Nearly three years after the world's worst civilian nuclear disaster, Mikhail Gorbachev made his first visit to Chernobyl last week. The Soviet leader seemed intent on cleaning up the continuing environmental and political fallout from the accident. Soviet newspapers in recent weeks have reported the births of deformed farm animals and widespread radioactive contamination of land and food. Local workers surrounded Gorbachev to tell him of their worry about the health consequences.
Clad in a white coat and cap, a sympathetic Gorbachev and his wife Raisa inspected the reopened facility, in the shadow of the entombed reactor No. 4, and stopped...
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