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On 6/24/19 3:06 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism wrote:
I found out about this from Kate Brown's book on Chernobyl.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S57Xq03njsc
Here is Brown's discussion of the aftermath of this horrible miscalculation:
Shcherbytsky again watched in horror in 1972 when a team of scientists
from a closed military research lab tried to use a nuclear bomb to put
out an underground gas fire in a pipeline near Kharkiv. The gas fire
raged out of control for the better part of a year. Arriving to help,
physicists from a top-secret bomb lab drilled a hole down two kilometers
next to the burning gas well and planted a 3.8 kiloton nuclear bomb in
the shaft. Soviet bomb designers had detonated peaceful nuclear
explosions (PNEs) in other parts of the USSR to smother gas fires.il
They were confident that this secret "Operation Torch" would work.
Soldiers showed up in surrounding villages to give notice that there
would be an explosion that morning. Villagers felt the earth rumble
violently while the ground beneath their feet liquefied. Underground,
the nuclear blast piled earth up and over the gas derrick and snuffed
out the flame. That was just what the physicists had planned. The fire
was finally extinguished.
That tableau held for twenty seconds.
And then something went awry. A scorching jet mixed with earth and stone
belched from the gas well and shot up improbably high. The blaze rose
higher than any skyscraper to pierce the summer sky. A minute later,
witnesses ducked from the force of a blisteringly hot shock wave.
Radiation levels in nearby communities climbed to harmful levels.
Soldiers raced in to temporarily evacuate several villages. As people
piled into buses, radioactive soot floated down around them.
The Ministry of Defense scientists did not tell Shcherbytsky much about
this miscalculation, but he could guess. He was told that due to an
"unfortunate circumstance" it would be better not to eat local produce
for the rest of the summer. From Moscow, they sent the Ukrainian
leadership special rations of clean food." After that episode,
Shcherbytsky tried and failed to halt the construction of additional
reactors at Chernobyl and near other Ukrainian cities.
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