TIME Magazine Coverage
May 12, 1986
The first warning came in Sweden. At 9 a.m. on Monday, April 28, technicians at the Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant, 60 miles north of Stockholm, noticed disturbing signals blipping across their computer screens. Those signals revealed abnormally high levels of radiation, a sure sign of serious trouble.
PERHAPS THE WORST, NOT THE FIRST
The estimated 375 commercial nuclear power plants in operation around the world have now built up more than 3,800 years of experience. But since the first one went on-line at Obninsk in the Soviet Union in 1954, there has always been the fear of an accident.
U.S. POWER INDUSTRY BRACING FOR BACKLASH
While atomic-energy officials around the world were trying to escape the political fallout from the Chernobyl accident, some of their American colleagues were fearful that the tragedy could doom their industry for years, perhaps even decades, to come. The U.S. industry has long been in deep trouble, and now it has to prepare for new attacks on several fronts.
May 19, 1986
To a world that received the initial news with shock and foreboding, the explosion and fire at the Soviet Union's Chernobyl nuclear plant suddenly became as close as wind and rain could carry it last week--and as menacing as a nightmare.
May 26, 1986
GORBACHEV GOES ON THE OFFENSIVE
For 18 days his silence resounded around the world. Then finally last week Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev publicly acknowledged the gravity of the April 26 accident that destroyed a nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl power station in the Ukraine and spread radioactive fallout across the globe. ''For the first time ever,'' Gorbachev declared on Soviet TV, ''we have confronted in reality the sinister power of uncontrolled nuclear energy.''
GRIM LESSONS AT HOSPITAL NO. 6
To most of the world, the Chernobyl nuclear accident was a disaster of terrifying proportions. But for the specialists struggling to save lives at Moscow Hospital No. 6, the mishap created a kind of medical classroom--a unique if horrific opportunity to learn how to cope with large-scale exposure to deadly radiation. So far, the lessons have been sobering.
June 2, 1986
Chernobyl. In little more than a month, the name of a once obscure Soviet plant has become a global household word, a new entry on the list of late-20th century technological disasters and a rallying cry for all those who fear and oppose nuclear power. The April 26 explosion and fire that destroyed reactor No. 4 at the Chernobyl plant in the Ukraine spread radioactive fallout around much of the world. Now the accident is transforming the East-West political climate and perhaps altering diplomatic relations between the U.S. and its European allies.
June 9, 1986
The sounds of rock 'n' roll blared through Moscow's Olympic Stadium last week as some of the Soviet Union's most popular bands belted out their hottest numbers. Tickets for the three-hour event, styled after Western charity extravaganzas, raised about $150,000 for victims of the devastating accident that destroyed a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear plant on April 26.
June 23, 1986
THE LIFELESS SILENCE OF PRIPYAT
For those who have seen it, Pripyat is a place of silence, devoid of life. The only movement that suggests human habitation is the flutter of laundry on clotheslines. But the laundry has been there, day and night, since April 27. On that day, most of the town's 40,000 citizens hastily collected a few belongings and piled into buses that evacuated them from the vicinity of the shattered Chernobyl nuclear reactor only half a mile away.
June 30, 1986
GORBACHEV LOOSENS THE MEDIA'S REINS
Soviet readers understand that Pravda, the newspaper founded in 1912 by Vladimir Lenin, is the official voice of the Communist Party and that its role is to support, not to second-guess, the Soviet leadership. Its pages are usually filled with stories of happy workers, overfilled production quotas and bumper crops. Last week, however, Pravda dropped the rosy prose in favor of a strong slap at Soviet incompetence, confusion and cowardice. The newspaper's target: the management of the Chernobyl power plant, the site of one of history's worst nuclear accidents last April 26.
July 21, 1986
No commercial nuclear reactors have been ordered in the U.S. since 1978, a year before the Three Mile Island accident. In the aftermath of Chernobyl, moreover, the prospects for nuclear energy have become even bleaker. And yet, say many experts, there is no long-range alternative.
September 1, 1986
In an official report to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Soviet Union admitted that the men and women operating the Chernobyl atomic-power plant were responsible for the worst nuclear-reactor accident in history.
September 8, 1986
''WE ARE STILL NOT SATISFIED''
On the surface, relations among the nearly 600 delegates to last week's symposium on the nuclear accident at Chernobyl were cordial, detached and scientific. After all, the Soviets had agreed to the extraordinary 62-nation conference, sponsored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in a spirit of international cooperation. Said Chief Soviet Delegate Valeri Legasov: ''All our experts understood that the events that happened (at Chernobyl) concerned not just the Soviet Union but the whole world.''
March 16, 1987
ANDREI SAKHAROV ON ARMS AND REFORMS
In February, barely two months after Soviet authorities unexpectedly released him from internal exile, Andrei Sakharov created a worldwide sensation by turning up at an international forum in Moscow. Sakharov, 65, a nuclear physicist often described as the ''father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb'' and a courageous defender of human rights in his homeland, spent nearly seven years under virtual house arrest with his wife Elena Bonner in the closed city of Gorky. During the February forum, Sakharov delivered three speeches eloquently expressing his concerns about human rights, U.S.-Soviet relations and the nuclear arms race. He made a slightly edited version of those speeches, along with a preface explaining his reason for giving them, exclusively available to TIME.
July 20, 1987
Camera shutters clicked and high-intensity television lights flooded a makeshift courtroom last week in Chernobyl, the Ukrainian town whose name has been forever emblazoned in the pantheon of nuclear disaster. In the blinding glare, dozens of photographers zeroed in on six haggard-looking men seated in the defendants' box. Thus began the trial of the once obscure former plant officials and technicians charged with primary responsibility for history's worst nuclear accident.
November 13, 1989
The Soviet government's first reaction to the 1986 catastrophe at
the Chernobyl nuclear plant was to hide it from the world. Only when
confronted with irrefutable evidence did officials admit that one of
the plant's reactors had exploded, releasing a radioactive cloud that
spread over the country and across Europe.
But some Soviet politicians and scientists now claim that a
cover-up is still going on.
April 9, 1990
IGOR KOSTIN: MAN WITH A MISSION
Just hours after the Chernobyl accident, a pilot friend asked Igor Kostin if he wanted to fly over the nuclear plant. ''I agreed, of course,'' recalls Kostin, 53. ''I wanted to prove that I was a man.'' He also proved he was a good journalist by becoming the first photographer on the scene. ''There was still smoke coming out of the reactor,'' he says, ''but I managed to get a few shots off. You could actually feel the silence. It was like a cemetery.''
April 9, 1990
Four years have passed since the meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear plant, but the grim legacy of the Soviet catastrophe is still unfolding. Large populated areas surrounding the reactor site in the Ukraine and in nearby Belorussia remain contaminated with high levels of radioactivity. The poisoning of the land has created dire health problems and economic devastation.
May 21, 1990
ANDREI SAKHAROV: ''MANKIND CANNOT DO WITHOUT NUCLEAR POWER''
After the Chernobyl nuclear-reactor catastrophe of April 26, 1986, the reports in the Soviet press led me to adopt far too sanguine an approach. One clue that should have alerted me to a possible cover-up was a mid-May report that several fire fighters had perished; if radiation levels in the vicinity of the Chernobyl plant did not exceed 10 to 15 milliroentgens an hour, what could have caused their deaths?
April 29, 1991
Nuclear power. The words conjure first the hellish explosion at Chernobyl that spewed a radioactive cloud across the Ukraine and Europe five years ago this week, poisoning crops, spawning bizarre mutant livestock, killing dozens of people and exposing millions more to dangerous fallout.
April 29, 1991
BOOKS: WHO KNOWS HOW MANY WILL DIE?
The people of Pripyat had no way of knowing that their small Ukrainian town was dying that morning as they gazed at the ruddy glow over Chernobyl reactor No. 4 some 2 1/2 miles away. It was a bright spring Saturday, April 26, 1986. A townsman came in from sunning himself on a roof, exclaiming that he had never seen anything like it, he had turned brown in no time at all. He had what would later be known as a nuclear tan. A few hours afterward, the man was taken away in an ambulance, convulsed with uncontrollable vomiting. Soon many of his neighbors were coughing, throwing up and complaining of headaches and a metallic taste in their mouth.
December 7, 1992
Few environmental nightmares strike a more frightening chord than Chernobyl. It is not merely the radioactive mess left by the 1986 meltdown. Six years later, 19 similar graphite-moderated nuclear time bombs are still ticking away, alarming relics of a badly designed, haplessly run nuclear-power program that none of the independent republics of the former Soviet Union can afford to shut down.
May 17, 1993
The basic story of what happened on April 26, 1986, at reactor 4 of the nuclear power station near Chernobyl, in the Soviet Ukraine, is well known by now: an explosion and fire; the death of 31 people from acute radiation exposure and dozens more from diseases plausibly related to milder exposure; the likelihood of a surge in cancers over the next few decades; the poisoning of crops and livestock. The accident and its aftermath, coming less than a decade after the near meltdown at Three Mile Island, also poisoned the world's attitude toward nuclear power.
May 17, 1994
What, asked a reporter, was the most important thing about Bill Clinton's visit to Latvia? A foreign policy aide had to ruminate silently for a moment before answering. "Well," the aide finally replied, "he's the first American President to come to the Baltics. That's a big deal!"
June 6, 1994
TIME DAILY
NUKE RISKS IN RUSSIA: Cash-hungry Russia, skimping on safety at its nuclear power plants, is increasing the risk of another Chernobyl. That conclusion comes from its own atomic-watchdog agency, which faults poor salaries among nuclear-plant workers as increasing the safety risks. What's needed to head off danger: $300 million for 1994 alone.
April 13, 1995
TIME DAILY
END OF THE LINE FOR CHERNOBYL? Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma promised today that the Chernobyl nuclear power plant would be closed by 2000. Representatives from the 15-nation European Union and G-7 countries visiting Kiev called the decision "a radical change in Ukrainian policy" given the former Soviet country's grave economic difficulties. Previously, Kiev had refused to consider closing the plant, most of which has been enclosed in an unstable, radioactive sarcophagus since the 1986 disaster.
