(2 of 2)
The scene Medvedev describes in the hours after the explosions is straight out of Dante. While fire fighters, engineers and others heroically exposed themselves to massive doses of radiation as they tried to contain the damage, Chernobyl's bosses moaned, wrung their hands and did little else. Meanwhile, all night, as the reactor core blazed, local residents calmly fished in the cooling pond just outside, watching the spectacle, oblivious to the danger.
No one had any way of estimating how much radiation exposure the Chernobyl workers suffered, since all the measuring instruments at the plant had gone off the scale. Nor did Pripyat doctors know much about treating radiation sickness. The windows at the clinic were left open as the fire roared a few miles away. The fallout was wafting in like sunlight, settling over everything. The doctors themselves were being poisoned: patients were emanating radiation.
The damage still grows. The Soviet government has compiled a registry of 576,000 potential health victims who may contract cancers and other diseases ) as a result of radiation exposure. But some top officials think at least 4 million people will be affected, most in the western U.S.S.R. but some as distant as Germany and Sweden. Radiation levels remain extremely high in parts of Belorussia, the Ukraine and the Russian republic.
Former Olympic gymnast Olga Korbut, who won three gold medals at the 1972 Munich Games, still lives in her Belorussian hometown of Minsk, 180 miles from Chernobyl. Part of the region is heavily contaminated with radiation, and she tells of how children learn about nature at special exhibits. "This is a bird," says the teacher, showing them plastic models. "This is a tree." In an area long known for its wild mushrooms, berries, flowers and the beauty of its forests, the children are no longer allowed to go into the woods.
CHART: NOT AVAILABLE
CREDIT: From a telephone poll of 1,000 American adults taken for TIME/CNN on April 10-11 by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. Sampling error is plus or minus 3%. "Not sures" omitted.
CAPTION: How likely is it that a nuclear power accident like Chernobyl will occur in this country?