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In Europe, leaders were furious with the Soviets for initially concealing the disaster, and fearful of its health effects. Said Swedish Energy Minister Birgitta Dahl: "We shall reiterate our demand that the whole Soviet civilian nuclear program be subject to international control." In West Germany, Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher urged Moscow to shut all nuclear-power plants similar to the one at Chernobyl. The West Germans asked that an international team be allowed to visit the site. Danish Prime Minister Poul Schluter called the situation "intolerable and extremely worrying." In Poland, where officials said there could be a sharp increase in cancer rates in the next two to three decades as a result of the mishap, people were especially angry. Said one Warsaw resident: "We can understand an accident. It could happen to anyone. But that the Soviets said nothing and let our children suffer exposure to this cloud for days is unforgivable."
In the absence of detailed information, Europeans and their governments took frantic steps. Polish authorities banned the sale of milk from cows fed on fresh grass and said children from birth to age 16 would receive iodine solutions to keep their bodies from absorbing the element in radioactive form. That created lines of up to 100 customers at Warsaw drugstores, while special all-night pharmacies had block-long queues even at 4 a.m. Washington advised women of childbearing age and all children against traveling to Poland because of potential health risks. Rumania, declaring a state of alert in all parts of the country, urged people to stay home and to avoid drinking rainwater.
The Austrian state of Carinthia asked that pregnant women and children under six remain indoors. Outdoor fruit and vegetable stands were instructed to wash and cover their produce. Officials warned Swedes and Norwegians to be careful about the water they drank. The British embassy in Moscow organized an airlift of more than 100 British students from the Soviet Union, and cautioned 30 who had been in Minsk when the nuclear cloud passed overhead to shower and wash their hair every two hours.
Many people were just plain scared. In Oslo, callers were on the phone to the State Institute for Radiation Hygiene after news reports told of an invisible radioactive cloud over the most densely populated part of Norway. Sample queries: "I am a mother of small children. What measures should I take against the radiation in the air?" "I am pregnant. Are the radiation beams dangerous to the child I am bearing?" Public-health assurances that the radiation was too low to pose a hazard failed to stem the concern. "Mass hysteria in a situation like this is not uncommon," said Are Holen, a catastrophe researcher in Oslo. "We experience a danger that we cannot see and cannot register with any of our other senses, and that leads people to be worried and afraid."
The Soviets' lack of candor struck many observers as part of an ingrained national trait. Says Marshall Goldman, associate director of Harvard's Russian Research Center: "There is a traditional fear and concern within the Soviet Union about panic. After all, mass panic is what set off the revolutions in 1905 and 1917. The authorities have an inordinate fear of the masses running wild."