第3期:抢救切尔诺贝利(3)

This is the first picture ever taken of the breach. All my equipment jammed after a minute. I couldn't understand what was going on.

I thought my batteries were dead. I only managed to take a dozen photos. Once I returned to Kiev, I processed my pictures and I noticed the negatives were black and the colors very poor.

I didn't know it yet, but the photos had been exposed to radioactivity. At the core of the blown-out reactor, and buried under 14 meters of rubble the graphite surrounding the nuclear fuel burns and melts the uranium.

The radioactive fallout is going be 100 times greater than the combined power of the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the Kremlin, eight hours after the explosion Gorbachev only has scant information on the situation.

The first information consisted of 'accident' and 'fire'. Not a word about an explosion. At first, I was told there hadn't been an explosion. The consequences of such false information were particularly dramatic.

Pripyat's 43,000 inhabitants life goes on as usual. They know nothing about the disaster 3 kilometers away. The information we got was that everything was sound, including the reactor.

When I asked the academician Alexandrov, he told me the reactor was absolutely safe. It could even be set up on Red Square. It wouldn't be any different than a samovar. Like putting cattle on Red Square.

There are rumors in the town of a fire at the plant and deaths in the night but no official information is been released. The white flashes on these images are the results of radioactivity on the film.

People in the streets hardly blink an eye at the masked soldiers scattered throughout the city. Colonel Grebeniouk leads the troops in charge of controlling the situation.