The first person to observe anything amiss in the air about him was a Finnish soldier. There was no smoke left by the time the Chernobyl cloud reached the Finnish border, so he saw nothing. His instruments told the story. The soldier's duty was to supervise a radiation-detection station on the border between Finland and the USSR, and what his instruments noticed was a small but unexplained increase in the normal background radiation. The soldier reported it at once to his superiors, of course.
They puzzled worriedly over the information, but, for the
time being, they decided to keep it to themselves. There was a political problem they had to take into account. Finland is not part of the Warsaw Pact, but all the same, Finnish leaders have iearned a good deal of discretion. It was possible, they thought, that the radiation came from an unannounced Soviet nuclear bomb test. Disturbing reports about nuclear events in their Soviet neighbor are not broadcast indiscriminately in Finland.
Finland, however, was not the only foreign country to discover that there was something wrong with the air on that otherwise peaceful Sunday in April. It was only the first of them. At two o'clock that afternoon, in the Swedish nuclear power plant at Forsmark, a worker coming off shift went through a radiation scan. The test was pure routine, but the results were not.
The man's shoes were radioactive.
Sweden does not take the discovery of unexplained radioactivity lightly. There is a powerful antinuclear movement among the Swedish people. Everything that happens at an atomic power plant is scrutinized at every step with great care. So this information was reported on the nationwide alert network at once. It caused immediate concern, multiplied when other stations reported that their air, too, was unexpectedly as radioactive as after a nearby bomb test. Or even after a real bomb.
The first thought (after they decided that the Swedish plants themselves were innocent) was a terrifying one. Most of Scandinavia's air comes from the west and south. (It is for that reason that the smoke from England's factories kills Swedish lakes; the British got rid of their pea-soup fogs with huge stacks that export the pollution to Scandinavia.) So their first thought was that the source of the radiation was in the United Kingdom. Was it possible that England had suffered a nuclear attack? But the English radio stations were still prattling away. Alternatively, could the English, the Germans, or the Dutch have — totally unexpectedly — set off a nuclear bomb test? Then meteorologists traced the recent movements of the air masses over Sweden, and informed the nuclear authorities that the patterns were a bit unusual. It was not from the west that the radioactive cloud came; untypically, the most recent incoming air had originated to the south and east.
It had come from the Soviet Union.
The Swedes are as conscious of their Soviet neighbor as the Finns, but less careful about Soviet sensibilities. They saw no reason to keep the matter secret. The news services were informed. The report made instant headlines. In an hour most of the world knew that something big and nuclear had happened in the USSR.. almost all of the world, in fact, except for the USSR itself.
Chapter 18
The Embassy of the United States of America in Moscow is on the ring boulevard, in the section of the boulevard named after the composer Tchaikovsky. The Embassy isn't a single building. It is a collection of several structures, linked together in a ramshackle red-brick compound. At every entrance to the compound a couple of uniformed KGB guards loiter, smoking cigarettes and chatting to each other, until someone approaches: then they interpose themselves in front of the door and request U.S. passports or hotel cards. When the documents are found to be in order, the KGB guards then say, or the more polite ones say, "puzhalsta," which means "please," and perhaps they even touch the visors of their caps as they step out of the way. (There have been times when they have been less polite and a very great deal more energetic, especially when, as has now and then happened, some desperate Soviet citizen has tried to hurl himself past them to sanctuary.)
Really, the American Embassy in Moscow is a slum. It should have been abandoned at least a dozen years ago, but the chilly state of U.S.-Soviet relations has caused endless bickering and delays over every detail, and so plans for the splendid, modern new embassy building have remained incomplete. Its best feature is its cafeteria. There the American staff can get the only authentic hamburgers, French fries, and milk shakes to be found anywhere in Moscow. Its worst feature may well be that of its scores of drivers, telephone operators, translators, kitchen workers, and cleaners, almost all are locally employed Soviet nationals and nearly every one of those is known to have a second career — or, really, a first one — as an officer in the KGB.
Warner Borden, the assistant Science Attache at the Embassy, was yelling at Emmaline Branford, the Press and Cultural Affairs officer, about the fact that the astonishing news was coming in over the open teletypes. "Keep the nationals out," he said angrily, meaning the translator and the cleaning man.
Emmaline Branford looked at him in astonishment. "But all we've got here is the open news services, Warner. There isn't anything secret about it."
Lowering his voice, Borden hissed, "Sometimes we talk in here, don't we? Keep 'em out till I come back!"
"Are you going to check the code room?" Emmaline asked, and Borden gave her a mock frown.
"See what I mean?" he asked, and then, "I'm gone." Emmaline sighed as he dashed off toward the secure teletypes in another part of the Embassy, with their Marine guard always at the door. At least, she reflected, he hadn't patted her bottom this time.
Across the narrow hall her translator, Rima, was bent over her morning Pravda, meticulously putting a story about fisheries production goals in the Baltic Sea into her careful English. Rima had a last name — it was Solovjova — but for most of the American Embassy staff most of the Russians had only one name, like plantation hands in old Dixie. For Emmaline, a black woman, some of whose ancestors had been named Cuffee, Napoleon, or Jezebel, the practice was unpleasing. But the Russians themselves seemed to prefer it that way. Perhaps that was because they didn't enjoy American attempts to pronounce names like "Solovjova." Emmaline stopped beside her and said, "Look, Rima, we'd better do what he says."
Rima said, looking down at her desk, "It is no problem, Emmaline."
If the Russian woman had any interest in this nuclear radiation flap that was burning up the teletypes, she was keeping it to herself. Emmaline tarried for a moment, thinking. She wanted to ask Rima Solovjova if there were anything at all in Pravda about unexplained radioactive emissions, but she already knew there was not. Emmaline herself had already scanned the paper. Although her command of Russian was still a long way from easy, she would not have missed a story like that— not even in, or actually especially not in, the short paragraphs on an inside page where any kind of bad news was usually to be found.