THE RIGHT BOOKS

Two days after the disastrous explosion of a nuclear reactor at Chernobyl on April 26, 1986, TASS announced: “The accident at the Chernobyl power station is the first one in the Soviet Union. Similar accidents happened on several occasions in other countries. In the United States, 2,300 accidents, breakdowns, and other faults were registered in 1979 alone.” (A Radio Moscow science correspondent shortly raised the figure to twenty thousand, and asserted that “hundreds of [these] rated as particularly serious.”) “Don’t [Westerners] know,” demanded Georgi Arbatov, head of the Institute of the U.S.A, and Canada, “about the dozens of accidents during the operations of [their own] military nuclear technologies, including the two cases involving U.S. submarines?”—his implication being that no similar incidents had occurred on the Soviet side. And on May 14, Mikhail Gorbachev, the architect of glasnost, stated bluntly, “For the first time ever we encountered in reality such a sinister force as nuclear energy that has escaped control.” Glasnost or no, that statement in particular was a boldfaced lie: for thirty years, Western intelligence has been speculating on the nature of a nuclear disaster that occurred near the city of Sverdlovsk in the Ural mountains in 1958, one of the innumerable incidents discussed by James E. Oberg in Uncovering Soviet Disasters: Exploring the Limits of Glasnost (Random House, $19.95).

“The purpose of this book,” Oberg avers, “is to restore a balance to an existing and clearly unbalanced body of literature, which ranges from official Soviet ‘success stories,’ by the Soviets or sycophantic admirers, to the most rabid of the anti-Soviet ‘dirty linen’ collections.” The West stands to learn from an informed accounting of Soviet mistakes and misadventures, Oberg believes, and so, in clear, relaxed, occasionally inaccurate journalistic style (unfortunately marred by his publisher’s excessively Random editing) he chronicles anthrax infections, nuclear explosions, commercial-plane crashes, rocket blow-ups, submarine sinkings, satellite plummetings, cosmonaut deaths, and mine disasters; the cumulative effect of which is almost to make one discount the threat of the Soviet equivalent of SDI until one recalls that, as the author reminds us, what we have here is only the corrective other half of the story. It all makes for extremely interesting and entertaining reading, by no means in the cynical sense those adjectives might suggest. In no instance does Oberg gloat over tragedy; indeed, he has dedicated his book to “Grigoriy Nelyubov, an unfortunate cosmonaut and official non-person, and other unremembered victims.”

CW

About the Author

Chilton Williamson Jr.

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Two days after the disastrous explosion of a nuclear reactor at Chernobyl on April 26, 1986, TASS announced: “The accident at the Chernobyl power station is the first one in the Soviet Union. Similar accidents happened on several occasions in other countries. In the United States, 2,300 accidents, breakdowns, and other faults were registered in 1979 alone.” (A Radio Moscow science correspondent shortly raised the figure to twenty thousand, and asserted that “hundreds of [these] rated as particularly serious.”) “Don’t [Westerners] know,” demanded Georgi Arbatov, head of the Institute of the U.S.A, and Canada, “about the dozens of accidents during the operations of [their own] military nuclear technologies, including the two cases involving U.S. submarines?”—his implication being that no similar incidents had occurred on the Soviet side. And on May 14, Mikhail Gorbachev, the architect of glasnost, stated bluntly, “For the first time ever we encountered in reality such a sinister force as nuclear energy that has escaped control.” Glasnost or no, that statement in particular was a boldfaced lie: for thirty years, Western intelligence has been speculating on the nature of a nuclear disaster that occurred near the city of Sverdlovsk in the Ural mountains in 1958, one of the innumerable incidents discussed by James E. Oberg in Uncovering Soviet Disasters: Exploring the Limits of Glasnost (Random House, $19.95).

“The purpose of this book,” Oberg avers, “is to restore a balance to an existing and clearly unbalanced body of literature, which ranges from official Soviet ‘success stories,’ by the Soviets or sycophantic admirers, to the most rabid of the anti-Soviet ‘dirty linen’ collections.” The West stands to learn from an informed accounting of Soviet mistakes and misadventures, Oberg believes, and so, in clear, relaxed, occasionally inaccurate journalistic style (unfortunately marred by his publisher’s excessively Random editing) he chronicles anthrax infections, nuclear explosions, commercial-plane crashes, rocket blow-ups, submarine sinkings, satellite plummetings, cosmonaut deaths, and mine disasters; the cumulative effect of which is almost to make one discount the threat of the Soviet equivalent of SDI until one recalls that, as the author reminds us, what we have here is only the corrective other half of the story. It all makes for extremely interesting and entertaining reading, by no means in the cynical sense those adjectives might suggest. In no instance does Oberg gloat over tragedy; indeed, he has dedicated his book to “Grigoriy Nelyubov, an unfortunate cosmonaut and official non-person, and other unremembered victims.”