![]() In believing that the Chernobyl zone safely contained the accident, we fall for the proximity trap, which holds that the closer a person is to a nuclear explosion, the more radioactivity they are exposed to. In it, people lived for 15 years in levels of contamination as high as areas within the official zone until the area was finally abandoned, in 1999. ![]() Tourists and journalists exploring the zone rarely realise there is a second Chernobyl zone in southern Belarus. The public is often led to believe that the Chernobyl exclusion zone, a depopulated 20-mile circle around the blown plant, safely contains Chernobyl radioactivity. In the path of the artificially induced rain lived several hundred thousand Belarusians ignorant of the contaminants around them. No one told the Belarusians that the southern half of the republic had been sacrificed to protect Russian cities. If Operation Cyclone had not been top secret, the headline would have been spectacular: “Scientists using advanced technology save Russian cities from technological disaster!” Yet, as the old saying goes, what goes up must come down. Wherever pilots shot silver iodide, rain fell, along with a toxic brew of a dozen radioactive elements. The pilots trailed the slow-moving gaseous bulk of nuclear waste north-east beyond Gomel, into Mogilev province. The raindrops scavenged radioactive dust floating 200 metres in the air and sent it to the ground. Next day, 27 April, powerful winds kicked up, cumulus clouds billowed on the horizon, and rain poured down in a deluge. In the sleepy towns of southern Belarus, villagers looked up to see planes with strange yellow and grey contrails snaking across the sky. When they caught up with a cloud, they shot jets of silver iodide into it to emancipate the rain. They flew 30, 70, 100, 200km – chasing the inky black billows of radioactive waste. The pilots circled, following the weather. Soviet air force pilots climbed into the cockpits of TU-16 bombers and made the easy one-hour flight to Chernobyl, where the reactor burned. So that day, in a Moscow airport, technicians loaded artillery shells with silver iodide. If the slow-moving mass of radioactive clouds reached Moscow, where a spring storm front was piling up, millions could be harmed. On it, an arrow shot north-east from the nuclear power plant, and broadened to become a river of air 10 miles wide that was surging across Belarus toward Russia. Forty-eight hours after the accident, an assistant handed him a roughly drawn map. It was his job to track radioactivity blowing from the smoking Chernobyl reactor in the hours after the 26 April explosion and deal with it. In 1986, the Soviet minister of hydrometeorology, Yuri Izrael, had a regrettable decision to make.
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