Chernobyl: Disarmament and democracy benefited from the world’s worst nuclear accident.

The world’s worst nuclear accident occurred 10 years ago today. An explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in the former Soviet Union sent a radioactive plume across Europe and eventually to the United States, with consequences that were completely unanticipated.

Most interest has focused on the health impacts. Within a few weeks of the explosion, 31 people died, most of them nuclear engineers and firefighters who were at the plant at the time of the accident. There have been subsequent deaths that can be attributed directly to the effects of radiation, but probably not more than 20. This means that fewer people died from Chernobyl than on a typical day in a large U.S. city.

The real long-term health threat from the accident would be seen in increased cancers and birth defects. Although there are more than 700 thyroid cancers in children, mostly from radioactive iodine, there appears to be no increase in leukemia or other cancers. This is important since leukemia was the cancer that increased the most and most rapidly in the atomic bomb survivors in Japan. Its absence among Chernobyl’s victims suggests that other more common cancers, like those of the breast and lung, are unlikely to be increased substantially over the next few decades. Equally fortunate, there is no increase in birth defects, nor is such an increase likely in the future. This makes sense; children whose parents were atomic bomb survivors, who received much higher doses of radiation than the Chernobyl victims, were similarly unaffected.

Except for the increases in thyroid cancers, these effects were predicted by most biomedical scientists in the immediate aftermath of Chernobyl. But what of the scorecard for politicians and political scientists? Here is where the unexpected happened.

First, Chernobyl exposed the ineptitude and corruption of Soviet science and technology. Since Lenin, the Soviet regime had placed science on a pedestal unimaginable in the West. Scientific and technical advances changed Russia in 50 years from a rural to an industrial society--something that took 200 years in the West. With a vast nuclear weapons program, it also made the Soviet Union a world superpower. These accomplishments, a source of considerable pride to every citizen and especially the Soviet leadership, were crushed by Chernobyl. The enormous resources needed to deal with Chernobyl, the public outcry and the immediate medical consequences, were a clear lesson to the Soviet leadership and especially the military of the potential consequences of a nuclear war. This undoubtedly influenced their willingness to negotiate nuclear weapons reduction treaties.

The second unanticipated consequence of the accident was to awaken Ukrainian nationalism. Suddenly, Russia had 60 million very unhappy neighbors who felt that the Soviet government was lying to them and suppressing vital health information about Chernobyl. No security apparatus, not even the KGB at its peak of power, has a chance against mothers who believe that their children are being exposed to cancer-causing radiation. People questioned why so many of the nuclear reactors supplying electricity to Russia were in Ukraine.

The environmental and nationalist groups that coalesced around Chernobyl applied enormous pressure on Ukraine’s leadership to secede from and dissolve the Soviet Union. There is also no doubt that the willingness of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakstan to relinquish nuclear weapons and participate in the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is driven by the popular reaction to Chernobyl.

The lessons from Chernobyl are not only for its neighbors. One clear message is that with modern technologies like nuclear energy and nuclear weapons, an accident anywhere is one everywhere. National boundaries of are little consequence. Second, technologies are neither intrinsically good nor evil; how people use them is what makes the difference. Third, if a single commercial nuclear power station in Ukraine caused such a catastrophe, we’d better avoid a nuclear war, even a small one.

As a physician who treated and continues to treat Chernobyl’s victims, I am profoundly aware of its tragic consequences. But I am equally persuaded that this tragedy may, in a final accounting, have left the world safer.