1
In the summer of 1942, when the Soviet Union was allied with the United States and Great Britain in a pitiless war against Germany, a young Russian physicist named Georgi Flerov, on leave from the front, travelled to the Tatar city of Kazan. Here were the government ministries and scientific institutes that had been evacuated from Moscow and Leningrad. Anxious to catch up on any developments in nuclear physics, Flerov went to the library of the Soviet Academy of Sciences to read the scientific journals from abroad. He found the journals that, despite the war, had reached Russia, but not the articles he had expected. The papers describing the work in progress of Western scientists like Joliot-Curie in France, Rutherford in England or Fermi in the United States were not to be found: there was no mention whatsoever of any research in Flerov’s field of nuclear physics.
Flerov realized what this meant. The research had been classified: the Americans were developing a nuclear bomb. He at once wrote a letter to Stalin similar in tone to that which Albert Einstein had written to Roosevelt in 1939. Flerov warned his leader of the theoretical potential for mass destruction inherent in an atomic weapon and urged him to seek the advice of the nation’s most distinguished physicists.
Stalin heeded his warning, deciding that the Soviet Union too must develop a nuclear bomb. The scientist he chose to supervise the project was Igor Kurchatov, who in the 1930s, at the Leningrad Physical Technical Institute, had been the first Soviet physicist to achieve nuclear fission. Although not yet forty when Stalin summoned him to Moscow, Kurchatov had grown a long black beard while recovering from pneumonia in Kazan. Besides his talents as a physicist, Kurchatov had other qualities that appealed to Stalin. He was a Russian, not a Jew, and, if not a Communist, he could show a pedigree of a proletarian kind: his great-grandfather had been a serf who, after being lost to an industrialist in a game of cards, was sent by his new master to work at an iron foundry on the River Sim in the Urals.
To marshal the resources for such a huge undertaking, Stalin appointed as overall director of the atom bomb project the Georgian chief of his secret police, the NKVD, Lavrenty Beria. The terror inspired by his NKVD would ensure the project’s secrecy and concentrate the minds of those called upon to provide the resources. Beria also controlled many of the resources himself – the uranium mines worked by prisoners, and the huge network of gulags where many of the best physicists were to be found. In the terrible purges of the 1930s, when anyone with a bourgeois background was a potential enemy of the people and professionals in the tens of thousands were incarcerated on any pretext whatsoever – a chance remark, an unfortunate friendship or the anonymous denunciation of an envious colleague – many eminent physicists had been arrested and transported to labour camps in Siberia. For example, at the Institute of Physics in Kharkov, where vital research in nuclear physics was being done, both the head of the atom-splitting department, Leipinski, and a professor of theoretical physics, Lev Landau (whom Flerov had mentioned in his letter to Stalin), had been arrested.
Beria’s solution to the problem was not to order the release of the imprisoned physicists but to build camps within camps where the secret work could be done. Thirty thousand metres of tarpaulin were allocated to make tents for the physicists, and fifty tons of barbed wire to fence them in. A special ministry was formed with an anonymous name to conceal its secret purpose – the Ministry of Medium Machine Building. It was headed by an energetic engineer, Efim Slavsky, who had joined the Bolsheviks under Lenin and had fought in the cavalry under Semyon Budenny in the civil war. Under his direction, everything asked for by Kurchatov was wrung out of an economy shattered by war. An experimental reactor was built in a secret laboratory in the woods outside Moscow, where there were flats for the physicists and a villa for their director, Kurchatov. Forty kilometres from Moscow a whole town was devoted to the nuclear project, including a camp for German physicists Captured in the closing months of the war. It was a town with no name, unmarked on maps and roadsigns. By the same token Kurchatov’s name was never mentioned; his code name was Borodin, while to his friends he was simply ‘The Beard’.
On 14 July 1945 Stalin met Churchill and Truman at Potsdam, a suburb to the west of Berlin. Two days later, the Americans successfully detonated the world’s first atomic bomb in the New Mexican desert at Alamogordo. On the 24th, Truman told Stalin that the United States had a new weapon of extraordinary destructiveness. Stalin showed no special interest, but that night he cabled Beria to hasten the development of a Soviet bomb. When he returned to Moscow he demanded weekly progress reports from Beria. In August he learned that the Americans had not only built an atomic bomb but were prepared to use it – obliterating the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and bringing the war in the Pacific to an end.
An acute sense of urgency spurred on Kurchatov and his team. Whatever personal misgivings any may have had about Stalin or the Communist system, there was a real fear that the struggle against the Germans might be followed by a war with the Americans. The development of the bomb became the top priority of the Soviet state. No expense was to be spared, and the authority of Kurchatov, as scientific director, became greater than that of a minister. In the autumn of 1946 he was authorized to hire up to thirty-seven thousand workers to speed up the construction of the facilities he required. Where labourers were lacking, convicts took their place. Five thousand prisoners were transported from prison camps in Siberia to work on the facilities at Mayak, near Chelyabinsk in the Urals. Where zeal was lacking, Beria used terror.
It was a style that others would emulate. Even Kurchatov, cultivated and humane though he was, made maximum use of his good standing with Stalin when dealing with recalcitrant government ministers. With his scientific colleagues, Kurchatov was more easygoing. They could argue with him – even lose their tempers, leave the room, slam the door – with no adverse repercussions. Although rumoured to be anti-Semitic, he had several Jewish scientists on his team. He employed one, Boris Dubowski, to take charge of safety at the town with no name south of Moscow, even though Dubowski had no formal qualifications, and he personally sought Stalin’s authorization to allow Dubowski to travel to Chelyabinsk. Another Jewish physicist who had a sharp sense of humour was allowed to mock and mimic the most eminent ministers and academicians.
Although Kurchatov directed the project, he was assisted by a team of top physicists like Khariton, Kikoyin, Kapitsa, Tam and Tam’s ablest pupil, Sakharov. He also benefited from the intelligence provided by the Soviet agent, Klaus Fuchs, in the United States. On 25 December 1946, in his secret laboratory on the outskirts of Moscow, Kurchatov and his team achieved their first chain reaction. However, they were still some way from a bomb. For this they required plutonium, a product of the fission of uranium. This plutonium could only be produced in sufficient quantities in the atomic reactor being built at Mayak.
2
For the design of this reactor, Kurchatov had turned to one of the country’s leading engineers, Nikolai Dollezhal. A small, unassuming man, Dollezhal was typical of the ‘bourgeois specialists’ whom the Bolsheviks had employed to develop the industrial capacity of their Communist state. He came from a professional family in the Ukraine. His grandfather had been a Czech engineer employed by an Austrian company to build a bridge over the Dnieper for the railway from Kursk to Odessa. Nikolai was baptized into the Orthodox church, sang in the church choir as a boy and spent his holidays on his Russian grandmother’s crumbling, neglected estate. His interests, like those of his parents, were in music and literature, not politics: the dramatic events of 1917 passed him by.
Graduating from the prestigious Technical University in Moscow – formerly the Imperial College – in 1923, he worked in the power and chemical industries as both a designer and an engineer. He never became a Communist: although frequently invited to join the party, he always made the excuse that he could not claim to be a Marxist since he never had time to read Marx. Arrested in 1930 on suspicion of complicity in the ‘Industrial Party’ conspiracy, which was to lead to the first of Stalin’s show trials, Dollezhal was released for lack of evidence and went back to work in the power industry in the Ukraine.
By 1945, Dollezhal had moved to Moscow. He was a member of the government’s technical advisory council and director of an institute that he had founded to design machinery for the chemical industry. It was in this capacity that he was approached by Kurchatov and invited to join his team.
The two had met before at a game of tennis in Leningrad in the 1930s. Now the task at hand was more serious: to design a reactor that would produce plutonium for the bomb. This was to be not just the primary but the only purpose of the design Kurchatov was asking for, which also had to take into account what could be produced by Soviet industry at the time. Both zeal and terror could extract extraordinary achievements from human beings, but time was short; they could not wait to develop technologies to match the optimum design.
Within these constraints, and with astonishing speed, Dollezhal planned a reactor to meet the requirements of Kurchatov and his team. With the resources provided by Slavsky’s Ministry of Medium Machine Building, the reactor was built in the utmost secrecy at Mayak. On 10 June 1948 it was commissioned. A little over a year later, in July 1949, the first Soviet nuclear explosion took place at Ustyurt in the desert of Kazakhstan. Three months later, on 23 September 1949, they successfully detonated the first Soviet atom bomb. ‘Now,’ said Kurchatov, ‘we have our atomic sword and can start thinking about peaceful uses for the atom.’
3
From the first years of the twentieth century, when it had been discovered that by splitting the atom mass could be converted into energy, it had also been understood that heat generated by this nuclear fission could be converted into electrical power. A decade before, this had been only a theoretical possibility; now, with a functioning reactor at Mayak, it became a practical one, which Kurchatov tackled with his usual zeal.
No one at this time stood higher in Stalin’s estimation. Kurchatov was not only given every decoration worthy of his achievements, including the first Order of Lenin ever awarded, but also had bestowed upon him the material rewards reserved for the favoured few. Besides the spacious house in the woods by his secret laboratory, called the ‘Forester’s Cabin’, he was now given a villa in his beloved Crimea. Dollezhal, too, was rewarded with a dacha – a pleasant house in the woods of Zhukovski outside Moscow, where he found among his neighbours the composer Shostakovich, the cellist Rostropovich; and the physicists Flerov, Sakharov and Tam. Kurchatov was a frequent visitor, often playing with Dollezhal’s daughter in a little hut in the garden: he had no children of his own. There they would also discuss Kurchatov’s plans to turn the nuclear sword into a nuclear ploughshare, not just to generate electricity but to drive submarines, icebreakers, locomotives and even aeroplanes.
In 1949 Kurchatov sought Stalin’s approval to build an experimental nuclear power station at the town with no name south of Moscow where the captured German physicists were held. Dollezhal was part of the scientific team; he designed the turbines while Kurchatov himself chose the reactor. It was a graphite-moderated, water-cooled model similar to that which was already up and running in Kurchatov’s own laboratory and at Mayak. The project was approved, but Stalin did not live to see it function. He died in 1953, and in December of the same year Beria and his closest associates were shot.
Kurchatov did not fall with his erstwhile patrons; quite to the contrary, he was both liked and admired by Nikita Khrushchev, who subsequently came to power. The experimental nuclear power station at the town with no name – the first in the world – went on line on 27 June 1954. There was no fanfare for this achievement of Soviet science and technology because the whole Soviet state remained in the grip of the obsessive secrecy of Stalin’s time. It was only two years later, after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress, that Kurchatov was named as the founding father of Soviet nuclear power. Borodin could now drop his mask; ‘The Beard’ became familiar outside his small circle of colleagues and friends. The laboratory outside Moscow was named after Kurchatov, and the secret city was finally given a name: Obninsk. When Khrushchev, with Bulganin, paid a state visit to Britain in 1956, Igor Kurchatov went with them and spoke to British scientists about Soviet nuclear power and the bright future for the peaceful atom.
In the Soviet Union itself, not everyone shared Kurchatov’s vision. Khrushchev’s chief scientific adviser, Vladimir Kirillin, argued vigorously against atomic power because of the unsatisfactory return on the investment required. In contrast to the hydroelectric power stations planned at Bratsk on the Angara River, which would produce 4,500 megawatts of electricity, the experimental power station at Obninsk produced only five megawatts – insufficient for the plant’s own requirements. The nuclear power station planned at Beloyarsk was to produce a mere fifty megawatts.
In his struggle with Kirillin, however, Kurchatov had the backing of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building. Beria might be dead, but the empire he had founded remained a state within a state, incorporating the burgeoning defence industries and with loyal allies in the ministry of planning, Gosplan, and the KGB. It could always play the trump card of the ideological imperative: when it became known that the Americans were developing a new type of reactor cooled by water held under pressure so that it could not boil, it was not difficult to persuade the Central Committee that the Soviets must do the same. Authorization was given for the construction of a new power station using a reactor of this kind at Novovoronezh, about thirty miles south of the city of Voronezh.
The man chosen to head the development of the pressurized water reactor was a scientist who had worked with Kurchatov throughout his career, Anatoli Alexandrov. Like Dollezhal, he too was a ‘bourgeois specialist’: his father had been a judge in the Ukraine until the Revolution of 1917, when he had changed his profession to that of a schoolteacher: a new species of justice required judges of a different kind. Showing an aptitude for physics, the young Anatoli had taken a post at the Roentgen Institute in Kiev. In due course, his work there attracted the attention of Abram Ioffe, who offered Alexandrov a job in his institute in Leningrad, working alongside the young Igor Kurchatov.
In developing a pressurized-water reactor, Alexandrov faced a formidable task because the requirements for the large pressure vessels tested Soviet technology to its limits. As a result, the construction of Novovoronezh was delayed over and over again by problems with the reactor, and the Soviet government eventually decided to revert to conventional, fossil-fuelled power generation.
When Kurchatov got wind of this, he drove straight from his institute to the Kremlin and there insisted that the Central Committee and Council of Ministers reconsider their decision. He argued forcefully that the Soviet Union must be in the vanguard of nuclear science. Was it not the first society in human history to be based upon scientific principles? Could they allow it to be shown that the world’s first Socialist society, the new civilization, built according to the precepts of Marx and Lenin, was incapable of matching the technological advances made in the decaying, capitalist West? Had not Lenin defined communism as Soviet power plus electrification? Then how could the application of science par excellence to the generation of electricity be abandoned for the coal and water that had been in use since feudal times?
Kurchatov had his way: the resolutions were rescinded. When asked by a sceptical minister when they could hope to see tangible benefits from nuclear power, Kurchatov replied that for twenty-five or thirty years they should regard the programme as no more than an expensive experiment. Only then would the benefits become apparent; they would have to wait until around 1985.
The debate about nuclear power focused on cost, not safety. Safety was never an issue; yet during these deliberations some members of the Central Committee, the military high command and the Ministry of Medium Machine Building had known that in 1957 there had been a catastrophic accident at Mayak. Radioactive waste had been stored a mile or so from the plants, in concrete tanks lined with stainless steel. These tanks had been cooled by water piped through their walls. In 1956 leaks of this coolant had been noticed, but nothing had been done to stop them. It had been assumed that the waste was stable, but it had dried out and, when ignited by a spark from a control device, chemicals had exploded – blowing the lid off the tank and sending twenty million curies of radioactive elements into the atmosphere.
Most of the heavy particles had fallen back to the ground in the vicinity of the tanks, but around two million curies of lighter particles had been carried off by a southwesterly wind towards Sverdlovsk. No deaths were ascribed to the accident, but more than 10,000 people were evacuated and 250,000 acres of agricultural land laid waste.
Two further accidents were to follow at Mayak: the first, when radioactive waste was dumped directly into the Techa River; the second, when the highly radioactive waters of an artificial lake used to cool the reactors were whipped up by a cyclone and spread over a large area of land around Kyshtym. Eight thousand people living on the banks of the Techa River were evacuated and many thousands of acres were made barren.
All these accidents were hidden from the outside world. No one broke the code of omertà. It was not just the fear of the KGB but the esprit de corps of those who worked for the military-industrial complex under the aegis of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building. Patriotism, too, played its part. Few doubted their government’s propaganda that the Americans were preparing for a war to obliterate the new Socialist civilization. Irene, the daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie, and her husband, Jean-Frédéric Joliot-Curie, a pioneer of nuclear fission, were both Communists and on international questions followed the party line. So too did a large number of Western intellectuals like Louis Aragon and Jean-Paul Sartre; there was therefore no reason for the Soviet scientists to doubt the existence of saboteurs and spies. Closed cities like Mayak and Obninsk were surrounded by barbed-wire fences and guarded by whole regiments of special troops.
This esprit de corps was sustained by the favourable conditions within the perimeter. There were theatres and cinemas far superior to those found in other provincial cities. The flats were better built and the shops stocked with goods that were unobtainable elsewhere. Absolute discretion was maintained with both stick and carrot: no one wanted to betray his country, go to prison or lose his job.
It was also noted that the accidents at Mayak had nothing to do with the reactors themselves. With such a new and advanced technology, it was impossible to anticipate every eventuality: the most important thing for the scientists was to learn from these mishaps about the effects of radiation, not so much to prepare them for further accidents but for the aftermath of the anticipated atomic war. An institute of biophysics was set up next to the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, which had laboratories at Mayak. A young radiobiologist, Leonid Ilyn, wrote his thesis on what he had learned after research in the area around Kyshtym on the absorption of radioactive strontium in meat. Kurchatov’s personal physician, a young woman called Angelina Guskova, at Mayak from 1948 to 1958, learned from the accident how best to treat victims of radiation sickness.
In 1957, at the age of only fifty-four, Guskova’s principal patient, Igor Kurchatov, suffered a stroke. There was no specific link between this and the dose of radiation that he had inevitably accumulated in the course of his life, but the struggle to arm his country with an atomic bomb had meant years of incessant labour with great stress and little sleep. Even after the stroke he continued to work from a sanatorium, where three years later he suffered a second and fatal seizure while sitting on a bench next to a fellow physicist, Academician Khariton.
Kurchatov died in the knowledge that his work was largely done. Not only was the Soviet Union armed with nuclear weapons, but it was committed to the development of nuclear power. From the small group of young scientists whom he had gathered around him in 1943, there had grown an enormous empire. His institute in Moscow employed ten thousand people; Obninsk was a city of one hundred thousand. Now not just the old institutions, like Ioffe’s Physical Technical Institute in Leningrad or the Roentgen Institute in Kiev, but every major university and technical college had its department of nuclear physics. The armed forces had their own facilities, from the testing grounds in the deserts of Kazakhstan to the dockyards at Komsomolsk, where reactors were fitted into nuclear submarines. His service to his nation had been outstanding and was recognized by those in power: Nikita Khrushchev was one of the pallbearers who carried his coffin to his grave.
5
The man chosen to succeed Kurchatov as sovereign of his atomic empire was his companion from the early years in Leningrad, Anatoli Alexandrov. Now aged fifty-seven, he was a man whose scientific skills were augmented by a talent for administration and a natural authority – no doubt inherited from his father, the czarist judge. He was tall with a huge hairless head, pointed ears, an aquiline nose and a commanding manner. Already an academician, decorated with medals for the defence of Leningrad, Stalingrad and Sevastopol, the winner of an order of the Red Banner, an order of the October Revolution, three Heroes of the Soviet Union and four state awards, as director of the Kurchatov Institute Alexandrov now gained patronage of an unparalleled kind. It was he who now decided subordinate appointments and allocation of funds, research projects and trips abroad. As editor in chief of Atomenergo he controlled the publication of all the findings in the field of nuclear physics, and as director of the Kurchatov he could take advantage of the well-established practice of publishing papers written by his subordinates under his name.
Alexandrov was also now a leading member of the unacknowledged aristocracy of Soviet society, into which only the inner circle of political leaders were admitted, along with a few favoured scientists, writers, artists and musicians. As an academician, he became entitled to a dacha and a larger flat in a better building; a further emolument was added to his salary as the director of an institute. With his family, he had access to special recreational facilities and medical care; his children could attend elite schools and coveted institutes of higher learning. There was a black chauffeur-driven Volga to take him from his flat to the Kurchatov Institute or to the beautiful Neskuchny Palace, which housed the presidium of the Academy of Sciences.
Alexandrov was not alone among Kurchatov’s colleagues to be rewarded in this way. Dollezhal, too, was made a member of the Academy of Sciences and was now the director of his own bureau for designing atomic reactors, the Scientific Research Institute of Technical Energy Construction, or NIKYET. Never fond of each other, as each had been of Kurchatov, the two leaders of the nuclear industry were now further separated by the distance between their institutes and the vast armies of underlings each had at his command.
The mutual antipathy of these two leaders of the atomic community did little to help solve the practical problems that, despite the growth of the theoretical institutes, continued to bedevil the industry. At the start-up of a new reactor at Mayak, Alexandrov himself had to take over control from an operator to prevent an accident. At the Kolski nuclear power station an operator happened to notice steam coming out of a pipe. The reactor was shut down, the pipe examined and a crack found in the moulded seam. Further checks were made, and twelve additional seams, which the inspectors had certified as sound, were discovered to be faulty.
Deficiencies of this kind were particularly dangerous in the pressurized water (VVER) reactors and the projected fast-breeder reactors, where the coolant was liquid sodium, which, if brought into contact with water as a result of a ruptured pipe, would lead to both an explosion and a fire. The later VVER reactors had to be built with complex and expensive containment structures to prevent the spread of hazardous radiation in the case of an accident.
Given the difficulties they faced in developing the VVER and fast-breeder reactors, it was a comfort to Alexandrov and the Ministry of Medium Machine Building to have the tried and tested design of the very first reactors at Mayak and Obninsk. If the VVERs were thought of as the gazelles of the industry, this old design was seen as the workhorse. It had proved so safe and reliable that there seemed no need for an expensive containment structure; and the industrial base required to build it had been in existence since the war. All that was required to increase its capacity was to increase its size.
Following this reasoninig, there emerged from the drawing boards of Dollezhal’s institute plans for a ‘high-powered, boiling, channel-type reactor’ – the RBMK – which would generate one thousand megawatts of electrical power. Although it used the same graphite moderator, uranium fuel and water coolant as the early prototypes, there had been developments in the design. For example, the turbines at Obninsk had been driven by steam in a separate circuit, which had led to a considerable loss of thermal energy at the point where the heat was exchanged. At Beloyarsk, therefore, and in subsequent reactors of this kind, the steam came straight from the fuel channels of the reactor itself.
The advantage of this design was not just the increase in efficiency but the more modest technological demands. The temperatures of the water and the pressure of the steam in the pipes had been substantially reduced, and the only defences considered necessary were watertight walls around the reactor and the circulation pumps, so that any leaks of radioactive steam or water could be fed into the tanks, known as the ‘bubbler pools’, beneath the reactor.
Three airtight cylindrical containers filled with gas, water and sand surrounded the reactor itself. Between the reactor and the bubbler pool below there was a thick concrete floor, and above the reactor there was a neutron shield made of steel and concrete. It was seventeen metres in diameter, three metres thick, and perforated with holes to enable the fuel and control rods to enter the reactor. One of the advantages of the RBMK design was that it could be refuelled without being closed down.
These safeguards, however, were to protect the operating personnel from the harmful radiation emanating from the reactor, not to contain a potential explosion. Although the graphite blocks surrounding the fuel channels were combustible, the worst hazard imaginable was the rupture of one or possibly two of the fuel rods, which could at most cause a localized leak of radioactivity. The reactor itself could always be kept stable by the 211 boron control rods, which when lowered into the reactor absorbed the neutrons and either slowed the rate of fission or brought it to an end.
In the early 1960s approval was given for the construction of two RBMK-1000 reactors outside Leningrad. So confident were Alexandrov and Dollezhal of this design that they proudly described it in 1971 to the Fourth International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in Geneva. Even though the Leningrad reactors were not yet operational, the go-ahead had been given to build further reactors of the same type in other parts of the Soviet Union – among them Ignalina in Lithuania and Chernobyl in the Ukraine.
The few misgivings expressed about the design, both inside and outside the Soviet Union, were either dismissed, overlooked or ignored. The Americans had used graphite-moderated, water-cooled reactors to produce plutonium, but not for civil power. British graphite-moderated reactors were cooled by CO2. The lack of a containment structure, and the danger of a ‘positive void coefficient’ were among the seven reasons given by the British Atomic Energy Authority as to why a RBMK-type reactor could not be licensed in the United Kingdom. There was also a considerable margin between theory and practice; for example, it took eighteen seconds to lower the control rods into the reactor core, although the physicists had said that it should take three.
The enormous size of the active zone of the RBMK-1000 reactors worried Boris Dubowski, the man whom Kurchatov had appointed to head the department of nuclear safety at Obninsk. At a meeting in 1976 called to discuss safety at the RBMK reactor built near Kursk, he suggested that extra boron control rods be installed into the lower part of the reactor. In this he was supported by Alexandrov, and it was decided to recommend to Dollezhal’s bureau that this be incorporated into the design. But even though the measure had Alexandrov’s blessing and the chief nuclear safety inspector was present at the meeting, the modifications were never made. Like so many other measures during this period, which was to be called the era of stagnation, the idea travelled sluggishly through the clogged arteries of the obese Soviet administration, moving from department to department and committee to committee in the vast bureaucracies of NIKYET and the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, where a combination of the expense involved in making the changes and the apparent safety record of the RBMKs ensured that nothing was done.
In addition, those who had called for the changes had other things on their minds. Dubowski himself, following an accident at Obninsk for which he was technically responsible, lost his position as head of the nuclear safety department, while the year before Alexandrov had been appointed president of the Academy of Sciences. This was a majestic achievement that not only recognized his accomplishments as a scientist but also revealed the continuing prestige of the military-industrial complex in the collective mind of the Central Committee. Unlike an atomic scientist in the West, Alexandrov was no mere back-room boffin who came up with clever ideas; he was a scientific leader, a general in command of battalions dedicated to the Bolshevik cause. New discoveries were made both to serve and to defend the new Soviet civilization, and with the glory came the usual perquisites of power. No longer was Alexandrov driven to and fro in a mere Volga; like General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev himself, he became eligible for a Zil. But unlike the party leader, who looked like a gorilla, Alexandrov, the judge’s son, had the haughty demeanour of a true aristocrat; and when he descended from his huge limousine to walk up the elegant staircase of the Neskuchny Palace, where he now reigned supreme, it was as if to the manner born.
6
Preoccupied now with his wider duties as president of the Academy of Sciences, Alexandrov delegated many of his powers as director of the Kurchatov Institute to his first deputy director, Valeri Legasov. A much younger man than Alexandrov, Legasov shared his leader’s zeal for the cause of their Communist country; but he was no ‘bourgeois specialist’, having been born after the Revolution into the privileged elite of Soviet society. His father, Alexsei Legasov, the son of an Orthodox priest, had been head of the ideological department in the secretariat of the Central Committee, which, like the Holy Inquisition in the Roman Catholic church, decided what conformed to the true faith. As a student, Valeri served on the committee of the Communist Youth organization, Komsomol, and in 1951 – impatient to do something dramatic for his country – he led brigades of students from the Mendeleev Institute, where he studied, to bring in the harvest in Siberia.
The work Valeri had first embarked upon at the Kurchatov Institute followed from his graduate research into the chemistry of noble gases. Drawing around him a team of able scientists like Vladimir Klimov and Nikolai Protzenko, he and his team rapidly made discoveries of a theoretical nature that had practical applications in industry and defence. His extraordinary capacity for hard work, for taking risks, for understanding and solving the problems that arose in the course of their research made Legasov the natural leader of his group. The position held by his father in the Central Committee gave him a confidence no ordinary Soviet scientist could afford: he would take risks in his research, and also mock the pomposity of the most eminent party leaders who visited the Kurchatov. He was a wonderful raconteur, and because of his access to foreign books and journals, which he would sometimes lend to his colleagues at the Kurchatov, he had a breadth of culture far greater than that of the general product of the Soviet educational system.
Legasov rose rapidly in the hierarchy of the Kurchatov Institute: from senior researcher to head of the lab, from head of the lab to head of the department. Loyal to the system in which he fervently believed, and with ambitions beyond the realm of science, he served for a period as the institute’s Communist party secretary. This political zeal, combined with his scientific achievements, led to further promotions. For his work in applying fluoride chemistry to military technology, he was made a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences. When Alexandrov was appointed its president in 1975, Legasov was his choice as first deputy director. From then on he became responsible for running the Kurchatov Institute, a position of power that made him both enemies and friends. To old friends like Protzenko, he became remote, distanced not just by his eminence, but by a coterie of ambitious sycophants who fawned on him to promote their own advancement.
All the patronage that had been Alexandrov’s was now in Legasov’s hands. In the allocation of funds he made enemies, such as the physicist Yevgeny Velikhov, who led the team doing research into nuclear fusion. To Legasov, this was a dream that consumed billions of rubles from their budget; to Velikhov, Legasov was a chemist who, though his work might have led him into physics, was not qualified to rule on questions of this kind.
Legasov also had to decide the petty but all-important question of which scientists should be sent to congresses and symposia in the West. Here race played a role; the Jewish scientists were considered too assiduous in putting themselves forward for perks of this kind. Legasov, who was Russian, held them back: by reason of equity, according to the Russians; from prejudice, according to the Jews. There was also rancour among many of his colleagues that Legasov had risen so far and so fast. The influence of Brezhnev was thought to be behind his promotion; Legasov remained the golden boy of the Central Committee. It was unquestionably satisfying for the party leadership to see the success of one of their own – to approve his appointment as a professor at the Physical Technical Institute of Moscow University, and in 1980, when he was only forty-four years old, to make him a full member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
7
It was not just the patronage of politicians, but his adoption by Alexandrov that made Legasov his heir apparent. Already over seventy when he was made president of the Academy of Sciences, it was beyond Alexandrov’s capacity to perform the functions that this office entailed, as well as direct an institute of ten thousand physicists and supervise atomic power throughout the Soviet Union.
In 1979 a crisis arose in this domain because of an accident outside the Soviet Union. On 29 March at four a.m. at a nuclear power station at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, a fault in the boiler feed system led to the lifting of a safety valve in a reactor primary-cooling circuit. This led to a loss of core-cooling water. Unaware of what had happened, the operators in the control room shut off the emergency cooling system, which had automatically come into operation. Water in the core of the reactor began to boil; the uranium fuel rods overheated and finally ruptured. When this critical situation was discovered two hours later, water was pumped into the reactor to restore core cooling. By the time the operators regained control of the reactor, the core was badly damaged, in part melted and slumped down, and the cooling water was highly radioactive. Little radioactivity escaped into the atmosphere, but thousands fled the vicinity of the reactor, and many people throughout the world lost faith in the assurances they had been given that nuclear power was safe.
Although it was tempting for the Soviet leaders to gloat over the discomfiture of their rivals in America, they were aware of the skeletons hidden in their own cupboards. Nor did they wish to alarm their own people about the potential dangers of nuclear power. Thus instructions were given that little about the accident was to appear in the Soviet press.
However, the facts were known to those academicians, like Nikolai Dollezhal, who had access to foreign journals, and later in the year, assisted by an economic specialist, Yuri Koryakin, he wrote an article on Soviet nuclear power that was published in the magazine Kommunist. He began with a description of the development of the industry to date and continued with assurances about its safety. ‘Designs of nuclear power stations,’ Dollezhal wrote, ‘take into account any kind of emergency situation, even hypothetical ones, so that later they cannot endanger the personnel at the plant or the environment.’ Soviet scientists, he insisted, ‘because they do not have any other interest but the interests of their people,’ always make technical decisions based ‘primarily on human considerations’ – unlike, he implied, the capitalist Americans, who were only interested in profit.
Nevertheless, there were problems, notably with the processing of spent fuel and the disposal of nuclear waste. In words laden with significance for those who knew about the accidents at Mayak, Dollezhal reminded his readers that the handling of waste remained ‘a major problem.… This is why places for the regeneration of nuclear fuel are located far away from industrial areas and populated settlements.’ On the other hand, most of the planned nuclear power stations were to be built in the European part of the Soviet Union – west of a line drawn from the Volga to the Baltic, an area that contained 60 per cent of the country’s population. This meant that they were encroaching upon the most valuable land and damaging the environment. ‘The current principle of deployment,’ he warned, ‘could very quickly, in our opinion, lead to the exhaustion of the ecological capacities of the region.’
Dollezhal and Koryakin estimated that the land required to build fifty nuclear power stations could grow enough food for several million people and that the amount of water lost through evaporation in the already fertile regions was in danger of damaging the ecological balance. The solution to the problem, wrote Dollezhal, was to build huge clusters of new nuclear power stations in the remoter areas of the Soviet Union – Siberia, the Arctic and the Far East – where water was plentiful and the land barren.
Dollezhal’s article was immediately refuted by Alexandrov. Taking the unusual course of calling a press conference to which Western diplomats and foreign journalists were invited, Alexandrov insisted that atomic energy was completely safe. Dollezhal, he said, merely designed reactors, and his colleague Koryakin was an economist; how could either of them feel qualified to pronounce on nuclear technology? The suggestion that had been made by Dollezhal, and also by the nuclear physicist Academician Per Kapitsa, was dismissed by Alexandrov as absurd.
Alexandrov’s reaction was not just the expression of an old man’s pride. The dispute between the academicians reflected differences between party leaders about how the development of the Soviet energy industry should proceed. Energy had always been seen as a measure of the strength of the Communist system itself, and the country’s appetite for power had grown at an accelerating rate since the end of the Second World War. Generating capacity, only 1.2 gigawatts in 1920, had risen to 11.2 gigawatts by 1940, reaching 295 gigawatts by 1983.
Yet despite these dramatic increases, demand for power continued to exceed supply. Not only was Soviet industry profligate in its use of power, but the chief reserves of fossil fuels were to be found in Siberia, thousands of miles from the centres of industry in the European part of the Soviet Union. Added to this was the need for the Soviet Union to provide energy for its satellite countries in Eastern Europe, none of which had satisfactory sources of their own.
The large coal mines in the Donbas region of the Ukraine and in the fields south of Moscow were rapidly becoming exhausted; the coal that remained was in deep seams that were expensive to exploit. Bringing coal from Siberia to replace these stocks already tied up 40 per cent of the freight on the country’s railways; to build more coal-fired power stations could only make things worse.
There were alternative sources of energy in oil and gas, both of which could be piped from Siberia, where reserves were plentiful, but these were also the only commodities for which the Soviets could find a ready market abroad. With recurrent shortages of grain from poor harvests that had to be made up by purchases in hard currency on the international market, Soviet planners became loath to squander this precious asset on their own energy requirements. It seemed much more sensible to provide for the shortfall in energy by a rapid expansion of nuclear power.
It was for this reason that the full authority of the Central Committee and the Soviet government came down on the side of Alexandrov. Dollezhal’s article, which some had seen as the beginning of a debate, turned out to be a flash in the pan. No further criticisms were published; Alexandrov, assisted by Legasov, made sure that the journal Atomenergo rejected any articles that dealt with the question of safety. In the numerous papers included in the twelve issues published between 1975 and 1987, none even referred to real or potential accidents in the industry.
Privately, Legasov was concerned about the safety of various installations – chemical plants and thermal as well as nuclear power stations – in the event of war. The Israelis’ bombing of a Soviet-built reactor in Iraq had shown that there were potential nuclear hazards in a conventional war. Power might be cut off from the servomotors for the control rods and the pumps of the cooling system before the reactors could be shut down. However, he had no reason to suppose that under normal operating conditions the RBMKs were not entirely safe, and in November 1985 he co-wrote an article in the magazine Priroda reassuring its readers of the safety of the RBMK reactors.
This was now the party line. The eleventh Five-Year Plan, launched by President Brezhnev in December 1980, accepted Alexandrov’s view that ‘the entire deficit in the fuel and power balance should be covered by a substantial expansion of atomic power.’ In 1981, at the Twenty-sixth Party Congress, it was stated that any expansion of electrical production in the European part of the USSR would be in the nuclear and hydroelectric sectors, and Yuri Andropov, Brezhnev’s successor as general secretary, confirmed to the presidium of the Central Committee that ‘the future of our power industry lies first and foremost in the use of the latest nuclear reactors.’
8
Alexandrov had triumphed and, given his present preeminence and past achievements, it was only appropriate that his eightieth birthday on 13 February 1983 should be a cause for several celebrations. In the Kremlin, a ninth Order of Lenin was awarded by Yuri Andropov himself. At the Academy of Sciences their president was acclaimed by a gathering of the nation’s most distinguished citizens; scientists, statesmen, even astronauts were there. His family gave a private party at home, while Legasov and his colleagues at the Kurchatov prepared elaborate festivities in the institute’s House of Culture – first a concert and speeches in the auditorium to which four hundred and fifty were invited; then a more select party in the restaurant.
Someone noticed that there were eighty steps leading up from the entrance of the House of Culture to the auditorium, and so on each step they recorded the achievements appropriate to that year, and over the elevator – for some of Alexandrov’s old friends like Academician Khariton could hardly be expected to climb the eighty steps – they had painted a huge paw like that of a gorilla with the words, ‘A hairy hand did not push him to the top’ – a reference to the way in which the late General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev had given preference to his family and friends.
Accompanied by his wife and family, and with his loyal lieutenant, Valeri Legasov, at his side, Alexandrov took his place before the podium, and the festivities began. There were speeches full of praise for the distinguished physicist’s achievements; and even ribald jokes, as when Alexandrov’s wife complained that even now, at their advanced age, he pestered her with his attentions. This brought cheers from the audience of friends and admirers. It was his taste for red meat and vodka that did it! Then to round off the evening there was a competition: a box of chocolates for the first person to interpret the signalling flags that old friends from Alexandrov’s days in the navy had strung out as a backdrop on the stage.
It was shameful: the old men could not remember. But then a little boy, Alexandrov’s grandson, sitting with his family on the front row, stood up and read what it said: ‘Keep going along the same lines for another eighty years, Anatoli Petrovich!’ He was right. There were more cheers. The boy went forward to collect the box of chocolates and was promised as an extra prize one of the three remaining hairs from his grandfather’s head.