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]]]]]]]]]]]]]] VICTIMS OF STALIN'S A-BOMB [[[[[[[[[[[[[[[
By Mikhail Klochko (10/31/88)
(Abridged from New Scientist, 23 June 1983, pp. 845-849)
[Kindly uploaded by Freeman 10602PANC]
Joseph Stalin's drive to build a Soviet atomic bomb may have cost
more lives than those lost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. A
scientist who worked on the Soviet "Manhattan Project" tells the
story of the forgotten victims.
[The following appears as an insert on p. 847 of the article:
Dr Mikhail Antonovich Klochko was born in the Ukraine, then part
of the Russian Empire, in 1902. After graduating in 1925 from
the Kiev Polytechnical Institute, he took part in research work
there, and from 1930, at the Soviet Acadamey of Sciences in
Leningrad (1930-34) and Moscow (1935-1961). ...
The Canadian government granted Klochko political asylum in
August 1961, and five years later he became a Canadian citizen.
He has worked as a scientific consultant in Canada, and has
published scientific papers as well as magazine articles about
his life in the Soviet Union.]
[Note by OP: I think Klochko unsoundly attributes every untimely
death to the effects of radiation (some may be due to
heavy-metals poisoning or poisoning by some other of the various
agents used in the extraction and preparation of radioisotopes).
He does not provide an estimate of expected deaths by age for
such a sub-population, and is a little too free in his
assumptions and those assertions prefaced with 'unquestionably'.
I do not doubt that a number of people died because of radiation
poisoning, but I think it likely that many also died because of
exposure to poisonous chemicals. The important point of the
article is that many died so that Stalin could have his bomb.
Note: New Scientist is a potentially good magazine marred by a
pronouncedly Left viewpoint (these days, what isn't?).]
On 29 December 1962, many scientists, engineers and workers in
the Soviet Union read with cynicism an article in Pravda about
the toll of radiation-induced diseases among the people of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nearly 20 years after the atomic bombs
dropped, Japanese people were still dying. But the people who
had worked on Joseph Stalin's atom bomb project in the 1940s and
1950s already knew well the perils of radiation -- despite the
heavy veil of secrecy surrounding the issue. "Why point the
finger at Japan," many readers of the article must have thought,
"when in the USSR itself countless people suffer from the same
diseases and thousands have died from them."
In the West, however, little was known about the hazards of
the Soviet nuclear programme until the dissident scientist Dr
Zhores Medvedev published in New Scientist (vol 72, p 264) an
article about a nuclear disaster in the Urals in 1958. At a time
when concern is mounting about the effects of the early American
atomic tests, it is essential to bring the Soviet toll into the
picture. This article is based upon my own observations of the
work on the Soviet atomic bomb project, on conversations with
friends and colleagues working on the project, and on material
from the Soviet scientific literature.
The literature not only gives some idea of the time when the
Soviet Union began to take measures against radiation-induced
illnesses, but also reveals some interesting facts in the
biographies of scientists and some administrative workers who
took part in the nuclear programme. Although Soviet biographies
and obituaries never openly mention radiation sickness, the
juxtaposition of certain facts, such as work on nuclear topics, a
short life-span, a long, serious (unnamed) illness, may point to
death by some disease associated with radiation.
One problem with writing the story of the Soviet atomic bomb
project is the practice by successive Soviet regimes of rewriting
history. From 1946, the Soviet news media, together with both
the general and scientific literature, tried in vain to prove
that Russian atomic science was indigenous, and that the
government had encouraged it before the Second World War.
However, it was common knowledge in Leningrad that during the
1930s, the authorities looked with disdain upon scientists
engaged in studying the atomic spectrum at the Optical Institute.
The scientists were deprived of ration cards because their work
had "no practical value." ...
There can be no doubt that the large-scale development of
Soviet atomic science and technology started only when Stalin
heard about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in
August 1945. After that, work on the Soviet bomb began in
frantic haste. Hundreds of research institutes, universities,
technical colleges and industrial enterprises were involved, and
the government began building special research institutes and
pilot plants for the Soviet "Manhattan Project."
One visible sign of this feverish activity was when the
salaries of senior research workers trebled in April 1946. For
example, my monthly salary as doctor of sciences and head of a
laboratory in an academic institute sprang suddenly from 2000 to
6000 (old) roubles. To conceal the reason for the increase, it
applied to all senior scientists, not just those working on the
bomb. But the atomic scientists received secret bonuses and
special privileges, such as cars and dachas (country houses).
The scientists, however, derided these bonuses as the "carrot"
that coexisted with the "stick" -- in the shape of Stalin's
secret police. Thousands of scientists went to the concentration
camps in the years between 1918 and 1945. Hundreds died there.
...
IONKH is the Russian acronym for the Kurnakov Institute of
General and Inorganic Chemistry of the Soviet Academy of
Sciences. I worked there as head of a laboratory from 1934 to
1961. The institute was among hundreds of scientific
establishments that were dragged into the nuclear field in 1945.
We studied compounds of uranium, its isotopes and transuranic
compounds.
When transferred, together with many other academic
institutions, from Leningrad to Moscow in 1934, IONKH was placed
in the premises of a small institute which was closed down. In
time, the premises became overcrowded and the sewage system
became overloaded. Ventilation was also inadequate. When the
work with the nuclear materials started, we introduced no
precautionary measures such as screens or glove-boxes. Liquid
radioactive wastes were poured into the general sewage system,
which often overflowed and spilled on the floor, evaporating into
the air. The faces and bodies of workers were exposed to
radiation inhaled with the dust of nuclear materials. The
results of such a blatant disregard for elementary safety
measures were not long in appearing. An elderly woman who
cleaned a hood where radioactive materials had been spilled died
a few months after the start of nuclear research at IONKH. She
was soon followed by the electrician, Mochalov, who had been
repairing the hood ventilation. He had only recently returned
from four years of war at the front lines only to die of
radiation sickness.
Meanwhile, the personnel of the First Department, the cell of
the secret police in the institute, began to spread false rumours
about how the two victims died. The agents claimed that the
cleaner has died of a "woman's disease" and the electrician of
sarcoma. However, the friends and relatives of the deceased knew
very well the true reason.
In addition to radiation-induced diseases, another plague
affected our workers in the guise of a band of secret police
officers. Brought into every institution or enterprise connected
with the nuclear business to control the passes of every person
entering or leaving, the guards spied on workers and denounced
anyone who mentioned the harsh conditions of life or other
heretical topics. As a result of such infamous activities of the
guards, helped in their denunciations by the local First
Department, two people were arrested at IONKH. One of them died
in jail, the other disappeared without a trace. If an accident
such as a fire took place in an institute, firefighters or
medical helpers were not allowed into the building on the pretext
that they did not have the proper passes. Such an occasion
occurred at our neighbour, the Institute of Physical Chemistry.
A young female worker was struck down by a high-tension current.
Emergency first aid was called for, but the guards refused to
allow the doctor to enter the building. While the guards were
telephoning their superiors for the necessary permission, the
girl died.
The first casualties among research workers at IONKH occurred
among scientists working on uranium compounds under Academician
Ilya I. Chernyaev. Neither he, nor his assistants had worked on
fissile materials before. This was the case in hundreds of other
scientific installations, universities, and technical colleges
mobilised in 1945-1946 for the bomb project. Belatedly, in 1947,
IONKH organized a "control station" where people could check the
degree of contamination of their bodies and equipment. The only
visible result of the performance of the station was that its
manager, the young and likeable Seryozha Starostin, fell ill and
died in the academic hospital two weeks after he was admitted.
As in the case of the electrician and the cleaner, the staff of
the First Department began to spread rumours that Starostin had
bled to death during an operation. The rumor-mongers almost
guessed right: Starostin died from leukaemia.
Starostin's untimely death was marked by a black frame around
his name in a paper published posthumously. As a rule, junior
scientists are seldom honoured by an obituary in a Soviet
scientific magazine. However, three doctors of science at IONKH
who died after exposure to radioactive materials were given the
posthumous "honour".
[Accounts of several deaths at ages 40-60 omitted.]
One junior scientist, Makartseva, working under Dr I.I.
Kornilow with white-hot uranium alloys, went blind (a possible
effect of radiation). She was refused an invalid's pension,
despite the fact that she was a member of the Communist Party,
because her chief, also a member of the Pary, wanted to clear
himself of blame. A senior scientist, Anna D. Gelman-Novikova
also began to lose sight after working with compounds of
trans-uranium elements.
Our trade union, the head of which is always a member of the
Party, did not pass a single resolution of protest or demand
regarding the death of people at our institute and the
contraction of radiation-induced diseases by others. Eventually,
the matter assumed scandalous proportions and in 1947 the
institute opened a medical post with one nurse. A doctor visited
twice a week. All of those working at the institute had their
blood analysed for signs of radiation.
It turned out that more than half of the institute's staff,
about 250 people, suffered from some degree of disease associated
with radiation. Among them, more than 100 were serious cases.
Even some workers not engaged in nuclear research were ill,
because the entire institute was contaminated.
[Accounts of several deaths at ages 40-62 omitted.]
The journal Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk (Advances in Physics)
between 1951 and 1981 published obituaries of more than 20
nuclear physicists, most of whom died before the age of 60.
Those who managed to live a little longer died "after a long
serious illness". [Accounts of several deaths at ages 40-62
omitted.]
Five years earlier, Academician Pyotr I. Lukirsky, who was
working in the Radium Institute, died at the age of 60. The
obituaries give the names of more than 10 other nuclear
physicists who died between 40 and 60 years of age. Others are
remembered only by a black frame around their names in the title
of a posthumous scientific paper. But most of the younger
scientists, who did not live long enough to obtain a doctor's
degree, died of radiation-induced diseases without winning an
obituary.
Among the many hundreds of research establishments involved in
the nuclear bomb project from the end of August 1945 were almost
all of the Soviet Union's universities and technical colleges,
scientific institutes and laboratories. In addition, the
government built several special nuclear establishments which
were constructed between 1946 and 1960. Among them was the
so-called Devyatka (Institute Number Nine) which housed work on
the chemistry of fissionable materials and headed from 1946 to
1953 by Orest Y. Zvyagintsev, one of our directors of sciences.
Several workers of the institute died at a comparatively young
age. Some of their names, such as that of Boris N. Sudarikov,
who died in his fifties, appear in the literature in a black
frame. Some students who graduated from Moscow University and
started their work at IONKH, died from acute radiation sickness.
The number of all the people mentioned by name in the
preceding sections and scores of other scientists who died from
the effects of radiation and whose names can be found in
literature, represents only the tip of the iceberg. The number
of technical personnel afflicted is even greater. After
scientists designed the Soviet atomic bomb, hundreds of thousands
of engineers and workers had to realise the project. The path
from the uranium mines to the test grounds is paved with corpses.
During the first decade of the bomb's development (1946-1955),
inmates of Soviet concentration camps did the lion's share of
that work. The camps neglected even the most elementary safety
arrangements. Radiation sickness was a complementary mishap to
the many accidents in mines and on the production line. Each
test of the bomb threatened not only the engineers but the
population of the surrounding areas as well. Alexander
Solzhenitsyn in his Gulag Archipelago lists many projects built
and manned by prisoners. To this list must be added the
installation at Norilsk, built by camp inmates. The inmates were
working on mining and dressing uranium ores when I visited that
city with Academician I. Chernyaev in 1946. He consulted the
administration on methods of separating uranium in the so-called
"Macaroni factory" -- a euphemism for the uranium ore dressing
mill.
Scientists in the West detected many tests and explosions of
the Soviet atomic bombs. Fallout was often observed beyond the
borders of the USSR, for example in April 1956, when the fallout
reached China. The numbers of the fallout victims (as well as of
many others) were kept a strict secret in the USSR. And only
recently, in 1976, has Dr Zhores Medvedev revealed the tragic
catastrophe that occurred in 1958 as a result of a fire or
explosion at the site of a nuclear waste disposal plant in the
Southern Urals. The fallout covered a large area; tens of
thousands of people were affected and hundreds of them died.
Studies of the hazards connected with the atomic bomb and with
the nuclear industry in the Soviet Union raise two important
issues: Why did so many deaths occur? And how did the Soviets
succeed in concealing a major disaster until 1977 when Medvedev's
article appeared?
At the beginning of the atomic bomb project in August 1945,
Stalin set Soviet atomic scientists the task of making the bomb
in the shortest time, at any cost. To achieve that goal,
authorities spared neither material expenses nor human lives.
Our IONKH was not unusual in its total absence of safety measures
at the start of nuclear research. Other establishments that
started that work in 1945-1946 shared the same attitude.
Certainly, nobody attempted to raise his voice against Stalin's
directive.
According to Medvedev, even in 1951 (two years after the first
Soviet explosion), workers dealing with radioactive isotopes knew
nothing of their dangerous effects. During the first decade of
the bomb project, 1945-1955, even the words "radiation sickness"
were taboo. The journal Gigiena i Sanitaria (Hygiene and
Sanitation) did not print a single article about the hazards of
radiation before 1955. In November 1955 (more than two years
after Stalin's death) an article appeared on a conference on the
problem of ionising radiation, which took place in Moscow in July
1955. The author said the conference was the first in the
country. Radiation sickness and its manifestations was mentioned
in several reports of the conference, and diagnosis and
prevention were discussed. Participants stressed the need for
further work on the problem of ionising radiation. From that
time, articles on the problem appeared not only in that journal,
but also in reference books. To counter the claim of some
Western sources that the Soviet Union showed no interest in
radiation-induced diseases, an article on radiological problems,
written by a Soviet professor, appeared in an American journal.
A peculiarity of that article is the absence of references to the
works it mentions. ...
Morbidity and mass deaths suffered by people in the USSR from
radiation-associated diseases came to be such a frequent
phenomenon in the 1960s that articles about it appeared even in
the general press. An article by Professor A. Lebedinsky, a
member of the Academy of Medical Sciences (The Struggle Against
Radiation Sickness, Pravda 18 August 1964) states directly that
"radiation sickness is a consequence of accidents occurring
during the operation of an atomic reactor. Several such cases,
however, have unfortunately occurred in physical laboratories".
To have been completely correct, the phrase should have included
the words "tens of thousands" immediately following the word
"several" and close with the words "atomic factories and test
grounds".
But how did the Soviet authorities keep secret the scale of
the disaster? The answer is quite simple: because of the
peculiarities of Soviet censorship. To have a clear idea of
Stalin's censorship one must be acquainted with a book issued in
the late 1940s under the title An Enumeration of Information
Prohibited for Publication in the News Media.
After the infamous "secrecy decrees" of 1947, I had to read
that book inside the premises of the First Department, being
nominated (among three other IONKH scientists) as a censor of
papers to be published by our workers.
Among many hundreds of items the book cited as prohibited
were: epidemics; accidents in mines, factories and testing
grounds; transport crashes of various kinds; and any natural
disaster in the USSR, earthquakes included. Any statistics,
local or central, were prohibited. So why should the Soviet news
media publish the statistics (or even separate cases) of
radiation fatalities, even if the number exceeds tens of
thousands? The press allowed far greater catastrophes, for
example, the famine caused by the forced collectivisation of
1932-33, when about 5 million people in the Ukraine and more than
one million in Kazakhstan starved to death, to pass in silence.
Only comparing the figures of two censuses, of 1926 and 1939, one
can reveal the decrease in the number of Ukrainians and Kazakhs,
despite the increase of the country's population during these
years.
So long as no official data are published about Soviet victims
of radiation, we can make only rough approximations of the number
of deaths in each of the main three groups: scientists;
technicians and workers; and people living in the bomb-test
areas. There were 162 500 scientists in the USSR in 1950, of
whom about 60 percent, some 97 000, specialised in physical,
chemical and technological sciences. Perhaps half of them, about
48 000, took part in the nuclear business in such a manner that
they could have been exposed to dangerous radiation. If we apply
to this figure the casualty rates at IONKH, where out of 80
scientists, five died and out of 20 technicians, two died, the
rate would be between 5 and 10 percent. Taking the average
figure of 7.5 percent, we have about 3600 scientists who died
during the first years of their work and another 44 900 who
suffered from some disease associated with radiation.
These are conservative figures. Kurchatov's deputy, I.N.
Colovin, wrote that "many thousands of persons were solving the
atomic problem in those years (1945-1960) in plants, institutes
and test grounds", and that fewer and fewer participants of the
atomic project remain alive. On the other hand, one of my close
friends, a high ranking scientists, told me after one of his
trips to the atomic plant in the southern trans-Ural region: "You
cannot imagine the colossal death rate among the scientists and
technical personnel there. Each time I visit the plant I find
that the cemetery here [sic] has doubled in size."
Assuming that no less than 1 million workers and engineers
took part in the whole process of preparing the bomb, from mining
the uranium ore to making the bomb itself, and that between 5 and
10 percent died as a result, we come to an estimate of 50 to
100 000 fatalities. This gives a number that compares with the
deaths at Hiroshima.
As to the tests of the bomb, besides fatalities on the ground
among those who organized these tests and studied their results,
there were groups of Soviet people who had the misfortune to live
in areas affected by fallout. Medvedev has reported that tens of
thousands of people were affected by an explosion at one nuclear
waste site. Also there is no doubt that each test explosion
caused suffering and death to thousands of people.
From these figures, I estimate that the number of deaths from
the development of the Soviet atomic bomb exceeds those of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
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