At Chernobyl, Gore Urges India, Pakistan to Take Heed

Fresh from a helicopter tour of the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident and a stroll through the ghost town abandoned in its wake, Vice President Al Gore on Thursday used the images of Chernobyl’s devastation to urge India and Pakistan to renounce a new round of nuclear competition.

“Today, for the first time, I saw Chernobyl,” Gore said after making the highest-level visit here of any U.S. official. “It looms as a menacing monument to mistakes of the century that is now slipping away from us--a hulking symbol of human decisions unworthy of our children.”

Culminating a two-day visit to Ukraine, Gore recalled how the April 26, 1986, explosion and fire at the Soviet nuclear reactor complex released a radioactive cloud that circled the globe. “The truth about Chernobyl is that we are all connected, forever,” he said in a speech at the museum in Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, devoted to Chernobyl.

Gore urged India and Pakistan to negotiate as the United States and the Soviet Union did during the Cold War and to become peacemakers like Ukraine, which “earned the thanks of a grateful world” for renouncing the nuclear weapons it inherited from the defunct Soviet Union in 1991.

Gore’s Chernobyl tour wrapped up his second visit to Ukraine for a meeting of the U.S.-Ukraine Binational Commission created in 1996 to promote ties. The vice president then flew to Moscow for his first meeting with Prime Minister Sergei V. Kiriyenko, the 35-year-old who became head of the Russian government three months ago.

High on the agenda for Gore’s meeting with Ukrainian President Leonid D. Kuchma was a looming financial crisis that has Kiev desperate for a $2.5-billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund. Earlier this year, the IMF suspended a $542-million standby credit because Ukraine failed to meet budget targets.

Ukraine’s lackluster economic reforms have failed to satisfy the 92 conditions the IMF has set for granting more money. Kuchma recently issued a flurry of decrees, though like many welcome reform measures here, problems arise in their implementation.

Gore praised the steps but warned at a news conference with Kuchma on Wednesday that “without continued, bolder economic reforms,” Ukraine’s chances with the IMF are dim.

Gore announced some agreements, including one expanding field research into Chernobyl’s environmental and health impact; 12 years after the disaster, scientists continue to study the unique radiological laboratory the disaster created in the Rhode Island-sized Zone of Alienation.

A major source of worry is the “sarcophagus,” the hastily built concrete mound entombing Chernobyl’s gutted No. 4 reactor. Rain drips through its cracks, and birds carry radioactive dust as they fly in and out through the fissures.

“The biggest problem with the sarcophagus is uncertainty,” Valentin Kupny, the official in charge of maintaining the containment structure, told journalists waiting in its shadow for Gore’s brief inspection.

Heat and radiation sensors installed in the sarcophagus in the 1986 scramble to cover the reactor core were “placed where it was possible, not where it was necessary,” he explained. Today, no one really knows how stable the building is or where 215 tons of reactor fuel may be.

Kuchma has pledged to completely shut Chernobyl by 2000--one reactor is still operational--but insists that he needs financial aid from the West to do so.

After a donors conference headed by Gore last year, $180 million in foreign aid has flowed into a fund, managed by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, for a new shelter facility for reactor No. 4; the total cost is estimated at $750 million.