Globe: My quiet moment with citizen Jane

My quiet moment with citizen Jane - When urban guru Jane Jacobs passed away this week, much was made of her grand vision, Catherine Gildiner remembers her kindness most of all, Saturday, April 29, 2006

It was May in 1981. I had just given birth to the largest identical twins ever born at Toronto's Women's College Hospital the previous month.

I already had a two-year-old at home. Well, home was a stretch. We lived above a store three doors south of Honest Ed's on Bathurst Street. My husband and I were students at the time. In order to pay the rent, he had gone to Inuvik to earn isolation pay.

The twins cried all night every night for the first month of their life and my two-year-old son was unhappy with the new additions to the family. Finally one night, no longer able to take the crying any more, I put the two babies in a carriage and balanced the third on the handle, (this was obviously before safety had been invented) and headed to the park at 5:30 in the morning.

When I arrived, no one was there except for one woman reading a book. She was in her 50s or 60s. The babies were screaming, both wanting to be fed, but I could feed only one at a time. The lady didn't say anything -- she never asked if I needed help. She could probably tell I was the type who would have said no. She just took one of the babies and walked around with him until he stopped crying. This gave me the chance to feed the other in the first experience of peace I'd had in days. I remember the velvet sound of that silence.

For some unknown reason, my two-year-old, Jamey, travelled everywhere with a stack of hockey cards. Some kids had a teddy bear or a blanket. He had hockey cards. He looked at them all the time and shuffled the deck in some meaningful way.

He was angry that I could pay so little attention to him. I couldn't push him on the swing. I could barely focus on him at all since the twins were only a few weeks old. He began screaming about his hockey cards and how I didn't care about them. (What a mind reader.)

The woman picked up the cards and began reading all the statistics about each player. My son sat in rapt attention. She asked him all kinds of questions. Things I could never have come up with such as "Why with that many assists did Bryan Trottier have so few goals?"

Jamey would make up elaborate answers to these questions and smiled for the first time since I'd brought home the twins. She had paid attention to the hockey cards as though they were important and really tried to understand them. My son picked up on her sincerity and her engagement.

As the woman and I sat on the park bench, we watched the sun come up and all the children were content. We heard the first birds of spring and saw the dew on the still-closed daffodils as they shone as yellow fists in the new sunlight.

As she spoke, I picked up a New York accent and she picked up my Buffalo one. She said we were lucky we could both walk only a block to a park in our neighbourhood and could help each other out. She said she'd been a mother too. She said knew how hard it was to be locked in an apartment alone. My eyes filled with tears as I said that I never needed help more than I had needed it that day. I held Sam; she held Dave; and Jamey lined up all of his hockey cards in order. All felt calm in the world.

About a year later, I was walking down Bloor Street. The twins were now in a double stroller, Jamey was perched on my husband's shoulders and I saw the woman who had helped me on the opposite side of the street. I pointed her out and my husband said, "That is Jane Jacobs. She is probably the most famous city planner that ever lived."

Gwynne Dyer, January 2005: Sudan deal, a Pandora’s box on borders

Sudan deal, a Pandora’s box on borders, Tuesday 18 January 2005, Gwynne Dyer, The Canberra Times (reprinted in the Sudan Tribune April 2006)

If the peace agreement signed in Kenya on January 9 really ends the 21-year-old Sudanese civil war, the killing will stop and millions of refugees will be able to go home - but the deal carries a big risk for Africa. As The Nation put it in Nairobi: ’’One of the elements of the settlement is that the south has the right to secede after six years. This is the first time in Africa that a peace settlement has recognised the right to secession.’’ That’s not strictly true, since the almost equally long war in Ethiopia ended in the early ’90s with independence for Eritrea. But Eritrea could be treated as an exception because it had already been a separate entity in colonial times; the Sudan deal is different. The basic rule that Africa’s old colonial borders must never be changed, adopted by the Organisation of African Unity (now the African Union) at the dawn of independent Africa, is starting to break down.

The OAU declared Africa’s borders sacrosanct not because they made good sense, but precisely because they didn’t. They were arbitrary lines on maps that bundled peoples of different languages, cultures and religions within the borders of a single state, and divided others between several states. If you let anybody get away with changing just one of those borders, you would be opening Pandora’s box - because there’s hardly a border anywhere in Africa that somebody couldn’t make a good argument for changing.

Fifty-one African countries (or 52, or 53 - it depends how you feel about Somaliland and Western Sahara); about 200 separate ethno-linguistic groups of more than half a million people each; no more than five or six groups south of the Sahara that number more than 10 million: Africa is the last place in the world to start trying to draw rational borders. Leave them alone! That was the rule from the start, and it probably saved millions of African lives over the decades, in wars that were not fought, because even if you won them you couldn’t change the borders. Yet the wiser men among the OAU’s founders probably secretly knew that the rule couldn’t last forever. Never mind. It would keep big inter-African wars at bay for at least a generation, and by that time surely economic growth and education would have eroded the old ethnic divisions. With luck, African borders would matter no more than Scandinavian borders by then.

It seemed a plausible hope at the time. Africa’s living standards and education levels were much higher than Asia’s in the ’60s, and most people expected the kind of rapid development in Africa that subsequently did happen in Asia. If that had actually come to pass, African borders really wouldn’t matter much by now. But it didn’t happen, so they matter a lot.

The Sudanese peace deal makes good sense from the point of view of the Sudanese. Neither side can win the war, which has killed two million people and displaced another four million in the past two decades, and the country’s oil reserves can only be developed if the two sides stop shooting and share the profits. So President Omar al-Bashir’s regime, which controls the Arabic-speaking, mostly Muslim north of the country, has agreed to share power with the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, which runs much of the black African, mostly Christian and animist south.

SPLA leader John Garang will become First Vice-President to President Bashir, the two armies will be integrated (in theory, though probably not in practice), and oil revenues, mostly generated in the south, will be evenly shared between north and south. There is even hope that the new, integrated government in Khartoum will take a saner approach to the rebellion in the western region of Darfur. Khartoum’s current approach, which has been to unleash a brutal militia called the Janjaweed, recruited from Arabic-speaking pastoral tribes in the north of Darfur, to terrorise the more ’’African’’ farming communities of southern Darfur from whom the rebels are drawn, has been as vicious as it was ineffective. It has cost 70,000 lives in the past year and made almost two million people refugees, and still the rebels have not been defeated. The rebels in Darfur are trying to emulate the success of the SPLA, but without either oil or religion to strengthen their hand - everybody on both sides in Darfur is Muslim - they stand little chance of success. A less violent approach from Khartoum and some oil money to lubricate a peace deal there could cut the ground right out from under them.

But the price of all this has been that the non-Muslim southerners (about a third of Sudan’s 30 million people) will be able to secede legally in six years’ time if they still want out. The hope is that a share of the oil money will reconcile everybody to a more or less united Sudan, but it’s unlikely that there will be enough money, fairly enough distributed, to transform opinion in the south (which has been separatist since before independence) in only six years. If the south chooses to become a separate country in 2010, under an agreement and procedures that have the official approval of the African Union, then the rules in Africa would well and truly have changed, and Pandora’s box would be open at last. This is a very big gamble.

Gwynne Dyer, June 2004: State of war

State of war, Gwynne Dyer, Jordan Times, Thursday, June 3, 2004

The worst killing in the world this month was in Nigeria, which isn't officially at war. Nigerian police routinely underestimate the number of people killed in fighting between Muslims and Christians, believing that the true numbers will just encourage revenge killings elsewhere, but at least 600 Muslims were murdered in the central state of Plateau in early May in a steep escalation of tit-for-tat killings between Fulani cattle-herders (Muslim) and Tarok farmers (Christian) over land and cattle. “Allah will avenge us,” said one survivor in the burnt-out town of Yelwa. “The pagans have killed our people.” Revenge came a week later, although not against those guilty of the murders. Between 500 and 600 Christians were killed in the Muslim-majority city of Kano in northern Nigeria by gangs of Muslims youths armed with machetes and clubs. Many of the bodies were burned and mutilated, and as in Yelwa even children were killed.

It has been a particularly bad month in Nigeria — but about 10,000 people have been killed in this kind of Christian-Muslim violence in the past five years. So is this war, or do we just treat it as a very bad case of civil disorder? The answer matters, because it shapes our perception of what kind of world we live in.

More people died violently in Nigeria this month than in Iraq, which got most of the headlines about war in May. Many more were killed in Nigeria than in the Gaza Strip, which came second in news coverage although actual deaths were far fewer. One side in Iraq and in the Gaza Strip was wearing military uniforms and fully involved in the fighting, whereas in Nigeria the uniformed people just went around collecting the bodies afterwards, but it seems reasonable to treat all of these clashes as a kind of war.

Then why were the Nigerian killings so under-reported? Because they were in Africa. People elsewhere see massacres between rival ethnic and religious groups in African countries as something chronic and specifically African which does not really have the same news value or political importance as killings elsewhere that involve regular armies. At the same time, however, people are dimly aware that there are many ethnic wars in Africa, and it adds to their perception of a world ravaged by war.

So let's count them. There is the ethnic struggle that may finally be ending in southern Sudan and the new one that has flared in Darfur province in western Sudan; the bizarre and bloody campaign of terror waged by the Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda; the civil war between the Muslims of northern Ivory Coast and Christians of the south, currently frozen by a ceasefire; the multisided war that still drags on half-heartedly in the eastern Congo; and the war between Hutu guerrillas and the Tutsi-dominated government in Burundi. All of them are tribal in nature; some of them have an overlay of Muslim-Christian hostility — and there actually aren't that many of them.

There certainly aren't many compared to twenty years ago, when Angola, Namibia, Mozambique, Ethiopia and Eritrea were all consumed by guerrilla war and Somalia was beginning its descent into anarchy. Sudan was already well into its north-south civil war, and President Robert Mugabe's troops were busy massacring Ndebele in western Zimbabwe who had supported the wrong liberation movement.

The Congo was still at peace, but both Burundi and Rwanda were suffering from Hutu-Tutsi clashes and Morocco was waging a full-scale war against Polisario rebels in the Sahara. Ethnic strife in Nigeria, Africa's biggest and most complicated country, was as common as it is now, and South Africa still writhed under the brutal apartheid regime, with no hope of peaceful change in sight. War is still a huge problem in Africa, but it is definitely smaller than it was twenty years ago.

Elsewhere, the number of wars has shrunk by more than half. Twenty years ago there were major guerrilla wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Peru and Colombia; today the only such war that survives in all of Latin America is in Colombia.

Two decades ago Asia was the second home of war, with big guerrilla insurgencies in Cambodia, the southern Philippines, East Timor, Burma, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, and full-scale war between Iran and Iraq. Apart from Iraq and Afghanistan, all these countries are now at least provisionally at peace, and the only active new guerrilla wars in Asia are in Nepal and Kashmir.

Above all, there is peace among the really dangerous countries. The nuclear war the industrialised countries had been preparing for since the late 1940s has been cancelled, and even the aftershocks attending the belated end of the Russian empire — ethnic wars in the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia — have mostly died down.

The planet is more at peace now than since the European empires covered most of it like political glaciers and smothered all dissent and difference beneath their weight. The retreat of the glaciers was bound to unleash a lot of tectonic activity, but it is dying down again. The only kind of political violence that people in most countries have to fear any more is terrorism — and if that's your only worry, then you really don't have many worries.

Gwynne Dyer, June 2004: Sudan — peace in the south, war in the west

Sudan — peace in the south, war in the west, Gwynne Dyer, Jordan Times, Wednesday, June 23, 2004

USAID predicts that 350,000 people will die of hunger, disease and exposure in the refugee camps of western Sudan in the next few months. Back in April, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan was already warning that the international community should be prepared to take steps in Darfur “that may include military action”. But nothing has happened. Well, not literally nothing. The African Union is sending a handful of observers to monitor the ceasefire that was signed in Darfur in April (though it hasn't actually stopped the killing). A UN appeal raised $288 million for relief operations in Darfur last week, although that is $80-$100 million short of what is needed and the rainy season will restrict deliveries to the camps starting about now. The core of the problem is in Khartoum, however, and nobody wanted to touch that.

The Sudanese president, Omar Bashir, still insists that foreign governments are blowing the events in Darfur out of proportion, but low-level flights across southern parts of the province report virtually every village burned out. Over a million people are living in refugee camps (including 158,000 who have fled across the border into Chad), and even in the camps the refugees are not safe, as raids by the Janjaweed militia continue. But at least the United States and the United Nations have finally criticised the government in Khartoum directly.

“I received numerous accounts of the extra-judicial and summary executions carried out by government-backed militias and by the security forces themselves,” said United Nations special rapporteur Asma Jahangir in Khartoum on June 13. “There is no ambiguity that there is a link between some of the militias and government forces.”

After months of dodging the issue, US Secretary of State Colin Powell echoed her words on Sunday: “We believe that the government of Sudan did provide support to these militias.” He still avoided using the word “genocide”, but he was clearly aware that President Bill Clinton had evaded the duty of responding to the genocide in Rwanda a decade ago by refusing to call it by the right name: “All I know is that there are at least a million people who are desperately in need, and many of them will die if we can't... get the Sudanese to cooperate with the international community. And it won't make a whole lot of difference after the fact what you've called it.”

Why did the US and the UN wait so long before putting the blame where it belongs? This is where it gets complicated, because the main reason is that they were afraid of jeopardising the deal that is finally bringing peace to the southern Sudan after 21 years of war and at least two million dead.

Every government in Sudan since independence has been dominated by the Arabised Muslims of northern Sudan who account for two-thirds of the country's population — and almost every one of those governments has spent much of its time at war with rebels in the African, predominantly Christian south of the country. The current fighting flared in 1983 after an Islamist faction got the upper hand in the struggle for power among the northern, Arabic-speaking population and tried to impose Islamic law on the whole country.

Eventually the growing importance of Sudan's oil — it could be exporting half as much as Kuwait in a few years — and concerns that the country's Islamist regime had links with Al Qaeda focused official American attention on Sudan. An adroit use of sticks and carrots by Washington brought first a more moderate government in Khartoum, and now a peace deal between north and south (signed in Kenya early this month) that provides for a ceasefire, sharing of oil revenues between north and south, and a referendum on southern independence in six years' time.

But other neglected regions, seeing what the Christian south has achieved by revolt, were tempted to play the same game. Everybody in Darfur is Muslim, but there is a deep hostility between the African farmers of the province's southern river valleys and the Arabised pastoral people of northern Darfur, who traditionally raided the farmers for cattle and women. So the Islamist faction in Khartoum, now out of power and looking for a way to undermine its rivals, urged the people of southern Darfur to revolt, which some of them did last year — and the faction now in power in Khartoum turned the Arabised pastoral people of northern Darfur loose on them.

The Janjaweed militia's raids on the farming villages are now backed by Sudanese government helicopter gunships, and rather than just stealing cattle and women they murder everyone they can catch, burn the crops and smash the irrigation systems. It is genocide, no doubt about it — but the government that backs it is the same Sudanese government that has pushed the Islamists out of power in Khartoum and is now making peace in the south.

Now, very late in the game, the US and the UN are starting to condemn the Sudanese government openly, but it's not clear what they will actually do about it. Overthrow the present lot in Khartoum, and you probably restart the much bigger war in the south. It's another problem from hell.

Reuters: Chernobyl boss - "True cause of disaster was hidden"

Chernobyl boss: "True cause of disaster was hidden", Tue Apr 25, 2006, Christian Lowe

KIEV (Reuters) - The world has failed to learn the lessons of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, according to the man who was in charge of the reactor that blew up 20 years ago this week.

Former Chernobyl director Viktor Bryukhanov told Russia's Profil magazine in a rare interview that scientists had covered up the full truth about the design faults that helped cause the world's worst nuclear accident.

Bryukhanov, who was jailed for negligence over the accident, was speaking at a time when nuclear power is returning to favor in countries like China and the United States as a way of producing electricity with no carbon emissions, unlike fossil fuels.

"You need to understand the real causes of the disaster in order to know in what direction you should develop alternative sources of energy," Profil quoted Bryukhanov as saying in its latest issue, published on Monday. "In this sense, Chernobyl has not taught anything to anyone."

The Chernobyl plant's No. 4 reactor blew up as staff were running a test early on April 26, 1986. The reactor, in what was then the Soviet republic of Ukraine, spewed a huge cloud of radioactive dust over much of Europe.

Most scientists now agree the accident was caused by a fatal combination of flaws in the reactor's design and a failure by the staff on duty to follow safety procedures.

Bryukhanov acknowledged his staff had made mistakes. But he said official investigations into the cause of the disaster had been a whitewash designed to exonerate the nuclear industry.

"The scientists, the construction engineers, the prosecution experts, they all defended their professional interests and that was all. It was a tissue of lies that distracted us from the search for the real causes of the accident," he said.

Reactors of the same design as the one at Chernobyl are still in operation in eastern Europe, though they were modified after the accident to eliminate the safety flaws uncovered by the Chernobyl investigation.

The official probe into the accident was part of a broader, international cover-up about the risks of nuclear power, Bryukhanov said, though he offered no evidence to back this up.

"(It's) not just us: the Americans, the French, the English, the Japanese, are all hiding the real causes of accidents at their own nuclear power stations," he said.

Bryukhanov was at his home near the plant when the reactor blew up. He served half his 10-year jail sentence and now lives in the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, the magazine said.

Globe: Iran's holy terror

Iran's holy terror, Paul William Roberts, April 22, 2006

The Holocaust's 'a myth,' Israel must be 'wiped off the map,' the U.S. should just mind its own business? PAUL WILLIAM ROBERTS searches for the method to the apparent madness of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

A pub I used to patronize in London for its unusually large clientele of celebrity villains also had a lone psychotic Hungarian plasterer, whose presence I found even more dangerously riveting than that of the cream of East End felonry, which included such luminaries as the psychopathic Kray brothers (one always carried a hammer in a special pocket because guns were for "nancy boys"), Johnny Binden (who had a thriving career playing himself in movies and could hang 10 beer mugs on his erect penis), Chas (Razor) Hanford and Jimmy (Fingers) McGissie, who removed the fingers of those who annoyed him using bolt cutters, and kept thousands of blackened digits in the steel trunk that doubled as the base of his coffee table.

These were dangerous people. You didn't bump into them without apologizing profusely. You avoided eye contact. You made sure you were never overheard talking about them. They were hair-trigger cases when drunk, and would slit a throat or crack open a skull at the slightest suspicion of a dis.

When the Hungarian started disparaging them out loud, daring them to take him on but scoffing that they were too cowardly to try, I felt certain his life would end shortly. But no one touched him. They ignored him. So he kept doing it, and became a local legend.

I once summoned the courage to ask Johnny Binden why he hadn't made the man into an umbrella stand for his taunts. " 'Eza nutter, inni?" saith the Enhanced One. " 'E don't fucken care wot 'appens t'him, see? Ya don' fucken fight someone who don't care if 'e lives or dies. Wossa point?"

That pub often struck me as the world in miniature, and today Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is playing the Hungarian.

By pursuing nuclear capability, by threatening Israel's existence, by doubting the Nazi Holocaust, he knows he will achieve the same kind of reaction. Maclean's magazine finds him scary; the National Post thinks he's crazy, and the facts about him are not reassuring. Imagine the following attached to an application for high office: "Devoutly religious, adhering to extreme fundamentalist beliefs concerning an apocalyptic war between good and evil and the reappearance of a saviour. His statements about Israel and the Palestinians are often extreme, unbalanced, and their reckless bias causes furor across the Middle East. Makes no secret about wanting to export his national ideology and system of government. While his speeches make frequent reference to peace and justice, he also has openly threatened to use nuclear weapons, and there seems to be very little justice in his system for those not sharing his views."

Scary? Crazy? Before you start penning encomia to the Post and Maclean's editorial boards, please note that the previous paragraph was written about U.S. President George W. Bush, although it could apply equally to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

To see Iran's leader objectively requires seeing Mr. Bush and his judgments in a similar manner -- even if we have to be tricked into doing it. For, if ever two men were so mirrored in each other -- ideologically, emotionally, intellectually and even spiritually, they probably weren't in a position to trigger Nukeogeddon.

The chilling fact that they are the ones we have handed the keys to life or genocide ought to drive us toward facts alone for all assessments. Partisan politics have no role in the endgame.

There has so far been a tendency to dismiss Mr. Ahmadinejad as insane or just someone grandstanding on the world's stage for a home audience -- as if either of these facile opinions explains or solves anything. The key issue is to decide whether his extreme devotion to Islam is genuine or just a garment worn for popular approval. The latter would make him a political player, and the former makes him a theocrat. You can negotiate with one, but the other is intractable -- he's doing God's will, and man, of course, is more moral than God.

Terms such as "crazy" and "scary" are also ways of saying "I don't understand," which is no way to enter a complex negotiation. It is viewed across the East as a weakness; it is also what is intended by that venerable military maxim: Never underestimate your enemy.

No one is required to like Mr. Ahmadinejad. But we need to understand him, because from understanding comes respect. And if we are to sort the rhetoric from the rectitude, respect is a sine qua non.

We'll also have to stop pretending we've done nothing to offend denizens of the area. The Chinese and Russians did some terrible things in the past, and have admitted them, but Britain and particularly America are in denial, acting like their actions have been blameless.

This may play well to the domestic audience, but it is preposterous in any of the countries involved. Try telling relatives of the 3,000 Panamanian civilians slaughtered during the Noriega "regime change" that there were few casualties. And try telling someone born in Iran around 1956 that Iranian democracy was not murdered in its crib by an Anglo-American coup d'état to keep Iranians from nationalizing their own oil.

Mr. Ahmadinejad was born on Oct. 28, 1956 -- the son of a blacksmith outside Tehran -- so the coup would have been a fact of his early life. It installed the Shah -- until then a parliamentary monarch -- as sole dictator, with 100,000 U.S. "advisers" to assist him in the toilsome work of making sure Iranian politics remained a solo act. Because of the notorious SAVAK secret police, Iran became a repressive state more brutal even than the hell created in neighbouring Iraq by the Shah's good friend, Saddam Hussein, and comparable to any of those now on the Bush administration's axis of inhumanity list.

Mr. Ahmadinejad also would have been exposed to the creation of Iran's Gandhi figure: Ayatollah Khomeini, who began by trying to rid his land of Western colonialism and ended by establishing the world's first theocratic state since the fall of the Dalai Lama.

An aging professor of jurisprudence, he was pushed out of the classroom and into history when it was suggested that Americans accused of a crime in Iran could be tried and punished only back in the United States. "Their chauffeur kills your religious leader, and he can only be tried back in America?" the Ayatollah said. "I don't think so. Today, we have lost our country . . ."

He refused to back down, and soon was forced into exile. While away from Iran, he recorded sermons decrying the Shah's wickedness and America's imperial meddling. These cassette tapes were the weapons responsible for terminating Iran's monarchy and U.S. dominance in the region. Mr. Ahmadinejad collected these recordings, and they helped him to create the style he uses today as orator, physically and mentally.

To live through momentous times and to see the hand of God in action leaves its mark on a person. But the future President's true life-altering epiphany was not Iran's revolution in 1979 but the war with Iraq that followed.

During that war, as German political scientist Matthias Küntzel recalls in the current issue of The New Republic, the Ayatollah imported 500,000 tiny plastic keys from Taiwan -- essentially as weapons because, after the Iraqis invaded, it was clear Iran's forces were no match for Saddam's professional, well-armed military.

In an attempt to compensate, the Ayatollah decided to send Iranian children, some as young as 12, to the front lines. There they marched in formation toward the enemy, clearing a path through the intervening minefields with their bodies. Before every heroic mission, one of the Taiwanese keys was hung around each child's neck -- to open the gates of paradise for them.

The children were part of the Basiji, a mass movement the Ayatollah had created in 1979. The sacrifice of the Basiji was irredeemably hideous, repellent. But even today for Iranians there is no shame entailed in the gruesome memory; indeed, there is a growing sense of pride. Furthermore, since the war ended in 1988 (when both sides in effect lost), the radical Basiji has burgeoned in numbers and in influence. Last year, it provided the political base that propelled Mr. Ahmadinejad to the presidency.

Why does he have such a special relationship with this somewhat sinister faction? Because during the war with Iran, he joined the Revolutionary Guards and was one of the Basiji's supervisors. His particular contribution, it is believed by insiders in Tehran, was to create the techniques of mind control that made sure each mission of death was conducted calmly and with joy.

The fact that Mr. Ahmadinejad ascended to the presidency on the shoulders of the Basiji is itself evidence that after almost 30 years, the Iranian revolution has entered a new and disturbing phase. The generation of Iranians whose views on life were forged by the atrocities of the Iran-Iraq war has made a sudden and successful move on power, utilizing a far more ferociously ideological approach to politics than that deployed by its predecessors.

The revolution's children are now its leaders, and at such times revolutions have often entered a phase of unexpected and savage terror that pales in comparison with anything before it, and giving the impression that someone has unlocked the gates to hell.

And this is the culture that nurtured Mr. Ahmadinejad's view of the world and life. Several people have insisted that he played a role in the 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy, although his presidential website says he was "on active service as a Basij volunteer up to the end of the holy defence [the Iraq war] and served as a combat engineer in different spheres of duty."

After the war, having evidently improved his cachet dramatically, he served as the governor of Ardebil Province and as an organizer of Ansar-e Hezbollah, a gang of ultraviolent Islamic vigilantes.

Then, after being appointed mayor of Tehran in April, 2003, he used the position to build a network of radicals known as Abadgaran-e Iran-e Islami, or Developers of an Islamic Iran.

This role cemented his reputation -- and popularity -- as a hard-liner pledged to rolling back the liberal reforms of then-president Mohammed Khatami.

He positioned himself as the leader of a "second revolution" to eradicate corruption and Western influences from Iranian society. So when he ran for president last year, the Basiji embraced him, effectively serving as his campaign workers.

A past immersed in such a cult of self-destruction would be chillingly ominous in any country. In the context of the Iranian nuclear program, however, this obsession with martyrdom is deeply worrying. Basiji followers are no longer sent into the desert; now, they go into the laboratory. Basij students are encouraged to enroll in technical and scientific disciplines. According to a spokesman for the Revolutionary Guard, the aim is to use the "technical factor" in order to augment "national security."

During his swearing-in ceremony last year, Mr. Ahmadinejad did something very revealing, something only one other Iranian president has ever done: He kissed the hand of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country's supreme religious ruler. More than just loyalty, the act demonstrated his firm conviction that he serves the faith, not the people.

The bottom line is that we must expect monstrosities from the current Iranian regime. What began in the early 1980s with the clearing of minefields by human detonators has led to extremists working as chemists in a uranium-enrichment facility.

So, with Mr. Ahmadinejad, the traditional U.S. approach to regime change could be the gravest of errors, and trigger the very thing it seeks to avoid. Then again, we must remember that the presidency is not the most powerful office in Iran. The oligarchs who control the unelected institutions of the state blocked the reformist agenda before Mr. Ahmadinejad because it threatened their interests. And they will block his radical Islamist and populist agenda if it turns out to be bad for business.

Left to solve its own problems, Iran will emerge from this crisis in excellent shape. Made into another Iraq, however, it could be lost forever. This is why they can elect a man no other nation would allow near politics, and it is why we need to understand the worst is here and demand restraint from all concerned.

So, let's listen to Johnny Binden and not pick a fight with the Hungarian. Wossa point?

Spiegel: Chernobyl - The Pompeii of the Nuclear Age

April 17, 2006, Chernobyl's Aftermath, The Pompeii of the Nuclear Age, Walter Mayr

Chernobyl has become synonymous with the worst technological disaster in the history of human kind. But how bad was it really? Two decades after the calamity, the search for answers continues.

The death zone is still off-limits today. Police officers armed with automatic weapons and Geiger counters man the checkpoint blocking the road to the Chernobyl reactor, and only those able to produce special permits are waved through.

The forest grows wild on both sides of the asphalt road. Windowless ruins of single-level houses are visible through a thicket of birch, pine and poplar trees. Meter by meter, nature is taking back the land once claimed by the residents of Chernobyl.

"Preserve the environment for your descendants," reads a rusted sign that has remained intact in the midst of a wilderness now devoid of human presence, a grotesque imperative from a lost era. But for the descendants of the Hassidic Jews who had settled in the region around Chernobyl for centuries, and for the children of Soviet workers who came to Chernobyl after 1970 to work at its nuclear power plant, no future of any kind exists any longer.

The few remaining elderly inhabitants who refused to leave and still live in the forests within the 30-kilometer (about 18 miles) restricted zone around Chernobyl complain about wolves that have become so bold that they follow them into their gardens and eat their guard dogs. Wild boars roam the streets of Prypiat, now a ghost town, past abandoned Communist Party buildings in which the open doors of file cabinets creak in the wind. The city's "Energetik" cultural center sits abandoned.

A deathly silence prevails in this Pompeii of the nuclear age, where time stopped at 1:24 a.m. on April 26, 1986.

A melange of radioactive debris

It was on that date when the fuel rods exploded inside Reactor Four at the Lenin Nuclear Power Plant, forcing open the reactor core's massive lids and ejecting radioactive dust high into the atmosphere. Since then, the surrounding soil has been contaminated with cesium, plutonium and strontium, and the name Chernobyl has become synonymous with the biggest technological disaster in the history of mankind.

Today the exploded reactor, lined with steel plates and dwarfed by a towering smokestack, resembles a heavily armored steamship in dry dock. During the months following the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl, workers installed a protective mantle over the reactor consisting of 300,000 tons of concrete and 7,000 tons of steel. To this day, the mantle conceals a mélange of radioactive debris, including collapsed concrete girders, tons of radioactive dust and cone-shaped piles of reddish-brown radioactive lava.

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), only 3 to 4 percent of the nuclear fuel used in the reactor escaped in the Chernobyl explosion. The G7 countries are calling for a new "sarcophagus" for the radioactive site, at a price tag of more than $1 billion, a project for which Western corporations are bidding.

But Ukrainian radiation expert Viktor Poyarkov believes that up to "50 percent of the fuel" managed to escape into the atmosphere in 1986. Indeed, after investigating the reactor site, scientists at the Moscow's renowned Kurchatov Institute now believe that almost all of Chernobyl's radioactive material was released in the accident 20 years ago.

The whereabouts of 180 tons of radioactive material isn't the only controversy swirling around the Chernobyl accident. Also at issue is the number of victims, both past and future. The "body count" is of critical importance in addressing whether the Maximum Credible Accident, or MCA, at Chernobyl presents a valid argument against investing billions into nuclear power projects in the future.

Fifty-six dead or 50,000?

The IAEA's nuclear experts say that Chernobyl has claimed 56 lives to date -- 47 workers at the disaster site and nine children who have since died of thyroid cancer. In contrast, the Ukrainian National Council on Radiation Protection claims to have documented 34,499 deaths among rescue workers. The United Nations' World Health Organization (WHO) estimated the number of Chernobyl workers who died from radiation exposure or committed suicide at 50,000 -- six years ago.

Like hardly any other incident with global consequences, the tragedy at the Lenin Nuclear Power Plant continues to drive a steady debate between scientists and politicians to this day. For many years, Chernobyl was used as fodder to support practically any world view -- because of a lack of reliable data on the causes and, more importantly, consequences of the accident, and because the Soviet leadership under former premier Mikhail Gorbachev either remained stubbornly silent on the issue or lied about it. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, additional traces and medical files on the victims, as well as evidence against culpable bureaucrats simply disappeared in the newly independent republics.

But now, 20 years after the reactor accident, sufficient evidence and documentation exists to arrive at a reasonably accurate assessment of what really happened at Chernobyl. The evidence is scattered throughout Moscow's Communist Party archives and in the medical files of Belarusian pediatricians, in the minutes of the meetings of international nuclear power corporations and their lobbyists, and in the tales of suffering told by nuclear workers who were resettled after the accident.

As much as they are snapshots taken from different points of view, when combined they paint a surprisingly consistent picture of the tragedy.

When the fuel rods exploded in Reactor Four at the Chernobyl nuclear plant Soviet government head Nikolai Ryzhkov was still asleep in his country house outside Moscow. Three and a half hours passed before his official telephone rang for the first time. The call came from the Minister of Energy, who reported that that there had been an "accident" in Chernobyl, and that local officials were talking about an "explosion."

"There are victims"

Ryzhkov asked to be provided with a detailed report at 9 a.m. and had his driver take him to the Kremlin. Shortly after arriving in his office, Ryzhkov received the first call: "It was the reactor, comrade. There are victims, radiation victims."

Ryzhkov reacted immediately -- exactly the way he had been taught. He formed a commission and placed himself at its head. For the time being, he chose not to notify the country's most powerful man, Mikhail Gorbachev, who had been General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party for the previous 13 months, nor did he inform the Russian people.

Ryzhkov is a man who sticks to his convictions -- even today, 20 years and hundreds of thousands of radiation victims later. Now 76, he is a member of the upper house of the Russian parliament and a man who, judging by his appearance, seems to bridge the worlds of then and now. Peering out through Soviet-style glasses, he wields a tiny, black-and-silver mobile phone in his left hand.

"We Didn't Make Any Mistakes"

The Soviet Union's former second-in-command denies any suggestion of an official cover-up following the reactor disaster. "What should we have written in the papers back then?" he asks. "The deaths weren't visible. We acted quickly and didn't make any mistakes."

To this day, Ryzhkov is proud of his initial response to the reactor accident, of his traditional Soviet approach of mobilizing massive numbers of people and quantities of material to deal with the tragedy. On the day of the accident, nuclear engineers were sent to Chernobyl from Moscow, followed by 6,000 troops, 40,000 members of the Soviet military's chemical task force and experienced helicopter pilots -- some redeployed from the battlefields of Afghanistan.

By the evening of April 26, 1986, Ryzhkov was still unaware that the amount of radiation released at Chernobyl was 400 times higher than that released by the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, and that trillions of Becquerel units of radiation were already drifting around the globe. He didn't know that firemen, young police officers and soldiers with insufficient protective gear were working 90-second shifts above the maw of Reactor Four, above the red-hot lid of the reactor, ruining their lives in an effort to control the flames.

But he did know, instinctively, that it would be a dark day for himself and for the party.

Years of warnings

Scientists had been issuing warnings for years about Chernobyl, where six reactors, with a combined output of 1,000 megawatts, made up what was then the world's most powerful nuclear power plant. On February 21, 1979, when he was still head of the KGB, the former General Secretary of the Communist Party, Yuri Andropov, had warned the party's central committee about potential problems at Chernobyl.

In a report titled "Deficiencies in the Construction of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant," a document marked "top secret," Andropov described violations of construction specifications "that could lead to technical failures and accidents." According to the report, safety procedures at the plant were not being observed, leading to 170 worker accidents within a span of only nine months.

The response to the report was predictable: the ministry responsible formed a commission. Four years later, on December 31, 1983, Victor Bryuchanov, Chernobyl's director and a Communist Party official, certified the on-time completion of the plant's fourth reactor -- despite the fact that the reactor, which would explode three years later, was not yet fully secured. In December 1985, Bryuchanov told an associate: "God forbid that something serious should ever happen to us. I am afraid that not only the Ukraine, but the entire Soviet Union would be unable to handle such an emergency."

The roof structure on the reactor building was made of a highly flammable material. To satisfy the party's demands for speedy completion, shortcuts were taken when it came to the concrete containment walls, evacuation plans, protective gear and Geiger counters. One of the most outspoken among those party officials calling for rapid completion was Ryzhkov, who became prime minister in September 1985.

At the 27th party congress of the Soviet Communist Party, only eight weeks before the reactor disaster, the USSR's energy ministry was denounced for having "failed to achieve, during the 11th five-year plan, the planned increase in the energy production of nuclear power plants." As far as party officials were concerned, it was an unacceptable state of affairs. After all, Gorbachev himself had called for a two and a half-fold increase in electricity production from nuclear sources within five years. The war in Afghanistan, by then in its seventh year, the arms race with the United States and a dramatic plunge in oil prices had brought the USSR to the brink of bankruptcy. The party was adamant in its demands for an increase in nuclear energy to meet domestic consumer needs and free up the country's oil and gas reserves for export -- and hard currency.

A warm Saturday in April

In the hours following the disaster, the 49,000 residents of Prypiat -- located just three kilometers from the reactor -- continued to go about their lives as if nothing had happened. It was a warm Saturday in April, and the streets were filled with people; mothers walking with their children, men drinking beer and kwas -- a local drink favorite -- at roadside stands.

According to a classified eyewitness report that was later sent to party headquarters in Moscow, officials in Prypiat were well aware of the amount of radiation exposure within an hour of the accident. But no one dared alert the local population without orders from Moscow. By noon, the streets were being washed with soap, but only the men who had worked the night shift at the reactor knew why, so that the only other residents of the city with at least some forewarning were their families.

On that same Saturday -- at a time when radiation in downtown Prypiat was already at several thousand times normal levels -- the operations manager at Chernobyl gave a raucous party to celebrate his daughter's wedding. None of his colleagues who were on duty that weekend felt that it was necessary to warn him.

On Saturday evening, Prime Minister Ryzhkov issued the order to evacuate Prypiat within the next few days, and by Sunday evening 1,100 buses had reached the city from Kiev, the Ukrainian capital. Those whose work did not require them to stay behind were told that the party wanted them to pack their bags and leave the city "for two to three days."

The politburo met in Moscow on Monday, and on Tuesday the government newspaper Izvestiya ventured a terse, eight-line report on an "accident" in Chernobyl, saying that "one of the nuclear reactors was damaged" -- nothing more.

By that time, more than three days had passed since the reactor accident. Officials were already aware of the scope of the catastrophe. The most seriously affected of the rescue workers had long since been admitted to Moscow's Clinic 6, their flaking skin burned a dark brown from the radiation and their hair falling out. But most citizens were still being kept in the dark. "We were concerned that a panic could break out -- and that in major cities like Kiev and Minsk," Gorbachev later said. Ironically, as recently as that year's March party congress, Gorbachev, quoting Lenin, had called for "the truth, always and under all circumstances."

The results of studies conducted by Minsk physician Yevgeny Demidchik now show that hundreds of cases of thyroid cancer in Belarusian children who were either not yet born or had just been born at the time of the disaster were caused by contamination with iodine 131 during the first few days following the Chernobyl explosion.

In a resolution dated May 8, 1986, the politburo ordered allowable radiation doses increased by factors ranging from 10 to 50. In a document titled "Secret Attachment to Item 10" of the minutes, party officials ordered radioactively contaminated meat turned into sausage, using a 1:10 ratio, throughout the territory of most republics within the USSR, including Russia, but "excluding Moscow."

Suppression and falsification

Under official order number U-2617 C, issued on June 27, 1986, all data relating to Chernobyl, to the treatment of the victims and to the nature and scope of their radiation exposure was classified. Though signed by Yevgeny Shulshenko, a minor official in the USSR's Ministry of Health, the document was sanctioned by senior party officials and smoothed the way for the subsequent suppression, falsification and destruction of evidence.

It wasn't until 1989 that Pravda published a map of the contaminated regions, which showed that 70 percent of the fallout from Chernobyl descended upon Belarus, with the remainder falling onto the Ukraine and southern Russia. This meant that 5 million people living in thousands of villages and a few larger cities in the Soviet Union spent three years living in areas exposed to high levels of radiation while oblivious to the risks involved. Many continued to eat home-grown vegetables and the berries and mushrooms they normally gathered in the forests.

Central Committee internal report number 20-34 on the Chernobyl disaster, dated July 10, 1986 and labelled "top secret," concedes that the Chernobyl case was "one of the worst accidents in the history of nuclear energy." According to the report, there were 26 dead, 135,000 evacuees and 800,000 people who required medical treatment.

A Dramatic Increase in Birth Defects

Svetlana wasn't even born yet when the fuel rods in Reactor Four at the Lenin plant in Chernobyl exploded. Her parents lived in Kiev, at least until the day when her father was sent to work at the stricken reactor. In the days, months and years following the disaster, 600,000 to 800,000 so-called liquidators from throughout the Soviet Union were sent to Chernobyl to help out in the cleanup project. Svetlana's father survived the mission, but he returned home traumatized and exposed to high doses of radiation.

Svetlana herself, born a year after the reactor disaster, is 19 today and lives in a home for disabled children and adolescents in the town of Snamyanka near Kirovgrad. She was born with a brain tumor and the right side of her face was so deformed that she can only see with one eye. Today, several operations later, Svetlana is still so disfigured that she shuns contact with the outside world, preferring to express herself with her hands.

She paints, writes poetry and cares for younger inmates at the home. Despite the severity of Svetlana's case, others in the home are even worse off. Grisha, for example, who was born just a few months after Chernobyl and is now almost 20, has deformed legs and the appearance of a three-year-old.

Deformed limbs, missing ears

Doctors speculate that Grisha and other children with similar symptoms are the victims of a growth disorder caused by a genetic malfunction of the pituitary gland. Cases of this type of genetic disorder were occasionally reported in the region before the nuclear disaster.

But according to the foundation "Children for Chernobyl," in the past decade doctors have seen a dramatic increase in deformities among young patients from parts of Belarus and the Ukraine that were exposed to high levels of radiation -- including deformed limbs, missing ears, harelips and feet with up to eight toes. To draw conclusions on the possible causes of these defects, doctors must review the children's medical histories to determine where and when they were born.

Geneticist Hava Weinberg, for example, examined 100 children of Chernobyl rescue workers who had emigrated to Israel. The rate of genetic mutations among those born after the accident was 700 percent higher than among those born before 1986. In a government-funded, long-term study headed by Volodimir Vertelecki, chief geneticist at the University of Southern Alabama, an average of 14,000 newborns are examined each year in the Ukrainian provinces of Volyn and Rovno. According to one of the results of the study, there has been an almost 20-fold increase in the number of infants born with "spina bifida" (cleft vertebra).

These children with genetic defects are the second generation of Chernobyl victims. And they have fuelled a revival of the debate between scientists and doctors in rival camps -- between the IAEA and its opponents.

The first round of the debate centered on thyroid cancer. Beginning in 1990, Fred Mettler, a radiologist at the University of New Mexico and a man with years of experience on the pro-nuclear side of radiation damage assessment, began researching the consequences of the Chernobyl reactor accident for the IAEA. In a study he published in 1991, Mettler claimed that there were none, not even children with radiation-induced thyroid cancer.

"Those people from the atomic energy agency"

The next year, the British scientific journal Nature published studies showing a dramatic rise in the incidence of thyroid cancer in contaminated regions not far from Chernobyl, and it was revealed that Mettler also had access to the same data from Belarus and the Ukraine. It was clearly an embarrassing revelation for Mettler and the IAEA, but not embarrassing enough to put an end to their relationship.

In its most recent report dated September 2005, submitted to the United Nations as part of the "Chernobyl Forum," the IAEA has this to say about the issue of genetic defects: "No evidence was found whatsoever for genetic anomalies that could be attributed to radiation exposure." One of the authors of the report was none other than Fred Mettler.

Kiev Professor Igor Komissarenko can only shake his head when he talks about "those people from the atomic energy agency." "They met with us, of course, but they're not interested in new information. All they say is that it doesn't resemble the evidence from Hiroshima."

Professor Komissarenko, the doyen of Ukrainian endocrinology, is a short, energetic gentleman in his sixties. He is neither for nor against nuclear power, but he does object to thyroid cancer, and he's an expert on the issue. "Just look at the numbers," he says, pointing to a hand-drawn diagram on his office wall. "Thyroid cancer in children increased tenfold between 1986 and 1990, and is only now beginning to decline. But it's a different story with adults: 38 cases in 1990, 308 today."

Iodine 131, which causes thyroid cancer, is one of the more short-lived of the isotopes released in the Chernobyl reactor accident. Cesium 137, on the other hand, has a half-life of 30 years, while plutonium's is much longer still. According to medical experts, illnesses triggered or promoted by radiation could remain dormant for decades.

Death by radiation is quiet, odorless and invisible. The firemen, medical orderlies and helicopter pilots who helped clear the debris from the reactor building knew little of the dangers. The bodies of the first 28 of these men, who died of acute radiation poisoning, have been buried under heavy lead plates in Moscow's Mitino cemetery for the past two decades.

Demands for compensation

Some of those still alive today received radiation doses of up to eight Sievert units -- more than 16,000 percent higher than the allowable maximum yearly dose of radiation -- within extremely short time spans. But according to Ukrainian radiation expert Vladimir Usatenko, many of the documents that could serve as evidence of the suffering these men have experienced were either falsified in response to party pressure or, in the summer of 1986, stolen from a safe in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

These victims have found little support for their efforts to uncover the truth. The countries charged with their welfare -- mainly Belarus and Ukraine -- are already heavily burdened with the consequences of the accident they have shouldered, unassisted, since the collapse of the Soviet Union. More than 300,000 of the disaster's most serious victims have demanded compensation.

In Darniza, a Kiev neighborhood of high-rise apartment buildings where many Chernobyl evacuees were resettled, residents in their mid-fifties are now dying by the dozens. But the causes of death listed on their death certificates are unlikely to make any impact on the IAEA's victim statistics. "Ninety percent of the people here are completely healthy when they die," survivors say derisively. Those still alive complain of chronic fatigue, headaches and the metallic taste on their tongues that radiation exposure leaves behind as a lasting souvenir.

One man who lives in the neighborhood, a former head of engineering in Reactor One at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant who was on duty on the night of the accident, remains optimistic. In October, doctors amputated both of his legs from the thighs down, but their diagnosis -- "arteriosclerosis" -- makes no mention whatsoever of Chernobyl. Now he is learning to walk again, using a walker built for him by former metal workers from the power plant. His prosthetic limbs were intended for invalids wounded in the war in Afghanistan.

Sergei Parashin was working the night shift when the fuel rods exploded in Reactor Four. He was the senior party secretary for operations at Chernobyl -- an extension of the party in the Soviet Union's laboratory of the future.

Following the explosion, the area around the reactor erupted into chaos. The director of the power plant, who arrived an hour late, refused to believe radiation readings that were already indicating radiation levels of up to two Sieverts outside the reactor. He refused to comply with the civil safety regulations that would have required him to issue a catastrophe alert.

"No cause for concern"

The plant's desperate engineers hurried to see party secretary Parashin: "Sergei Konstantinovich, the director seems mentally confused. You must speak with him!" But Parashin refused to comply, saying: "Why should I speak with him? After all, I'm no radiation expert."

Unlike many of his colleagues, the party's man on the ground at Chernobyl survived that night unharmed. He was subsequently named director of the nuclear power plant, whose remaining three reactors were kept running for another 14 years. In the end, he became director of the State Office for Resettlement and Evacuation Issues -- the unchallenged ruler of the 30-kilometer death zone.

In this position, Parashin continues to this day to represent Ukraine at international conferences. Accompanied by Volodimir Holosha, his former deputy Communist Party secretary and today a deputy minister in the country's disaster ministry, Parashin was present on Sept. 6, 2005 when the IAEA released a 600-plus-page report on the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster two decades after the fact. The report was issued by the UN's Chernobyl Forum, a group led by the IAEA and including representatives of World Health Organization, five other UN organizations, the World Bank and the governments of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine.

In addition to arriving at the seemingly favorable conclusion that the disaster has claimed all of 56 lives to date, the expert panel also issues a broader all-clear when it comes to nuclear mishaps. WHO representative Michael Repacholi expresses the group's message in a way that even the uninitiated can understand: "The Chernobyl Forum's main message is this: no cause for concern." The East-West partnership, nourished over the decades, between the elite of the Soviet nuclear research community and their counterparts in the West has apparently borne fruit.

Building a new Chernobyl coffin

Hans Blix served as a willing figurehead for this conference of the like-minded from the very beginning. The Swedish career diplomat with the academic demeanor was named head of the IAEA in 1981. On May 8, 1986, Blix was the first Western eyewitness to fly over the remains of the Chernobyl reactor. The words he used to express his impressions earned him the Soviet leadership's lasting appreciation. Blix's message to the world was benign: "We were able to see people working in the fields, livestock in the pastures and cars driving in the streets." He said that the area surrounding the reactor didn't look nearly that bad: "The Russians are confident that they will be able to clean up the area. It will be available for agriculture once again." To this day, the Kiev Institute of Radiation Medicine displays a plaque with which the government of the Soviet Union paid tribute to Hans Blix for his role in managing the catastrophe of Chernobyl.

Although Blix resigned as IAEA director in 1997, he remains connected to Chernobyl. He now heads the group of donor countries that, under the leadership of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, plans to raise €1 billion to build a new coffin for the Chernobyl reactor.

Germany, with direct and EU-channelled contributions amounting to €127 million, is the group's largest contributor. Despite adequate funding though, the project advanced little during the past eight years. The delay is not due to the individual studies submitted to the group that conclude that a new, expensive protective shell is unnecessary because hardly any radioactive material remains within the reactor.

Instead, the construction project's tortuous progress can be more accurately attributed to behind-the-scenes claims by former Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Mykola Tomenko. In April 2005, he denounced the consulting and expert fees paid to Ukrainian government officials and representatives of international organizations as the misuse of "incredibly large sums of money." In fact, the Ukrainian people have a term for the business of turning a profit from Chernobyl. They call it "Chernobyliski bisnes."

It's a business that reflects taxpayers' fears of radioactive waste, and there are two parties fighting over the spoils.

Profiting from disaster

On the one hand, major corporations in donor countries are hoping to garner contracts for the contaminated 30-kilometer zone: Germany's RWE-Nukem Group, French construction firms Bouygues and Vinci and, at the head of the pack, US firm CH2M Hill.

On the other hand are the parties representing the interests of Ukraine. The problems involved with Chernobyl's nuclear waste guarantee thousands of jobs at the reactor site, along with healthy profits for consultants. And international nuclear power corporations' construction projects promise long-term employment for the region.

Under the leadership of Orange revolutionary Viktor Yushchenko, Ukraine has placed its bets on nuclear power to accelerate its path into the future. The Ukrainian president has announced that the country plans to build eleven new nuclear power plants. The government's potentially profitable plan to import spent nuclear fuel from abroad for final storage in the Chernobyl death zone was temporarily put on ice in the face of massive popular protests against the idea.

And the 30-kilometer restricted zone around the defunct reactor? As far as nuclear energy experts and scientists are concerned, the government's supreme overseer of the zone, former party secretary Parashin, is in charge of nothing short of a gem -- the ideal site for genetic experiments, botanical field tests and research projects on radiation safety.

Plans are underway for a giant open-air laboratory within a 10-kilometer perimeter of the disaster site. An "International Test Site for Radiation Safety Research," shielded from the outside world, is already in development.

There are even plans to develop a tourist attraction in the space between the research site and the checkpoint where police officers with automatic pistols and Geiger counters still block access to the zone. The plans include a national park, complete with wild animals and rare plants.

Spiegel: Chernobyl May 5 1986 Reprint - Murderous Atoms

April 14, 2006, Chernobyl - 20 Years Later, Murderous Atoms

Editor's note: The following article appeared in the May 5, 1986 issue of DER SPIEGEL, just days after the world became aware of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. During the next few weeks, SPIEGEL ONLINE will publish a series of reports on the worst accident in the history of civilian nuclear energy and how it changed Europe and the world.

The Geiger counters continued to tick away for days as much as 2,000 kilometers (1,243 miles) away from the disaster zone, as air masses contaminated with radiation pushed across Europe. Many fears are justified. The major disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant proved the prophets wrong who underestimated the "residual risk" of nuclear energy. A look back from the archives of DER SPIEGEL.

The staff at Sweden's Forsmark nuclear power plant, located on the Baltic coast north of Stockholm, was just changing shifts. It was 7:00 a.m. last Monday when workers passing through a routine check in the security sluice at the entrance to the plant's reactor building set off warning signals.

[photo1 DER SPIEGEL, The May 5, 1986 cover of DER SPIEGEL: "Murderous Atom: The Super Meltdown in the Soviet Union."]

Radiation testing personnel were alerted. Using a piece of equipment that looks like a handheld vacuum cleaner, they scanned the plant employees and took radioactivity readings on the walls, on the plant grounds and in rainwater cisterns. The results were astonishing. The Geiger counters were ticking like crazy -- but outside, not in the reactor buildings.

"It was crazy," says measuring technician Bengt Wellman. According to Wellman, where the normal reading would be four radioactive decay units per second, "we measured 100 per second," even four kilometers (2.5 miles) from the reactor. Plant manager Karl Erik Sehlstedt issued a level 2 alarm, which meant that the local population was notified by radio. At 11:00 a.m., 800 employees left the power plant and gathered on a nearby athletic field, where they were all scanned for radiation and where many had to leave their shoes behind for decontamination and walk home with their feet covered in plastic bags. An hour and a half later, officials were still unable to rule out the possibility that something had gone wrong at Forsmark.

But then similar reports about elevated radioactivity levels began coming in from almost every other Swedish testing station and from neighboring Finland. In some places, the radiation was 10 times as high as natural environmental radioactivity. By then, Swedish experts knew that the invisible radiation and silent danger had blown across the Baltic Sea on a southeasterly air current. Meteorologists simulated the wind patterns of the preceding few days and physicists analyzed the spectrum of radioactive particles. Finally, everything pointed to the presumed source of the heightened radioactivity, a nuclear power plant near Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine.

At this point, the people of Kiev were unaware that a nuclear inferno had erupted two days earlier less than 100 kilometers (62 miles) north of their city. They continued to buy fruit and vegetable in local markets and decorate the city's houses and streets for the annual May Day celebration. Horrified, US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff William J. Crowe told US members of Congress that satellite images revealed that only hours after the accident, Soviet authorities had allowed a soccer match to continue in the vicinity of the reactor meltdown. The players and onlookers had no idea of the hazards to which they were being exposed.

It was with this silence, inwardly and outwardly, that the Soviets would have preferred to gloss over what had happened in their reactor No. 4 at one of their biggest nuclear power plant complexes. As it turned out, it was the most serious catastrophe in the history of the peaceful use of nuclear energy, an event experts in both the East and the West had declared practically impossible -- the "super maximum credible accident."

It was only in response to pressure from the global public and because they believed, for some time, that they would need foreign help in containing the reactor fire that the Soviets first admitted that an "accident" had occurred, later upgrading their assessment of the event to a "catastrophe." The government was no longer denying what Soviet news agency Tass called "a certain amount of leakage of radioactive substances" until finally, last Wednesday, Soviet state television even showed a photo of the half-destroyed nuclear power plant, of the ruin of what was once Chernobyl, reduced to little more than charred iron beams and blackened walls -- a monument to technical hubris.

The speculation over the immediate consequences of the catastrophe continued through the end of last week. According to Western intelligence agencies, there were "several hundred dead" and thousands still likely to die as a result of the accident. But the Soviets continued to insist on their numbers: 2 dead, 197 wounded, including 18 with life-threatening injuries. According to Soviet officials, 50 patients had already been released from hospitals.

Even before the details became known, politicians and nuclear power lobbyists in the West embarked on a true campaign of appeasement. At the annual meeting of the "Working Group of Regional Energy Supply Companies" in Munich on Tuesday evening, politicians from were quick to point out that these types of "mishaps cannot occur in Germany." Later on, unofficial sources revealed a more alarming position: that such disasters just happen to be "the price of technological progress."

Officials wanted to avoid a revival of the debate over the purpose and blessings of nuclear power at all costs, to ward off the kinds of public misgivings over nuclear energy that thwarted the construction of nuclear power plants in the German towns of Wyhl and Gorleben and led to violent civil protests over plants at Grohnde and Brokdorf in the 1970s.

But the attempts of nuclear power proponents to quell the growing fears of citizens by containing their arguments failed. Fear of the invisible danger grew as shifting winds blew contaminated air back and forth across the heart of Europe during the course of the week, and as instruments measuring radioactivity levels from Davos to Monaco produced printouts showing sharp peaks.

It was a danger that couldn't be felt, seen or heard. In fact, human beings have no inherent means of perceiving radiation -- which was all the more reason to be concerned about reports on television and the radio. First the Polish stations, and later stations in the German states of Bavaria and Hesse, cautioned citizens to avoid drinking milk from cows that graze outside, and to carefully wash fresh produce.

Radiation doses up to 500 times higher than normal were measured in some parts of Poland, especially in the eastern portion of the Masurian Lakes region. At a press conference, officials said that a "certain number" of cases of thyroid cases could be expected. Medical experts estimate that 10,000 Poles will contract radiation-induced cancer in the next 30 years.

Large numbers of trucks and cars coming from Eastern Europe were checked at border crossings. Whenever Geiger counters registered higher levels of radiation, vehicles had to be decontaminated and, in some cases, air filters had to be removed and were then classified as "low-level radioactive waste."

The German Ministry of Health issued an order imposing special inspections on Polish geese and other food products from Eastern Europe. Non-essential travel to the Soviet Union was cancelled. Western companies ordered their employees to return home. Overly anxious citizens in Germany and Scandinavia bought up the inventories of iodine tablets at pharmacies, and the University of Mainz Hospital reported the first cases of poisoning caused by the ingestion of iodine tablets.

On Friday, the Hamburger Abendblatt ran a cover story titled "Today and Tomorrow: Wind from the East." Suddenly every weather report was focusing on the wind direction and all but ignoring sunshine and rain. Concerned pregnant women overloaded telephone lines at the German Weather Service in Offenbach with questions of where they should go to avoid the risks posed by radiation. Officials recommended giving dry milk to young children, and called for excessively contaminated fresh milk to be processed into cheese.

Officials in the states of Bavaria and Hesse issued ominous-sounding warnings dubbed "preventive measures," advising parents not to allow children to sleep near open windows and to wash children after they had been playing outdoors. Radiation levels measured throughout the southern portion of West Germany, in the far north and in Berlin initially remained within ranges corresponding to normal fluctuations in nature -- including the kinds of peaks vacationers might experience while hiking at higher altitudes in the Black Forest.

West German testing stations did register worrisome peak values at times, including up to 120 times the normal level of radioactive isotope iodine 131 in Berlin and even up to 400 times normal values in the western city of Darmstadt.

Suddenly Germans found themselves facing a wild, confusing rise and fall of test data, of readings denominated in unfamiliar units, such as Becquerel and Curie, Sievert, Millirem and rad. Information on the locations and intensity of radiation in various parts of the country was suddenly as uncertain as the weather.

But at no time did radiation doses measured in Sweden and Germany pose an acute health risk. Nevertheless, the range of particle measurements provided experts with the irrefutable evidence that what happened at Chernobyl was not (as the Russians had claimed) merely an "incident" involving the release of radiation amounts that were completely safe for the Soviet Union's Western neighbors. There was no doubt that what had happened at Chernobyl was the kind of catastrophic case statisticians predicted could only happen once every 10,000 or even 100,000 years, an incident known as a core meltdown.

When this occurs in a power plant such as Chernobyl, up to 180 tons of white-hot uranium, combined with the melted special steel of the fuel sleeves, eats through the reactor's concrete wall. At this point, the radioactive inventory of the reactor core corresponds to that of about 1,500 Hiroshima bombs -- except that in this case the nuclear horror doesn't explode in the air in the form of a bomb, but instead, as a glowing, constantly radioactive lump of material, slowly eats its way through the concrete walls and into the ground.

To date, there is no reliable scientific data and there are no simulations or computer models on what exactly happens in a meltdown -- that is, whether the nuclear lava breaks down into many smaller balls or collects into a single aggregate, how long it takes to burn its way through concrete foundations, how deeply it penetrates into the earth and how much radiation it releases. The term "China syndrome" -- the fictional idea that a blazing hot plug of uranium in the United States could eat its way through the earth and pop back out on the other side -- has even served as the title for a popular nuclear thriller.

Scientists, including those from the Karlsruhe Nuclear Research Center, believe it is quite possible that even concrete foundations five to seven meters (16-23 feet) thick may not be capable of containing melted chunks of uranium. But five to seven meters would be several times as thick as the concrete floor under the reactor core in Chernobyl.

The unleashing of such massive amounts of nuclear energy even goes beyond the "Maximum Credible Accident," or MCA, for which power plant engineers design their structures, and is fittingly described as a "Super MCA." Late last week, there were two equally plausible versions as to how this could have happened at the 1,000-megawatt Chernobyl nuclear power plant. According to the first theory -- the one making the rounds in Moscow -- an explosion in the reactor's computerized control room caused the accident, disabling the plant's automatic shutdown systems and interrupting the flow of cooling water. Under the second hypothesis, a sudden, as yet inexplicable power outage disabled important systems in the plant, including the central cooling pump, and the emergency backup, which was activated immediately, somehow failed. This series of events led to a detonating gas explosion.

Western experts are already convinced that the accident contaminated more than just the groundwater in the reactor's immediate vicinity, also affecting open bodies of water. There have been indications in Moscow that radioactive material flowing down the Dnieper River and its tributary, the Prypiat, where the Chernobyl plant is located, has reached the Black Sea. In fact, it's been rumored the capital that Black Sea beaches will be closed this season.

Chernobyl, the scene of a disaster even more serious than the accident at the Three Mile Island facility near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, will undoubtedly remain a radioactive ruin for many decades to come. Experts estimate that radioactivity at the site measures at least 1000 rem per hour, a radiation level that is immediately and completely fatal to human beings. The question is whether the remaining three reactor units at Chernobyl, which presumably remained intact, can ever be used again. For the time being, the Soviets have shut down the 16 other nuclear reactors of the same type that they currently own.


Late last week, American reactor experts concluded that the soil within a 10-kilometer zone (about six miles) surrounding the destroyed power plant suffered "extreme radioactive contamination" and is "likely to be uninhabitable for generations."

The Soviets evacuated the region within a 30-kilometer perimeter (about 18 miles) of Chernobyl. The largest settlement within the emptied zone is Prypiat, a city of about 50,000 inhabitants specifically designed for operation of the plant, as well as three smaller villages. The region is generally a relatively thinly populated agricultural district, poor by Ukrainian standards, where rye is the principal crop.

The number of people killed directly as a result of radiation may in fact be relatively small, and could even be limited to reactor personnel. But the number of those who will die from the effects of radiation from the killer reactor in the coming weeks, months or perhaps even decades is impossible to predict.

Just how seriously people will fall ill, and whether they succumb to radiation-induced illnesses depends on the amount of time for which, at what distance and in what kind of environment they were exposed to radiation, whether they were outdoors or in a building and whether they were on the windward or lee side of the disaster's epicenter. Because a super MCA -- unlike the detonation of a nuclear bomb -- lacks such salient features as a major explosion, a mushroom cloud rising into the air and a blast of heat racing across the countryside, victims could very well feel spared.

But despite efforts by the nuclear lobby -- in the East and the West -- to convince us otherwise, there is no such thing as a dose of radiation harmless to human beings. Even the smallest doses of radioactive radiation can cause damage.

The standard measure of the effect of radioactive radiation on human beings is a unit known as "rem" ("Roentgen equivalent man"). It refers to the biologically effective dose of energy emitted by different types of radiation (mainly gamma radiation, in the case of a super MCA).

The West German Interior Ministry in Bonn has developed its own nomenclature for what it calls "catastrophic events." Under this system, 25 rem is a "dangerous dose," 100 rem a "critical dose" and 400 rem a "mid-lethal dose" causing death in 50 percent of those exposed. A person whose entire body is exposed to a "lethal dose" of 700 rem cannot survive and will die of "acute radiation sickness."

Doctors have a succinct way of putting it: "Radiation sickness is not an illness -- it's death." The question is, how quickly does death occur? It's impossible to predict. No method currently exists to determine, after the fact, the precise rem level to which victims were exposed.

Anyone exposed to the so-called supralethal dose of 1,000 or more rem will begin feeling dizzy in the first few minutes. Vomiting, diarrhea and fever quickly set in, and the whole thing is over within a few hours. Death comes while the victim is in a state of delirium -- and as a liberator.

Those exposed to between 400 and 700 rem spend up to two weeks in agony. The skin and mucous membranes become inflamed and begin to disintegrate. Victims are unable to eat or drink, and fever levels climb to over 40°C (104°F). "Symptom-free intervals" lasting hours or even days can give the doomed the false hope of survival. But survival is only a possibility for those who receive immediate and perfect intensive care in an aseptic "life island" in a specialized clinic, a treatment the German Medical Journal describes as "a balanced supply of fluids and calories, artificial ventilation, pain therapy and bone marrow transplantation."

The "symptom-free interval" is characteristic of all forms of radiation sickness. Victims believe that they have survived after all, but it's an illusory sensation. At a dose of 400 rem (50 percent lethality), the agonizing symptoms begin after 10 days, and at 200 rem (5-7 percent lethality), symptoms take 20 days to set in. For some Ukrainians, the worst is yet to come.

A treatment that targets the causes of radiation sickness doesn't exist. Contrary to the kind of talk that tends to gloss things over, medicine -- in the East and West alike -- is completely powerless when it comes to radiation. And contrary to popular belief, even the use of iodine tablets is only effective in protecting a single organ, the thyroid gland, because taking the pills temporarily blocks the glands' absorption of radioactive iodine. But radioactive iodine is only one of many of the hundreds of dangerous fission products released during a Super MCA. Besides, iodine tablets only protect against thyroid cancer, which may even develop decades later, and by no means against the effects of acute radiation exposure.

To the best of our knowledge, potential victims in the Ukraine were given no warning whatsoever. German tourists on an Aeroflot flight approaching Kiev saw a tall, black, ominous-looking plume of smoke rising from Chernobyl, but life in the region simply continued -- as if nothing had happened.

But radiation specialists in Vienna and the German city of Homburg an der Saar did measure what actually happened. A group of 50 workers employed by Austrian steelmaker Voest returned home last week from a stint at the company's Shlobin plant, 160 kilometers (about 100 miles) northeast of Chernobyl. In five of the workers, doctors measured twice the normal concentrations of radioactive iodine in the thyroid gland. In Homburg, officials confiscated the exposed luggage and work clothing of personnel returning from Russia, and doctors said that tests revealed "unsettling levels."

Experts in Scandinavia found 14 different radioactive trace elements, including radioactive isotopes of zirconium, niobium, molybdenum and cesium, as well as the man-made element neptunium 239, whose presence in Scandinavia experts found especially puzzling. They reasoned that if this element was in fact released into the atmosphere, the already weak shell of the Soviet reactor must have given way at a very early point in the catastrophe.

The appeasement argument in the West followed the same approach. According to a West German study on reactor safety, the "release of fission products would be ... decisively limited" in the event of a core meltdown in a comparably sized nuclear power plant built with Western engineering and specs. The safety shell, or "containment" -- the egg-shaped concrete structure that encloses the "hot" core of the reactor and has become a symbol of nuclear power and -- is seen as reliable by nuclear proponents in the West.

In the past, the Soviets opted to dispense with this reinforced concrete container in all of their nuclear power plants. It was only with the "fifth unit" at the Novoronesh power plant that they installed a protective, domed, reinforced concrete cylinder. But as recently as six years ago, Yury Syvintsev, head of security at the Russian Kurchatov Nuclear Research Center, said that the measure was "a waste of money." But in an interview with the publication Sovietskya Rossiya, the head of the construction team that built the container offered this almost oracle-like commentary: "the split atom, even if we call it peaceful, happens to have its own unpredictable moods."

The Soviets believed that the egg-shaped containment shells were indispensable for the type of reactor whose core recently melted at Chernobyl, and they were convinced that this type of design was especially beneficial. It also happens to be the oldest type of reactor in the history of civil use of nuclear energy. The first reactor of this type, though significantly less powerful than today's models, was constructed in the Soviet Union back in 1954.

The Russian reactors, known as graphite-moderated pressure tube reactors (or RBMK in Soviet terminology), are not used in the Western world. The core of this type of reactor consists of a massive graphite slab, seven meters (23 feet) tall and 11.8 meters (39 feet) in diameter, which contains 1,693 pressure tubes made of a special steel-zirconium alloy, with each tube containing two fuel rods. Water pumped upward through the tubes absorbs the heat produced in the fission process and turns into steam, which then runs the reactor's turbines.

The purpose of the graphite is to slow down ("moderare" in Latin) the neutrons that are released during nuclear decay, in turn triggering the fission of other atoms. The desired chain reaction in the reactor core can only develop if a sufficient number of neutrons come into contact with nuclei. The nuclear reaction can be slowed down or even stopped by inserting the 179 control rods. They contain boron carbide powder, which essentially swallows the neutrons, thereby interrupting the chain reaction. For some as yet unexplained reason, this process failed at the Chernobyl plant.

The Soviets see this model as advantageous because the entire reactor doesn't have to be shut down to replace individual fuel rods. The pressure tubes in the active channels are individually accessible using an overhead crane, a system that promised safety and, perhaps more importantly to the Soviets, made it possible to use the reactor as a breeder for weapons-grade plutonium. This was clearly one reason the Soviets preferred the RBMK reactor type, never made it accessible to international inspectors and never exported a single one of these reactors.

According to experts, the drawbacks of the RBMK include its relatively high price tag and the fact that it's equipped with a confusing array of tubes and tube connections -- upping the number of potential trouble spots in the system. Most of all, as some Western experts have consistently argued, this reactor type poses an especially high safety risk, at least when compared with the light water reactors commonly used in the West, in which water doesn't just remove heat, but also moderates the flow of neutrons (instead of the graphite).

When a leak in a light water reactor results in water loss, the reactor's output drops and the nuclear chain reaction automatically comes to a standstill. This leaves engineers with enough time to take steps to prevent what is known as afterheat from cracking the fuel rods and, in a worst-case scenario, melting the reactor core.

But a leak in an RBMK produces the opposite effect, increasing the moderating effect of the graphite. As cooling decreases, the reactor's output increases even further, quickly bringing the entire system to the brink of catastrophe.

To prevent ignition of the graphite, the reactor core in an RBMK is lined with a gastight steel shell. If this lining cracks or melts, oxygen leaks into the system, causing the graphite slab, which is nothing but crystalline carbon, to ignite like an enormous block of charcoal. But instead of bursting into flames, the smoldering graphite slab can glow eerily for days or even weeks. The process generates combustion gases which, like a kilometer-high chimney, transport a portion of the reactor's radioactive substances high into the atmosphere.

In addition to these graphite reactors, which have now proven to be highly volatile, the Soviets have also built the kinds of pressurized water reactors (PWR) common in the West. But until recently, the Soviets also dispensed with containment for this type of reactor (WWER 440 and 1000) -- specifically for reasons of cost.

In fact, Soviet nuclear engineers even went so far as to malign the West's more sophisticated safety philosophy as a monstrous product of capitalist thought. Nuclear physicist Klaus Fuchs (now 74 and living in East Germany) has called the West's policy of "using more and more steel and concrete to technically control even the most unlikely accident" an "economically unjustifiable concept." Indeed, Soviet bloc engineers have attempted to recast poverty as a virtue. According to Fuchs, "a high level of personnel qualification" and an appropriately deep understanding "of system and process design" are sufficient to eliminate the need for safety precautions made of steel and concrete.

In an article in Spektrum, the publication of East Germany's Academy of the Sciences, Fuchs wrote that nothing is more detrimental to resolving the problem of safety "than staring, transfixed, at the MCA like some rabbit staring at a snake."

In a 1982 study on "the Soviet nuclear program," Bremen physicist Jens Scheer wrote that the Russians have not only demonstrated "unprecedented unscrupulousness" in whipping their nuclear program into shape, but also a certain naïveté and mystification in working with the atom -- not unlike the romantic notion that manned space travel has somehow transported the spirit of Mother Russia into space.

"The rise of the nuclear sun provides for the good of Soviet people ... it floats, it floats, that white ship against a green shoreline -- oh pearl in the constellation of the atom -- Leningrad nuclear power plant Number One," wrote Leningradskaya Pravda in 1977, when a reactor of the same type used in Chernobyl went into operation on the banks of the Neva River in Leningrad.

Non-Russian operators of Soviet nuclear power plants took a more levelheaded approach to the issue and recognized the Soviet concept's weaknesses. Although the Finns, for example, felt coerced into buying two 440-megawatt pressurized water reactors from their Soviet neighbors, they insisted that the systems be protected with additional, Western-designed containments supplied by US manufacturer Westinghouse. Babcock & Wilcox, another US firm, brought the reactors' emergency cooling systems up to Western standards.

The situation is similar in East Germany, where Soviet-designed nuclear power plants were also equipped with additional safety features, though not to the level of West German safety regulations. East Germany's engineers, who boast of "having combined the advantages of Western and Eastern designs," also believe that they can make do without a protective shell of reinforced concrete.

Last week, nuclear power expert Bennett Ramberg of the University of California pointed out that there is a clear West-East decline when it comes to nuclear safety. According to Ramberg, the Soviet Union is "at the lowest end of the safety scale, even behind developing countries and other Soviet bloc nations. The Americans, he said, are "about in the middle," whereas the West Germans are "at the very top."

It is certainly true that safety requirements in West German nuclear power plants, pushed through to a large extent by citizens' initiatives and deemed "completely exaggerated" by power plant operators for years, are now the world's most stringent -- a status for which plant operators are now claiming responsibility. But last week Professor Dieter von Ehrenstein, a nuclear physicist at the University of Bremen, expressly warned the Germans against "inappropriate arrogance."

Although it is correct that an accident like Chernobyl cannot happen here in Germany, simply because the type of reactor installed there doesn't exist in the West, by no means does this mean that the Soviet Union is the only country with unresolved safety problems. Other serious accidents -- including an MCA -- are possible in Western nuclear power plants. American power plant operators have narrowly averted an MCA at least three times. A partial core meltdown occurred in October 1966 in the Enrico Fermi experimental breeder reactor near Detroit when the sodium cooling system failed. In March 1975, electricians working with an open flame in a cable shaft caused a cable fire that shut down the entire electrical control system at the Browns Ferry reactor in Alabama, causing the main cooling system to fail. The Three Mile Island reactor near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, narrowly escaped a total core meltdown in March 1979 when a series of operator errors and technical problems led to a partial destruction of the reactor core.

An accident that in some respects resembled the Chernobyl reactor catastrophe occurred back in 1957 in Britain's Windscale nuclear plant, which the British were using to produce weapons-grade plutonium. Like in the Chernobyl accident, the graphite in the reactor core at Windscale also caught on fire. More than 100 operating channels in the graphite core were affected, and it took officials two days to extinguish the smoldering fire. Radioactive contamination from the accident covered an area of 500 square kilometers (193 square miles). The reactor remained off-limits for 10 years before officials could begin dismantling it. It took the British nuclear power agency a full 25 years to admit that fallout from the accident led to an estimated 40 cancer deaths in England.

The Windscale accident was contained because plant officials managed to remove a large share of the uranium cartridges from the danger zone before the situation became uncontrollable. But even though the reactor was much smaller than the Chernobyl reactor, extinguishing the fire proved to be difficult. An initial attempt to smother the fire with carbon dioxide gas failed. In the end, the reactor core was flooded with water. The hydrogen explosion some experts feared never materialized, and the containment system remained in place.

Early last week, Professor Karl Heinz Lindackers, a reactor expert with the Rhineland Technical Inspection Agency (TÜV), suggested to the Soviets that they extinguish the Chernobyl reactor fire by spraying it from the air with hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of water. But another German reactor expert, Professor Rudolf Schulten, disagreed. According to Schulten, who also works with graphite in the high-temperature reactor at Jülich near Cologne that he developed, the only possible way to put out the reactor fire in the Ukraine is by spraying it with wet sand.

In fact, the Russians are trying to reduce the risk of radiation emanating from the core melt by dropping sandbags, lead and boron onto the reactor. Images taken on Thursday from "Spot," a recently launched French satellite, showed that the amount of smoke over Chernobyl has subsided to a sufficient extent that roads on the plant grounds are visible once again.

"What kind of nuclear disaster will German citizens have to face before our politicians finally give up nuclear energy?" It was with these words that Huberg Weinzierl, Chairman of the Federal Association for the Environment and the Protection of Nature (BUND), reacted to the news that the radioactive cloud had made it from Chernobyl to Berlin, Bavaria and Austria. For West Germany, which is second only to Japan in per capita use of nuclear power plants, there was more at issue than the possibility of an acute threat posed by radioactive particles from the East.

Like the Austrians (who don't even have their own nuclear power plants), the Germans face neighboring countries' nuclear power plants lined up along their borders. "I don't have to go very far at all in (the western state of) Saarland," said Jo Leinen, the state's minister of the environment, on a special television broadcast, "we will soon have four nuclear power plants nearby in France that aren't up to current standards of safety."

In explaining his position later on, Leinen said that safety standards are higher in Germany than in France, and that this difference is already evident in the quality of materials. According to Leinen, the Germans use higher-quality concrete and steel than the French. In addition, he said, the reactor pressure housing in French nuclear power plants is not lined with special steel, but instead is made with simple prestressed concrete. This makes the lining far more susceptible to internal and external pressure, such as the pressure resulting from the impact of a plane crash.

"No one can guarantee," Saarland Minister of the Environment Leinen continued, "that a different type of accident" cannot happen in Germany. BUND Chairman Weinzierl used a comparison to make his point, saying that when someone is involved in an accident with a Volkswagen, they would never say that "an accident with a Mercedes" is impossible. According to Weinzierl, "the arrogant technology comparisons between East and West are pure cynicism, given the lethal threat posed by any use of nuclear power."

There is no doubt that the multiple layers of safety systems and the rupture protection shell required for all civil power plants, the multiple-redundancy emergency cooling systems, automatic rapid shutdown features and superior filtration and retention systems in German nuclear power plants offer additional safety compared with Soviet plants. But Bremen nuclear physicist Scheer uses the expression "absolutely unfounded optimism" to describe Science and Technology Minister Riesenhuber's claim that a case such as that currently transpiring in the Kiev region is inconceivable in West Germany.

All safety studies conducted by Western power plant operators use the evasive term "residual risk" -- as if the risk in question were barely measurable and negligible. But upon closer inspection, it becomes clear just how much these safety scenarios are filled with self-deception and suppression of the truth. These studies ultimately define a "Maximum Credible Accident" as an accident that operators believe they can still control technically.

This applies, for example, to an assumed scenario in a West German nuclear power plant in which all safety systems fail and a core meltdown occurs. Even in this case, according to a West German safety study, the risk to the population would be low. The study's authors write that the fission products escaping from the melt are, "in most cases," retained in the safety container for at least several days.

Like in a smoke-filled room in which the air is clear by the next day, despite all windows and doors being kept shut, because the smoke particles have settled on the furniture and walls, this period would allow the worst radioactive particles to remain in the safety container, even if it develops a leak after a few days as a result of increasing pressure.

But there is certainly the possibility that this pressure container will burst earlier than expected, possibly as a result of a steam explosion in the reactor core. But risk studies downplay this alternative to such an extent that it seems virtually nonexistent.

According to the German study, although many tests have been conducted in recent years on the "problematic issue of steam explosions," and although such explosions have also been observed during these tests, they are "extremely unlikely" in reality. Karlsruhe safety expert J.P. Hosemann also believes that "core meltdown accidents on the high-pressure path" (the technical description of an accident involving an explosion) have not yet been "analyzed in detail."

Despite all this uncertainty, German power plant operators have not hesitated to build reactors in close proximity to densely populated regions or even near major cities. In a study commissioned by the city of Schweinfurt, using the Grafenrheinfeld nuclear power plant as an example (the 1,300 Megawatt nuclear power plant is located only three kilometers from Schweinfurt city limits), the Heidelberg-based Institute of Energy and Environmental Research calculated the unthinkable consequences of an accident.

The study concludes that in the event of a reactor accident with core meltdown, steam explosion and loss of the outer protective shell, up to 46,000 residents of Schweinfurt would be killed within four hours. Evacuation of the 85,000 people normally in the city at lunchtime would be impossible.

Bavarian Minister of the Environment Alfred Dick's efforts to downplay the horrific results of the study followed what is by now a familiar pattern. According to Dick, accidents of this nature would only be conceivable if the multiple protective precautions in place in the power plant were to fail simultaneously, which, he said, is "practically impossible."

As nuclear physicist Von Ehrenstein illustrated last week, the Western philosophy of redundant safety features has its own limits. After all, each additional emergency shutdown system or safety valve constitutes another potential source of trouble.

Safety analysts have also noted that all civil nuclear power plants currently in service carry a hereditary burden. In an effort to acquire nuclear energy as quickly as possible and at the smallest possible cost of development, engineers essentially mounted the new energy potential onto aging steam machine technology. This approach was not necessary.

In the 1950s, Siegfried Balke, the second German Minister of Atomic Affairs, considered the theoretical possibility of converting "the energy from the radiation directly, and not through the detour of heat," into electrical current, using a method known as direct conversion. This alternative was ultimately abandoned and engineers decided to apply the light water reactor model that had been developed for American submarines to the civilian nuclear power program. Other promising lines of development, though less risky, were discarded and treated cavalierly, often to save costs. As an example, the high-temperature reactor Rudolf Schulten developed in Jülich, which was cooled with helium and substantially safer than other models, only made it as far as the prototype stage.

Instead of increasing operating safety, the decision to combine the atom with the water in James Watt's steam machine ultimately increased susceptibility to problems.

As of last September, "significant incidents in nuclear power plants" had occurred 151 times, in a total of 14 Western countries, between 1971 and 1984.

Teams of engineers in the United States and Sweden are currently in the process of developing alternative power plant concepts after all, concepts equipped with greater "inherent" safety -- making them superior to today's power plants, with all their added emergency shutdown features and retention containers.

But these new types of power plants would only gradually diminish the risks, and they could not completely rule out radiation accidents.

"The completely safe nuclear power plant," former nuclear manager Klaus Traube said last week, "cannot exist."