EASTERN ENERGY AND THE TWO CHERNOBYLS

In answer to the numerous letters asking what I think about Eastern Europe, I am very hopeful about the Soviet colonies getting some measure of independence, but pessimistic about the USSR itself, where I believe the hardliners will kick out Gorbachev as soon as the economy and the political upheaval get sufficiently out of control to let them take over in the light of national saviors.

One of the reasons why the colonies will still be tied to the USSR for some time is energy. With their economies, environment and work ethic devastated by Communism, the colonies are in no shape to trade their shoddy products with the West at a profit. What they used to do with them was trade them for Soviet oil, gas, nuclear fuel (on which the USSR has a monopoly and the colonies have to turn in one used fuel rod for each new one), and recordings of Brezhnev's speeches. They don't need the speeches any more, but .

Glasnost has led to amazing revelations, e.g. that Robert Conquest's estimate of about 25 million killed by Stalin is right, and in the fields of history and political science many Soviet sources are now more credible than the Harvard-Princeton charlatans and apologists who not so long ago derided reports of Soviet terror as "right-wing exaggerations."

Something similar is happening in science and technology. One of my daily pleasant shocks was seeing Izvestiya of 11/13/89 with a review of J. Oberg's Uncovering Soviet Disasters, and a very good one, too. Oberg's outstanding book [AtE Apr 88] reveals details of a large number of disasters carefully covered up by the Soviets in the pre-glasnost era.

The Soviet government has also recently published a book Chernobyl:

Events and Lessons (so far only in Russian), formulated as questions and answers, with a very brief preface by Gorbachev himself. In my judgment it is 97% honest. It loses 3% on pointing to "disasters" in other countries, such as Windscale, Idaho Falls (a small research reactor), Fermi, and some others, as if they were comparable with Chernobyl. However, the authors were honest enough not to include TMI, and their mention of the sensationalist lies printed by Time and Newsweek is remarkably restrained. For the rest the book seems completely honest without any apparent traces of cover-up. It does not, for example, evade the question of the fundamentally flawed design of the RBMK reactors and admits that they have positive reactivity (i.e. inherent instability).

I hope, probably in vain, that the book will be given the credence it deserves in the USSR and its former colonies. Not surprisingly, the serfs believed that everything the oppressors told them was a lie, and that everything coming from the West was the gospel truth. Hence the dissidents, such as the truly heroic Czech "Charter 77' have always been antinuclear. (Its founder Vaclav Havel is an un-usually intelligent man and on this point he said some years ago that he does not fear the physical dangers of nuclear energy, but the power it gives to a government that unrestrictedly controls it.)

But while this attitude by blindfolded serfs is understandable, it was reckless and scandalous for the Wall Street J. to print an article by such an ex-serf on technical matters. "The Poisoned Ukraine" by a Ukrainian novelist (novelist!) on 12/12/89 might as well have been written by Sternglass and was technical garbage from beginning to end; for example, we are told that the lifetime safe limit of radiation is 35 rem. (Under the overly cautious US regulations, nuclear workers accumulate this dose in 7 years.)

If a lazy, ignorant or incompetent editor would not take the word of US experts to have the article checked, he could have inquired what the late A.S. Sakharov had to say about the matter. Or he could easily have located an expert among Soviet dissidents, which, glory be, is no longer a problem.