Chernobyl: The Soviet Union's Lasting Legacy

Yesterday was the 19th anniversary of the world's worst nuclear accident. On April 26, 1986 the 1000 ton steel and concrete lid capping reactor no. 4 at the poorly designed and built V. I. Lenin nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, Russia, was blown off when the atomic core it encased melted down and exploded, releasing one hundred times more radiation than was released by the A-bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

For days afterwards, the people of Pripyat, a town six miles from the reactor, the people of the numerous villages that abutted the reactor, and the people of Kiev, sixty miles away, were treated to deadly totalitarian silence-- deliberately kept in the dark by the Soviet government about the massive amounts of radiation their bodies were absorbing.

For weeks, the Soviet leadership did its best to hide the magnitude of the disaster. By accepting the Soviet government's official version of the event at face value even Hans Blix, then Director-General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), failed to grasp the seriousness of the situation. After returning from a visit to Kiev shortly after the reactor exploded Blix said that life near Chernobyl was proceeding normally and that farms and villages near the reactor would "soon be safe for residence."

In reality, the towns Blix spoke of will be uninhabitable for hundreds of years. In addition, twenty percent of the Ukraine's farmland, an area the size of Sweden, was immediately rendered unfit for cultivation due to the massive radioactive contamination. Radioactive fallout from Chernobyl spread across the globe and the massive long-term ecological damage caused by the disaster is still being assessed.

Chernobyl reactor no. 4 exploded on April 26, 1986 at 1:23AM. Its destruction marked the last of Soviet communism's awful contributions to mankind.