One sunny morning in September 1957, a line of military trucks drove down a narrow lane beside a lake in the foothills of the Ural Mountains, the chain that divides European Russia from Siberia. They stopped at a tiny village called Satlykovo. Red Army troops began knocking on doors and ordering the few hundred inhabitants to strip off their clothes, put on replacements unloaded from the trucks, and climb aboard. The villagers were being evacuated. They could not take any of their possessions, not even banknotes. As the evacuees bid a hasty goodbye to their worldly goods, the soldiers knocked down their homes to prevent them returning, and shot their cattle and pets.
The troops gave no explanation for the evacuation. They could not say — even if they knew — that a week before there had been an explosion in radioactive waste tanks at Russia’s biggest plutonium factory, in the nearby closed city known today as Ozersk. Nor could they say that the strange dark cloud that had descended on Satlykovo hours later contained the deadly fallout from the accident. Most likely it had been responsible for the death of Iran Khaerzamanov’s 10-month-old daughter, who had been in the garden with her grandmother when the cloud descended. She suffered severe diarrhea and died hours later. Her body was the last to be buried at the village cemetery.
The troops could not say any of this because the very existence of the nuclear-weapons complex was a military secret, known only to its fenced-in workers. Nobody outside was supposed to know — ever.
Sixty years later, on another bright, sunny morning, I became the first Western journalist to visit Satlykovo since the accident. I drove through a gate still guarded by armed troops and down a long rutted lane. I found the village, but the remains of the 75 hastily demolished houses were consumed by vegetation. Nettles were everywhere. The hot, sticky air was thick with giant dragonflies. Across overgrown fields, the lake had plenty of fish, though nobody was allowed to catch them. The encroaching forest along the track harbored elk, wild boar and foxes. Radioactive it may have been, but a barren wasteland it was not.
So started my journey to discovery the radioactive legacies of the nuclear age, an age I believe and hope is coming to a close. On this journey I explored the weird radioactive badlands created by nuclear accidents — some famous, such as Chernobyl and Fukushima, and some largely unknown, like the area around Satlykovo. I visited places where atomic bombs have been dropped, in the name of science or as acts of war, and where radioactive wolves roam but people fear to tread. I tried also to make sense of our many personal and collective responses to the unleashing of the power of the atom, to the sense of foreboding and the all-too-real threat that it could be used to annihilate us all. In many ways this new psychological landscape turns out to be the strangest place of all. Continue reading
Antinuclear 