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To the Nuclear Lighthouse
As an example of the environmental contradictions of twentieth century
industrial I arrived in Leningrad six weeks before the military-led coup against General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev that spelled the end of the Soviet Union. Days before my arrival, the citizens had voted to restore their city's original name of St. Petersburg, but the margin was close: 56 percent in favor, 44 percent against. Many senior citizens had clung to the old name in honor of loved ones who died defending Leningrad against Hitler's army during the ghastly nine-hundred-day siege of World War 11, when an estimated two million Russians perished after being reduced to eating glue and sawdust. Advocates of the name change, on the other hand, saw the new name as a blow against the still ruling Communist Party and a reassertion of the glories of Peter the Great, the czar who had made his namesake city Russia's window onto Europe in the early 1700s. The physical appearance of the city seemed as divided as the opinions of its citizens. Leningrad resembled nothing so much as a classic Rolls Royce that had deteriorated into a rusty, dented, filthy shadow of its former self. The grandeur of Peter's Winter Palace along the Neva River, the magnificent holdings of its Hermitage Museum, the stately stone buildings and canals that recalled Paris and Amsterdam all harkened back to the prosperous St. Petersburg of old. I was lucky enough to arrive in high summer, the season of white nights, when even at midnight there was enough light to read a newspaper outdoors. One night at about 11:30 I strolled down the main street, Nevsky Prospekt. The light was soft and luminescent, bright enough to appreciate the lines and proportions of the palatial buildings on both sides of the street yet dark enough to obscure the gaping holes, crumbling facades, and lack of paint that marred their elegance. For one enchanted evening, I felt I had been transported back to prerevolutionary St. Petersburg. Yet the shabbiness and hard times of present-day life were inescapable. I was met at the train station by Vlad, a Russian photographer I had known in San Francisco who would be serving as my interpreter here. His friend Alex had access to a rundown, old jalopy (the windows no longer rolled down, the seats had lost their springs), and as we drove across town the city itself seemed in no better shape than the car. Buildings were caked with so many years of dust it was hard to tell what their original colors might have been. The streets were pocked with huge potholes and lined on either side by weeds and waist-high grass. Vlad took me to his parents' place, where I would be taking over his old room for a few nights. His parents were factory workers who lived in a nine-story apartment building in the north of the city. The downstairs entrance was a plywood door that opened into an unlit vestibule that smelled powerfully of mildew and urine. The elevator was suffused with the same odor, but Vlad apparently no longer noticed it. During the very slow ascent of the elevator, it suddenly stopped with such a crash I was sure it had broken and left us stranded. But again, Vlad, Alex, and their friend Leonid were nonchalant. Vlad simply heaved open the elevator and we stepped into another dark, dank hallway, down which lay the door to the apartment. Inside was cozier, thanks to a couple lovely old pieces of furniture
and the great warmth of Vlad's folks, especially his father, who
informed me with impassioned hand gestures that under no circumstances
was I to drink water from the tap. This I knew already — water
pollution was the main environmental story I planned to investigate in
Leningrad. Nevertheless, when he filled a glass from the tap, it was
sobering to see the water's greasy texture and smell its metallic
scent. Vlad's father emphasized that I should drink only from the
green pitcher in the icebox, which contained water that had been
boiled for ten minutes. He added that the building had been completely
without water from five until nine o'clock that evening and, worse,
that there would be no hot water at all until September 1, two months
away. Also, the phone was out again. On our way downtown the next morning, Leonid and I stopped into a neighborhood food store. Dust coated the front door and windows so thickly one could not see through them. Inside, most shelves were empty; the only product available in any quantity was bread. In one corner were half a dozen five-kilogram bags of potatoes, one of which Leonid purchased. That afternoon, while walking the city, we passed through a private vegetable market with ample, fine-looking produce, but prices were five times the normal rate and Leonid was too proud to let me buy him anything. A few blocks later, we found ourselves on a street where peddlers stretched on for an entire block. Mostly desperate pensioners, they had on offer a pathetic range of items: pencils, an old hallway mirror, some empty bottles, a pair of very worn lady's shoes. Capitalism had only begun to arrive in Russia, and already the bottom was falling out for the lower classes. I spent a week in Leningrad interviewing environmentalists, city
council members, engineers, scientists, high party officials, and
average citizens about the state of Leningrad's water and its larger
ecological situation. Everyone knew that the city's water was unsafe;
the media had widely reported it. But except for the boss of the local
Pepsi Cola bottling plant, who told me he regularly took colas home
for his family, most people drank the water anyway. Leningrad drew its water from the Neva River, which was fed by Lake Ladoga, approximately fifty miles to the north. Ladoga was the largest lake in Europe. In olden days its purity was so renowned that sea captains would insist on stowing Ladoga water aboard before long journeys. Now, however, the lake was ringed with scores of paper mills and other factories that discharged vast amounts of heavy metals, acids, and chlorine. The Neva was further polluted while passing through Leningrad by the city's approximately two thousand factories, only 10 percent of which treated their waste before discharge. Human waste from the hundreds of thousands of households in Leningrad also poured into the Neva, generally without benefit of prior treatment. Drinking water was treated before being distributed to homes and offices, but with limited effect. The Neva still contained concentrations of olgino (a stomach bacteria) that were ten thousand times higher than the legal limit, according to a study by the city council. Compounding all these problems, a massive dam was being built across the Gulf of Finland twelve kilometers from downtown Leningrad, supposedly to protect the city from floods but also to provide a ring road for auto traffic. A colossal boondoggle of centralized planning that originated during the Brezhnev era, the dam would interfere with the Neva's traditional self-cleaning method of exchanging water with the gulf. Environmentalists pointed out that the dam would act like a cork in a bottle, stopping up the Neva with its pollutants and rendering the gulf a fetid swamp. Despite its poisonous water and highly contaminated air, Leningrad did
not rank among the ten most polluted cities in the Soviet Union.
Competition for that honor was stiff in a country where two-thirds of
the drinking water did not meet health standards, air pollution in
over one hundred cities exceeded legal limits by a factor of ten, a
chemically saturated river somewhere in the country burst into flames
once a month, and 20 percent of the population (about forty million
people) lived in areas that scientists had labeled zones of ecological
After a week in Leningrad I took the train to Moscow, where I stayed
with a friend of Vlad's named Kiril. A twenty-five-year-old former
prison inmate who thought nothing of beating up his downstairs
neighbor to get him off their shared telephone line, Kiril happened to
be the grandson of the man who served as Josef Stalin's ambassador to
the United States immediately after World War II. One day, when I
tried to present Kiril with the U.S. $20 he said he needed to pay for
a license to marry his live-in girlfriend, his pride was so wounded
that he angrily turned on me: Part of the reason Kiril treated me decently, I realized, was that I
represented a possible entree to the United States, a country he
yearned to visit. He was ashamed of the Soviet Union, a place he
ridiculed as backyards, ugly, and poor. Alas, this was not an entirely
unfair characterization. This was my first visit to the USSR, and I
was frankly astonished. Combine the appalling environmental
degradation with a stagnant economy, poor living standards, and the
shoddy technology everywhere on display, and it was difficult to
regard the Soviet Union as much of a superpower. Throughout my five
weeks of travel there, I often found myself thinking, Yet Americans had legitimate reason to fear the Soviet Union during
the Cold War, for Soviet leaders, like American leaders, had their
hands on the most deadly technology of the twentieth century. If the
automobile was the most economically important technology of the
century, nuclear fission was the most important technology, period,
because it raised the question of whether there would be any human
life beyond this century. Unlocking the atom's secrets was arguably
the single most fateful step Homo sapiens sapiens had taken in their
two-million-year pursuit of technological mastery over the natural
world. By discovering how to produce nuclear reactions, humans were
exploiting the very forces that generated sunshine and made life on
earth possible in the first place. These were powers that earlier
humans had ascribed to gods, a point not lost on the atomic bomb's
chief designer, physicist Robert Oppenheimer. At the moment the first
test bomb (or Within a month, Oppenheimer's creation had incinerated two Japanese cities and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. But Hiroshima and Nagasaki were by no means the only cities devastated by the technology that, in Einstein's famous phrase, changed everything except our way of thinking. As I was soon to see, on the western edge of Siberia was another city that carried the scars of its nuclear past — a city called Chelyabinsk. The express train from Moscow took thirty-six hours to plod across the featureless Russian plain to Chelyabinsk, a dusty industrial city with a million inhabitants. I awoke a few hours before arrival, when the train finally began lumbering up the shallow inclines of the southern Ural Mountains. Green, stony hillsides dotted with graceful white birch trees broke the visual monotony for the first time since Moscow, but the relief was temporary. Chelyabinsk lay just over the rise, at the edge of the vast steppes that stretched on to the Pacific. Fifty miles north of the city was an industrial complex whose Cold War
code name was Mayak. Translated, Mayak means As such, Mayak was the site of perhaps the biggest nuclear catastrophe in history after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. There had been three nuclear disasters at Mayak whose damages were comparable to, and probably worse than, the reactor meltdown in 1986 that made Chernobyl a household name around the world. The difference with the Mayak disasters was that they never became media events. On the contrary, they were kept secret — not only from the outside world but from the Russian people, including hundreds of thousands of local residents who were exposed to massive amounts of radiation. In a striking case of Cold War duplicity and doublethink, the news from Mayak was suppressed by both the KGB and the CIA, each of which apparently feared an informed populace as much as it feared the enemy arsenal. (The CIA learned about the accidents in the course of normal intelligence gathering but declined to publicize them. Thus, when I reached Chelyabinsk in 1991, the three Mayak nuclear disasters still remained largely unknown to all but a handful of international nuclear policy experts. Astonishingly enough, the first Mayak disaster was not an accident at all but the result of deliberate policy. From 1949, when the Mayak complex produced the Soviet Union's first nuclear weapon, until 1956, Mayak officials poured their nuclear waste directly into the nearby Techa River. Tens of thousands of people living downstream received average doses of radiation four times greater than those subsequently received at Chernobyl. For the twenty-eight thousand people most acutely exposed, average individual doses were fifty-seven times greater than at Chernobyl. Nevertheless, only seventy-five hundred people were ever evacuated from their homes, and people were not forbidden to use the river water until 1953, four years after the contamination began. The second, and most terrible, Mayak disaster took place on September 29, 1957, when a nuclear waste dump exploded, spewing seventy to eighty metric tons of waste into the sky. The waste facility had been constructed in 1953 as an alternative to more river dumping. When its cooling system malfunctioned, the waste began to dry out and heat up, eventually reaching the unearthly temperature of 350 degrees Celsius. The resulting explosion was equivalent to seventy to one hundred tons of TNT — enough to blast a thick concrete lid off the tanks and hurl it twenty-five meters away. The total amount of ejected radioactivity measured twenty million curies — ten times more than had already been dumped in the Techa River. Ninety percent of the radioactivity fell immediately back to earth, but the remaining two million curies formed a plume half a mile high that spread across the Chelyabinsk region, severely contaminating air, water, and soil. All the pine trees in a twenty-square-kilometer area died over the next eighteen months. Approximately 272,000 people were exposed to average doses of 0.7 rems of radiation, the same amount that 750,000 Chernobyl victims would experience in 1986. The third Mayak disaster occurred in 1967, and again nuclear waste was the culprit. In 1951, after Mayak officials realized they could no longer dump waste in the Techa River but before they built the storage facility that would explode in 1957, they began pouring waste into Lake Karachay, a natural lake within the Mayak complex; since Karachay had no outlets, this measure, it was assumed, would keep the waste from contaminating the regional water system. However, in 1967, a cyclone swept across the drought-exposed shores of Lake Karachay and whirled its deadly silt high into the air and across the surrounding landscape. Five million curies of radioactivity ,were dispersed over fifteen thousand square miles; nearly half a million people were affected. My guide in Chelyabinsk was Natalia Miranova, a tenacious, red-haired woman in her forties who had fought to win medical treatment and protection from further danger for her neighbors; her efforts had recently won her election as the people's deputy to the regional Supreme Soviet. I had met Natalia at an academic conference in the United States a few months before; now, she had kindly come to meet Vlad and me at the Chelyabinsk train station. Joining her was Valodya Ishkvatov, whose crinkly eyes and flat, honey-colored face reminded me that I was now on the Asian side of the Soviet Union. Valodya served as our driver over the coming days, and like many other locals, he had been personally affected by the Mayak disasters. When the Mayak waste dump exploded in 1957, Valodya was a boy of eight, living along the Techa River with his parents and three brothers and sisters. His father worked at a large orchard next to the river where pears and apples were grown. Valodya's family was not evacuated until a year after the explosion, and even after evacuation his father kept working in the orchard; every day, he walked the five miles from the nearby village where the family had been forced to take shelter in a farmer's barn. The orchard was kept in production, and its fruit sold throughout the Soviet Union, until 1964, when the government ordered the trees to be burned. Valodya, who now looked perhaps fifteen years older than his actual age of forty-one, said that all six members of his family were among the sixty-six thousand victims of the Mayak disasters upon whom the government had kept health records. But he had no confidence in those records. Many times that number of people had actually been irradiated, he pointed out, and he added that his own family's case illustrated how the official records substantially underestimated the number of victims. The complete death toll of the Mayak nuclear disasters will never be
known, and bookkeeping errors are but the most banal reason why. More
far-reaching and despicable was the outright deceit practiced by
Soviet authorities. Until 1989, Chelyabinsk health officials were
prohibited from even acknowledging the existence of radiation
sickness, much less admitting that it had been killing local people
for forty years. Instead, they had to diagnose patients as suffering
from ABC disease, a code name handed down from the Ministry of Health
in Moscow that carried the grotesque translation Instead, other innocents were conscripted. On my first day in Chelyabinsk, Natalia took me to the local children's hospital. Nearly all of the approximately thirty children on the leukemia ward were bald, thanks to the radiation therapy that, in a perverse twist, was now being applied in a last-gasp attempt to save their stricken bodies. The kids ranged in age from fifteen down to one. At night, their mothers slept beside them on cots. When a dozen of the mothers gathered in the playroom late in the afternoon to speak with me, the mother of one sad-faced, heavyset girl could not stop sobbing. Her daughter, who looked about ten, reached over and stroked her mother's arm to comfort her. This unleashed a deep, aching wail from the mother that drove her from the room. The mother's peers looked on with sympathy, dread, and a couple forced, painful smiles. They knew what the children did not: the doctors expected 75 percent of these children to be dead within five years, and some of them much sooner than that. Not all these children's cancers were necessarily the result of atomic contamination, of course. But the doctors had concluded that some, and perhaps many, were. A study that Mikhail Gorbachev had ordered of the ecological situation in Chelyabinsk (which I will refer to as the Gorbachev report) concluded the same. Nevertheless, for three years in a row Moscow had told the doctors that there were no funds to buy even such basic medical equipment as blood cell separators, which would cut the leukemia ward's death rate significantly. Soviet authorities tried to cover up the Chernobyl accident as well. Just as in Chelyabinsk, doctors were ordered not to diagnose Chernobyl patients as suffering from radiation exposure; the total amount of radiation Chernobyl unleashed was also considered classified. The deception began during the very first moments of the accident, when engineers who reported that reactor number four had suffered a catastrophic meltdown were ignored by the Chernobyl plant's director, who went on to assure Moscow that the situation was under control. (The engineers who investigated the blue-hot remains of the reactor were rewarded for their honesty with lethal doses of radiation that killed them within ten weeks.) The blast had released fifty tons of radioactivity into the sky. Although the fallout drifted across western Europe and eventually was detected as far away as Point Reves, California, the bulk of it contaminated fifty thousand square miles of prime farmland in Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. Five million people were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation, but only 135,000 were evacuated from a so-called exclusion zone that extended in a thirty-kilometer radius from the plant. Food grown in the irradiated areas continued to be consumed as well. In Moscow, some top officials apparently wanted to stonewall the
outside world, but that was impossible. Radiation monitors in Sweden
and elsewhere had registered alarming readings after the blast, and
foreign governments were demanding answers. Gorbachev, who had
announced his policy of glasnost only three months earlier, now had to
live up to it; sixteen days after the accident, he went on television
to admit that Although they could not entirely suppress the truth about Chernobyl,
Soviet authorities did succeed in sowing long-lasting confusion about
the accident's true scope and consequences. They had help, especially
from the pronuclear International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of the
United Nations. The IAEA's report on Chernobyl, published in 1991,
declared that the accident had not caused any physical health problems
for the local population, only psychological ones. Critics pointed out
that the IAEA had reached this astonishing conclusion on the basis of
information provided almost entirely by the Soviet government; among
its most egregious errors, the agency had simply ignored the two
groups of people exposed to the largest doses of radiation — the tens of
thousands of people who had lived within the plant's thirty-kilometer
Nevertheless, the same argument — the danger of radiation is all in
people's heads — resurfaced five years later on the front page of the
New York Times in a story by reporter Michael Specter titled So it was no wonder that the world paid a lot of attention to
Chernobyl. By contrast, while Chelyabinsk had also suffered
grievously, its travails were too little known to attract much
international concern, a fact that exasperated some of its defenders.
Penyagin went on to assert that the Mayak disasters were one hundred times worse than Chernobyl, hyperbole that seemed beside the point. There was quite enough suffering to go around in both Chelyabinsk and Chernobyl without having to pit one against the other. According to the Gorbachev report, Chelyabinsk was the cancer capital of the entire Soviet Union — no small achievement, given the dreadful state of Russia's environment and public health. Again, the Mayak disasters were not the only reason. Chelyabinsk was also a major agricultural area with extensive chemical use, as well as an industrial nerve center with a long military history. The region had produced weapons for Russian leaders since the time of the czars, and it played an especially critical role during World War II. In 1941, after the Germans overran the Soviet Union's western border, the Soviets transferred their entire metallurgy industry — factory by factory, machine by machine — from Ukraine to the relative safety (behind the Urals) of Chelyabinsk. But the factories had not been improved upon since, and the environmental consequences were devastating. Since Chelyabinsk factories had no air purification filters, they had
released some 391,000 tons of pollutants in 1990, giving Chelyabinsk
some of the most polluted air in the Soviet Union. Drinking water also
contained Even the bland bureaucratic language of the Gorbachev report could not
wholly mask the severity of the crisis in Chelyabinsk: I toured one of these zones of ecological tension on my second day in Chelyabinsk. We headed out early in Natalia's creaking, rust-holed Lada, Valodya at the wheel. Leaving the city behind, we passed spacious green cow pastures, golden cornfields swaying in the breeze, and countless stands of the shining white birch trees that dominate the Ural landscape. Once we turned off the main highway, we had to share the road with horse-drawn hay carts and slow down to avoid geese crossing our path. After about an hour, we pulled up to the seven-thousand-hectare Neva state farm, which produced meat, milk, potatoes, and feed corn. We were greeted by Nikolai Chvelev, a squat, energetic man with a farmer's ruddy complexion and an eyewitness's memories of what it felt like to live along the Techa River in the 1950s. Nikolai Chvelev was now the top man at the Neva farm, but in 1954 he was a twenty-one-year-old soldier who had fallen in love with a local girl while stationed in Chelyabinsk. He told me he and his fellow recruits were brought to the Techa one day in 1954 and told not to swim in it. But because they were not told why the river was off limits, and because there did not look to be anything wrong with the water, they sometimes disobeyed these orders, especially on hot summer days. Local people also continued using river water for drinking and cooking. Not until the second disaster, the waste dump explosion in 1957, did people begin to suspect that something was seriously wrong. After a hearty lunch of beef, noodles, and vodka (!) in the Neva communal dining hall, Chvelev and I hopped in his truck and headed for a far corner of the farm, where the Techa flowed past. It was a glorious summer afternoon, breezy and warm, and as we bounced across sun-splashed fields brimming with pink and white wildflowers, all notions of ecological disaster seemed impossibly remote. Radioactivity, after all, cannot be seen, felt, smelled, tasted, or heard; although I knew better, it seemed inconceivable that something so deadly could be lurking amid so much natural beauty. Pulling to a halt a quarter mile from the river, Chvelev estimated
that we were about eighteen miles downstream from the site where
nuclear waste was originally dumped in the Techa. At the truck, the
dosimeter Natalia Miranova had brought registered approximately 25
micro-rontgens, close to the normal background level of 20
micro-rontgens. I hiked ahead with Vlad to scout photo opportunities
while Natalia changed her shoes for the walk to the river. A couple of
minutes later, I heard her behind me calling out numbers from the
dosimeter. As Vlad translated them, they rose steadily the closer
Natalia got to the water: That day, ten times the normal background radiation level seemed very high tome. But the next day I traveled farther downstream, to the village of Muslyumova, and suddenly a reading of 221 seemed tame indeed. Muslyumova lay twenty-two miles downstream from the Mayak complex as the crow flies, fifty miles as the fish swims. On our way there, Valodya pulled the car to a stop about half a mile short of the village, next to a pasture where cows were lazily munching grass in the sun and white geese were splashing in and out of the river. At water's edge, the dosimeter read 445 — twenty times the normal background level. The road into Muslyumova was little more than a dirt path. We stopped on a bluff and looked across the Techa, one hundred feet below, to rows of low, wide houses on the other side of the river. A barbed wire fence, its rusted strands disintegrated into a tangled mess, was strung along the edge of the bluff, a pathetic remnant of the official effort to dissuade residents from going near the river. Peering through the fence, I saw a boy of nine or ten wading into the river from the far bank, fishing rod in hand. Natalia and I walked down to the water's edge. Here along the river's flood plain, nearly all the dosimeter readings were very high-500s and 600s. Natalia held the device over a piece of dried cow dung. The meter shot up to 850, a reflection of the fact that radioactivity becomes more concentrated as it passes through the food chain. We returned to the top of the bluff, where I was surrounded by a group of about twenty local residents, mainly women whose small children darted behind their mothers' skirts to' stare at the man with the notebook who was, they said, the first journalist ever to visit their village. A young woman of about twenty-five emerged as the group's spokesperson. She delivered spirited answers in a calm but authoritative voice and even spoke a little English; it was no surprise to learn she was one of the village schoolteachers. She claimed that the people of Muslyumova were told how dangerous the river was only a year and a half ago and that this warning came not from local authorities, who continued to insist that the villagers could safely remain where they were, but from local environmentalists and a team of visiting foreign scientists. I inquired about the children's health. A man behind me broke in to say that the village had voted recently in favor of evacuation, but the government had refused to help. Tests last spring, he added, had shown that half the local livestock had leukemia, since they still drank from the river. The teacher explained that a well had been dug two years ago to supply the villagers with drinking water, but it did not provide enough for the livestock as well. She shrugged. As deadly as the Techa River was, it did not pose the greatest
immediate environmental danger in Chelyabinsk. There was a place
inside the Mayak complex where an adult male could die from radiation
in less time than it takes to read a morning newspaper. If he stood on
the shore of Lake Karachay, next to the pipe that had poured hundreds
of millions of gallons of nuclear waste into the lake since 1953, he
would encounter a Since 1951, Lake Karachay had accumulated an awesome 120 million curies worth of radioactivity and absorbed nearly one hundred times more strontium 90 and cesium 137 than was released at Chernobyl. Moreover, although Mayak officials had assumed that waste dumped in the lake would be isolated from the regional water system, this had not proven to be the case. Dr. Cochran's team documented that 93 percent of the radioactivity in the lake had filtered down into the soil beneath, and 60 percent of it had reached the underlying water table. From there, it had already migrated half a mile away from the lake. The danger was not only that Lake Karachay's radioactivity would infect the water table through groundwater migration; there was also a danger that the lake would be struck by another natural disaster like the cyclone that caused the 1967 incident. Despite years of decay, the radioactivity remaining in Lake Karachay amounted to seven Chernobyls' worth of strontium 90 and cesium 137. Thus, another cyclone could bring nightmarish results. And the risk was real. Driving back to town one afternoon, Natalia and I came upon an entire grove of flattened birch trees, their splintered trunks a stark testament to the power of local windstorms. In addition, running beneath the Mayak complex were a number of geological fault lines, which could flush irradiated water across hundreds of miles via underground channels during an earthquake. I wanted to see Lake Karachay for myself, but the Mayak authorities refused to allow me inside the complex. Back in Moscow, Alexander Penyagin, the people's deputy for Chelyabinsk, had secured a promise during a long-distance phone conversation with the Mayak director, Mikhail Fitisov, that I would be able to visit the site. That promise evaporated, however, when Fitisov refused to return my calls in Chelyabinsk. Instead, I had to be satisfied with an interview with Eugene Ryzkhov, who had worked at Mayak for thirty-five years, mainly as an engineer, before joining the public' affairs department a few years ago. Ryzkhov lived up to the stereotype of press flaks the world over: unctuous smile, slippery claims, unswerving devotion to the official line. He blamed the shutdown of Mayak's five production reactors on the political fallout of the Chernobyl accident, denied that residents of the Techa River area ran a significantly higher risk of getting cancer,
and ridiculed as The doctors at the Institute for Biophysics in Chelyabinsk were more
troubled by their participation in the Mayak cover-up. Perhaps seeking
to exorcise their guilt, Mira Kossenko and her colleagues Marina
Degteva and N. A. Petushova had authored a study that is now regarded
as one of the definitive analyses of the health effects of the Mayak
nuclear disasters. After guiding me through the intricacies of their
research, Kossenko and Degteva took me on a tour of their hospital,
where patients were housed four to a room on plain single beds. There
were none of the tubes, monitors, and other apparatuses that clutter
Western hospital rooms, and my escorts were clearly embarrassed to
show me lab equipment that, even to my untrained eyes, looked
remarkably out of date. Dr. Kossenko explained that the hospital had
always been underfunded. 'The recitation of this history led me to suggest to the two doctors
that, until 1989, their institute had engaged in rampant medical
deception of the very people it was supposed to be healing. I worried
for a moment that my bluntness had insulted them. Dr. Degteva shifted
some papers on her desk, then lifted her gaze and looked me in the
eye. Located in a remote area of Washington State, in the northwest corner of the United States, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation was constructed during World War 11 to build the world's first nuclear weapon. And Dr. Degteva was right. The parallels between what happened in Chelyabinsk over the years and what happened at Hanford are nothing short of eerie. In Hanford, too, the immediate postwar climate fostered a mentality in
which production took precedence over safety. And so, in 1945, Hanford
officials released 340,000 curies worth of radioactive gases into the
atmosphere, without warning the local populace, apparently because it
was the simplest way to get rid of the waste. Later, Hanford officials
also elected to pour nuclear waste directly into the nearest waterway.
As a result, the mighty Columbia became the most polluted river in the
United States. Soil was also contaminated. According to the Brookings
Institution study, Atomic Audit, Nor were Hanford officials any more forthcoming about the risks of their secret actions than their counterparts at Mayak were. The 1945 venting of gases was not made public until 1986, when environmentalists near Hanford forced the release of nineteen thousand pages of official documents. By then, the Hanford complex had also discharged approximately eight trillion liters of low-level liquid radioactive waste directly into the soil, making the complex arguably the most polluted site in the United States. The Hanford experience was not an aberration. The U.S. government
knowingly understated the health and ecological risks of nuclear
weapons production throughout the Cold War. In the 1950s, the
government assured the public that nuclear testing in the Pacific
posed no more health dangers than a chest X ray. The crew of a
Japanese fishing boat found out differently when they encountered a
radioactive cloud from one of the tests and immediately fell ill; one
crew member died before reaching home port two weeks later. Residents
of Utah and Nevada were likewise told The government also used citizens as guinea pigs to test the effects
of nuclear weapons. In an episode that U.S. Secretary of Energy Hazel
O'Leary, in 1993, likened to the Nazi experiments of World War 11,
approximately 250 experiments were conducted in the United States
between 1944 and 1973 on an estimated one hundred thousand
individuals, including hospital patients who were injected with
plutonium and pregnant women who were given radioactive pills.
Thousands of American soldiers were ordered to march through the
mushroom clouds of atomic test blasts. Not until 1988 did the U.S.
Congress grant these In short, the U.S. and Soviet experiences with atomic energy during
the Cold War were often more alike than not. Secrecy and cutting
corners in one country were used to justify secrecy and cutting
corners in the other. Each nuclear establishment acted like a state
within a state whose officials sometimes seemed to have more in common
with their adversaries than with their fellow countrymen and women.
The two nuclear establishments even used the same vocabularies, as
when U.S. military planners recommended creating The starkest example of this shared mind-set was the cloak of secrecy
the CIA and KGB draped over the second Mayak disaster, the 1957 waste
dump explosion. For twenty years, the two intelligence agencies
declined to inform the rest of the world about an accident of
cataclysmic scope and consequence, even though this meant, for the
CIA, foregoing the chance to score points in its propaganda campaign
against the Secrecy and sacrificing innocents are part of most wars, but they took
on new meaning during the Cold War because of the unique nature of
nuclear technology. During World War II. a lapse in security might
have endangered a given infantry unit or tactical maneuver. But during
the Cold War, any such lapse could endanger the entire country, for
the arms race led both superpowers to accumulate enough firepower to
destroy each other many times over. As Soviet premier Nikita
Khrushchev remarked in 1962, any additional weapons would Robert Oppenheimer compared the taming of the atom to man's fall from
grace in the Garden of Eden. The creators of the bomb had Talk about playing the sorcerer's apprentice! Few of the early nuclear champions realized how little then actually knew about this technology, which, after all, had been developed very rapidly under wartime conditions. Their ignorance proved costly; the old rule of thumb about the commensurate costs and benefits of a revolutionary new technology was soon validated once again. Nuclear fission represented the greatest power humans had ever tapped, but the associated costs and challenges were no less monumental. The embrace of atomic energy not only threatened the end of human civilization, it condemned humanity to environmental and health injuries that would take decades if not centuries to heal, and it saddled us with waste disposal responsibilities that for all intents and purposes will last forever. The damages at the Hanford and Mayak facilities only begin to tell
the story. There are hundreds of sites around the world where aspects
of nuclear weapons production have been undertaken, from uranium
mining to plutonium reprocessing to weapons testing to waste storage.
At virtually all these sites, the soil and water have been polluted
and human health compromised, often severely. The most reliable and
comprehensive account of the damage is found in Nuclear Wastelands, a
handbook compiled under the auspices of International Physicians for
the Prevention of Nuclear War, whose work was awarded the Nobel Peace
Prize in 1985. The precise number of casualties attributable to nuclear weapons production is impossible to determine, not least because the official secrecy, deception, and disregard of individuals' welfare practiced at Mayak and Hanford has long been the norm at nuclear facilities the world over. Even in the United States, whose laws give citizens considerable freedom to uncover official wrongdoing, much remains unknown. For example, only in 1997 did government health officials announce that nuclear blasts at the Nevada test site near Las Vegas in the 1950s had caused between ten thousand and seventy-five thousand thyroid cancers, mainly among children. Many of these cancers might have been avoided had the military located its test site on the Atlantic coast, where prevailing winds would have swept the fallout over the ocean. But the Nevada site was chosen because it was more convenient and secret — the military already owned it. The United States and the other nuclear states conducted approximately nineteen hundred nuclear weapons tests between 1945 and 1990, an average of one test per week. The 518 tests that were conducted in the atmosphere are calculated to cause 2.4 million cancer deaths worldwide beginning in 1949. (Nearly half a million of those deaths would occur before the year 2000.) The Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 reduced the damage by moving tests underground (a precaution France and China ignored until 1974 and 1980, respectively). But even underground tests posed enormous hazards. After all, nuclear test sites amounted to unlicensed nuclear waste dumps, and poor ones at that, since their ability to contain radioactivity had been compromised by the force of the blasts themselves. One nuclear disaster zone is found at the top of the Kola Peninsula in northwestern Russia, near the border with Norway and Finland. The harbors of Kola were home to the Soviet Union's Northern Fleet during the Cold War and now contain enough radioactive materials to rival Chelyabinsk. For decades, Soviet authorities treated the sea surrounding Kola as a waste dump, casting used submarine reactors, spent fuel, and other nuclear debris into one of the world's richest fishing areas. By 1991, when the dumping stopped, the waters contained two-thirds of all the nuclear waste ever dumped into the world's oceans. Seventy nuclear submarines on Kola still await decommissioning, each containing large amounts of enriched uranium. Thousands of spent fuel rods in corroded containers likewise continue to leak radioactive pollution into the sea. But at least no nuclear warheads were compromised at the Kola
Peninsula (as far as we know). In 1986, a Soviet submarine sank off
the coast of Bermuda while carrying sixteen nuclear missiles and
thirty-four warheads. Future accidents, either in Russia or the United States, can by no
means be ruled out. An internal report by the U.S. Energy Department's
nuclear safety director warned in 1993 that there was a Cleaning up the environmental mess left behind by nuclear weapons
production will be a long, difficult, extremely expensive job. In the
United States alone, the Department of Energy expects the job to take
another seventy-five years and cost $200 billion. A study by Stephen
I. Schwartz of the Brookings Institution estimates the cost at $365.1
billion. Because the crisis is so much more dire in the former Soviet
Union — more ecosystems were more severely polluted there — the job
will cost much more and take far longer to complete there. As the episodes recounted in this chapter show, nuclear waste has been an Achilles' heel since the earliest days of nuclear production. It was always considered tomorrow's problem, something to deal with after more urgent tasks-producing a bomb, catching up in the arms race, introducing nuclear-generated electricity had been achieved. Finding a solution to the waste disposal problem is complicated by the fact that many radionuclides — most important, plutonium — are not only extremely toxic but have half-lives of thousands of years; thus, they must be isolated from ecosystems and human contact for a period of time equal to the known length of human civilization. And the amount of waste that must be managed is huge and growing. To date, humans have produced some seventy thousand nuclear weapons. The consequent waste products include an estimated four hundred thousand metric tons of depleted uranium, three billion curies of high-level plutonium-related waste, and one hundred to two hundred million metric tons of uranium mill refuse. Ironically, these figures will increase as post-Cold War disarmament proceeds and more and more nuclear weapons are dismantled. Of course, civilian power reactors also produce nuclear waste. In fact, 95 percent of the waste now in existence (if measured by radioactivity rather than mere volume came from commercial nuclear power stations. Devising an acceptable method of waste storage has been a major logistical problem for both the civilian and military wings of the nuclear industry. In the United States, the government finally approved an underground repository for military waste in 1998. Despite opposition from environmentalists, the Energy Department plans to bury some five million cubic feet of radioactive debris 2,150 feet below the desert near Carlsbad, New Mexico, in a complex called the Waste Isolation Pilot Project. But no such remedy is in sight for the waste generated by nuclear power stations. As a result, some electric utility companies may have to shut down their nuclear reactors earlier than expected because they are running out of room to store the waste they produce. For years, the civilian industry has been pushing the federal government simply to declare victory over the problem and open a permanent nuclear waste disposal facility. The industry has pinned its hopes on a government project to build a storage facility deep within Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Unfortunately, it turns out that Yucca Mountain sits above thirty-two active geological faults. Government scientists have also discovered that rainwater leaks from the top of the mountain into its core, raising the danger that any nuclear waste stored there would eventually reach the larger ecosystem. Such uncertainties have delayed the opening of a permanent disposal facility, originally scheduled for 1998, until well into the twenty-first century. Ten-thousand-year time spans may humble those impressed by the fragility of human institutions and the limits of our vision, but nuclear industry officials are undaunted; they have long been confident that they can isolate their waste products from the environment for as long as necessary. After the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania in 1979, I interviewed scores of these men for my book Nuclear Inc.: The Men and Money Behind Nuclear Energy. Even then, the lack of a solution to the waste problem was threatening the industry's prospects, and I frequently asked its leaders how they planned to overcome the obstacle. John West, vice president of reactor manufacturer Combustion Engineering's nuclear division, told me that the real trouble was not that there was no solution to nuclear waste but that there were too many solutions and the dithering federal government, as usual, could not make up its mind which one was the best. And if the industry's certainty about nuclear waste storage turned out
to be wrong, so what? And the nuclear industry wonders why people don't trust it. Yet, there is cause for hope. This book would have struck a decidedly
gloomier tone were it not for the remarkable breakthroughs in nuclear
weapons negotiations that have occurred in recent years — not just
the cutbacks agreed to by the United States and the former Soviet
Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s but also the Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty signed by 158 countries in 1996. Since nuclear weapons
cannot be reliably deployed without first testing them, an effective
test ban would block new weapons development and a return to the arms
race. There is even talk of abolishing nuclear weapons altogether, a
cause being championed by some of the very men who used to have their
fingers on the nuclear trigger, including Gen. Charles A. Horner,
leader of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, which protects
the United States and Canada from nuclear attack. Nuclear war is the ultimate environmental danger, the single greatest threat to continued habitation of the planet, and for decades it looked like humanity was heading for it as surely as a heat-seeking missile locked on to its target. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 was the most serious flashpoint, but there were at least eleven other occasions when the United States threatened to use nuclear weapons, including during the Vietnam war in 1969 and 1972 and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. (How many times the Soviets and other nuclear states made similar threats is not publicly known. And the superpowers were not the only loose cannons. In May 1990, war nearly broke out between India and Pakistan during a quarrel over a disputed border region. U.S. officials monitoring the conflict termed it an even more dangerous episode than the Cuban Missile Crisis. The risk of global nuclear war seemed especially great in the early
1980s. Both superpowers were feverishly expanding arsenals that
already bulged with overkill capacity. In the United States, Reagan
administration officials spoke openly about fighting and winning a
nuclear war. Soviets as well, and among strategists on both sides brinksmanship was the order of the day. When the Soviets insisted on deploying SS-20 missiles, the United States and its NAT() allies contended that this justified their own deployment of new cruise and Pershing missiles. It was bad enough that both superpowers' arsenals boasted ever larger numbers of ever more powerful weapons. But the more worrisome trend was the sharp decline in battlefield reaction time. Cruise and Pershing missiles could strike targets within six minutes of launch. That left opposing military commanders precious little time to decide whether what they saw on radar screens was a genuine attack that had to be countered or a mere computer error to be ignored. With the hair trigger stretched so taut and U.S.-Soviet relations so
embittered, the outbreak of nuclear war, whether by accident or
design, was a real and present danger. Political activists capitalized
on popular fear to catalyze massive public opposition to the arms
race. Millions of people marched through the streets of Western
European capitals in the spring and summer of 1981 to demand a
nuclear-free Europe. In June 1982, nearly a million demonstrators
filled New York's Central Park as part of a national movement to
But there was no substantive shift in official policies until Mikhail
Gorbachev became Soviet general secretary in March 1985 and began
making one unilateral concession after another. That July, he
announced an eighteen-month moratorium on Soviet nuclear weapons
testing, which he later extended three times. In January 1986, the
Soviet leader announced a plan to rid the world of nuclear weapons
entirely by 2000. The Reagan administration repeatedly rejected
Gorbachev's initiatives, calling them No such foot-dragging was possible when Gorbachev, however, later
accepted the Americans' long-standing call for the withdrawal of all
Euromissiles from Europe. The result was the Intermediate-Range
Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty of 1987. The treaty obliged the Soviets
to eliminate far more weapons than the Americans would, but Gorbachev
accepted the imbalance, explaining that If the INF Treaty marked humanity's first step back from the nuclear abyss, the second came in 1991, when the two superpowers signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START. By then, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Gorbachev's calm acceptance of the end of the Warsaw Pact military alliance, and his demobilization of hundreds of thousands of Soviet ground troops had proven to all but the most intransigent Cold Warriors that a fundamentally new era had begun. START was lauded as the first nuclear treaty that would actually reduce arsenals rather than manage their continued growth. There was less to START than met the eye, however. During the nine years it had taken to negotiate the treaty, the superpowers' arsenals had grown by about the same number of weapons as START would eliminate. START thus turned out to be a classic case of running to stand still; it merely maintained the nuclear status quo. The momentum of the arms race was not decisively reversed until the START 11 Treaty was signed in 1993. Under the terms of START 11, each nation had to reduce long-range nuclear warheads to approximately thirty-five hundred-about one-third as many as each had had in the late 1980s—by 2003. For the first time in more than four decades, the United States and the former Soviet Union would be dismantling more nuclear weapons than they were building. To reverse the drill for death known as the nuclear arms race was a genuinely historic achievement, a stirring victory for humanity and its future. There were many lessons in the victory, but perhaps the most basic was never to give up hope. At certain moments in history, despite the darkest of outlooks, conditions can change enormously,' and all but overnight—a heartening reminder as one ponders how to defuse the more gradual environmental crises that cloud humans' future. No sooner had the nuclear hair trigger relaxed, however, than a bland complacency overcame many citizens and policymakers. Few seemed to appreciate how close they had come to catastrophe, how lucky humanity had been to dodge the nuclear bullet, or how much further they still had to go to secure a truly safe world. After all, what if Gorbachev had not come to power and launched his unilateral initiatives'. Amid the self-congratulations and relief that followed the Cold War, the nuclear arms race and the era it had defined were regarded as a sort of bad dream, best forgotten amid the cheer and possibility of the new morning. Some of the men who labored inside the nuclear system knew better.
George Lee Butler, a retired U.S. Air Force general who directed the
Strategic Air Command from 1992 to 1994, warned that humanity was in
danger of lurching The generals may not have known it at the time, but the world had come
distressingly close to an accidental nuclear war just two years
earlier, long after the end of the Cold War had supposedly turned
Americans and Russians into trusting friends. On January 25, 1995, the
Russian military confused a scientific research rocket launched from
the Norwegian Arctic island of Ando/ya for a NATO missile, even though
Russia had been warned in advance of the launch. Calling the episode
The size of the remaining arsenals makes accidental war a grave hazard. Presidents Yeltsin and Clinton agreed in principle in 1997 that a START III treaty would reduce long-range missiles to no more than twenty-five hundred apiece by 2007, but there was a big catch. START III could not be negotiated until the Russian parliament ratified START II, which was no sure thing. Even before NATO's decision in 1997 to expand eastward into Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, a move despised by Russians of virtually all political stripes, ratification of START II had been blocked by communist and nationalist deputies who resented what they saw as America's high-handed ways in the aftermath of the Cold War. But the Americans had little room to criticize Russian foot-dragging; the U.S. Senate had not gotten around to ratifying START 11 until 1996. And even under START II, both Russia and the United States would still wield more than enough firepower to obliterate human civilization. The political and economic turbulence in Russia gave rise to perhaps
the most harrowing nuclear hazard of the post-Cold War world: the
so-called loose nukes problem. How to keep nuclear weapons and
materials from falling into the It takes about fifteen pounds of plutonium to make a Hiroshima-strength bomb. There were four hundred thousand pounds of plutonium lying around in the former Soviet Union in 1991, plus 2.4 million pounds of enriched uranium. Often this material was poorly guarded. In 1996, U.S. government investigators were able to wander into the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow without even showing identification. There, they discovered a cache of nuclear materials guarded by a single unarmed policeman. In a land where organized crime now made a mockery of the rule of law, such laxness courted disaster. In June 1997, U.S. agents posing as drug traffickers arrested two Lithuanian smugglers in Miami who promised to sell them surface-to-air missiles and tactical nuclear weapons, and the smugglers proved they could deliver on the deal. In his 1996 book, Avoiding Nuclear Anarchy, Harvard professor Graham Allison documented six cases in which stolen nuclear materials were smuggled out of Russia before foreign security forces intercepted them. How many smugglers have gone undetected is, of course, not known. Imagine the horror if the terrorists behind the Oklahoma City bombing
of 1995 (or the recurring bombings in the Middle East, Northern
Ireland, and other global hot spots) had relied on nuclear rather than
conventional explosives. Professor Allison is convinced such a tragedy
is only a matter of time, and he is not alone. Theodore Taylor, a
former nuclear weapons designer at the U.S. Los Alamos National
Laboratory, told the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1995 that
the proper setting of its minutes-to-nuclear-midnight clock depended
on what definition of The collapse of the Russian economy magnifies the peril, for it is not
just theft of nuclear materials by outsiders that poses a danger; an
inside job, by workers impoverished and disgruntled after months
without wages, would have the same effect. In the years since the
dissolution of the Soviet Union, more and more of its people have been
reduced to penury and desperation. The shock transition to capitalism
implemented by President Yeltsin at the insistence of the
International Monetary Fund and Western governments has caused
industrial production to fall nearly 50 percent, while driving a
quarter of the population below the official poverty line. Some Russians responded to their situation with sardonic humor: Humanity has made extraordinary progress against the threat of nuclear destruction in recent years. The reversal of the U.S.-Soviet arms race so unexpected for so many years-is the most encouraging political development of our time. But there is still a long way to go before we are out of the nuclear woods. The greatest immediate danger arises from the hair-trigger status of
the approximately ten thousand nuclear warheads that remain in each of
the American and Russian arsenals. To lower the risk of accidental
war, Russia and the United States could revamp their nuclear doctrines
by taking their forces off Above all, Russia and the United States must make clear by both word
and deed their commitment to the eventual abolition of nuclear
weapons. This applies especially to the United States, the world's
sole remaining superpower. Unfortunately, American policymakers show
few signs of embracing this goal. Although President Clinton has
signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, Congress has yet to ratify
it. More disturbing, the Department of Energy has continued to conduct
so-called India in particular has accused the United States of hypocrisy for
urging nuclear have-not nations to remain that way while the United
States refuses to agree to a specific timetable for nuclear
disarmament. This was India's rationale for not signing the test ban
treaty, and it was trotted out again in May 1998, when India carried
out five underground nuclear weapons tests, including one test of a
The nuclear era of human history is only beginning. If traveling in Africa teaches one to look to the deep past before gauging our species's environmental prospects, traveling to Chelyabinsk shows that imagining the distant future the world our offspring may one day inherit-is no less important. The Cold War may be over, but the plutonium it left behind, and the knowledge of how to use it, will last forever. Nearly 80 percent of the 2.4 million cancer deaths expected to result from atmospheric nuclear testing will occur after the year 2000. Vast swaths of land, including the areas around the Chernobyl and Mayak nuclear complexes, will be uninhabitable for centuries. An enormous quantity of nuclear waste will remain so radioactive it must be insulated from human contact for millennia. Contrary to the assurances of nuclear power executives, humans have yet to discover whether this can be accomplished. Meanwhile, existing stocks of plutonium remain susceptible to weapons diversion, yet both civilian and military plutonium production continues. The nuclear danger will persist and intensify until the so-called
plutonium economy of nuclear weapons and power production is
dismantled, according to Arjun Makhijani. The last step may be the most controversial, for it has important economic implications. It means not only closing weapons production plants but also prohibiting plutonium use in civilian power reactors; such a move would limit the role of nuclear energy as a major energy source in the twenty-first century. France closed its Super-Phoenix plutonium breeder reactor, which accounted for 50 percent of the world's breeder capacity, in 1998. Japan, another great champion of civilian plutonium use, is rethinking its program after serious accidents at the Monju breeder plant in 1995 and the Tokai reprocessing facility in 1997. Nevertheless, the global nuclear industry has not given up its dream of a plutonium-fueled future, and it still has plenty of political muscle, as its post-Chernobyl behavior demonstrates. It seems incredible, but there are fifteen nuclear power reactors
still in operation in the former Soviet bloc that are at least as
dangerous as the reactor that exploded at Chernobyl in 1986. The
plants lack not only emergency core cooling systems, which can head
off a reactor meltdown, but containment vessels, which, in the event
of a meltdown, are supposed to keep any fallout from reaching the
atmosphere. These and many other inadequacies led the United States
and other Western nations to press for these reactors to be shut down;
in 1990, economic aid was pledged toward that end. But Russia refused to shut
the plants, claiming that their electricity was irreplaceable. The West
relented to Russia's insistence, which apparently stemmed more from the
ambitions for the Russian nuclear program than any shortages of electricity.
The unsafe plants could, in fact, be closed without disrupting local
economies, according to William Chandler of the U.S. Department of Energy:
But instead of pressing to close the unsafe plants, Western governments are underwriting training programs and other marginal efforts to upgrade their safety, as much as that is possible without adding emergency cooling systems and containment vessels, a technical and financial impossibility. The winners under this deal are the Russian nuclear ministry, along with Westinghouse, Mitsubishi, Electricite de France, and the other nuclear companies gobbling up the Western subsidies. The losers big surprise are the people who live near these plants, which, as Chernobyl demonstrated, means people throughout the European continent. Did Chernobyl teach us nothing? Even in the aftermath of the worst nuclear power accident in history, commercial pressures are allowed to mock public safety. Meanwhile, Chelyabinsk is offered but a pittance to clean up its mess and forestall the accident-in-waiting at Lake Karachay. In effect, it is being written off, by both the West and the Russian government, as a sacrifice zone, a place too polluted to ever be salvaged. Some people in Chelyabinsk suspected all along that this would be
their fate. I remember saying good-bye to Valodya, the Tartar who had
cheerfully driven Natalia Miranova and me around Chelyabinsk. Valodya
had been fascinated by the idea of my global journey — to travel
around the world as one's job seemed incredible to him. Hands clasped,
we were saying our farewells when Valodya asked earnestly whether I
would ever return to Chelyabinsk. I tried to deflect the question,
noting that I had many other countries I had to visit first. Yes, he
persisted, but if you could come back, would you want to? I didn't
want to lie, but I couldn't tell the truth. I looked at the ground in
silence. Sensing my embarrassment, Valodya clapped me on the shoulder
and said, |
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