Reed Irvine - Editor
Dan Rather has taken over the anchor assignment for the CBS Evening News with a serious handicap--his long association with "60 Minutes," which has established an unenviable record for distortion.
Take the case of the segment on "60 Minutes" re-run on August 2, 1981 entitled "The Kyshtym Disaster." This was narrated by Dan Rather, who opened with this statement: "Nuclear waste--tons of radioactive debris that we thought had been buried forever suddenly exploded, and those deadly particles were carried in the air over a large inhabited area. The plot for a disaster movie starring Jane Fonda? No. Since we first broadcast this story, nothing has turned up to dispute the overwhelming evidence that such a disaster has taken place in the Soviet Union, although the Soviets have never confirmed it. For over 20 years, it was kept secret from the general public in the West until Dr. Zhores Medvedev, a Soviet scientist now living in exile in London, told this story."
The story told by Dr. Medvedev had been first published in the British popular science magazine, New Scientist, in 1976 and had received extensive press coverage at that time. Subsequently Medvedev expanded his story into a book, which was published in 1979 with the title, Nuclear Disaster in the Urals. Medvedev performed a useful service in digging out of Soviet scientific literature the evidence that a large area in the southern Urals had suffered severe radiation contamination in 1957-58. His findings have been confirmed by an independent review of the scientific literature by three scientists affiliated with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, who published their research in the July 18, 1980 issue of Science. A few individuals who had either passed through the contaminated area also provided confirmation or who had encountered some of the people hospitalized as a result of the accident.
Dan Rather was right in saying that no evidence had turned up to dispute the report that such a disaster had taken place, although he seemed to be giving himself and "60 Minutes" credit for breaking the story in that opening statement. Where Rather proved himself to be untrustworthy was in his gross oversimplification of what Medvedev and the Oak Ridge scientists had said and in his outrageous effort to associate this accident with alleged dangers in the development of nuclear power
The soviet government has maintained the deepest secrecy about what happened at Kyshtym. The Oak Ridge Laboratory team (John R. Trabalka, L. Dean Eyman and Stanley I. Auerbach) concluded that all the evidence pointed to a major airborne release of radioactive fission products near the city of Kasli in Chelyabinsk Province in the winter of 1957-58. They concluded that on area of 25 to 100 square kilometers was contaminated with high levels of radioactivity and that the area contaminated to a lesser degree could exceed 1,000 square kilometers.
The most likely cause of this contamination, they concluded, was "the chemical explosion of high-level radioactive wastes associated with a Soviet military plutonium production site." They found that the cause could not be determined with certainty because of the fragmentary nature of the available information, but they speculated that there might have been an explosion of ammonium nitrate that found its way into the nuclear wastes as a result of processing designed to remove one of the isotopes.
The Oak Ridge team said that many types of accidents could be postulated, but "most would not be credible in the light of U.S. practice and experience." They added: "We have not considered other accidents whose causes are unrelated to the technology. We have not seriously attempted to analyze a situation involving multiple accidents, combinations of accidents and non-accidents, or a single complex event, because all the potential causes discussed contain considerable speculation already: further additions seem pointless." They said confirmation would simply have to await the release of information by the Soviet scientific community. They concluded their article with an appeal to Soviet scientists to share all the pertinent information with the outside world, since this would be invaluable to the world nuclear committee.
Although "60 Minutes" had the Oak Ridge study and referred to it in the broadcast they began with a very different theory of what had happened, which they introduced as Medvedev's speculation. Showing on the screen a drawing of a mountain full of bore holes, both vertical and horizontal, Dan Rather said: "A complex mixture of dangerous radioactive substances then remained in liquid form. That nuclear waste had now to be disposed of--millions of gallons of it. The Russians, in their haste to catch up, simply buried this waste down boreholes and metalworkings, which are numerous in the Ural Mountains. Then, in the winter of 1957-58 that high-level radioactive waste spontaneously exploded." The graphic showed the top of the mountain being blown off. Rather continued: "It was a small explosion, as such explosions go. But the radioactivity it released was devastating."
Rather did not say what caused the explosion, but the viewer could easily have inferred that it was a nuclear blast if it was large enough to take the top off a hill. Later in the program Rather said Medvedev's theory was "that a small nuclear reaction in the waste produced a massive steam explosion.
Dan Rather obviously did not read Medvedev's book very carefully. In the book, Medvedev says, "It is useless to make any absolute assertions about the mechanism that set off the explosion." He advances three hypotheses. One is that the wastes were stored in tanks that leaked and small amounts of residual plutonium were concentrated in the soil to the point where a chain reaction became possible. The second in that the cooling system on a storage tank failed, building up heat and pressure sufficient to cause an explosion. The third was the one used by "60 Minutes," with the wastes simply dumped down bore holes. The residual plutonium, under this hypothesis became concentrated "by selective absorption" and reached a critical mass, which exploded. However, under this theory the top of the mountain was not blown off. The wastes were vented "through the extensively jointed rocks in the area.
Thus "60 Minutes" took one of three possible explanations for the explosion mentioned by Medvedev but altered it from a small nuclear explosion that blew steam out of fissures in the mountains to a huge explosion powerful enough to take the top off a mountain. Having gone to all the trouble of presenting this at the beginning of the program, complete with a graphic illustration. Rather, half way through the program, mentioned the Oak Ridge team's theory that ammonium nitrate may have been to blame. He added: "This seems more likely than Medvedev's own theory that a small nuclear reaction in the waste produced a massive steam explosion."
If Rather had set out to do a simple, straight forward report on what was known of the "Kyshtym disaster" he would certainly have featured the most plausible hypothesis advanced for the explosion, that suggested by the Oak Ridge team. He would have qualified it, as the scientists did, with the caveat that it was only speculation. He might have mentioned that nuclear scientists found Medvedev's theory of a nuclear explosion wholly out of the question. Medvedev himself mentions in his book that the British expert Sir John Hill contends that if there were such a concentration of residual plutonium in the soil and if it did explode, it would be of very low power and would not blow any contamination high into the air. This is presumably why the Oak Ridge team, while acknowledging their debt to Medvedev for publicizing the disaster, did not mention any of his speculations as to the cause of the explosion.
If CBS had dwelt on the Oak Ridge hypothesis, they would have been obliged to explain why the wastes included explosive ammonium nitrate. It would have become clear that the scientists did not believe that it was the nuclear wastes themselves that exploded, but rather a chemical introduced by a special processing operation.
The reason CBS did not want to go into this became obvious at the end of the program. Criticizing the old Atomic Energy Commission for not knowing anything about the Kyshtym disaster, Rather said: "Regardless of where the real blame lies, it certainly was the AEC's business to have known about an accident involving nuclear power." He then put Ralph Nader on to make this statement: "In the last eight years, there has been mounting public debate on nuclear power. That debate would have occurred in the late 1950s and early 1960s in that critical period when the government and the utilities were deciding to go full blast with nuclear power plants around the country, if our government had disclosed evidence about this radioactive waste catastrophe in the Soviet Union, made it public and informed the people about the real risks of nuclear power."
Then Rather concluded with this statement: "As we in the United States continue to invest in nuclear energy, such as this nuclear power plant under construction on Long Island. N.Y., should we really care about a nuclear disaster that occurred on a cold, wintery day, not unlike this one, a continent away and over 20 years ago? The Soviets, after all, were incredibly careless. Their technology primitive. We are told that it couldn't happen again. However, disposal of nuclear waste, waste that remains radioactive for centuries is still the biggest problem dogging nuclear energy programs today. As the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has said, a nuclear accident anywhere in the world is a nuclear accident everywhere in the world."
Suddenly Rather had made a transfer from an accident that involved a Soviet nuclear weapons production operation to the dangers of nuclear power plants. What is the connection? Both produce nuclear wastes. If you can create the impression that nuclear wastes might spontaneously explode, spreading radioactive contamination over a vast area, you can strengthen the hand of those who oppose nuclear power.v
An honest report about the Kyshtym disaster would not have done that. An explanation of the Oak Ridge team's hypothesis about the cause of the explosion would have made it clear that the suspected explosive, ammonium nitrate, is not present in the nuclear wastes produced in this country, either by nuclear power plants or weapons plants. An honest report would not have included Nader's suggestion that there is some rational reason why what happened at Kyshtym should have been taken into account in deciding whether or not we should generate power from nuclear fuel in this country. Nor would an honest commentator have concluded this report with the statement, "We are told that it couldn't happen again. However, nuclear waste... is still the biggest problem dogging nuclear energy programs today."
Dan Rather was telling his audience that perhaps they should not believe what "they" say. Nuclear waste is not a problem because scientists think it might explode, but because the nuclear phobia created by programs such as this makes it more difficult to develop the sites for the safe disposal methods that now exist.
MR. SULZBERGER LENDS US AN EAR
Beginning in 1978, Accuracy in Media has been given an on-the-record interview with Mr. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Chairman and President of The New York Times, making it unnecessary for us to attend the annual shareholders' meeting of The Times.
On July 23, 1981, AIM Chairman Reed Irvine and our President, Murray Baron, lunched with Mr. Sulzberger and Sydney Gruson, Vice Chairman of The Times and we discussed several complaints and made some constructive suggestions.
The failure of The Times to properly identify certain individuals who occasionally write for it and certain types of groups mentioned in its columns was brought up again this year. This was one of the issues that we discussed with Mr. Sulzberger in our first interview in 1978. At that meeting we complained about the failure to properly identify Wilfred Burchett, the Australian journalist who has been identified before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee as both a communist and a KGB agent. This year we were obliged to bring up the Burchett matter again. His memoirs were favorably reviewed by The Times last March. The reviewer, Thomas Powers, had simply taken Burchett's word that he had never joined the Communist Party. He said nothing whatsoever about the testimony of former KGB agent Yuri Krotkov that Burchett had sought and obtained a job with the KGB. Nor did he mention the role Burchett had played in helping extract and rewrite phoney germ warfare confessions from our POWs during the Korean War.
Mr. Irvine pointed out that he had promptly written to The Times Book Review, giving some of the important facts about Burchett's career that the reviewer had generously overlooked. Nearly four months had elapsed and the letter had not been published, although assurances had been given that it would be run. (The letter was finally published on July 26. The Washington Post also published a similar letter.)
Mr. Sulzberger said he didn't know why The Times was being so slow. He said he was sure there was no conspiratorial effort to avoid identifying Burchett, although he had been misidentified in the past. He said: "We did not identify him correctly. We admit it. It was just dumb. We did not say what he was. I think I've made my message clear to the editors. Apparently the message has not gotten through to the Book Review... I agree with your point one hundred percent, and I don't think you'll find an editor on the paper who doesn't agree with you. You ought to identify people for what they are, absolutely. It's a service to the reader."
Mr. Irvine said that the same problem existed with respect to the Institute for Policy Studies and people affiliated with it whose articles often appeared on the op-ed page of the Times. He commended the Times for the excellent article on the IPS by Josh Muravchik that was published a few months earlier. Mr. Irvine and Mr. Baron had suggested that such an article be published when they met with Mr. Sulzberger last year. Mr. Irvine said that Mr. Sulzberger had followed through on that suggestion very well, but the article seemed to have had no impact on the editor of the op-ed page, who was now identifying this far-left think tank merely as a "research organization."
Mr. Gruson said that he had not seen any pieces by IPS lately, and Mr. Sulzberger said that was his impression also. Mr. Irvine said that the publication of IPS material was unabated. One had appeared just a few days earlier, and the identification had been simply "research organization."
Mr. Baron observed that the op-ed page had recently seemed to be heavily loaded with articles that were in essential agreement with the views being expressed on the editorial page. He said the conformity between the two pages had gotten to be ridiculous. Mr. Gruson said that he agreed that if the page had become predictable it was not serving its intended purpose.
Mr. Baron called attention to a statement in a June 29 story written by The Time's correspondent in China, James Sterba. It read: "In preparing for the festivities on July 1, the party-controlled press has dwelled on the glories and victories of the struggle against foreign oppression in the period before it came to power in 1949. It had eulogized the early optimistic years of its rule and glossed over the era since 1957, in which China mostly stagnated in a kind of war of propaganda that made many in the outside world think of it as a kind of utopia."
Mr. Baron said that we now have overwhelming evidence that what happened to China after 1949 was a major disaster. Picking up on Sterba's acknowledgment that many in the outside world had been misled, Mr. Baron asked if it would not be a good idea for The Times to do an investigation into how the Free World had been so far misled. Mr. Sulzberger agreed that the subject would bear looking into. Mr. Irvine said The Times had been doing a good job of reporting on conditions in China in the past year and a half, but it did not stand out as having seen through the propaganda during the 1960s and 1970s.
Mr. Baron cited a March 15 art article by Annette Insdorf in The Times entitled. "Rediscovering Polish Jewry." He said the article described two survivors of the Holocaust in Poland who had found a haven in the United States and were described by The Times as continuing to fight the war against fascism by supporting the anti-war movement of the Vietnam years. Mr. Baron said it was outrageous for The Times to portray the United States as being the equivalent of the Nazis in this way. He said this was not an isolated case. Fred Hechinger had written an article comparing Nazi propaganda with terms used by the American military during the Vietnam War. Mr. Baron said that Hechinger was inviting the reader to equate the Nazis' manipulation of language with what we did. Another recent op-ed article had compared the actions of the Israelis and Palestinians in the Lebanese conflict to what the U.S. had done in Cambodia. Mr. Baron said he was deeply troubled by these efforts to lynch America's reputation in the pages of The Times. Mr. Sulzberger indicated that he certainly agreed that it was improper to equate the U.S. with the Nazis. He said he would take a look at the Insdorf article.
Mr. Irvine said he had been struck by the inadequacy of the coverage of Central America by The Tunes recently. He called attention to articles in The Washington Star. The Washington Post, the Diario Las Americas and the UPI wire on the second anniversary of the Sandinista takeover in Nicaragua. The government had announced massive confiscations of land and private businesses. The Times had ignored this, carrying only a tiny story reporting that there had been a celebration in Managua and that half a million people had turned out. Mr. Irvine noted that even the Arizona Republic had recently carried detailed articles on several Central American countries. The one on Nicaragua had been headed, "Dictatorship is Gone, but Misery Continues for People of Nicaragua." It had given a pretty good summary of what had happened in the past two years. The Washington Inquirer had published a similar rundown, based in part on a UPI report that was available to The Times. The Times had run nothing similar.
Mr. Irvine pointed out that The Times had ignored several important defectors from Nicaragua--Jose Francisco Cardenal, former vice president of the Council of State, Nevardo Arguello, former No. 3 man in the Justice Ministry, and Jaime Pasquier, former Nicaraguan ambassador to the UN office in Geneva, Switzerland. They had also said nothing about Eden Pastora leaving Nicaragua to take up arms elsewhere. Pastora had won fame as "Commander Zero" when the Nicaraguan congress was taken hostage in 1978. Nor had The Times mentioned the flight of another hero of the Sandinista rebellion, Fernando Chamorro, who had fired a rocket at Somoza's headquarters from the hotel across the street.
Irvine noted that Cardenal and Pasquier had recently spoken in Washington warning that the government in Nicaragua was firmly in the control of the communists and that it was just a matter of time before they would publicly announce that Nicaragua was a communist state. Pasquier had disagreed strongly with those who take the view that the Nicaraguan leaders are uncommitted and are willing to sell themselves to the highest bidder. He had said that they were committed and were ideologically out to destroy the free enterprise system.
Mr. Sulzberger said he found this confusing. If it was so clear, why hadn't top officials in the government said so? "What I don't understand," he said, "is a raging argument as to whether it is left or right or centrist." Mr. Irvine said our government was made up of a variety of individuals, and the answer you would get would depend on which individuals you asked. He had no doubt that he could turn up experts who would say exactly what Cardenal and Pasquier were saying. He compared it to the situation with respect to Cuba before Castro came to power. Robert Hill, our ambassador to Mexico had tried to warn that Castro was a communist who had been deeply involved in the communist uprising in Colombia in 1948. His warnings had been brushed aside. When Earl E.T. Smith had been named ambassador to Cuba, a high ranking State Department officer had instructed him to get a briefing on Cuba from Herbert Matthews, the New York Times correspondent who did so much to bring Castro to power.
Confronted with conflicting advice from their subordinates, top government officials all too often opted to err on the side of caution, deciding not to stick their necks out and risk being criticized by The Times. Mr. Irvine said it was the duty of The Times to report what people like Cardenal and Pasquier were saying. Unfortunately it was not doing that.
Mr. Sulzberger said the failure to report these items was explained simply by the fact that they didn't have the manpower to cover such things as the symposium at which Pasquier and Cardenal spoke. Mr. Irvine pointed out that they could have used the UPI wire story. He said Luis Pasquier had warned that if Americans did not wake up to what was happening, they would have the problem on the Rio Grande. Cord Meyer, a former CIA official, had been pointing out in his column in The Washington Star that the guerrilla warfare in El Salvador was merely a sideshow, it was distracting our attention from Nicaragua, where the biggest military force in Central America was being built up.
Meyer had warned that this force would be stronger than all the other Central American military forces combined. If they took El Salvador they would have an additional 5 million population, which would provide a lot more cannon fodder. None of this had been in The New York Times. Mr. Sulzberger acknowledged that it was news to him. He asked for copies of the Meyer columns.
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Write to CBS News to protest this dishonest journalism. Note two things: (1) the misleading description of the probable cause of the explosion: and (2) the implication that this old accident has some bearing on the risks presented bv nuclear power. Write to Mr. Bill Leonard, President, CBS News, 524 West 57th Street. N.Y., N.Y 10019.
AIM Report NOTES FROM THE EDITOR'S CUFF
I HAVE GOOD NEWS FOR MANY OF YOU THIS MONTH. THOSE OF YOU WHO HAVE PAID DUES or made contributions to AIM in the past year of S30 or more should get this issue and subsequent issues of the AIM Report by first class mail. We have been unhappy, as many of you have; about the length of time it takes the Report to reach you. I know that it takes about 10 days for it to be delivered to my home, and that is a lot closer to the point of origin than most of you are. We thought that we were solving the problem when we switched from 3rd class to 2nd class mail, but we have found that even though we pay more for the 2nd class service we get no faster delivery. Therefore, when we use up our current supplies of envelopes, we plan to revert to use of 3rd class mail for those whose membership category involves an annual payment of under $30. This should not result in any deterioration in the service. We decided to make available for those who can afford $30 a year or more the benefits of first class mail delivery.
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I WANT TO THANK THOSE OF YOU WHO HAVE RESPONDED TO MY SUGGESTION IN THE LAST issue that we could use some additional support to holster our cash flow. We have had to trim our sails a bit, dropping our weekly buy of space in Broadcasting magazine to carry our Media Monitor column. I would very much like to resume that, because it was very effective in getting our message out to an important media audience. I was going to get out a special letter to our membership asking for all the help you can give us at this time. But the response to that little low-key appeal in these notes encourages me to think that we can save the expense of such a mailing. I will put a coupon at the end of these notes and I urge that you use it to send a contribution now. Bear in mind that we have kept the basic price of the AIM Report at only $15 through many years of rising prices. We do this against the astute advice of some of our counselors because we don't want to put the Report out of reach of those who simply cannot afford more. Those of you who can afford more are urged to do your utmost to help us keep our programs rolling and expanding.
CORRECTION: IN THE LAST ISSUE OE THESE NOTES I SAID RICHARD SCAIFE WAS THE GRAND- son of Andrew Mellon. No. His grandfather was Richard Mellon, Andrew Mellon's brother.
OUR LEAD STORY IN THIS ISSUE DEALS WITH A SEGMENT OF "60 MINUTES" THAT WAS originally aired on November 9, 1980. I had missed seeing it at that time, and now that I have seen the re-run I am very glad that I didn't try to critique the program merely on the basis of a transcript. This is one of those cases where the visuals are very important. In describing what he said was Zhores Medvedev's speculation about the cause of the explosion that has been labeled "the Kyshtym disaster," Dan Rather said, "It was a small explosion, as such explosions go." The accompanying graphic that was shown on the tube showed the top of an entire mountain being blown off. That, of course, was the message to the viewer--an enormous explosion of a magnitude that could really be explained only as a nuclear explosion. But if one had not seen that visual and had depended only on the transcript one would not have gotten that impression, especially since Rather--much later in the program--said that "a small nuclear reaction in the waste produced a massive steam explosion." What had been pictured was an explosion of volcanic force. What he said was entirely different.
JUST IN CASE YOU DON'T READ THIS STORY CAREFULLY, LET ME EMPHASIZE THAT THE nuclear experts insist that the explosion, if indeed there was a single explosion, was not caused by a nuclear reaction in the stored waste products. These waste products simply don't contain the concentrations of plutonium or uranium needed to produce a critical mass capable of causing a bomb-like nuclear explosion. Medvedev in his book cited evidence that when wastes containing tiny amounts of plutonium were stored in trenches from which there was seepage, it was found that the plutonium tended to concentrate in certain types of soil. He speculated that this might have been what happened at Kyshtym, with enough plutonium being so concentrated in the soil that it produced a critical mass. The British expert, Sir John Hill, strongly disagreed. Sir John said that even if there were such a concentration and such an explosion it would be so small that it wouldn't go much beyond the confines of the storage trench. It obviously not have been large enough to cause a disaster of the proportions described by Medvedev.
I HAVE SUGGESTED THAT AN HONEST REPORT OF THIS MATTER WOULD HAVE GIVEN GREATER attention to the report of the three scientists affiliated with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, who were in a far better position than Zhores Medvedev to evaluate the various theories about the causes of the disaster. I should stress, however, that these scientists were very careful not to pretend that they knew how the accident happened. A lot of things could have gone wrong, including the undramatic leakage of wastes into the streams and lakes in the area. The "60 Minutes" type presentation almost inevitably conveys a far greater impression of certainty than the known facts would justify. CBS set out to fan the public's fears, not to inform them.
I THANK THOSE OF YOU WHO WROTE TO THE SPONSORS OF THE CBS SERIES ON NATIONAL DEFENCE. The replies have generally taken the line that the company tries to avoid sponsoring programs that have too much sex and violence. They say that they are not permitted to preview "news programs" that they sponsor and that anyway news programs have to be treated differently from entertainment programs. This is a tribute to the influence of the Coalition for Better TV, because a few years ago these big corporations were simply saying that they had no influence over the content of the programs they sponsored. Sponsoring Soviet disinformation may do more harm than "Three's Company." Let's tell them.
TO: Reed Irvine, AIM, and 1341 G ST., N.W., WASHINGTON, D.C. 20005
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