Violation of the established order in preparation for the tests . . . violation of the testing program itself and carelessness in control of the reactor installation . . . inadequate understanding on the part of the personnel of the operating processes in a nuclear reactor . . . loss of a sense of danger.
The language was thick and bureaucratic, but there it was in black and white. In an official report to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Soviet Union admitted that the men and women operating the Chernobyl atomic- power power plant were responsible for the worst nuclear-reactor accident in history. Said Andronik M. Petrosyants, chairman of the Soviet Committee for the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy: "The accident took place as a result of a whole series of gross violations of operating regulations by the workers."
In most other societies, an admission of human error might seem commonplace. But not in the Soviet Union, where for decades official failures have seldom been acknowledged, official sins seldom recognized. Disasters such as plane crashes and earthquakes are like trees falling in the forest when no one is present. No one ever hears the crash.
That is how it was immediately after last April's accident at Chernobyl, in the Ukraine. Only after furious protests and demands for information from Sweden and other Western countries did the Soviets even admit that anything had occurred, and then they limited themselves to terse statements that only increased anxiety over the nature and extent of the mishap. The result, of course, was runaway rumors. In the absence of credible official information, stories began to circulate of 2,000 or more people dead and mass graves dug in the countryside.
The report delivered to the IAEA and outlined at a Soviet press conference in Moscow last week, was one of the more startling examples of a new Soviet openness. Not only does the two-volume, 430- page document assign guilt for the catastrophe but it includes page after page of statistics, charts and drawings explaining the design and operation of Soviet nuclear reactors. The report will serve as a working paper at an IAEA meeting this week to discuss the international implications of the Chernobyl disaster. About 80 nations were slated to send delegations. Participants are expected to approve a new accord in September for the sharing of information about any future nuclear accidents. Said Petrosyants: "The accident at the Chernobyl atomic-power station badly affected Soviet atomic-power engineering, and will undoubtedly have an effect on the world's atomic-power industry as a whole."
While some Westerners found the report's analysis distorted and incomplete, most were impressed by its thoroughness, its spirit of self-criticism and the promptness with which it was prepared. Said Kennedy Maize, a senior analyst at the Washington office of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a group that has been critical of the nuclear-power industry: "I must confess that I think we know more at this stage about Chernobyl than was the case four months after Three Mile Island," the much less serious 1979 nuclear accident near Harrisburg, Pa.