Soviet Nuclear Bomb Drive Took a Vast Human Toll : Radiation: Shocking episodes are revealed. In one, workers were sent into mine a day after an atomic blast.

Nobody told the villagers why the fish in the river turned blind. Or why bulldozers showed up one day to plow under the road. So, they continued to cut hay in the meadows. When these peasants were forced by soldiers to leave their cottages in the Urals, they still didn’t get a frank explanation.

And even when they began to die, they were not told the truth.

The history of the Soviet nuclear program is one of both great scientific prowess and vast human suffering. Bled white by World War II and barreling toward Cold War confrontation with the West, the Soviets in the late 1940s were willing to pay any price to catch up with the Americans and to build an atom bomb.

One star of the crash program, the late physicist Andrei D. Sakharov, wrote about those frenzied times: “Above all, I felt myself committed to the goal, which I assumed was (Soviet dictator Josef) Stalin’s as well: after a devastating war, to make the country strong enough to ensure peace.”

There was to be no room for failure. The sadistic chief of secret police, Lavrenty P. Beria, was put in charge of the Kremlin’s answer to the Manhattan Project; he reportedly drew up two lists. One was of scientists to decorate with medals, if the bomb worked, the other of scapegoats to shoot if it was a dud.

Toiling like slaves in all but name, prisoners by the tens of thousands without any means of radiation protection mined uranium ore in ghastly conditions and built veritable cities where Sakharov and his colleagues lived and worked in forced seclusion.

Later, the atom would claim victims of a different sort, as the Kremlin--faced with the fact that, although most of the Soviet population lived in Europe, 80% of the fossil fuel reserves were in isolated Siberia--embraced nuclear power as a panacea for its energy ills, and muzzled any hint of the risks.

“Soviet nuclear projects were sick from the moment of their conception with megalomania that backfired in a doomsday fashion,” said Romuald A. Shatyrnik, a high-ranking official with the Belarus State Committee on Chernobyl. “This is a nightmare that doesn’t go away when you wake.”

Many episodes of this nuclear past, and their effects on people, are being discovered only now. Just this summer, for instance, it became known that a nuclear bomb was secretly detonated in 1979 in a mine in Ukraine’s Donbass region near the town of Yunokommunarovsk. Why? Because scientists thought the blast would disperse methane gas.

One day later, thousands of coal miners were sent back to work, oblivious to any danger.

Until this year, the 8,000 townspeople were still being told by officials that the high levels of radiation in the area were caused by the Chernobyl power plant accident, although that incident, in which a reactor blew up and caught fire, occurred at the opposite end of the Ukraine.

But it was the peasants who lived in villages along the cattail-fringed Techa river in the Urals, some 1,000 miles east of Moscow, who were the first sizable civilian population to suffer from the Kremlin’s drive to harness the atom.

And unlike Chernobyl, what happened along the Techa was intentional.

“The search for nuclear weapons led our country to wage nothing less than a nuclear war on its own people,” Natalia I. Mironova, a Chelyabinsk lawmaker who chairs the regional nuclear safety committee, reflected grimly.

It was sometime in 1949 that the people in charge at the super-secret Mayak Chemical Combine, where the first lot of bomb-grade plutonium was being refined, decided to dump their wastes into the Techa. No one told the Russians, Tatars and Bashkirs who used the river for drinking, bathing and fishing.

From 1949 to 1956, about 2.6 billion cubic feet of waste laden with 2.75 million curies of radioactivity--or more than half the long-term radiation released at Hiroshima--were poured into the Techa, according to information Mayak engineers have given the Chelyabinsk Institute of Physics and Biology.

Because of the harmful effects of the wastes produced in plutonium refining--in particular strontium 90 and cesium 137--tens of thousands of people downstream were exposed to dangerous doses that ranged as high as 350 rems per year, said Dr. Mira M. Kosenko, head of the institute’s clinical department. (In comparison, a nuclear power plant employee in the West, experts say, should receive no more than five rems.)

The eyes of the pike that live in the Techa turned a dead, glassy white. Even today a gamma-ray detector placed on the bank reads 1,700 micro-roentgens per hour--100 times normal levels.

It was only when radioactivity showed up in waters 1,000 miles downstream, in the ocean off northern Russia, that the bomb builders turned off the stream of waste. Evacuation of the villages began in 1953 but dragged on for eight years.

When confronted by residents who were beginning to complain of health problems--from nosebleeds and chronic listlessness to leukemia and cancers--Kosenko and her fellow physicians were told by authorities to say nothing about radiation. “We were always feeling unwell,” one woman from near the Techa remembered. “But at the Institute of Physics and Biology, the diagnosis was always the same--blood pressure problems.”

The Soviet obsession with nuclear secrecy dates from this period. Sixteen sprawling, hidden installations were built for the military-industrial complex; they were so secret they did not even have names but cryptic designations (Mayak is “Chelyabinsk-65”) and did not figure on any map.

In Siberia, 100,000 convicted criminals toiled 600 feet below the surface to hack a cavern from solid rock as large as three Great Pyramids. That enormous man-made grotto, Krasnoyarsk-26, housed three reactors for the production of plutonium; it has polluted stretches of the great Siberian river, the Yenisey.

Deprived of the Techa to use as a sewer, Soviet bomb builders next began dumping high-level waste into an open lake, Karachai. Even today, environmentalists are stunned at the results.

“They made it into the single most polluted spot on the face of the planet,” said Thomas B. Cochran, a senior scientist at the Washington-based Natural Resources Defense Council who has visited Mayak.

Today, the lake is so laden with radioactivity--120 million curies’ worth, or almost 2 1/2 times as many long-lived isotopes as spewed from Chernobyl--that “to stand on its bank, even for a half-minute, would be deadly,” Kosenko said.

There were more large-scale releases of radiation, and more cover-ups. On Sept. 29, 1957, a deafening explosion shook the Mayak complex. Only three years ago did the Soviets officially report what had happened.

The cooling unit on a vat used to store high-level nuclear waste failed. The waste grew so hot it exploded with the force of 10 tons of TNT. An airborne plume up to five miles wide traveled more than 600 miles, sprinkling the ground with radioactive dust. More than 10,000 people were evacuated in the following 18 months.

Now a wraith with hennaed hair, Fatima Dautova, the mother of three sons who have since turned sickly, was one of the evacuees. “In three years, I became as withered as a dried fish,” the Tatar peasant woman, who looks fragile as glass, said. Her doctors wouldn’t tell her why.

(In yet another incident, drought shrank Lake Karachai in 1967, exposing sediments on its bottom. A tornado picked up the dust laden with cesium 137 and other radioactive nuclides and scattered it over an area larger than Maryland.)

The impact on humans of the events at Mayak is still being assessed. Anatoly F. Tsyb, an academician and one of 50 Soviet medical specialists who studied the affected people, says no fewer than 400,000 of them were exposed to heightened radiation.

Records in local medical clinics were routinely falsified to eliminate any hint of radiation, so the toll in human terms will probably never be known.

The Soviet nuclear energy program grew directly out of the push for the ultimate weapon and predictably incorporated many of the bomb program’s flaws: desire for secrecy; single-minded pursuit of the government’s goals, and primacy of production over safety.

Sometimes, even the hardware was the same: The graphite-moderated RBMK reactor that blew up at Chernobyl in the spring of 1986 was developed, in part, because, as it heated water to steam to generate electricity, it also produced plutonium for the warheads of Soviet ICBMs.

Until Chernobyl brought things to an abrupt end, the country had a love affair with what Communist Party propagandists christened the “peaceful atom.” Electricity generated by nuclear fission doubled in every five-year period between 1965 and 1985. Reactors were supposed to be so safe, Belarussian writer Ales Adamovich remembered ironically, that one could supposedly be built beside the Kremlin wall.

However, what was constructed, and still exists today, was described by one Western expert as no better than a “bargain-basement” version of a nuclear power industry, in some cases 20 years behind facilities in the United States, Britain and other countries.

“The Soviets could make a reactor big enough to light up an entire city, but they didn’t have the hang of producing a good, reliable Geiger counter,” said John Large, who operates a London-based consulting business on nuclear engineering and safety.

How flawed--in technology, safety and professional terms--the Soviet civilian nuclear Establishment was can be gleaned from comments of the official in charge of safety at the troubled Balakovo power plant on the Volga, where there had been 30 emergency shutdowns in a 12-month period.

Half the stoppages were due to shoddy electrical equipment that gave frequent false alarms, the others to human error, the official, Yuri Vishnevsky, said a few years ago.

“Quite often beginners allowed to run the reactor without old-timers’ supervision and help did something wrong and a shutdown followed,” Vishnevsky told a Soviet reporter, without explaining why novices were left on their own in the first place.

Safety regulations written in some Moscow office were the last concern of operators, whose attitude was “we know best” and who even had disconnected alarm systems, Vishnevsky said.

As for the hardware, generators designed for 30 years’ service were so poorly made they worked for only three, and the rock underneath Balakovo’s reactors was giving way.

“The Russians are good scientists,” said Morris Rosen, director of nuclear safety for the International Atomic Energy Agency. “But the whole philosophy of redundancy--of putting in backups (to use in the event of primary system failures)--didn’t exist for them.”

The RBMK reactor, for example, was built without a safety housing to catch radiation that might leak in the event of an accident. In fact, the reactor was so poorly designed that the “scram button,” supposed to smother the reaction by dropping control rods into the atomic pile, actually accelerated the neutron storm inside--”like hitting the brake pedal on a truck and feeding gas to the engine, instead,” said Friedrich Niehaus, an IAEA reactor specialist.

Soviet nuclear equipment, Western engineers say, was milled to common industrial standards rather than the more exacting criteria used in the West. “Like in the Russian military, the pressure was mainly to get the job done,” Large said.

Until Chernobyl shattered willful disinformation and professional complacency like that lamented by Vishnevsky, the official position was that there had never been a serious accident at a Soviet nuclear station.

In fact, the details of even foreign nuclear mishaps became top secret, so as not to alarm the Soviet population. According to Grigori Medvedev, only heads of major government departments and their deputies had a right to exhaustive accounts of the 1979 emergency at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania. “For 35 years, people did not notify each other about accidents at nuclear power stations, and nobody applied the experience of such accidents to their work,” Medvedev wrote in his eye-opening expose on Soviet nuclear power, “The Truth About Chernobyl.”

Such secrecy--and the illusion of safety it gave rise to--prevailed until Chernobyl exposed the industry’s grave problems, because a single government agency--the Soviet Ministry of Energy and the Atomic Power Industry--operated power stations and was responsible for policing them as well.

The cult of nuclear silence was effective for so long because in the totalitarian conditions that prevailed until Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost , or openness, atomic scientists--like journalists or members of any other profession--were supposed to follow orders from the Soviet state and the Communist Party. Most did so. “Sixty-four institutes in Ukraine are now focusing on the Chernobyl calamity and its effects. But why were they silent until 1990?” asked Vyacheslav S. Konovalov, a biologist from Zhitomir.

Another Ukrainian, physicist Yevgen V. Korbetsky, sputtered with anger when he recounted how party bosses muzzled him and his colleagues at Kiev’s Institute of Nuclear Research following the Chernobyl accident.

The 300 scientists were forced to sign a statement saying they would conceal the surge in radiation in Kiev from the public. They were ready to do so, but when bureaucrats also demanded that the physicists cut the findings they submitted to the government by a factor of six--which would have enlisted the scientists in the official disinformation campaign about Chernobyl--some rebelled. “We said: ‘We’re giving you the readings we’ve got,’ ” Korbetsky recalled.

It was an all-too-rare moment of mutiny in the nuclear Establishment.

“Frankly, the Russians didn’t care too much about their people,” said Friedrich Steinhausler, an official in the IAEA’s radiation safety section. “These people have not been given correct information for years--all they had were rumors.”

As Russians, Ukrainians and the other peoples who lived in the old Soviet Union assess the health and environmental damage done by Soviet nuclear programs and ways to reverse or minimize the effects, what strikes activists is how little some things have changed.

Even in post-Soviet Russia, it seems, the cult of nuclear secrecy survives.

It was only three months ago that civilian researchers looking into health problems in the Altai Mountains that may be caused by nuclear tests in Semipalatinsk were able to coax a map of the test site out of the military.

In a citywide referendum, 86% of the voters of Chelyabinsk, a city of more than 1 million, opposed the reprocessing of foreign nuclear fuel at Mayak. But even adamant advocates of closing the facility, which the Russian government inherited from the Soviet, doubt they have the power to succeed.

“The paradox is that although we have greater democracy in Russia these days, there is not yet greater consultation with the population about nuclear matters,” said Dr. Yelena Zhukovskaya, a Chelyabinsk pediatrician.

Moscow Bureau reporter Andrei Ostroukh contributed to this story.

NEXT: The Herculean chore of cleaning up the Soviet nuclear mess