He added that, "by shipping nuclear warheads to the Russian Federation and receiving reactor fuel back in exchange, Ukraine has shown us all how."