The Concrete Coffin

Soviet workmen are trying to seal the twisted uranium-packed fuel rods of reactor 4 at Chernobyl in a concrete coffin. If it works, their coffin will stand in splendid desolation for centuries, too hot to handle, a monument to the nuclear age just as Stonehenge is to the age of the first crude ax.

Now that the war of words between Washington and Moscow over the shattered plant is cooling down, it becomes clear, too, that the concrete blob will also serve as a monument to heroic human efforts to cope with the worst nuclear power accident in history on a scale of any epic poem.

Firemen stood their ground after the first explosion, fighting flames ten stories tall, until the asphalt melted under their boots. Helicopter crews buzzed the huge metal reactor that must, at some point, have been white hot to smother it in sandbags. Divers plunged into radioactive water around the plant to divert it away from a nearby reservoir. A physicist probably would add to that list the coffin-makers themselves, who are only beginning to seal the reactor core away. “In theory, it is a straightforward matter,” said Linn Draper, president of the American Physical Society. “In reality, it is a highly difficult undertaking.”

Soviet General Secretary Mikhail S. Gorbachev told his people in his first public statement on Chernobyl Wednesday that “the worst is over.” That apparently is true as far as radioactive leakage is concerned. But not for 28 victims who were on duty at Chernobyl and were hit with a direct blast of radiation. Dr. Robert Peter Gale of UCLA and an international team of specialists in bone-marrow transplants are working in “battlefield” conditions to save them, calling in tissue from around the world.

And as Canadian scientist Rosalie Bertell said in Washington Wednesday, “We’re looking at many years of suffering” and of “slow and painful deaths.” A doctor talked of an epidemic of leukemia that might come in three years and of cancers that might appear in eight.

The monument might also mark a step toward a more open approach by the Soviet government in providing information to the West and to its own people. The details of the Chernobyl disaster were slow in coming from Moscow, but that they came at all in the dimensions of horror that finally emerged is an incredible improvement over the Soviet treatment of past disasters. Whether the flow of information is a fleeting thing will depend in part on how Gorbachev fares in the months ahead if the calculations of coming tragedy are accurate. He now holds the top job in a society that is held together by a pact, almost feudal in concept, in which the rulers take care of the ruled. How Soviet citizens will regard the status of their pact will be more important to Gorbachev than what the rest of the world thinks.

Whether the door stays open also will depend on whether the West takes account of the human aspects of the tragedy or whether it continues to treat it as just another political photo opportunity in the East-West conflict.

Washington muttered all of the proper condolences at the outset. But it also muttered that President Reagan’s tough radio speech the week after Chernobyl exploded was made because the Soviets were so vulnerable he couldn’t pass up the chance to get in another dig.

If that continues, then the concrete coffin at Chernobyl will stand also as a monument to a triumph of ideology over sheer tragedy. The world has too many monuments like that already.