Ten Times Worse Than Hiroshima : THE TRUTH ABOUT CHERNOBYL <i> By Grigori Medvedev</i> , <i> foreword by Andrei Sakharov (Basic Books: $22.95; 274 pp.) </i>

When the Chernobyl power station exploded on April 26, 1986, the official in charge of nuclear power at the Central Committee of the Communist Party in Moscow was one Vladimir Marin. Two days after the explosion, this most powerful of all Soviet “experts” was inspecting the damage close to the reactor without any respirator or protective clothing. In pure frustration at the threat to his career, Marin kicked a piece of rubble. It was graphite from the reactor core, and blasting out something between 2,000 and 20,000 roentgens an hour. Like the communist system he represented, Marin began to die slowly and in humiliating pain.

Having been assured by lesser “responsible officials” that the reactor was intact, Marin had no idea what the graphite was, nor what its radiation would do to him. Marin was the man who rejected the first suggestions to evacuate the local townsfolk, and blocked the proposal that all similar nuclear reactors be closed down. We can hardly blame him. The entire chain of command of Party hacks and semi-competent bureaucrats promoted to run Chernobyl by the various Soviet ministries simply refused to believe the reactor could possibly have exploded--even though brave men had doomed themselves to a dreadful death by going to see the raging core with their own eyes.

We had all begun to forget about Chernobyl, even though the recent reminder of the uncertainties around the oil supplies from the Persian Gulf has been prodding the West’s nuclear-power industry back into life. Our family had begun to forget, although I covered the disaster as a Moscow correspondent and we checked our food with a Geiger counter for months thereafter.

But now comes this book by Grigori Medvedev, which almost explodes in the reader’s hands. We never will forget about nuclear power again. The day after Chernobyl exploded, but before anyone knew about it, my wife and children flew from Moscow to London for a holiday. The flight path went right through the Chernobyl plume. From Medvedev’s book, I now know that Aeroflot was decontaminating its own planes that took that route. But they did not bother to tell British Airways.

There is something nightmarish about the very plainness of this account, by the prosaic Soviet technician assigned to investigate the worst nuclear accident the world has known. Medvedev was given the authority to probe everywhere, to wander through the makeshift offices where the cream of the Soviet scientific establishment was grappling with a reactor that was raging out of control.

He walked in on Yevgeny Velikhov, Gorbachev’s main science adviser, and the man that the Pentagon says is in charge of the secret Soviet Star Wars program:

“The Chernobyl explosion was worse than any other nuclear explosion,” said an exhausted Velikhov. “Worse than Hiroshima. That was only one bomb, whereas here the amount of radioactive substances released was ten times greater, plus half a ton of plutonium.” Velikhov was pale and wan from the radiation dose he already had suffered, and baffled at the ignorant arrogance of the Chernobyl managers who had switched off all the emergency control systems to run a fatuous experiment in how long the reactor would deliver power after being closed down.

We learn about the nuclear tan, which burned the worst victims so badly that their wives marveled that they looked like black men before they died. The deaths went on. Squads of soldiers were assigned to pick up those chunks of graphite and reactor core with shovels and buckets because there was simply nothing else available. “You poor people,” muttered Medvedev. “You are now gathering the terrible harvest of twenty years of stagnation. Whatever happened to the millions of rubles assigned by the state to the development of robots and remote-controlled manipulators?”

We learn about the nuclear pallor. A blast of about 100 roentgens sent the capillaries into spasm and squeezed the blood from the skin. A Soviet nuclear-power worker was supposed to get no more than five roentgens a year. Everyone who lived in the city of Kiev, 100 miles to the south and upwind from the explosion, got seven roentgens in the first three days after the explosion. Medvedev reports this bluntly, without drawing the obvious conclusion, that simply living in Kiev for a week, a month, for the whole poisoned summer, must already be spawning a dreadful breed of cancers across the hapless people of the Ukraine and Byelorussia.

There are moments of pure Tolstoy, when we seem in the grip of some obsessive Russian novel. Our narrator meets a pretty young girl who has volunteered to come to Chernobyl and help the cleanup. She is picking fresh cherry blossoms, and inhaling the scent, and he jokes that she has come to find suitors among the thousands of young men conscripted to the cleanup. No, she says, she has come to help. He gathers his own flowers, and goes strolling through the ghost town. And then a dosimetrist checks him and he throws away the blossoms when they are found to be registering 20 roentgens an hour.

The first of the dead were so radioactive that they had to be buried in lead coffins that were soldered shut. An ordinary wooden coffin would have let the radiation seep into the water table. The corpses gave off so much radiation that the Moscow mortician who put them into the coffins suffered nuclear burns, that distinctive tan again, across his belly.

Medvedev already had suffered radiation poisoning, in one of the many nuclear accidents the Soviet system never told anybody about, even before he became deputy chief engineer at Chernobyl in the 1970s. He knew all the technicians, the bureaucrats and Party hacks, and he knew the flawed relationship between men and technology that made something like Chernobyl inevitable. He is the perfect Dante to guide us into this nuclear Inferno. He knows all the secrets and the science and is awed by none of them; it is the terrible human folly and the awesome human courage that stun him.

“One of the firefighters climbed onto the roof of V block, at level +70 (230 feet),” one of the eyewitnesses told Medvedev. “He must have been checking on the reactor and coordinating the work of his comrades on the roof of the turbine hall, 100 feet below him. Now, some time later, I realize that he was the first person in the history of mankind to be exposed to that kind of danger. Even in Hiroshima there was no one who got that close to the nuclear explosion, as the bomb went off at an altitude of 2,300 feet. But at Chernobyl he was right next to the explosion. At his feet, the crater of a nuclear volcano was emitting 30,000 roentgens an hour.”

On May Day, 1986, shortly after the Chernobyl explosion, those of us in the Moscow press corps, exhausted from trying to pry some information on the disaster out of the secretive and mendacious government, threw a party in our foreigners-only apartment building. Sasha, a Jewish refusenik jazz musician, had brought his guitar, and quite spontaneously, the assortment of Western journalists and diplomats, Soviet friends and dissidents composed “The Moscow May Day Radiation Blues.”

The chorus went:

They are cooking down in Kiev

And they’re frying up in Minsk

That Mikhail Gorbachev can get out if he chooses

But we just got those Moscow May Day Radiation Blues.

Never suspecting that the radiation had been that dangerous--the Soviets, after all had allowed a May Day Parade to march in Kiev just after the accident--we laughed and sang the chorus very loudly, so the KGB microphones would get every word of our defiant and frustrated gallows humor.

But, little did we know, the chorus had it right all along.