Reed Irvine - Editor
Two weeks after the accident that devastated the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and spewed radiation into the atmosphere, the outside world knew little about what had gone wrong, how much radiation had been released, how the effort to prevent further contamination was progressing and how many people had received life-threatening doses of radiation. The first lesson of the Chernobyl accident is that the Soviet regime is both extraordinarily secretive and callous even in dealing with matters where better and faster information could protect the health and the lives of large numbers of its own people.
This came as no surprise to those familiar with the mentality of ruling communists, whether in the Soviet Union, China or Cambodia. They have blithely killed millions of their subjects. Why worry that several thousand might be killed or physically impaired by radiation from a nuclear accident? It appears that the Soviet rulers had hopes of keeping the Chernobyl disaster a secret, just as they had kept the devastating radiation from the Kyshtym accident in the southern Urals in 1957-58 secret for many years.
No one knows to this day exactly what happened in Kyshtym. An explosion involving nuclear wastes evidently contaminated a broad area. The emigre Soviet scientist and writer, Zhores Medvedev, pieced together evidence from Soviet scientific publications, and 19 years after the accident, he tore aside the veil of secrecy that had concealed it from the outside world. He reported that as a result of radiation contamination some 33 villages had to be abandoned. How many people died we still don't know. Medvedev subsequently published a book, Nuclear Disaster in the Urals. A three-man team from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory made an independent review of the avail- able evidence and published their findings in the July 18, 1980 issue of Science magazine.
The Oak Ridge team concluded that a major air- borne release of radioactive fission products in Chelyabinsk Province in the winter of 1957-58 had seriously contaminated an area of 25 to 100 square kilometers. They believed that the area contaminated to a lesser degree could have exceeded 1,000 square kilometers. They concluded that the most likely cause of the contamination was the "chemical explosion of high-level radioactive wastes associated with a Soviet military plutonium production site."
Nearly thirty years after this major disaster, the Soviet rulers have still said nothing about the accident or its causes. The Oak Ridge team speculated that it was the result of a chemical explosion, perhaps because ammonium nitrate had found its way into the nuclear wastes as a result of processing designed to remove one of the isotopes. To this day, the cause of the Kyshtym disaster remains shrouded in secrecy and mystery.
Chernobyl: The Kyshtym Re-run Failed
Apparently ignorant of the Kyshtym experience, the attempted cover-up of the KAL-007 shootdown, as well as the Soviet penchant for concealing lesser accidents such as airplane crashes, some of our media personalities seemed genuinely puzzled by the failure of the Soviets to issue a prompt announcement about the Chernobyl accident. Soviet apologists explained that nothing had been said about the accident until persistent inquiries from Sweden had forced out the truth, because the authorities wanted to find out the facts before saying anything. It is obvious that they were concealing the known facts both from their own people and from the outside world, probably hoping that they could conceal Chernobyl just as they had success- fully concealed Kyshtym.
They knew enough about the seriousness of what had happened that they began evacuating over 40,000 residents of the immediate area on the afternoon of Sun- day, April 27, 36 hours after the reported start of the accident. But 24 hours later they were still responding to Swedish inquiries about elevated radiation levels with denials that they knew anything about a nuclear accident. Eugene Pozdnyakov, a senior official at the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Canada appearing on ABC's "Nightline" on the following Wednesday night, April 30, explained: "It happened on Saturday. Governments are usually on holiday on weekends."
Ted Koppel, "Nightline's" host, exploded: "Oh, come on. Come on. I would be astonished, and I don't think you're going to tell me that the Kremlin closes down on Friday evenings and opens up again on Monday morning. I can assure you that the State Department doesn't close down, that Whitehall doesn't close down, that the Elysee Palace doesn't close down. I'm sure that every government in Europe has duty officers that could have accepted a call like that. Now that's nonsense when you say it was over a weekend like that."
Pozdnyakov reiterated that it was over a weekend, and Koppel became even blunter, saying: "But it is nonsense when you suggest that you couldn't give information to governments because it was a week- end." Pozdnyakov had to try a different tack, and so he said, "But before you give information you have to assess it. Do you agree with me?" Then he told another whopper: "Everything is blown out of proportion. If it is a little bit contaminated, it is not dangerous to health."
Various excuses have appeared in our media to ex- plain why the Soviets had blundered so badly in handling this matter. To some, it was incomprehensible that Gorbachev should have permitted his media- created image of openness and candor to be demolished so quickly. Pozdnyakov's effort to persuade Ted Koppel that it was simply because things were closed down for the weekend was silly, and it would have been exposed as even more absurd had Koppel point- ed out that the cover-up persisted until 9:00 p.m. Monday.
Another absurd excuse came from Gary Lee, the Moscow correspondent of The Washington Post. In a front page story on May 4, Lee wrote: "While the Reagan administration appears to seek propaganda gains from attributing the information vacuum to willful decisions by Soviet leaders to suppress information, diplomats and other westerners here are increasingly concerned about the likelihood that the compartmentalization and rigidity of the Soviet system itself may have caused much of the confusion.... The original two-day gap in public information in the Soviet capital about the disaster, followed by a relative flurry of official activity has created an impression that only inquiries from abroad called the attention of senior officials in Moscow to the case, according to a consensus of western envoys here."
On May 9, Lee reported that Alexander Lyashko, prime minister of the Ukraine, said officials in Moscow were informed of the accident on day one, Saturday, April 26 but did not become aware of the full gravity of the situation until the following Monday. The evacuation of 49,000 people on Sunday would have required Moscow's knowledge and consent. That would have required proof that the situation was grave.
What happened on Monday, April 28 was that Sweden noticed the radioactivity and began making insistent demands that Moscow explain it. With the fire still raging at Chernobyl and with our capability of detection by satellite, the Kremlin realized that it could not get away with a Kyshtym-style cover-up. It reluctantly admitted the accident, playing down its gravity. Gorbachev's image was tarnished, but helpful American journalists can be counted on to put the blame on inefficient subordinates, thus salvaging the image they did so much to create.
Transfering the Fear to the U.S.
Deprived by Soviet stonewalling of any precise information about what was happening at Chernobyl, our media quickly gravitated to the question of what the Soviet accident might mean for the safety of nuclear power plants in this country. The CBS Evening News put on Edward Markey, an anti-nuclear congressman from Massachusetts, to tell us that the Soviet experience should remind us that nuclear power generation is "an inherently unsafe technology." He was on the CBS Morning News the next day telling us that he didn't feel safe and that the Reagan administration had lost sight of a lot of the lessons of Three Mile Island. ABC's "World News Tonight" put on not only Cong. Markey, but also Lanny Sinkin, a lawyer for the Christic Institute, who said that Chernobyl was "the nail in the coffin of the nuclear power industry." The normally respectable "Nightline" aired an introductory segment on nuclear power accidents by correspondent James Walker on April 29, in which he declared that "no one knows exactly how much radiation was released over the countryside at Three Mile Island." He then put on some footage purporting to show cows, cats and goats that suffered death or deformities as a result of the Three Mile Island accident.
It was a shock to see these old-wives tales about TMI on "Nightline." It is false to say that no one knows how much radiation was released at TMI. It was thoroughly monitored and studied. A person immediately off the site who stayed outdoors for 24 hours could have received a maximum dose of 80 millirems, the equivalent of three chest X-rays. The stories about cows, goats and cats dying or being deformed as a result of the modest increase in radiation from TMI have long since been exposed as false. Walker was good enough to report that "scientists believe that Chernobyl was worse" than Three Mile Island, but he didn't say how much worse. On May 3, Boris N. Yeltsin, a Soviet official, was quoted as saying that radiation at the Chernobyl site was down to 200,000 millirems per hour. He didn't say what it was in the immediate environs. U.S. experts estimate that a mile from the plant the 24-hour dose may have been a million millirems, 12,500 times the maximum possible dose at TMI.
The main lesson of Three Mile Island, where not a single person was killed or injured, was that the safety features built into American nuclear power plants worked. As Dr. Petr Beckmann, the author of The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear, has point- ed out many times, the only deaths properly attributable to the TMI accident are approximately 500 caused by pollution from the coal burned to generate the power lost when the two TMI reactors went out of service. That is a lesson that Cong. Markey and many others have apparently never learned, partly because the media have done a poor job of telling the truth about the safety of nuclear power relative to alternative forms of energy generation.
This probably explains why an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll taken after the Chernobyl accident found that 65 percent of those polled were opposed to the United States building any more nuclear power plants. USA Today's poll showed that those opposed to more nuclear plants came to only 54 percent of those polled, but it found that 58 percent were of the opinion that the kind of accident that happened at Chernobyl could happen here also.
That poll was taken Wednesday and Thursday nights; the intensive media comment on Chernobyl and its ramifications had begun Monday morning. We had not succeeded in getting some very important information to a majority of the people in this country about the most obvious lessons of Chernobyl. USA Today found that only 38 percent of those polled understood that the Soviet disaster had occurred be- cause the Soviets don't have adequate safety at their nuclear power plants."
Not only have they failed to build the immensely strong containment structures that we erect around our nuclear reactors to prevent massive radiation leaks into the atmosphere in the event of an accident, but the technology of the reactors at Chernobyl is outmoded. It relies on graphite to moderate the nuclear chain reaction. This has a number of technical disadvantages. One of them, as the Chernobyl experience has shown, is that graphite burns at high temperatures. The Soviets obviously had a serious problem trying to control the fire in the reactor because the graphite itself had caught fire. Our media have reported the flaws in the Soviet nuclear plants, but it takes more than that to offset the needless alarm created by people such as Cong. Markey.
Anti-nuclear groups are trying hard to realize the prediction of Larry Sinkin that Chernobyl will be the nail in the coffin of nuclear energy. It would be a tragedy if we permitted Soviet recklessness and ineptitude to deny this country the great benefits of nuclear power, not the least of which is its safety. Write letters to the editor of your newspapers and call in on radio talk shows to make this point, using the material in this AIM Report.
MORAL MELTDOWN AT THE WASHINGTON POST
At the annual meeting of The Washington Post Company on May 9, AIM Chairman Reed Irvine remind- ed Katharine Graham, the chairman of the board of The Post, that in 1975, when faced with his plea that she right an injustice done by her editors, she had said, "You have to realize that I must stand by my editors or get new editors." The discussion at the meeting demonstrated once again that Mrs. Graham and her son, Donald, the publisher of the Post, are not inclined to let moral issues come between them and the editors who have helped make their paper a money-making machine.
Dishonest Reporting on the CIA
The first question raised by the AIM chairman concerned a front-page story in The Washington Post on May I which said: "The Reagan administration is considering the criminal prosecution of five news organizations for publishing information about U.S. intelligence gathering operations." This story was based on a meeting that William J. Casey, the Director of Central Intelligence, had with Post Executive Editor Benjamin C. Bradlee and Managing Editor Leonard Downie, Jr.
According to a spokesman for Mr. Casey, the CIA director had arranged the meeting to caution the Post editors against running a story that, in his view, would damage our national security. Mr. Casey is said to have advised them that if they went ahead with the story, he might recommend that they be prosecuted under a statute which makes it illegal to publish classified information about codes, ciphers or "communication intelligence activities of the United States or any foreign government." Casey's spokesman said that the director had point- ed out that other publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Times, Newsweek and Time, had, in his view, violated this law. He was not planning to ask that all of them be prosecuted. He was simply interested in warning The Post of the possible consequences of publishing the story it had under consideration.
The Post relegated this to the fifth paragraph of its story, saying, "In addition, Casey warned Post editors that possible prosecution against this newspaper would be 'an alternative that would have to be considered' if The Post were to publish another story it has prepared concerning U.S. intelligence capabilities but which the newspaper has not yet decided whether to publish."
Irvine asked Mrs. Graham if she considered it good journalistic practice to relegate the main thrust of Mr. Casey's statement to the fifth paragraph, beginning with "In addition."
Publisher Donald E. Graham argued that Mr. Casey had said he had come from a meeting at the Justice Department, where he had talked about possible prosecution of five news organizations. "That struck us as a very important story," he said. He added, "The other element you cited is, as you said, in the fifth paragraph of the story, right spans on page one. It makes it perfectly clear to the reader what the purpose of the meeting was, who was there and what happened."
Irvine asked if it was honest journalism to report a meeting with Mr. Casey, which he had called to warn The Post against publishing a particular story under pain of possible prosecution, as if he had given an interview to the Post editors to inform them that he was contemplating legal action against four other publications. Irvine said, "He wasn't announcing to the world that he was going to start prosecuting five news organizations. That was not the purpose of the meeting, and your people know it."
Don Graham: "We did not say it was the purpose of the meeting."
Irvine: "You made it the headline and you made it the lead."
Graham reiterated his view that it was a major news story when the head of the CIA said he was contemplating the prosecution of five news organizations. Irvine charged that The Post was simply trying to divert attention from itself and its plans to run a story that might damage national security interests. He said they had created what was essentially a phony story in order to get as allies the other publications. He asked again if that was good journalism.
Mrs. Graham replied, "Well, we thought so, obviously." There was no denial of Irvine's interpretation of the strategy behind the story.
Asked whether she believed that journalists should think about the consequences of their stories, recognizing that they can do harm as well as good, Mrs. Graham replied, "You have to think first of the news, because once you start deciding what is bad or good for people to know, I think that editors get on a very slippery slope, that they really should not try to decide what is good for people or bad for people to know. They simply have to pass on all the information they have to readers. In the case of either libel or privacy or national security, these are unusually sensitive areas, and they do think with special care in these areas."
Irvine then noted that on April 27, The Post had devoted two full pages to list 110 individuals who had either held positions or had been considered for positions in the Reagan administration against whom some allegations of wrongdoing or impropriety had been made. He said that by his tally, 17 had been absolved by official inquiries or investigations; two had been acquitted in court; and no for- mal charges or action had been taken in 37 cases. He said that in many of the other cases, the charges were unsubstantiated or trivial. Yet all of these people had been lumped together with individuals who had been found guilty of felonies or who had been demonstrated to be guilty of seriously improper conduct. Irvine asked how this rifled in with Mrs. Graham's feeling that special care should be taken in dealing with people's reputations.
Donald Graham replied that the story had made it clear that a number of people listed had been cleared of any wrongdoing. He thought it was good journalism to lump them all together because "there had been a large number of such accusations." He said he would stand by the story.
Irvine said he didn't see the point of lumping people who had been cleared together with those who had been found guilty. He cited two individuals on the list, William Harvey and Donald Bosard, the former chairman of the board and president of the Legal Services Corporation respectively. The original allegations against them had been trumped up with the collaboration of The Washington Post. They had been proven to be totally unfounded, and The Post had so acknowledged in an editorial. And yet they showed up again in this latest list, with an acknowledgement that they had been exonerated, to be sure. But including them in a list that was sup- posed to show the extent of sleaze in the Reagan administration could only suggest that their exoneration was perhaps not valid and that they were part of the sleaze.
Irvine noted that The Post's ombudsman had been critical of the story and had written an internal memo about it. No reply had been received from the editors. Mrs. Graham said Irvine's view was a reasonable point of view, "but not our point of view." She denied that the charges were unsubstantiated in the form in which they were put in the paper. But many of them were nothing more than someone's unproven allegation. The Post often calls that sort of thing "McCarthyism," when others do it.
Irvine brought up the way in which Gary Lee, The Post's Moscow correspondent, had twisted a story out of the Geneva summit meeting last year. Yuri Stern, a Soviet emigre, had attended a high level Soviet press conference in Geneva and confronted the officials with concrete evidence of official Soviet anti- Semitism.
Gary Lee's report of the incident had not mentioned what Stern did or said, but it did report Leonid Zamyatin's reply, which was a diatribe alleging that the United States was anti-Semitic and that there had recently been a pogrom in New York City. Man- aging Editor Len Downie had conceded in a letter to AIM that it appeared The Post had missed a good story. Irvine said this was not enough, that there should have been an investigation to determine how the story had become so distorted. Don Graham said that when personal swipes were taken at people, he felt obligated to say that Gary Lee is a fine reporter and that The Poet's Moscow correspondents over the years had done an outstanding job.
Mrs. Graham acknowledged that Gary Lee, who is also criticized in the foregoing story on Chernobyl, should not he above criticism. Impressed by Don Graham's defense of Lee, Irvine asked, "Who goes to the defense of people who are unjustly accused in the pages of The Washington Post?" Mrs. Graham said only, "We have heard you."
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NOTES FROM THE EDITOR'S CUFF By Reed Irvine
AS WE POINT OUT IN OUR LEAD STORY IN THIS ISSUE, THE DRIVE TO SALVAGE THE IMAGE of Mikhail Gorbachev as a "new style" communist leader from the wreckage of Chernobyl is underway. Additional evidence comes from Valentin Falin, chairman of Novosti, a Soviet propaganda and disinformation agency that fronts as a news agency. Falin told Der Spiegel of West Germany that Gorbachev shouldn't be criticized for delays in releasing information about the accident. He acknowledged that Gorbachev was informed of the accident the first day it occurred, but he claimed the dictator didn't get a detailed, factual report until just before the Politburo met two days later, Monday, to discuss the situation. Some 49,000 people had already been evacuated from the vicinity on Sunday, and we can rest assured that Gorbachev knew about that. I should note that it wasn't until 12 days after the accident that the world was informed that an additional 35,000 had been evacuated from Chernobyl, which is 12 miles distant from the reactor. We still don't know just when that evacuation took place, but it's believed that they were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation for at least a week. Zhores Medvedev, the Soviet emigre scientist who first revealed the 1957-58 disaster at Kyshtym, says that for 10 years he lived within a mile of the very first Soviet nuclear power plant. The public was never notified when there were accidents that resulted in release of radioactive materials into the river or the air. At Chernobyl, the Soviets were just following their standard cover-up procedure. This time it didn't work.
I FIND IT DISGUSTING THAT HANS BLIX, DIRECTOR GENEFAL OF THE INTERNATIONAL ATOMIC Energy Agency in Vienna, Austria, has been more critical of the reporting of the accident by the Western media than of the virtual non-reporting by the Soviets. Blix said, "I fear Western-style reporting in the Soviet Union could well have resulted in much and mostly unnecessary panic." He added: "The Soviet reporting was late, meager, but probably not untrue. The Western reporting was fast, massive and often misleading. Can there not be anything in between?" Because of the refusal of the Soviet regime to provide information, Western media did have to fall back on speculation and rumors, such as the one that 2,000 people had died, We know that reckless and inaccurate reporting created unnecessary alarm at the time of the Three Mile Island accident. But at Chernobyl, many thousands of people were subjected to dangerous levels of radiation far longer than they should have been. Mr. Blix ought to be centering his media criticism on the subservient Soviet press that did absolutely nothing to prod Gorbachev and all his minions to act speedily to protect the lives of these people. Our media did a better job this time of seeking out reputable scientists to comment than they did at TMI. They put on their share of Union of Concerned Scientist spokesmen without identifying this as an anti-nuclear organization or pointing out that the name is a misnomer because so many of its members are not scientists. Lanny Sinkin, who is quoted in our story, appeared on ABC News as a spokesman for the Christic Institute, which was formed by a group of lawyers who worked on the Karen Silkwood case. They were on the side of the Silkwood family. Sinkin has been active as an intervenor against nuclear power plants for 14 years. ABC did not identify either Sinkin or his organization as anti-nuclear activists. But TV viewers saw a lot more genuine nuclear experts than they did seven years ago.
AN AIM MEMBER IN WISCONSIN WRITES THAT SHE AND HER HUSBAND NEVER MISS OUR RADIO program, "Media Monitor." But she suspects that a lot of members don't know about it and says we should promote it more. I agree. On the reverse is a list of 45 stations that air the program. Another 39 get it, and we'll list them when they give us the time they broadcast it. The program is provided free to stations. If you think you might be able to get a station in your area to use it, please try. We will be happy to provide you with a sample tape you can give them, or we will send it directly to the station. If you are in business, you might want to sponsor the program on one of your local stations--or on several stations. You may be able to interest some of your fellow business men in joining in the project.
WE HAVE ALSO DECIDED TO MAKE THE "MEDIA MONITOR" TAPES AVAILABLE DIRECTLY TO AIM members at a modest cost. For $25 for three months or $90 a year, we will send you a cassette each week. Each cassette has five commentaries voiced jointly by Cliff Kincaid and myself. Try it for three months. I think you'll like them, and you can pass them on to friends and family. We will send them free to AIM donors who contribute $1,000 a year or more to AIM.