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Throughout the week, an anxious, puzzled and increasingly frustrated world struggled to understand the extent of the disaster. The task was made impossibly difficult by the Soviets' stubborn refusal to provide anything more than a few sketchy details. Moscow's obstinance condemned people everywhere to fragmentary and often conflicting accounts that tended to shift abruptly as new facts became known. Not until the weekend did a Soviet official come forth with the beginnings of a straightforward account. Boris Yletsin, a candidate-member of the Politburo, said reservoirs near the plant were contaminated and the area remained too radioactive for residents to return. In remarks to the West German television network ARD, Yletsin said of the accident, "The cause lies apparently in the subjective realm, in human error. We are undertaking measures to make sure that this doesn't happen again."
For the Soviet Union, the consequences of Chernobyl could be devastating. Anywhere from two to 2,000 people near the plant were reported to have been killed by causes ranging from the initial blast to lethal radiation, and tens of thousands may have been evacuated from the endangered region. Meanwhile, radioactive gases and particles have spread over a vast section of the Soviet breadbasket in the Ukraine, and water supplies for the more than 6 million inhabitants of the Kiev area are threatened with contamination. Milk from local cows will probably be tainted for months to come.
While Soviet pronouncements sought to minimize the extent of the damage, information gathered from satellite photos suggested a hellish scene at the accident site. All evidence pointed to a nuclear reactor fire burning out of control in the gentle, rolling Ukrainian countryside and steadily releasing radiation into the air. That makes the catastrophe unimaginably worse than the 1979 partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, where a containment building kept most radioactive material from escaping out of the plant. The Chernobyl unit, by contrast, lacked such a protective structure.
Fueled by the white-hot graphite core of one of Chernobyl's four reactors, the runaway blaze burned at temperatures of up to 5000 degrees , or twice that of molten steel. The crippled reactor itself was unapproachable--too hot from the fire ravaging it, too dangerous radioactively. "No one knows how to stop it," said one U.S. expert. "It could take weeks to burn itself out."
On Tuesday, Annis Kofman, a Dutch amateur radio enthusiast, reported picking up a broadcast in which a distraught ham operator near Chernobyl announced that two units were ablaze and spoke of "many hundreds dead and wounded." In Kofman's account, the man cried, "We heard heavy explosions! You can't imagine what's happening here with all the deaths and fire. I'm here 20 miles from it, and in fact I don't know what to do. I don't know if our leaders know what to do because this is a real disaster. Please tell the world to help us." In the absence of any Soviet description of events at the scene, this dramatic but unconfirmed account was seized on by the media and widely carried.