ANALYSIS: Chornobyl's fallout : brought down on Belarus to spare Russia? (07/28/02)

ANALYSIS

Chornobyl's fallout : brought down on Belarus to spare Russia?

by Vera Rich
RFE/RL Newsline

Western nuclear scientists are at last coming to accept what people in Belarus have claimed for years: that the radioactive contamination from the Chornobyl nuclear disaster on April 26, 1986, was deliberately "shot down" over Belarus in order to prevent it from blowing back on to Moscow. However, even 16 years after the event, they are unwilling to put their names to that theory.

Maps of the fallout that appeared in the Soviet Belarusian press three years later, at the beginning of February 1989, revealed two patches of high radioactivity isolated from the main focus of contamination, where there had been heavy showers of rain just as the fallout was passing over.

The population of these areas has always maintained that the rain was artificial - "seeded" on orders from the Kremlin. Soviet authorities dismissed these reports as "radiophobia" fomented by "anti-socialist elements," and said they did not have the technology to "bring down clouds" in that way (although for years, the Soviet media had claimed exactly the opposite, with circumstantial accounts of crops saved from storm damage by prophylactic "cloud seeding").

Western scientists tacitly accepted the Soviet denials - partly in the belief that no government would act so callously and also because they considered the Chornobyl-polluted area a unique "laboratory" for studying the migration of radioactive contamination in the soil and did not want to provoke the authorities into denying them visas. However, the bulk of circumstantial evidence is now causing them to think again.

To date, none have been willing to "go public," arguing that - in the political climate of today's Belarus - to give their names would not only endanger their visas (and their continuing research) but also put their informants at risk. However, the following information emerged in informal discussions on the sidelines of a recent scientific conference.

One researcher, whose official task is to monitor whether the soil of these areas can be safely brought back into cultivation, has begun collecting the reminiscences of local inhabitants as to what they remember of the days immediately after the accident. He made no attempt to lead his witnesses. Amid the many purely personal incidents (weddings, May Day celebrations, etc), there were repeated reports of unusual activity of aircraft and/or rockets being fired in the vicinity. One man, the chief administrative officer of his locality, stated categorically that he had seen an aircraft with "stuff coming out of the back." Many people remembered that the rain showers that followed were "unusually heavy" and that - unlike "normal" rainstorms in early May, were not accompanied by thunder.

Challenged by colleagues that such reports were "subjective," the researcher pointed out, "These people are farmers and know about rain!" When further asked why such claims had never been made before, he pointed out that, to date "no one [i.e., no Western scientist] had bothered to ask the locals!"

A senior scientist who had been working mainly in Russia stated that an unimpeachable Moscow source, who at the time of the accident "had been in a position to know," admitted that the clouds were, indeed, brought down. People like his informant, this scientist said, "are prepared to talk in cars - particularly Western cars!" (i.e., where there is little likelihood of bugging).

In fact, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, one scientific paper was published in the West that reported, on the basis of local claims, that the soil had been tested for traces of silver iodide, the chemical most widely used for seeding. No such traces were found, the report said. But this is at best negative evidence. The soil samples in question were taken more than six years after the accident - and the small amounts of silver left by seeding could well have leached out of the soil during that time. Alternatively, the Soviets might have used a different chemical for seeding.

One scientist who has worked on the Chornobyl contamination since 1992 is Dr. Alan Flowers of Kingston University (in the United Kingdom). Many of his colleagues in Belarus, he says, seem to accept as established fact that the clouds were seeded - but again, they have never publicly admitted this. When asked - 16 years after the event and with the Soviet officials who would have taken the decision to "seed" the cloud presumably out of office, retired or dead - he replied that "for a full understanding of the distribution and effects of the Chornobyl fallout, we need as much evidence as possible. What caused the rain is still an uncertainty in our knowledge about the intensity and nature of the contamination."

Vera Rich is a London-based freelance researcher. She was Soviet correspondent for the scientific journal Nature at the time of the Chornobyl disaster.

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