Seeking to calm the unruly public, Soviet minister of health Evgeny Chazov called for backup. He asked the World Health Organization (WHO) to send a delegation of “foreign experts” to assess the 350 mSv safe lifetime dose. Wasting no time, WHO officials put together a commission of physicists—not physicians—who were already on record minimizing the Chernobyl accident.1 That fact didn’t matter because the phrase “foreign expert” rang like a church bell across the Chernobyl territories, clear, sharp, and humane. Residents of Navrolia, the closest Belarusian city to the smoldering Chernobyl plant, announced a general strike until the foreign experts came to their town. They had a list of demands; the first was a study of Chernobyl health consequences. The foreigners, they were sure, would help them.2
Honoring the strikers’ wishes, the commission of well-dressed scientists took a detour to Navrolia, on an itinerary that included a number of suffering communities. In each town, the visitors spoke to packed auditoriums with the cameras rolling.3 They sped through Minsk, where they met with Belarusian scientists, who told them about the wide range of health problems they were finding. The experts moved on to Moscow.4
After their whistle-stop tour, the WHO consultants came to the conclusion that any association between the reported rise in noncancerous diseases and Chernobyl fallout was a mistake of “scientists who are not well versed in radiation.” They suggested instead that health problems were due to “psychological factors and stress.”5 They wrote that 350 mSv “would present only a small risk to health, comparable with other risks to human life.”6 Using as a baseline the findings of the Life Span Study of Japanese bomb survivors, they recommended raising the safe lifetime dose two to three times higher. This was a remarkable statement, given that there was no accepted understanding at the time of how bodies responded to chronic, low doses of radiation. The WHO consultants were proposing a threshold ten to fifteen times higher than the recommendations of the IAEA and the International Committee for Radiation Protection.7
After the foreign experts boarded planes home, Minister of Health Chazov prepared a circular to party leaders. He singled out the rebellious Belarusian scientists for censure: “foreign experts had an exceedingly grave impression of the level of radiological competency of some specialists of the Belarusian Academy of Sciences.”8
Unfortunately, slander is one tool in the cultivation of knowledge. When villagers said they were sick from Chernobyl fallout, they were derided as frightened and ignorant. When Belarusian scientists who had spent the previous four years studying the effects of Chernobyl exposures said people were ill, they were dismissed as poorly trained and incompetent by experts who visited for just a few days. The president of the Belarusian Academy, V. P. Platonov, wasn’t having it. He aimed a reply in a letter to Nikolai Ryzhkov, Gorbachev’s second in command. Chazov’s statement, he said, was “insulting” and ill-informed. The 350 mSv safe lifetime dose was “scientifically unsound.”9
The world’s leading health agency’s hasty assessment greatly disappointed Soviet green parties, citizens’ groups, and activists.10 The World Health Organization report was also an embarrassment for international science. Radiologist Fred Mettler, U.S. delegate to the UN Scientific Committee for the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), said of the WHO mission, “No one received what they said very well. They put in no time, no real resources.”11 With the cameras following, the WHO mission was more media spectacle than investigation. Science performed for political theater.
The controversy over the Chernobyl diagnosis caused a rift. Ninety-two Soviet scientists signed a joint letter to Gorbachev supporting the 350 mSv safe lifetime dose. They justified it by citing the Life Span Study of Japanese bomb survivors. They also argued that the lower lifetime dose Belarusians and Ukrainian leaders sought would displace a million people and cause a lot of anxiety, which would be far more damaging, they argued, than 350 mSv. The signatories included the roster of nuclear physicists and experts in radiation medicine in Moscow and Leningrad and their collaborators in Kyiv.12 Lined up against them were scientists and doctors who worked in territories directly affected by the disaster. The Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and the entire Union of Soviet Radiobiologists sided with the Belarusians.13 Belarusian scientists cited the work of Moscow and Leningrad researchers who opposed them, scientists who apparently no longer openly followed the science they once charted in closed institutes.
The dissident scientists’ point was simple and essential. One could not generalize the estimated radioactive exposure from Japan to Ukraine and Belarus, from a single bomb blast (as it was conceived in the Life Span Study) to an eviscerated reactor. Denying that “residual radiation” was a factor, scientists in Japan calculated that the atomic bombs delivered one large dose of gamma radioactivity to Japanese survivors, which passed into and out of their bodies in less than a hundred seconds. They failed to take into account the buildup of radioactive fallout in the food chain and environment of the bombed cities.14 That estimation of a single-shot exposure, the Belarusian scientists contended, differed essentially from Chernobyl’s slow drip of beta and alpha particles ingested in contaminated food and dust to accumulate in human organs and flesh over many years. The Life Span Study began five years after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, whereas Ukrainian and Belarusian doctors got to work within weeks examining people exposed to Chernobyl radioactive contaminants. Grasping these differences, the Belarusian and Ukrainian scientists argued they saw more subtle, immediate changes to health and had a better grasp of how radioactivity at low doses incorporated into bodies damaged the health of infants, children, and adults.15
While central Soviet leaders tried to control the situation, Belarusian and Ukrainian diplomats went rogue. They sent emissaries abroad as if they were independent countries. They asked for foreign aid and for their own foreign experts to review the safe residency plan.16 Meanwhile, Belarusian scientists kept working. Even the drowsy Ministry of Health got involved. In Minsk, Larisa Astakhova, assistant director of the recently opened Belarusian Institute of Radiation Medicine, gave a newly donated ultrasound machine to her assistant, Valentina Drozd. Astakhova scanned the recently published maps of radioactive contamination and realized that many thousands of Belarusian children had received high doses of radioactive iodine to their thyroids. Astakhova told Drozd to go to southern Belarus and check children’s thyroids.17
Yuri Spizhenko, who replaced Romanenko as Ukrainian minister of health, wrote to Chazov doubting the assurances of Moscow scientists: “Many meetings with people and questions from deputies have convinced us that our system of public health is expected to firm up demands for effective radiological protection.” Spizhenko worried especially about strontium-90. “At first we were told there was not enough of it for concern, but from year to year the sanitation services find the biological availability of strontium is on the rise. This is a growing phenomenon.”18 Natalia Lozytska, the physicist who disguised herself as a cleaning lady, wrote to Spizhenko’s ministry previously that year about strontium-90 and its dangers. Apparently, her message and that of other scientists got through finally to the top ranks of power.
I was struck by the force of this Lozytska Effect. She and other concerned citizens—people who were shut out of information, censored, threatened, watched, bodily removed from conferences as Lozytska was in 1988, and had microphones silenced while they spoke at rallies in Kyiv—mobilized their expertise and moved a state as large and elephantine as the Soviet monolith.
I visited Lozytska and her husband, Vsevolod, several times at their university observatory and at home in a Brezhnev-era high-rise. Natalia gave me a Ukrainian peasant shirt embroidered with sky blue thread because she was grateful that after three decades someone finally answered her letters.
Vsevolod showed me around the circa 1953 solar telescope he and Natalia managed in an observatory, hidden in a courtyard garden of flowers and fruit trees in central Kyiv. “Everyone has satellite telescopes now,” he explained, running a hand over the missile-shaped barrel of the scope. “No one uses telescopes like this anymore.” The couple dedicated their careers to studying the eruption of plasma jets on the sun. Vsevolod was obsessed with the topic. He returned to it at every opportunity, speaking almost mystically about plasma jets. His ever rational wife would gently change the subject.
One evening Natalia was out, and Vsevolod could dwell on his favorite topic unhindered over a meal of stuffed peppers. He said the solar telescope taught them not just how the sun affects the earth, but also how the earth and the actions of humans on it impact the sun. He showed me charts of sun eruptions over 150 years of observation. The biggest jet occurred in 1946, which he interpreted as right after the bomb fell on Hiroshima. More eruptions followed in quick succession during the years of atmospheric nuclear testing. I listened skeptically, though later I found articles about how Americans and Soviets exploded high-altitude nuclear bombs in the early 1960s with the specific purpose of changing the electromagnetic fields and radiation belt surrounding the planet.19 The bomb, Vsevolod read into his graphs, was a mistake, a huge error that altered the heavens itself. “Before we turn the earth into something miserable for human life,” Vsevolod wanted me to know, “we have to recognize that mistake.”