Red Atom: Russia鈥檚 Nuclear Power Program from Stalin to the Present by Paul Josephson, W. H. Freeman, 拢17.95/$26.95, ISBN 0716730448
WITH the laconic sense of humour for which the Russians are famous, they coined a neat slogan that sums up the impact of the world鈥檚 worst nuclear accident: 鈥淐hernobyl-the peaceful atom in every home鈥�. But Eisenhower鈥檚 great postwar dream of Atoms for Peace died in the four seconds it took for the chain reaction to run out of control.
The mistakes made by operators testing a turbine in the middle of the night of 26 April 1986 could not be undone come the morning. The explosion ripped apart reactor number four of the Lenin Atomic Energy Station in Ukraine, spread radio-activity over a continent and changed the way in which the world perceived nuclear power.
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Nuclear reactors were no longer simply machines for boiling water: they had become cradles of contamination capable of poisoning people in their homes.
Harvard historian Paul Josephson is fascinated by the way the accident at Chernobyl changed history. He argues that it exposed the failures of state socialism and helped to break apart the Soviet Union. Above all, it exposed the terrible 鈥渢echnological arrogance鈥� of scientists who really believed they had mastered nature. The disaster at Chernobyl, the pride of the Soviet nuclear industry, was the inevitable result of decades of secretive, centralised planning that had put production targets before public safety. 鈥淚f it hadn鈥檛 happened now,鈥� said the Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov in 1986, 鈥渢hen it would have happened at some time.鈥�
Soviet scientists had supreme confidence in nuclear reactors as the means of achieving the Communist utopia of mass electrification, a view reflected in their other nuclear projects. They fitted 235 submarines, ships and ice-breakers with reactors as engines and then just dumped the waste in the sea. They spent forty years fruitlessly trying to control the enormous power of nuclear fusion by containing 100-million-degree plasmas in magnetic fields.
Between 1965 and 1988 this nuclear fan club conducted 120 鈥減eaceful nuclear explosions鈥� to extract oil, mine ores and excavate reservoirs. And Soviet scientists launched a major effort to kill harmful bacteria by introducing widespread food irradiation. Both these programmes stumbled to a halt when doubts emerged about their safety.
Josephson is good at highlighting the contradictions of the unalloyed nuclear enthusiasm of the early days. When rat experiments, for example, showed that irradiating beef and cod could seriously deplete the foods鈥� nutritional value, the researchers simply proposed adding vitamins, rather than questioning the whole process.
His dissection of the components of 鈥渁tomic-powered communism鈥� is exemplary. Clear descriptions of the technologies involved are combined with careful explanations of the central role they played in both ideology and science. Added to this are entertaining profiles of key personalities such as Andrei Sakharov, Igor Kurchatov, builder of the world鈥檚 first nuclear power station, and Nikita Khrushchev. Anecdotes abound, such as how the leading physicist Lev Landau used to hold 鈥渓uridly sexual conversations on the telephone鈥�, for example.
But Josephson is disappointing in the details of the nuclear downside. His conclusions sometimes lack empirical evidence to back them up. He reminds us, for example, that 600 000 pieces of radioactive waste were jettisoned into the sea between 1946 and 1982. This included 16 reactors dropped into the Arctic Ocean. Does this matter? Should we worry? He fails to give any insight into the environmental threat that this 170 000 tonnes of waste might pose.
Similarly, descriptions of accidents at the former Soviet Union鈥檚 other notorious nuclear complexes, such as Mayak in the Urals, are sparse in spite of his fascinating account of Chernobyl. And there is little information about the contamination caused by the peaceful nuclear explosions. But perhaps it鈥檚 too soon to get the whole picture: after all, the scientists have only recently begun to confess their cock-ups.