THE STALLED INTERACTION 185a terrible disaster took place at a civil nuclear-power station in Cher-
nobyl in Ukraine. The core of the nuclear reactor went into meltdown.
At first the local authorities as well as the central ministries pretended
that the problems were innocuous. But soon the catastrophe could no
longer be disguised, and the Politburo became involved. The contami-
nation, carried by rain clouds, reached far beyond Soviet borders into
Western Europe; and foreign monitoring facilities raised an alarm.
Gorbachëv initiated a thorough investigation of the disaster and the
Soviet leadership put all thoughts of talks with the Americans on hold.
Shevardnadze’s aides asked him to explain the shambles and the mis-
information. The Swedish media had been a better and quicker source
than anything that had issued from TASS or appeared in Pravda.
Shevardnadze was in bitter mood: ‘I’m tired of all this. I’m tired of
trying to show that one shouldn’t keep quiet.’^37
Gorbachëv, of course, was wrong in his claim that the Politburo
had received no alert about the dangers at Chernobyl power station:
the KGB had provided a damning report seven years earlier. But it was
true that the Politburo had received assurances that the problems
had been solved.^38 In fairness to Gorbachëv, moreover, he certainly
arranged for the Soviet media to show greater openness and honesty
in reporting on the disaster. Secretiveness only caused further damage
to the USSR’s reputation abroad. Scandinavian and other foreign
monitoring facilities were registering horrifying data about the air-
borne spread of radiation. Gorbachëv publicly accepted that politicians
and scientists at lower levels had been incompetent and mendacious.
Ryzhkov flew to the district around Chernobyl to supervise the
decommissioning of the power station. TV, radio and the press
covered the topic in detail. Although criticism was kept to a min-
imum, no disaster in Soviet history had ever been treated with such
frankness. Although no communist state allowed public censure to
appear, politicians across Eastern Europe were no less agitated about
the disaster than their peoples. Gorbachëv tried to calm popular
opinion. But if anything, he was even more shaken than most Soviet
citizens. An explosion at a single power station brought home to him
what a catastrophe would ensue from any use of nuclear weapons.^39
The accident at Chernobyl prodded the American administration
into activity. Shultz told the President that Soviet leaders had become
‘defensive and withdrawn’ since the beginning of the year. Deadlock in
US–Soviet relations was in nobody’s interest; it also might damage the
electoral prospects of friends like Thatcher and Kohl.^40 On 13 May