The Rhetorical Rise and Demise of “Democracy” in Russian Political Discourse, Vol I: The Path from Disaster toward Russian “Democracy” 9781644697337

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The Rhetorical Rise and Demise of “Democracy” in Russian Political Discourse

The Rhetorical Rise and Demise of “Democracy” in Russian Political Discourse Vo l u m e 1

The Path from Disaster toward Russian “Democracy” David Cratis Williams, Marilyn J. Young, and Michael K. Launer

BOSTON 2021

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Williams, David Cratis, 1955- editor. | Young, Marilyn J., 1942editor. | Launer, Michael K., editor. Title: The rhetorical rise and demise of “democracy” in Russian political ­discourse. volume 1, The path from disaster toward Russian “­democracy” / David Cratis Williams, Marilyn J. Young, and Michael K. Launer. Description: Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021037729 (print) | LCCN 2021037730 (ebook) | ISBN 9781644697320 (v. 1; hardback) | ISBN 9781644697337 (v. 1; adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781644697344 (v. 1; epub) Subjects: LCSH: Rhetoric--Political aspects--Russia (Federation) | Democracy--Russia (Federation) | Conspiracy theories--Russia ­ (Federation) | Korean Air Lines Incident, 1983. | Chernobyl Nuclear Accident, Chornobyl’, Ukraine, 1986. Classification: LCC P301.5.P67 R4947 2021 (print) | LCC P301.5.P67 (ebook) | DDC 808--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021037729 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021037730  

 

Copyright © Academic Studies Press ISBN 9781644697320 (hardback) ISBN 9781644697337 (adobe pdf) ISBN 9781644697344 (epub) Book design by PHi Business Solutions Cover design by Ivan Grave Published by Academic Studies Press 1577 Beacon Street Brookline, MA 02446, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com  

 

Contents Acknowledgementsvii List of Interviews ix Note to Readers xiii Prefacexv Introduction to Volume One. Image and Reality: The Declining Role of Evidence in Public Discourse

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Part One: KAL and Cracks in the Rhetorical Wall1 Route R-20—Terry Graves Illustration 2 Takahashi—Novosti Satellite Map 3 Ogarkov Double Loop Map—The New York Times 4   1. Did the United States Suppress Ground-to-Air Communications?5   2. KAL 007 and the Superpowers: An International Argument 23   3. The KAL Tapes 58  4. BCAS Correspondence: “Flight 007: Was There Foul Play?” 74   5. The Need for Evaluative Criteria: Conspiracy Argument Revisited83   6. Soviet Media Tactics and the Body Politic: Prevention and Treatment of Communicable Diseases 109   7. When the Shoe Is on the Other Foot: Comparative Treatments of the KAL 007 and Iran Air Shootdowns 136   8. Of Mighty Mice and Meek Men: Contextual Reconstruction of the Iranian Airbus Shootdown 163   9. “007”—Conspiracy or Accident? 183 10. Flight 007 188 11. Carlos the Jackal Attacks RFE/RL! 195

Part Two: Chernobyl, Eco-Nationalism, and Loss of Rhetorical Control 199 Plaque at the entrance to the Chernobyl AES administration   building (1989) 200 The Original Sarcophagus (1989) 201 Interior access door to the sarcophagus at Chernobyl (1989) 202 A Billboard at the Rovno Nuclear Station (1996)203 The New Secure Confinement (2019) 204 12. Chernobyl in the Soviet Media: Unintentional Ironies, Unprecedented Events 13. Redefining Glasnost in the Soviet Media: The Recontextualization of Chernobyl 14. Chernobyl: From the Ashes a New Society? 15. Nuclear Power in the USSR 16. Civilian Nuclear Power in the Commonwealth of Independent States: A Case of Cognitive Dissonance 17. Soviet News Media: Uncertainty in the Throes of Change 18. Nuclear Power and Ecological Debates in the Soviet Press, Mid-1988 to Mid-1989 19. The Final Days: The Development of Argumentative Discourse in the Soviet Union 20. Ukraine Nuclear Power Struggles for Survival 21. Nonrational Assessment of Risk and the Development of Civilian Nuclear Power 22. Ukraine, Russia, and the Question of Nuclear Safety 23. Soviet Bureaucracy and Nuclear Safety 24. Review of Two Books by David R. Marples 25. Review of Plutopia 26. Review of Plokhy, Chernobyl 27. Pseudo-Science and Potemkin-History 28. Confronting Climate Change: Assessing the Role of Nuclear Power

205 208 234 236 248 261 265 286 303 311 327 366 375 380 384 393 410

Afterword413 Bibliography415 Index443

Acknowledgements

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any individuals have participated in making this project a reality. Igor Nemirovsky, Director of the Academic Studies Press, first conceived the idea of collecting our studies and making them available to a new generation of Slavists and rhetorical scholars. His letter to Marilyn Young in 2019 initiated this process. Ekaterina (Kate) Yanduganova, the ASP acquisitions editor for Slavic, East European, and Central Asian studies, has shepherded the publication process for this volume tirelessly and efficiently, as have the members of her copy editing team. Michele Pedro has been indispensable on our end proofreading and formatting the elements that have made up our manuscript. It is impossible to overemphasize the valuable assistance provided by staff members at Voice of America (Washington) and Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty (Munich), as well as the research librarians who worked at ABC, CBS, and NBC (New York)—sadly no longer functioning. We also wish to thank Daisy Sindelar and Martins Zvaners (RFE/RL) and Dr. Tiffany Cabrera (State Department Office of the Historian). We appreciate the support of Karin Beesley, Wendy Fernando, Annabel Flude, Sean Ray, Rachel Twombly, and especially Mary Ann Muller—as well as the organizations they represent—for facilitating the process of receiving permission to re-publish articles that appeared in the books and journals they curate. We also thank others who read draft versions, provided research support, or participated in the writing of individual studies presented here, including Curtis Austin, Scott Elliott, Maksim Fetissenko, Svitlana Jaroszynski, Jim Kuypers, Debbie Launer, and Aleksandr Yuriev. Unless otherwise indicated, translations from Russian into English were provided by Michael Launer. In addition, we express our deep gratitude to all of the people around the world who sat for interviews, responded to inquiries, or spent time

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assisting us in our research—and who are identified on the following pages. The studies in this volume are more complete, more authoritative, and simply more correct because of their assistance. That said, we take full responsibility for any errors of commission or omission that may still exist.

List of Interviews Anonymous. Pripyat, Ukrainian SSR, May 1989. Anonymous. Deputy Chief Engineer for Operations. Chernobyl, Ukrainian SSR, August 1989. Anonymous. Ventilation Specialist. Chernobyl, Ukrainian SSR, August 1989. Anonymous. Leningrad, USSR, August 1989. Anonymous. Moscow, USSR, June 1990. Anonymous. Pismo Beach CA. July 1992. Anonymous. State Committee for Radiation Safety. Kiev, Ukraine, July 1994. Beguchev, Oleg P. Russian Academy of Sciences. Moscow, Russia, April 1995. Brochman, Philip G. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Energodar, Ukrainian SSR, August 1989. Bronnikov, Vladimir K. Chicago IL. November 1992. Brutain, G. St. Petersburg, Russia, January 1992. Callan, L. Joseph. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Energodar, Ukrainian SSR, August 1989. Cayia, Alfred J. Point Beach Nuclear Plant. Two Creeks WI. September 1995. Clarkson, Natalie. Chief of the Russian Division at Voice of America. July 1985. Congdon, Mike. PNNL. September 2016, June 2019. Dodd, Laurin. PNNL. June 2018, November 2019. Ewing, Harold. Boeing 747 pilot. September 20, 1986. Faris, Kent. PNNL. May/June 2018. Feaver, Douglas. The Washington Post reporter. May 27, 1986. Gal′berg, Valery. Kursk RBMK Reactor Physicist. Salem Township PA. June 1990. Glukhov, Andrei. Chernobyl. October 2018.

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Gurshtein, Aleksandr. Russian Academy of Sciences. Tallahassee FL. November 1994. Haynes, Philip. VOA. September 1985. Hersh, Seymour. Author. July 1985. Jernigan, Lisa. Physician. Tallahassee FL. June/September 2018, October 2019. Jett, Brandon. Builder. Tallahassee FL. June 2018. Kambulov, I. N. USSR Academy of Sciences. Moscow, USSR, May 1989. Kang, Sugwon. Author. December 1984. Kessler, Carol. PNNL. November 2019. Kolomtsev, Yuri V. Kola Nuclear Power Station. Polyarnye zori, Russia, July 1995. Koltunov, Viktor. Zaporozhe Nuclear Power Station. Energodar, Ukrainian SSR, July, August 1989. Kontsevoi, A. USSR Ministry of Atomic Energy and Industry. Moscow, July 1989, June 1990. Lodeesen, Jon. Director of US Operations for RFE/RL. Washington DC. July 1985. Lystsov, Vitaly N. Russian Federation Ministry for the Protection of the Environment and Natural Resources. Moscow, Russia, April 1995. Marcelli, Dave. Nuclear engineer. November 2018. Maertens, Tom. US Department of State. June 1984. Martin, Tim. INPO. October/November 2018. Miltenberger, James. Pennsylvania Power & Light Company. Salem Township PA. June 1990. Moffitt, Bob. PNNL. September 16, 2020. Navasky, Victor. Editor of The Nation. October 1995. Oberg, James. Author. February 13, 2000. Parsons, R. M. American Society of Civil Engineers. April 1996. Pasedag, Walt. United States Department of Energy. St. Petersburg, Russia. April/May 1996. Pearson, David. Author. December 1984. Ponomarev-Stepnoi, Nikolai N. Deputy Director, Kurchatov Institute. Moscow, USSR, June/July 1990. Reynolds, Jack. NBC News correspondent. June 18, 1986. Richardson, James. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Rockville MD. July 1990.

List of Interviews

Shcherbak, Yuri. Ukrainian Ambassador to the United States. Tallahassee FL. April 1996, and Washington DC. August 1996. Sherfey, Larry. PNNL. June 2018. Sherron, Brian. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Rockville MD. July 1990. Shteinberg, Nikolai A. Gosatomenergonadzor. Kiev, Ukrainian SSR, June 1989, June 1990, and Obninsk, USSR, July 1990. Shteinberg, Nikolai A. State Committee for Radiation Safety. Kiev, Ukraine, June 1994, January 1996. Shvoev, Anatoly. Zaporozhe Nuclear Power Station. Energodar, Ukrainian SSR, August 1989. Sivintsev, Yuri V. Kurchatov Institute. Moscow, April 1995. Smith, Carolyn. ABC News Assistant Director of Political Operations, September 1984. Smith, Gerald. Duke Power Company. Charlotte NC. October 1989. Stackhouse, Kathy. New York, NY. June 22, 2019. Tevlin, Semen A. Moscow Power Engineering Institute. Moscow, April 1995. Umanets, Mikhail. Director of Kombinat. Chernobyl, Ukrainian SSR, August 1989. vanden Heuvel, Katrina. Deputy Editor of The Nation. October 1995. Wilson, George. The Washington Post reporter. June 3, 1986. Yablokov, Aleksandr V. Politician. Tallahassee FL. May 1991. Yakobson, Helen. George Washington University. July 1984. Yuriev, Aleksandr I. St. Petersburg State University. St. Petersburg, Russia, October 1996.

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Note to Readers

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o facilitate the reading process—and for economy of space—all citations within the text have been referenced to a numbered comprehensive bibliography placed at the back of this volume. Citations are presented by number alone, by number and page(s), or by author(s), number and page(s). Also, within the text of the individual chapters, place names (e.g., Moscow), proper names (e.g., Yeltsin), and familiar terms (e.g., glasnost) have been rendered in spellings that are familiar to Western readers.

Preface

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 he Rhetorical Rise and Demise of “Democracy” in Russian Political Discourse is a multi-volume series that orbits around analysis of rhetoric, public address, and political argumentation from the late Soviet period through the contemporary discourse of Vladimir Putin. Collectively, the volumes examine significant moments and evolving trajectories in Russian political address: from its emergence due to fissures in the ubiquity of Soviet information control occasioned by political disasters such as the 1983 shootdown of a Korean airliner (KAL 007) and technological and environmental disasters such as the Chernobyl nuclear accident; through its “flowering” in the open and relatively democratic Yeltsin years; to its slow strangulation under Putin’s creeping authoritarianism. This has been an enormous project, spanning nearly forty years of research and writing. But it was not planned that way; indeed, it was not really planned at all. Rather, this project began in the early 1980s when Michael Launer and Marilyn Young, an academic couple at Florida State University, found rich ground for collaboration in intersections between their respective disciplines. Michael was a professor of Russian language and linguistics (as well as a technical translator and interpreter), and Marilyn was a professor of argumentation and rhetoric, with a focus on the discourse of the Cold War. She was also the Director of Debate. Together, they began to analyze Soviet public arguments, which perforce meant they were restricted to those initially rare times when the arguments were public. It became clear much later that those times were also the occasions that slowly forced openings in Soviet information control, allowing for public and political contestation of official declarations and positions. Singly, in tandem, or sometimes with another collaborator, Michael and Marilyn published several articles analyzing and evaluating Soviet public arguments (including the use of evidence) that had emerged from events such as KAL 007, Chernobyl, and the 1988 shootdown of the Iran Airbus. They also coauthored a book focusing on the use of evidence in arguments advanced about KAL 007.

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In August 1991, even as the coup attempt in the Soviet Union was beginning to unfold, David Cratis Williams, a professor of Rhetoric and Communication at what was then Northeast Missouri State University (and a former Director of Debate at Wake Forest University), attended a biennial argumentation conference in Utah, where he learned of the upcoming “Conference on the Practical Application of Argumentation Theory to Politics, Business and Industry” to be held in Leningrad, USSR, in January 1992. A former student and debate assistant, who was a colleague of the American co-organizer of the conference, encouraged David to submit a paper proposal. “When will you ever get another opportunity to go to the Soviet Union?” the debate assistant asked. David was enticed, even though his work to that point had been focused on the rhetorical theories of Kenneth Burke, connections between ideology and rhetoric, and public argument in specific US case studies (including pro-slavery argumentation). He had no academic background concerning the Soviet Union. Marilyn attended the same argumentation conference in Utah. She and David knew each other through debate (she had judged him several times at college debate tournaments, and later they coached teams that competed against each other), but their relationship did not really extend beyond the debate connection. Neither recalls any conversations with the other during that Utah conference. As it happens Marilyn had also received a flyer about the Leningrad conference and had already begun to make plans to attend. Marilyn was especially excited, because, although she had been to the USSR twice at that point, both times as a tourist, this upcoming conference was exactly the kind of opportunity she was looking for. Michael had been to the Soviet Union in 1972, and again in 1978, as a Fulbright Scholar; in 1974 as the faculty chaperone for the US National Debate tour; and by the late 1980s was going regularly as an interpreter/translator for post-Chernobyl assistance programs. Marilyn developed a proposal for a paper along the lines of the conference theme, detailing the ability of local action to change government policy, and submitted it to the conference. While this paper looked only tangentially at argument and rhetoric, Marilyn and Michael hoped it would enable them to make contacts in Leningrad that would further their long-term research goal of testing the applicability of Western theories of rhetoric and argument in an information-restricted society.

Preface

Neither Marilyn nor David knew the other had submitted to the planned conference. Both submissions were accepted, and, independently, David and Marilyn and Michael prepared for travel to the Soviet Union. But things changed dramatically before the conference convened in late January. David’s airline ticket to Leningrad instead took him to St. Petersburg, which he knew from the handwritten sign in English posted outside the reception area at the airport: “Welcome to St. Petersburg.” David soon thought it might as well have said, “Welcome to the Wild West” (minus the gun battles). With the magnitude and rapidity of changes attendant to the sudden national independence of the Russian Federation and the declared democratic aspirations of President—and national hero for his opposition to the August coup attempt—Boris Yeltsin, the city seemed nervously euphoric. The old norms of life were vanishing, and what would follow was a great mystery. Tremendous optimism and hope mingled with fear and anxiety against a backdrop of food shortages, material deprivation, political uncertainty, and economic chaos. Conference participants stayed at the Oktiabrskaia, a traditional Soviet hotel off Nevsky Prospekt near Moskovsky train station, while the conference venue was at St. Petersburg State University. Given the disruptions in “normal” life, it should not be surprising that it was not a normal academic conference. The first day, a chartered bus carried conference participants along Nevsky, crossing the Neva River to the University for registration, payment of fees, and official welcomes. Paper presentations would begin the next morning. Following the reception, conference participants learned there was no bus back to the hotel. Indeed, there would be no more buses between the hotel and the University for the duration of the conference. Every day after that, they walked the length of Nevsky, shivering in the January cold. They met in unheated classrooms, breath condensing as papers were delivered. There was no program; there was no set order for paper presentations. Participants would ask each other, “Have you gone yet? Do you want to go next?” Yet, somehow, Russian college students appeared for each talk to serve as interpreters. When David presented his paper, “Argumentation, Rationality, and Ideology: The Case of the Ante-Bellum American South,” which looked at the roles of argument and rhetoric in social change, his interpreter was a student who introduced himself as Maxim. Following the presentation, Maxim engaged David in conversation, asking more about rhetoric and public argument. Russians,

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he said, did not know much about such topics since they were banned from the curriculum in the early days of the Soviet Union (excepting narrow considerations of “rhetoric” strictly as a concern with style, primarily meaning literary style). Maxim then indicated that his major professor, who—he quickly qualified—was not associated with the rather chaotic conference, was very much interested in the subjects of argumentation and social change and would like to meet and discuss them. They would send a car (a car!) to the hotel and drive to see his professor. He encouraged David to invite another American scholar with similar interests to join him. David immediately thought of Marilyn since he knew her, had some familiarity with her work, and understood that she had a good deal of knowledge about the Soviet Union, even if she (like him) did not speak Russian. Moreover, he had by then learned that Michael was a Professor of Russian and a translator and interpreter, which struck him as a good omen, even though Michael would soon leave the conference for an interpreting assignment in Western Siberia. At the appointed time, Marilyn and David waited together in the hotel lobby. Soon Maxim appeared accompanied by a middle aged man wearing a grey, seemingly wool, military-style trench coat and a black rabbit fur hat; he had a pale complexion, a virtually expressionless face, and pale blue eyes that were initially obscured behind sunglasses. Maxim introduced him as Vladimir. Here, thought David and Marilyn, was the major professor. But he spoke no English, so questions and further explanations were deferred. They all quickly scurried outside, where sure enough a car awaited them directly in front of the hotel. Instead of a Lada, which they had expected, it was a black Volga, a “Party car.” And there was a partially uniformed driver who wore a military-style jacket, a jaunty driver’s cap, and Western blue jeans. He was not introduced, and it soon became evident that he did not speak English either. They piled into the car, Vladimir up front and Marilyn and David on either side of Maxim in the back. Although not new, the car was clean on the inside and shiny on the outside; there was a large, wide console between the driver’s and front passenger’s seats. As they merged into traffic leaving the hotel, Marilyn and David expected a quick drive up Nevsky Prospekt to the University and the faculty offices. Instead, the driver turned in another direction. Maybe an alternate route? A shortcut? But as they asked questions, Maxim’s English began to waver. Although he had

Preface

been David’s interpreter, his spoken English was not in fact very strong, and for some reason it deteriorated the farther the vehicle got from the City Center. Marilyn and David began exchanging questioning looks as two things slowly became clear to them: they were not going, by any route, to the University, and Maxim—for whatever reason—was not going to provide illumination. Soon they were on a major highway, probably a ring road. Their anxiety elevated, Marilyn and David unsuccessfully began to press Maxim about where they were going. But they were interrupted by the wails of a siren—and they were pulled over by the police. Without waiting for the officer to reach the car, the driver and Vladimir jumped out and intercepted him as he approached. A vigorous and fairly loud discussion followed, but since it was in Russian Marilyn and David had no idea what was going on. Soon the driver and Vladimir marched back to the car with the policeman in tow. They opened the front doors, and then the driver opened the large console between the seats, revealing to Marilyn and David’s shock and amazement a built-in car telephone. He dialed a number then handed the phone to Vladimir, who spoke quietly and quickly into the receiver before handing it on to the policeman. The officer listened, responded with one of the very few Russian words David could recognize (“Da!”), then handed the phone back to Vladimir, saluted, returned to his vehicle, and drove away. As their car pulled back onto the road and continued toward wherever they were going without any word of explanation offered to them, Marilyn and David again shared perplexed and anxious glances. It was evident to them that things truly were far from normal, that someone—presumably the major professor— must be very important. Eventually they turned off the highway onto a two-lane paved road that wound eastward into a forest of tall, telephone-pole-straight birch trees. (Later, they would learn that the entire area was known as Osinovaia roshcha—Aspen Woods.) The road narrowed, the shoulder virtually disappeared, and the sun did disappear, blocked by the density and height of the forest. Shadows punctuated the road even as the forest swallowed most of the sun’s illumination. Yet on they went. Increasingly anxious, Marilyn and David kept exchanging glances permeated with apprehension. As they later discovered, they were each re-running in their memories every grade B Soviet spy movie they had ever seen. For all practical purposes, Maxim’s English had withered to nothing.

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Soon a painted concrete or mortar wall appeared on their right side, running parallel to the road and set back just a few feet from it. It was seven or eight feet tall and appeared to be thick and solid. They drove parallel to the wall for what seemed like several hundred feet before the road abruptly and sharply curved to the right, suddenly revealing a very large, two-lane wide solid gate in the wall. Two uniformed men carrying automatic weapons, presumably Kalashnikovs, guarded the gate. The car stopped, and the driver got out to speak with the armed guards before returning to the car. The gate swung open, they drove through, then— slam!—the gate closed behind them. They had arrived. Where, they did not know. All they knew at that moment was that they would be there until such time as someone escorted them back through the gate. They were in a compound with a small number of buildings and, judging from the length of the wall, a sizeable bit of land. The main building was a fairly large but unprepossessing house, a farmhouse by appearances. They were silently guided into the kitchen, where there was a small cluster of people. Maxim regained enough English to introduce them to the central figure in the small cluster: Dr. Alexander Yuriev. He, not Vladimir, was Maxim’s major professor, and he was clearly in charge of whatever was going on. One of the others there was an experienced interpreter. After resolving the important initial question of tea or coffee, Marilyn and David slowly began to get detailed explanations from both Alexander and Vladimir. The compound at which they had arrived was a government-owned dacha that Stalin had used when in Leningrad during its long siege. Now it was often referred to simply as “Stalin’s Dacha.” Alexander Yuriev was a professor of Political Psychology at the University, but he was also Lead Scientist of the Organization for Social Stability, Justice, and Ecology of Personality (or, as was written on the English language side of his business card, the SSSEL), a research and training center loosely associated with the University. Vladimir Vasiliev was the Executive Director. In addition, Alexander served as an occasional advisor to Boris Yeltsin and, later, Vladimir Putin (whom he knew from St. Petersburg city government). When Marilyn and David visited Stalin’s Dacha, Alexander and SSSEL were conducting a specially developed training program to prepare Yeltsin’s newly appointed Presidential Representatives to facilitate Russia’s transition to a democratic state. The entire program, they were carefully warned, was absolutely Top Secret.

Preface

David, who knew little about governmental structure or operations in the USSR, let alone in the Russian Federation, did not understand. So while Professor Yuriev attended to other matters, he and Marilyn sat in Vladimir’s office and were briefed about structural plans for governance and decision-making in the new Russia. Maxim, perhaps relieved by no longer having to protect secrecy, regained his English voice and interpreted. But as Vladimir took multiple phone calls, Maxim did much of the actual briefing. Each of the eighty territorial entities (e.g., oblasts, krais, and republics) of the new Federation would have an appointed Presidential Representative who would work with a Council of Deputies to implement Yeltsin’s vision for a democratic Russia. Later, the appointed positions would be phased out in favor of elected governors. As Marilyn and David talked with Maxim, Vladimir increasingly focused on his phone calls. Speaking Russian, he was unconcerned about their presence, knowing they could not understand what was being said. After lunch, Marilyn and David sat in a conference room and talked about their research, as well as that being conducted at the dacha. Alexander and Vladimir questioned Marilyn about the book she and Michael had written on the Korean Air Lines flight, asking specifically what Russian sources they had used. Michael had taught Marilyn how to pronounce the Russian names of the newspapers and journals they had consulted, and she rattled them off without hesitating. Later, again in Vladimir’s office, waiting to be taken back to the hotel, Marilyn and David noticed that Vladimir began taking his phone calls in another room. They decided he thought they had been sandbagging him about their not knowing any Russian! Alexander explained that the activities, indeed the charge, of SSSEL moved in three directions: 1) research on the political psychologies of different regions in Russia, including tests of both leaders and everyday people; 2) training of top leaders of the state to be democratic leaders (to underscore the need for that, he emphasized that roughly half of the leaders of the new Federation Council had previously been members of the Supreme Soviet); and 3) teaching students to become democratic leaders and citizens (here he smiled and added, “students like Maxim”).1 As directed by Yeltsin, SSSEL was deeply engaged in training programs for the newly appointed Presidential Representatives in an effort to transform them from their previous status as Soviet apparatchiks to that of democratic leaders and change agents.

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Yeltsin had authorized SSSEL to establish a training center at Stalin’s Dacha, and he also authorized another one outside Moscow. Each was to prepare half of the eighty Presidential Representatives but in groups of no more than eighteen at a time. And there were in fact eighteen of the Presidential Representatives in residence at the time of this initial visit. Alexander shared with David and Marilyn the curriculum and regulations of the twelve-day training session. Participants (all powerful leaders in the Soviet system) were required to stay in the compound at all times, to wear tracksuits and sneakers (e.g., non-power clothing), to surrender their mobile phones, and remain incommunicado from family, friends, or anyone else during the training period. The first two days of the program were dedicated to “psychological evaluation,” which included sleep deprivation and other techniques designed to break down the previous presuppositions of the participants, to—in Alexander’s words—“turn them into pupils.” This was followed by role playing exercises, debates against former Communist leaders and ideologists (to learn how to defeat them with arguments), briefings on democratic theory, practices, and procedures, and democratic skills-training (how to run a meeting, how to conduct a press conference, etc.). In short, the objective was to break down a Communist leader and rebuild him as a Democratic leader. Marilyn and David were then introduced to the group of eighteen Presidential Representatives in residence at that time (they were not introduced by name); one had been a leader of an influential union that called the strikes that contributed to the economic collapse of the USSR. Before Marilyn and David left, they again sat with Alexander for an extended conversation. He asked if they could recommend some academic literature to help him better understand various argument techniques, and then he stunned them by proposing a series of projects for collaboration, ranging from student/faculty exchanges to joint research projects (e.g., cross cultural research on the relative effectiveness of various techniques of argumentation in different cultures, such as Russia and the United States, or similar research on differences in allowable debate topics, debate formats, debate types and functions in Russia and the United States). Marilyn and David quickly agreed to collaborate, although they noted that they could not engage in much of the stress-related research because of US guidelines for conducting human research. Alexander did not see that as a barrier, and he told them that he would be traveling the following month to Hofstra University in order to initiate a similar exchange and

Preface

research relationship with the psychology program there. It would be his first trip to the United States. Marilyn and David thought the relationship needed to be formalized, so they agreed to draft a proposal to establish a legally registered international research center based on a consortium of SSSEL, Florida State University, and Northeast Missouri State University. They would then travel to Long Island, meet with Alexander and Vladimir, and sign the documents to legally charter their Center. It had been quite a day for them. Marilyn and Michael and David were suddenly research and writing partners. And Alexander had floated prospects of their returning to St. Petersburg to teach classes in his program or to participate in future conferences, some of which would be under his direction. As Marilyn and David reviewed the events of the day back at their hotel, they were somewhat overwhelmed by the magnitude and improbability of what had occurred. How was it possible that two American academics, neither with any kind of reputation or presence in Russia, who had been in the country for less than a week, and who had no well-placed Russian connections, had ended up at a top secret government training center charged with preparing leaders for the nascent national transformation from autocracy to democracy? It certainly reinforced Marilyn’s and David’s recognition that, at that moment, things were very far from normal. Marilyn, Michael, and David met with Alexander and Vladimir on Long Island in late February 1992 and signed documents registering the International Center for the Advancement of Political Communication and Argumentation (ICAPCA) as a not-for-profit center to be based at Florida State University. Marilyn was selected as International Director, with Alexander and David on the Board of Directors. David also became Director of the Northeast Missouri Chapter of ICAPCA. Under the auspices of ICAPCA, and with cooperation from the Communication Department at the University of Iowa (especially Professors Bruce Gronbeck and Michael Calvin McGee), Alexander and Vladimir came back to the United States the following year for a speaking tour that included the University of Iowa, Northeast Missouri State University, Florida State University, and the Speech Communication Association, whose annual meeting they attended that year in Chicago. The following summer Marilyn delivered a series of four seminars in St. Petersburg stretching over two months. In addition, Alexander organized lectures, seminars, and conferences that

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kept Marilyn and David (and sometimes Michael) traveling to Russia frequently over the next twenty years. While The Path from Disaster toward Russian “Democracy,” Volume One of The Rhetorical Rise and Demise of “Democracy” in Russian Political Discourse, focuses on openings created in Soviet information control by environmental and technological disasters, openings that permitted argumentative challenges and rhetorical opposition to gain public visibility, the subsequent volumes in this series begin with consideration of Russian political discourse from roughly the time of our collaboration with SSSEL through the present day. Volume Two, A Flowering of “Democracy” during the Yeltsin Years, is primarily comprised of articles and papers written under the auspices of ICAPCA, with additional authors involved in several of the papers. As the title indicates, the essays in this volume examine political discourse from the years of Yeltsin’s Presidency, although the focus is not on Yeltsin’s rhetoric per se. Among the topics discussed are the early Duma elections, debates and arguments surrounding national identity, arguments about the new Russian federalism and the roles of political parties, as well as positions advanced by Yeltsin in his Presidential Addresses. During the early Yeltsin years, Russia was probably more socially and politically open than at any other period in its history: freedom of speech blossomed, the free and unregulated media exploded, and the entire fabric of society relaxed. The time was as good for rhetoric and public argumentation as it was bad for economic stability and prosperity. It was mainly during these years that Alexander facilitated many opportunities for Marilyn and David. They attended the Second Annual Russian-American Seminar on Democratic Russian Institutions in August 1993, and presented a co-authored (with Scott Elliott), theoretical paper on democracy and what they called “cultures of democratic communication.” David’s colleague at Northeast Missouri State, John Ishiyama, a political scientist who was newly active in ICAPCA, also presented some results of his research on voting patterns and political party formation. During the conference, they all worked to get to know the Russian participants, aided immensely by John’s passable Russian, and were richly rewarded. They talked at length with Professor Alexei Salmin (it helped that Alexei’s English was impeccable), then affiliated with the Gorbachev Foundation, who described himself as one of the few political scientists in Russia.

Preface

The Americans were quite taken with and impressed by Alexei, and, as fellow political scientists, John and Alexei really hit it off, especially after they discovered they were both studying the development and roles of political parties in Russia. Following the model that had been so productive with Alexander, Marilyn and David invited Alexei to make a similar speaking tour, albeit with stops only at Northeast Missouri and Florida State. From that point on, whenever Marilyn and David arrived at Sheremetevo Airport in Moscow, Alexei—as a gesture of friendship and gratitude—always had his car and driver waiting for them. They maintained a strong working relationship with Alexei as he moved from the Gorbachev Foundation to help found the first non-governmental political research organization and “think tank” in Russia, the Center for Political Technologies, and then to become the first president of the national professional organization for political science. A member of Boris Yeltsin’s Presidential Council from 1994 to 2000, Alexei died unexpectedly in 2005 at the age of fifty-four, a great loss to Russia—and to all of us. The most dramatic of the opportunities Alexander facilitated for the Americans was a “moveable conference” he arranged in July 1994. Alexander convened the “Conference on Language, Persuasion, and Human Behavior” in St. Petersburg and presided over a brutally long day of paper presentations, featuring a keynote by Yuri Moskvich, a university professor and the Presidential Representative from the Krasnoyarsk region—who might well have been a pupil of Alexander’s in one of the training programs. Marilyn presented a paper, and David also presented with co-author John Ishiyama. They then defied State Department recommendations, hopped on a domestic Aeroflot plane, and flew to Krasnoyarsk where Moskvich, who had flown ahead on a private charter, met their flight. He arranged the second stage of this “moveable conference” at his university in Krasnoyarsk; but first he gave everyone a grand tour of what had been until only recently (earlier in that year) an officially designated “closed city.” Most notably, they saw the massive hydroelectric dam on the Yenisei River, still adorned with an equally massive image of Lenin indelibly embedded across its front. After the conference, Marilyn and David were to fly by chartered Aero­ flot turbojet (a Yak-40) to Irkutsk. But first they had to have a beer—and a tour of the newly renovated brewery of the domestic beer company, Pikra: the beer of Krasnoyarsk. The company was looking for rich investors; the

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Americans were looking for good beer. In the end, only the Americans left truly happy. So, after several cases of good Pikra beer were loaded onto the plane, Marilyn and David joined several others from the conference, including Moskvich and his wife, and flew to Irkutsk, where they were met by some dignitaries, including the local Presidential Representative, his wife, a businessman named Boris, and Boris’s bodyguard. They traveled immediately to the docks on Lake Baikal, where they crammed into a large Russian yacht (that turned out to be a converted fishing boat) for a twoday cruise on the lake with the Presidential Representatives, their families, and a few others, including an out of work physicist from Moscow who was part of Sakharov’s group. Moskvich spoke excellent English, and with Ishiyama’s Russian they ensured that Marilyn and David were also able to communicate with others. Most of the conversations gravitated around political, social, and economic issues, at least until the vodka caught up with everyone (What happened to the beer?), at which time the songfest began. Experiences like this enriched their understanding of some concerns in the regions and some of the alignments among political parties. During the Yeltsin years, Marilyn and David returned to Russia many, many times: they went places, interacted with people, and learned things that at other times—both before and after—would never have been possible. But even before Yeltsin resigned and, effectively, anointed Vladimir Putin as his unelected successor, the wide open, Wild West tenor of the initial years had already faded. * What we consider in this series to be the “Yeltsin years” are not coterminous with the years he served in office. The “democratic path” along which Yeltsin tried to lead Russia is the same path that our analysis shows Putin followed initially. In our view, the Yeltsin years didn’t really end until the path began to turn, and Volume Two of this collection concludes with articles taking retrospective perspectives on what generally was presumed to have been the first ten years (more or less) of the Russian democratic experiment. But the trajectory began to bend shortly after Putin won the Presidential election of 2000. The change of direction came, as it had during the Soviet period, as the result of another technological and human disaster: five months after Putin’s inauguration, in August 2000, the nuclear

Preface

submarine Kursk sank in the Barents Sea. With the President on vacation in Crimea, the early response by his government closely resembled that of the Soviets during the two tragic crises of the 1980s: stonewalling and attempting to control information. However, the media landscape had changed dramatically since 1986, and—faced with blistering criticism in the press, on television, and from the families of the trapped sailors— Putin belatedly interrupted his vacation and traveled to Severomorsk to meet with the families. Still, he refused aid offered by the United States, Great Britain, and Norway until it was too late: Everyone aboard the submarine who survived the initial blasts had perished. This tragedy marked a turning point in Putin’s relationship with democracy, in general, and the free press, in particular. The path laid out by Yeltsin took a new direction, one marked by a diminution of both press freedom and standard democratic rhetoric. At least through Putin’s first two terms, the lexicon of democracy was still employed, but its meanings began to shift. Thus, Volume Three of our project is entitled Disaster, Putin, and the Redefinition of “Democracy”: 2000–2008. After the Yeltsin years, the texts for our critical investigations increasingly became presidential speeches—Presidential Addresses to the Federal Assembly, inaugural addresses, Russia Day and other ceremonial speeches, and selected special addresses (e.g., Putin’s 2014 Crimea speech). That was not a planned constriction of focus but rather one which more or less unconsciously followed Russia’s own consolidation of power into what Putin rather euphemistically calls “the power vertical.” Even as Putin increasingly restricted freedom of the press, reversed or subverted democratic structures and procedures (e.g., the election of Regional Governors), his Presidential Addresses concurrently retained much of the core lexicon of democracy, but he used those words differently. Much of our subsequent work has focused on Putin’s redefinitions of those words and phrases of democracy and on the changes in rhetorical stance that flow from them. For this portion of the project, Marilyn, Michael, and David rely on theories of definition and definitional argument developed by philosophers and critics such as I. A. Richards and Kenneth Burke and by argumentation scholars such as David Zarefsky and J. Robert Cox. In the aftermath of the Kursk tragedy the discursive environment changed. Shaken by the attacks he suffered in the press, and personally insulted by Bush’s refusal to collaborate in the war against (Chechen)

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terrorism, Putin began pushing back against the West and reorienting his administration towards Eurasia. In articulating that process, he began moving away from the rhetoric of democracy, adding significant adjectival restrictions: “managed democracy,” “sovereign democracy.” The studies in Volume Three reveal changes in Putin’s political rhetoric over the first years of the twenty-first century as he degraded the essential elements of a democratic political system, signaling a move towards a more autocratic form of government that continues to this day. These essays, written more or less contemporaneously, analyze the arc of Putin’s rhetoric from the sinking of the Kursk to the end of his second term in office, as he began to look backward as well as forward for the rhetorical touchstones and ideographs that would move Russia closer to its totalitarian past and further from the free-wheeling days that promised a democratic form of government, rule of law, and basic individual freedoms. As Marilyn, Michael, and David began gathering their articles and papers for these volumes, they realized they had written little about Dmitry Medvedev. Some of his discourse, including excerpts from his Presidential Addresses, is discussed in papers that focus elsewhere, but they do not have sufficient directly relevant work to offer coverage of the Medvedev years in this series. And Medvedev’s influence on the rhetorical trajectories of Russian political discourse was lost after Putin’s 2012 return to the presidency. It would have been interesting to see how the history of Russia might have played out had Medvedev served a second term. Volume Four of this series, The Demise of “Democracy” after Putin’s Return to Power, offers essays detailing Putin’s further retreat from the discourse of democracy, literally from the moment of his inaugural address in 2012—in the middle of massive anti-government protests—through the present time. Some emergent themes over Putin’s most recent years as President include the redefinition and even disappearance of the lexicon of democracy; concurrently, there has been a noticeable shift in the definition of Russian national identity, from the “citizen participant” in the Yeltsin era, to redefinitional truncation, to an identity grounded quite literally in the history of mythic Russia. This transformation provides the basis for the rhetorical justification of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and is a noticeable theme in Putin’s March 18, 2014, speech explaining that event to the nation and the world. As a way to bring the broad picture of changes in Russian political discourse in the Russian Federation from its beginning to the present time

Preface

into better focus, Marilyn, Michael, and David have engaged in a longitudinal study of Russian Presidential Addresses to the Federal Assembly (PAFAs), beginning with Yeltsin in 1994 and continuing to the present. One facet of this study—which has the working title “Russian Democracy: Defined, Redefined, and Disappeared”—encompasses the gradual redefinition of terms such as “democracy” in Putin’s speeches over the years; another describes the declining frequency of what they have called “stand-in terms” (such as “civil society” and “the rule of law”) in these speeches. Collectively, these four volumes will provide a comprehensive view of the discursive changes that took place in the USSR/Russia over the thirtyseven years from 1983 to 2020. This rhetorical and narrative arc discloses not only how language choices drive public understanding of pivotal events, but also how such events can alter our view of the world around us. Through rhetorical and argumentative analysis, the subtle strategies and tactics of Soviet and then Russian leaders to control the discursive environment— and therefore public understanding—are made apparent. David Cratis Williams January 2021

NOTE 1. Maxim, who was really the catalyst for our long collaboration with Alexander, was still an undergraduate at the time of that first St. Petersburg conference. The paper he gave that day caught our attention, and, after finishing his degree, he enrolled at Florida State for graduate school, finishing a Master’s and a PhD in communication studies. Ultimately, Maxim became a US citizen and remains a good friend.

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Introduction to Volume One. Image and Reality: The Declining Role of Evidence in Public Discourse

O

ver thirty years ago, Michael Launer and I submitted a manuscript on the 1983 Korean Airliner tragedy to a major national newsmagazine. The rejection came by return mail. Not surprising, perhaps, but what really caught our attention was a margin comment from one of the editors: “No one cares about evidence anymore,” the comment read. Well. Perhaps this was (and is) so. Certainly, there was little in the public domain then and even less now to refute that statement. Indeed, the manuscript we had submitted—in fact our entire book-length study of the shootdown of Korean Air Lines flight 007 by a Soviet fighter pilot ([480], excerpted in this volume)—addressed the use and misuse of evidence by both the United States and the Soviet Union to advance their perspective. So perhaps the editor was right. Nevertheless, disturbed by the implications of the comment, I originally wrote this essay in 1990 for presentation at a national conference. (474) At that time, I certainly didn’t anticipate that it would become more and more salient as the years went by, until we found ourselves living in a “post-fact” world. In preparing to write this introduction, I came across that paper, and, rereading it, I realized how pertinent it still is; I decided to adapt it as the Introduction to this volume. Contemplating that editor’s comment, the obvious question—it seemed to me then and now—is “Why would no one care about the evidence?” And the important question from our perspective is “What does this mean for the future of public discourse regarding issues of importance like the tragedy of KAL 007 or the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant?” Or, for that matter, any issue of national or international significance? In approaching the latter question by means of the essays in this book, we examine the intersection of argumentation theory and criticism within the cauldron of public policy decision-making.

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The ascent of logic, and therefore evidence recognized as such, began with seventeenth-century rationalism and the impact of Cartesian rationality on the conduct of public affairs. (186)1 The apotheosis of Cartesian influence is, of course, the scientific method with its ability to predict and test causal relationships and to discover the ordered patterns of nature. But the value-free nature of the scientific method has never transferred happily to the volatile arena of human interaction; and it has had dubious effect when adapted to the public policy decision-making process. Witness the decisions to build and use nuclear weapons during World War II (more on this below) or, more recently, the approaches to containing the spread of the novel coronavirus in 2020. Thus, it should not be surprising that people address questions of evidence with such an ambivalent attitude. Indeed, it would appear that we have something of an approach–avoidance relationship with evidence in human affairs. We like the trappings of reasoned decision-making and tend to produce “reasons” to support the decisions we make, giving the appearance of induction (adducing evidence, constructing arguments, trying to show we “arrived at a conclusion” based on evidence). But all too often these reasons are developed after the fact rather than before, and are usually reached deductively or unthinkingly, often based on the opinion of a perceived leader. Since it should be the function of evidence to generate the reasons for decisions, one wonders what role, if any, evidence actually has to play in the decision-making process: generator or validator. This is true whether we are discussing the public realm of policy decisions or the private realm of personal decisions. It might be that our society no longer engages in public argument—as that term is ideally conceived—at all. Even using the broadest possible definition of argument—a claim backed by evidence—there is little in the public realm to contravene this notion. A case in point could be the “Pizzagate” scandal that arose during the 2016 US presidential election campaign in the United States. Alex Jones, the Info-Wars host, reported that Hillary Clinton was sexually abusing children in satanic rituals … in the basement of a Washington, DC, pizza restaurant! Despite having absolutely no basis in fact, the story prompted someone to drive from Salisbury NC to Washington, enter the pizza parlor that was the center of the purported crime ring, and shoot up the establishment. The claim that Hillary Clinton was a pedophile started in a Facebook post, spread to Twitter and then went viral with the help of far-right platforms like

Introduction to Volume One

Breitbart and Info-Wars.2 It took the better part of a year (and two teams of researchers) to sift through the digital trail. “We found ordinary people, online activists, bots, foreign agents and domestic political operatives. Many of them were associates of the Trump campaign. Others had ties with Russia.”3 In the early days of the internet, the Web was thought to be a democratizing force because it opened space for previously silenced voices. Instead, by turning the emphasis away from traditional argument forms, especially evidence, the internet appears to have become more of a force for suppressing reasoned discourse. This trend is reinforced and even exacerbated by the combination of the visual and discursive elements endemic to television and the internet.4 Consider, for example, advertising—a form of persuasion, if not argument. And while we would not automatically support the notion of deciding consumer purchases on the basis of a purely logical evaluation of advertising claims—lest such a practice destroy the economy—some ads are clearly argumentative, and all ads try to make a case for buying a particular product. Yet more and more the “reasons” given for wanting the product have no clear relationship to the thing being sold. One ad that comes to mind opens with a man in running attire jogging along a hilltop. The product is not running shoes or gear, however; the ad is selling a heating and cooling system. Similarly, a series of television ads for BMW convertibles bills the expensive automobile as “The Ultimate Tanning Machine,” a play on the words of the traditional BMW slogan “The Ultimate Driving Machine.” These are not the exaggerated claims with which we are familiar; these are “proofs” that have nothing to do with the argument at all! A variant of this process occurs when the central focus of an advertising campaign is a celebrity or athlete who endorses a product and presumably uses it. Regardless of the discursive reasons given by the spokesperson, the real message is the subtext: purchase this product because so-and-so uses it—so it must work (a type of fallacy known as argumentum ad verecundiam, or argument from inappropriate authority).5 Or, even, “use such-and-such a product and you just might begin to look (or act) like (this celebrity).” What we have here is not “argument,” but association. Association/ dissociation is one of the most powerful tools of persuasion and the most basic of human thought processes (491) and, when elevated to the level

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of sign reasoning, association becomes a process of rationality. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca explain that the absence of a precise connection in the association/dissociation leaves the auditor “free to imagine … a relationship that by its very lack of precision, assumes a mysterious magical character.” (358: 157) Once an association of this type is accepted, it operates subsequently as though causality were proved.6 What happens when the disconnect between image and reality in advertising migrates to actual arguments? A cogent example may be found in political campaign advertising, which, while still a form of advertising, is more clearly an argument for or against a particular candidate and/or a set of policies. As I write, we are in the midst of yet another round of name-calling and negative advertising in which data are transformed into enthymematic arguments: an argument structure where one or more elements is not explicit, but is supplied by the audience. This is not a new phenomenon. In 1990, the incumbent governor in Florida wrote his Democratic challenger a letter in which he pointed out that the challenger had met with an officer of a failed savings and loan company back in 1987 (remember the S&L scandal?). In the letter, the incumbent demanded to know the purpose of the meeting and the content of the conversation. No allegation is made—no argument in the traditional sense. Yet the governor’s campaign staff released the letter to the print media, thereby creating an enthymeme allowing the public to fill in the actual argument. In the 2016 US presidential campaign similar forms of campaign discourse occurred, indicating the resilience of such tactics. In one example, Hilary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, had been accused of mishandling sensitive material by storing it on a private server while she was secretary of state; finding no real evidence, the FBI closed its investigation. Then, shortly before election day, FBI Director Comey reported to Congress that another trove of emails had been located on a laptop belonging to the husband of Clinton’s aide. Clinton was effectively considered guilty of revealing national security data without any hard evidence, and this is believed to be a major reason for her surprising loss to Donald Trump. Later, after the election, it was revealed that the FBI found no evidence of wrongdoing (the “new” emails, it turned out, were not new at all, but were copies of material the FBI had previously evaluated) and, once more, the case was closed. Proving once again that allegations can have real impact, even without the presentation of any evidence.

Introduction to Volume One

In the 2020 US presidential election, the tactic reached a new level. The incumbent, President Trump, began “warning” his followers of the likelihood of voter fraud intended to deny him a victory. In the aftermath of a close election, Trump’s followers cried foul, particularly in a handful of states where the margins were very small. The perception was exacerbated by the order in which some states counted day-of-election ballots versus mail-in ballots or those from early voting. The Democrats had mounted a vigorous campaign urging people to vote early or—in states where it was allowed—by mail, due to the pandemic that was raging at the same time. But some states counted mail-in ballots first and some counted them last. In a few of the states where the race was particularly tight, Trump supporters saw the late surge by Joe Biden, the Democrat nominee, as evidence of fraud, despite the insistence of election officials (some of them Republicans) that there was no such evidence; that this was merely an artifact of the order of counting. Poll watchers from both parties, whose job it is to ensure against both fraud and errors in counting, reported no such problems. While Trump supporters were not convinced by these denials, the rest of the electorate was left to wonder whether there was any evidence. None was ever presented, either to the public or to the courts. Still, for some, the belief that the election was “stolen” from the incumbent persisted. Thus, in this iteration, both the rhetor (Trump) and the audience refused to acknowledge the validity of the evidence, insisting on the truth value of the claim alone, arguing that the evidence of fraud should be obvious to all. As far back as the 1988 presidential campaign a similar phenomenon occurred—posing arguments under the guise of mere factual statements. For example, the George H. W. Bush campaign aired an ad that sought to demonstrate that the Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis, did not support a strong military. (This was the frequently aired spot that showed Governor Dukakis riding aimlessly in a tank.) Amidst a listing of facts and opinions the TV viewer was told that Dukakis “even” opposed the 1983 “rescue mission” to Grenada. The use of a word such as “even” is a powerful rhetorical implement. In our opinion, it transforms a factual claim into an enthymeme by setting up the association necessary to the enthymematic process. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca have discussed the argumentative functions of such “variations in expression” at great length. (358: 163) Earlier, Weaver had singled out the adverb as “peculiarly a word of judgment” because it is

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“used frequently to express an attitude which is the speaker’s projection of himself.” (451: 133)7 Despite a certain amount of predictable semantic loading (a less sympathetic observer might have described this military action as an “invasion” rather than a “rescue mission”), the claim that Governor Dukakis opposed the Grenada mission represents more than a statement of purported fact. It invites voters to utilize this purported fact as the basis for their choice between the candidates. Opinion (semantically loaded): The US military action in Grenada was a rescue mission—a good action for America to undertake. Claim (purported fact): Governor Dukakis opposed the US action in Grenada. Fact (implied): Vice President Bush supported the US action in Grenada. Assertion: This is a voting issue; you should vote for Bush on this basis.

A variation of this tactic is the implied relationship between two juxtaposed, but unrelated facts about a candidate. Again, the conclusion is left to the audience to supply—another enthymematic construction. These constructions would be accompanied by visual material that “supports” the innuendo, which is the source of the enthymeme, substituting for evidence.8 Corresponding examples can be found in the Soviet government’s responses to the Korean airliner tragedy in the 1980s (discussed at length in this volume) and Russian reactions to events occurring in the 1990s and 2000s, after the fall of Communism (which will be addressed in subsequent volumes). The impact of these sorts of enthymematic arguments is to shift responsibility for the negative implications to the recipient, relieving the arguer of responsibility. The interaction of evidence and fallacy is of paramount concern because most of the so-called informal or rhetorical fallacies refer to the insufficiency or inadequacy of evidence. Indeed, the underpinning of all argument is evidence, whether overtly expressed, embedded in an enthymeme, or found in the underlying assumption(s) of the argument itself. It is the presence of evidence that turns a claim (or assertion)

Introduction to Volume One

into an argument; in the absence of evidence, there can be no argument. Indeed, the evidence/claim link is what we term “reason.” The process of mental movement from evidence to claim is made through the reasoning process, an acknowledgement of connectivity. Toulmin, in his model of argument, made this connection explicit by introducing the notion of the “warrant,” a mental step that illustrates how the connection occurs. (424)9 In the absence of this reasoning process, what one has is not argument, but exhortation. Over fifty years ago, Black defined exhortation as a genre of discourse where emotion not only precedes the acceptance of belief, but produces it. (75: 138–139) Black continues, “Exhortation is that type of discourse in which the stirring of an audience’s emotion is a primary persuasive force rather than—as in Aristotle—a derivative one, and is extensively rather than incidentally used. … Exhortation finds its end in radical conversion.” (75: 142) One of the casualties of divorcing evidence from claims is the concept of “burden of proof.” While this is a legal concept, it is also the basis of public argument—the notion that the party bringing the claim has the responsibility to produce evidence to support that claim. The absence of evidence means that the challenging party fails to produce a prima facie case—a case that will stand “on its face” before the opposition has an opportunity to rebut. In 2020, the Trump campaign’s legal team challenged the results of the presidential election in multiple jurisdictions, arguing that the election should be overturned. They generated emotional claims and convinced many of the President’s followers but failed to produce any evidence of fraud or error that would support their challenges, and all such claims were dismissed by the courts. This result did not, however, diminish the belief among the President’s devoted following that the election had been “stolen.” One person involved in the campaign even asked on national television, “Where is the evidence that the election was fair?”—thus completely divorcing the concept of burden of proof from the functioning of the argument. (501)10 A second concept that is often lost is that of the credibility and sufficiency of the evidence. To be persuasive, evidence should be both credible and sufficient. The evidence presented in support of a claim must be credible—believable—in order to be persuasive. Typically, credibility is assessed on the basis of the source, the methodology, and (in some cases) the chain of custody. But credibility of evidence is not, or should not

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be, enough, in and of itself. Evidence should also be sufficient—that is, there should be enough credible evidence to support a claim in the face of counter-argument and evidence. For example, in claiming “election fraud” in the 2020 presidential election, the Trump campaign insisted that votes—particularly mail-in votes—be audited or recounted by hand. In that process, a few ballots were found to be invalid for one reason or another. But the number of incorrect ballots was not sufficient to establish fraud or to overturn thousands of votes. Thus, if the public and its policy-makers are to have any hope of assessing the arguments they hear, they must be able to evaluate the evidence underlying, supporting, those arguments. Visual argument, used in most political argumentative ads, can be put forth in a predominantly nonverbal manner, with the “visuals” often substituting for actual evidence. One instance can be seen in a recent political campaign for state office in Florida. The well-known Democrat running to fill an open seat in the state legislature began her campaign with a very strange ad, one that relied almost entirely on visual association to make an argument for her candidacy. The ad depicted the candidate training for a triathlon: running, biking, swimming. The apparent takeaway was that, if elected, the candidate would put similar effort into working for the people of her district. In a decidedly “blue” district, the Republican challenger relied on print and television advertisements that also eschewed verbal statements about policy or platform. These ads capitalized on the one described above, and the Democrat, a Caucasian attorney, was depicted as an elitist who rode a six thousand dollar bicycle in triathlon competitions. On the other hand, the African American Republican was promoted primarily through an assemblage of still photographs: I grew up a poor orphan; “I am a mom; I am a cop; I am a preacher;” I am like you. Although never stated explicitly in any of the ads, the challenger was vehemently pro-life (opposing any and all abortions, including when the mother’s life was in jeopardy), pro-gun (allowing public school teachers to wear weapons in class), pro-law and order (opposed to public demonstrations against police brutality), and a supporter of prayer in public schools—all values held by her prospective constituents in outlying counties. But one learned this only from the negative advertising developed in support of her opponent or from the unspoken subtext of the visual ads. It was a fascinating campaign, both in the reciprocity of the advertising and in the reliance on visual rather than verbal arguments. Although the

Introduction to Volume One

challenger did not win, she came much closer to winning than anyone— particularly her opponent—ever imagined. * Because forms of argument and standards of proof may vary from discipline to discipline, a persistent issue in the study of public policy argument is the problem of talking across disciplinary fields, making it difficult for non-specialists to evaluate both evidence and argument. One example of the frustration experienced by both experts and non-experts—with resultant consequences for public policy—is the worldwide antivaccination movement; another was the refusal of many Americans to wear masks during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. Pertinent to this volume, a number of illustrations can be found in the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear accident. As one instance, consider the legacy of splitting the atom. In a special issue of The Journal of the American Forensic Association (now Argumentation and Advocacy) devoted to “Argumentation and the Nuclear Age” (3), two essays addressed the question of the use of evidence in the nuclear arms debate. In one of the essays, Hynes considered the role of evidence credibility and noted that questions of credibility were resolved by the participants in favor of positions already held: “evidence is systematically processed to match prior beliefs.” (215: 155) Certainly this is not a new observation; Holsti drew a similar conclusion about John Foster Dulles and discrepant evidence regarding communism. (210) In the other essay, Dauber addressed situations where strategic theorists produced mutually exclusive interpretations of the same data, noting that “the standards for evidence, the criteria for what constitutes a valid reason … are themselves drawn into the dispute.” (129: 169) There is nothing wrong with challenging evidence or the criteria for valid reasoning in an argument: establishing the credibility of evidence and the validity of arguments from that evidence is part of the argumentative enterprise. In fact, both Hynes and Dauber demonstrate that it is possible to assess evidence in the arena of public policy. The problem is the assumption that there is only one correct answer, a problem that has grown worse in the years since those articles were published. Much of the hostility and division that marks current politics and political policy arguments in the United States, in both the international arena and domestically, can be attributed to this certainty—which itself is a product

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of the power of prior beliefs to shape the perception of evidence—and the concurrent unwillingness to entertain countervailing evidence or to compromise. In authoritarian societies, such as the USSR was, the concept of the “public sphere”—where policy arguments are generated and deliberated— simply does not exist. Authority resides with the state, which often results in a closed deductive system that excludes contravening evidence. This approach, in turn, results in a sense of infallibility, wherein the state cannot be wrong, which in turn produces what Hugo terms “cant,” the attempt to cover up the lack of true rational processes. (213: 17–31) Indeed, in the Soviet Union, what passed for a public sphere was so constrained that it was close to the technical argument described by Goodnight (499) and therefore not susceptible to counter-argument by either the public or experts.11 One of the major drivers of the current unwillingness to credit evidence that does not conform to one’s preconceived view is the growth of conspiracy theories around domestic and world events. Conspiracy theories have long been a part of the human experience, perhaps as far back as Greek and Roman times, if not longer. The Greek and Roman Gods were seen as interfering in human affairs on a regular basis, bringing disaster—often natural disasters—when displeased. Thus were many natural and human tragedies explained. And so it remains today, except that the Gods have been replaced by evil actors bent on world domination. Even this incarnation has a rather long history in America and beyond. Numerous groups were labeled as conspiring against the status quo, including Jews, Catholics, Masons, the Illuminati, to name a few. Jews have been the most frequent target of conspiracy theories; the most notable example is The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a discredited document that purports to demonstrate the Jewish plan for world domination. Despite having been shown as fake many times, this insidious forgery continues to circulate among those who believe in powerful conspiracies. The presence of conspiracy arguments in contemporary political and policy argument is disconcerting, as it not only undermines faith in the political system, but also undermines faith in the use of reasoned argument and evidence in solving social problems. Yet belief in conspiracies persists and seems to have moved into the mainstream of political discourse in both the West and in authoritarian and quasi-authoritarian countries. In the Soviet Union and now Russia, as well as parts of Eastern Europe, some

Introduction to Volume One

conspiracy theories become part of the official political discourse. For example, the Great Purges at the end of the 1930s and the “Doctors Plot” in the early 1950s are vivid examples of the Soviet government creating conspiracies to promote its policies. Similarly, in the early 1980s, the government claimed that the shootdown of the Korean airliner, KAL 007, was the result of a conspiracy involving the US Central Intelligence Agency. Conspiracy beliefs appear to gain ascendancy primarily in times of upheaval and rapid social change. As events appear to spin out of control and people begin to feel disaffected, the appeal of the insular world of conspiracy theory grows and often becomes irresistible. This is not to suggest that there are no conspiracies that have impacted human history. There have been many. But true conspiracies are usually designed to achieve a precise end and are confined to actions that promote that goal. The overarching, far reaching conspiracies of those who see the entire world through that lens are what dominate the far-left and far-right airwaves and social media today. And they claim to be connected somehow. Conspiracy theories that stem from ideology are closed deductive systems, much like that in the Soviet Union, which do not admit outside evidence. The role of evidence in conspiracy theories is particularly interesting, for such theories are—as Zarefsky points out—self-sealing; that is, discrepant evidence is subsumed as further proof that the alleged conspiracy exists. (494) In the 1950s and 1960s, purveyors of the communist conspiracy against the United States relied heavily on the appearance of evidence supporting their claims; yet the “evidence” brought to bear was tangential and/or typically relied on association and innuendo (similar to that described earlier in this Introduction). Some of the conspiracy theories advocated today don’t even attempt to present evidence, relying instead on the fallacy of argumentum ad ignorantiam (see note 10). The fundamental problem with assessing evidence, especially as it relates to public policy—whether public health, military arms, or any other controversial issue—is that it is sometimes difficult if not impossible to agree on what constitutes proof; in other words, how does one determine if the evidence adduced is credible? What happens if the source of evidence is automatically unacceptable to one’s opponents? This is especially noticeable in politics, but as so many arguments over what should be nonpolitical policies become political, this problem can become divisive, as we saw in 2020, a year beset by a pandemic and a contentious presidential election in the United States. What is needed is a rubric for evaluating

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evidence, for determining what evidence is credible and what should be discarded. While standards exist in specific fields (especially scientific and quasi-scientific fields) and generally in textbooks about argumentation and public speaking, there is little in the way of advice for non-experts trying to decide on a course of action, which may make obtaining agreement through argumentation impossible. What should happen in argument development (if one is reasoning inductively …) is argument constructed on facts/evidence/interpretation. In policy argument, determining the facts is sometimes difficult (i.e., can the Strategic Defense Initiative work? what will COVID treatment cost?), but is nonetheless necessary. Next, one has to decide what proofs (facts and other evidence) are relevant to the discussion (evidentiary). One then needs to use those facts to form a judgment/develop an opinion. What does happen, as we noted earlier, is that people, including policymakers, come to issues with preconceived notions (interpretations, stories, beliefs) that they use to select facts and determine relevance. For example, in the 1990s, when the United States was trying to encourage democracy in Russia, some in the US government thought the whole “Russia thing” was a ruse and that some semblance of Communism would be reinstated at the earliest possible opportunity. Thus, regardless of countervailing evidence, these policymakers opposed any and all aid that sought to encourage the development of democratic institutions in Russia. In fact, this echoed an old theme from the post-WWII years, when every proposed treaty with the Soviets was opposed by some politicians on the grounds that it was a smokescreen that would allow the USSR to develop weapons—while the United States abided by the terms of the treaty and therefore fell behind its dominant enemy. The durability of this frame of reference is reminiscent of the situation with John Foster Dulles as described by Holsti and mentioned earlier in this essay. Indeed, remnants of this belief impact US-Russia relations even today.12 Similar in many ways to the problems encountered in assessing the argument over nuclear arms negotiations are those difficulties encountered in resolving the dispute over nuclear power, fueled by the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. Included in this volume (chapter 21) is an introductory essay I wrote for an edited volume on nuclear power; in that essay I discuss the development of what Weart has termed “nuclear fear”—an irrational fear of atomic power in all its forms brought on by the fusion in the public mind of nuclear weapons

Introduction to Volume One

with nuclear power production. (449)13 Thus, each time there is a nuclear accident of any kind, that fear is reinforced and expanded regardless of the nature of the accident itself. The first such event was the accident at Three Mile Island, a nuclear generating plant in Pennsylvania. Despite the fact that the secondary containment vessel prevented the escape of much nuclear radiation, fear ran rampant in the region; ultimately, the company that operated the plant paid out millions in compensation for dubious claims.14 Few, if any, new nuclear facilities were built in the years following the accident. Like Chernobyl, it is an event recognizable by a single term: Three Mile Island or, simply, TMI. The nuclear accident at Chernobyl has had a similar impact worldwide; this despite the fact that it was not really a nuclear accident at all, but rather an explosion caused by accidentally superheating the reactor cooling water. Because the Soviet style reactor had no secondary containment (unlike reactors in the United States), when the roof blew off the reactor building, radiation was released into the atmosphere, contaminating the surrounding area and carried by prevailing winds into Belarus and around the world. Many believe that Chernobyl was the final nail in the coffin of nuclear power, and a number of countries turned away from that renewable source of energy in the aftermath of Chernobyl. Reinforcing the fear of nuclear power was the tsunami that struck Fukushima Nuclear Plant in Japan—again, not really a nuclear accident but a tragedy brought about by a tidal wave that followed an offshore earthquake, overwhelmed the plant, and drowned the emergency diesel generators that were (poorly) placed in spots vulnerable to flooding. Again, no one was interested in the arguments or evidence that pointed out the difference between Chernobyl or Fukushima and Three Mile Island. And, at a time when the world is seeking to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy, even research into safer nuclear technologies was cut off. Although many believe that nuclear power is necessary to a viable green energy strategy, at least in the short term, one rarely hears it mentioned in discussions of the world’s energy future. * As noted above, the question posed at the beginning of this Introduction— “Why would no one care about the evidence?”—underlies the essays in this volume, as we explore the use and control of information in the USSR

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in the years leading up to that country’s dissolution. And the important question from our perspective is “What does this mean for the future of public discourse regarding significant issues like the tragedy of KAL 007 or the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant?” No change event occurs in a vacuum. The Soviet system itself laid the groundwork over many years for the impact that the events discussed in this volume had on the Soviet way of life. This is not to deny the profound ramifications that tragedies in the 1980s had on the 1991 dissolution of the USSR; it merely indicates that these events alone did not cause that dissolution— it was many years in the making. The Soviet war in Afghanistan, for instance, proved unsettling, as body bags returned from the front lines in contravention of the official line on the fortunes of the war. Nonetheless, it is our contention that both the shootdown of KAL Flight 007 in 1983 and the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986 exposed the system and its failings in a way that had not occurred before. In so doing, they opened a kind of public sphere, space for arguments over policy to arise, a claim we make in another essay included here, “The Final Days: The Development of Argumentative Discourse in the Soviet Union.” (489) In that essay we explore the ramifications of the decision not to contest environmental arguments that grew out of the Chernobyl accident. In the case of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, information being broadcast via Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) contradicted the official story published in Pravda and Izvestiia about the fate of the airliner and provided greater detail about the tragedy. Izvestiia, for its part, initially wrote that the airliner “continued its flight toward the Sea of Japan.” Even though only a few people were brave enough to listen to the shortwave broadcasts from RFE/RL or one of the other “radios,”15 information spread quickly via word of mouth and other traditional conduits. Thus, Soviet citizens were confronted with information about the fate of the airliner that directly refuted official pronouncements (or, in this case, official silence), something that rarely happened in the USSR. The nuclear accident that occurred when the Unit 4 reactor at Chernobyl exploded—and the government’s initial response to it—broke the increasingly fragile social compact that existed between the Soviet people and the government of the USSR. I have always believed that the accident itself revealed a great deal about the state of life in the Soviet Union. Consider that just a few miles from Pripyat (the town that housed those who worked at the power plant) a major explosion occurred, one that

Introduction to Volume One

literally blew a large hole in the roof of the reactor building, and no one noticed, everyone kept about their business. For two days, the inhabitants of Pripyat behaved as though nothing had happened; they continued their normal routine, children played outside in the warm spring sun. Then, two days after the explosion, hundreds of buses arrived to evacuate everyone from the contaminated zone. At that point, people began to panic; some in Kiev to the south of the plant threw their children onto any train leaving the area, without regard for its destination. Virtually everyone felt betrayed by the government. “They didn’t tell us!” people cried. “They didn’t tell us we were in danger!” That betrayal, coupled with the crushing economic blow of the anticipated health consequences of the accident and its aftermath, ultimately sealed the fate of the seventy-year-old system of government in the USSR. At the same time, however, it opened a potential path to a more democratic form of government, which we will examine in a later volume. In the information-constrained society that was the 1980s USSR, evidence provided by the state increasingly lacked believability and came to be seen as untrustworthy. Once people decided the government had lied to them, or had withheld vital information, no credibility was extended to the evidence offered in support of its claims—first about KAL 007 and then, more impactfully, about Chernobyl. This kind of “credibility gap” contributes to a decline in the use of evidence: if no one believes it anyway, why bother?16 At the same time, little in the way of training in critical thinking was available to the Soviet people, and they were not able to evaluate either the evidence or the claims that this evidence purported to support. In a rational world, evidence precedes belief. In the 1980s USSR, as a result of the loss of credibility after Chernobyl, Soviet citizens, acting at an emotional level, rejected the claims made by the Soviet state. Strikingly, in a bold move, the Soviet government attempted to counter the emerging lack of faith among the populace by authorizing the production of two documentaries—Chernobyl: A Chronicle of Difficult Weeks and Warning. Although unsuccessful, this strategy, which we detailed in a 1991 article (included in this volume) entitled “Redefining Glasnost in the Soviet Media: The Recontextualization of Chernobyl” (483), is further evidence that Mikhail Gorbachev understood the important changes taking place in Soviet society and the growing need to address popular concerns at some level.

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There was a third incident that impinged on US-Soviet relations in the late 1980s: the 1988 shootdown of an Iranian airliner, Iran Air Flight 655, by the USS Vincennes, which was on patrol in the Persian Gulf. The international media immediately began making the comparison to the Soviet shootdown of KAL 007 some five years earlier. Surprisingly, the Gorbachev government chose not to use the potential comparison to galvanize world opinion against the United States. Gennady Gerasimov, speaking for the Soviet government, commented, “the wild anti-Soviet howl raised by the US Government and mass media concerning the South Korean plane was a bad example, and we are not going to follow it.” (172) We continue to believe that the aftermath of this tragedy gives insight into the final years of the Gorbachev government and of the USSR and that the treatment given it in the international arena by both governments reflected a “significant change in relations between the superpowers.” (266: 305) This incident also gave us an opportunity to refine our method of composite narrative as a means of uncovering the connected message across multiple texts issued by governments, in this case the governments of the United States and the USSR. While texts are usually associated with specific rhetors, we prefer to think of “rhetor” in broader terms; today a “rhetor” can range from a single individual to a collectivity of individuals speaking on behalf of an organization, institution, or administration. Thus, when using composite narrative, a “text” can consist of several discrete elements/utterances if the set of such elements was conceived as a unified whole (e.g., an advertising campaign) or if all the set members aim to achieve a common purpose. While such a construct does not deny the instance when members of a collectivity speak as individuals, it recognizes the tendency of such entities to speak with a unified voice, permitting the collation of individual voices into a representative single voice for purposes of analysis and allowing the examination of those voices as a collective whole. More importantly, this construct recognizes the discourse of a rhetorical situation “as a complex episodical conception wherein the entire constellation of rhetoric surrounding a specific event is treated as the rhetorical text.” (475) These three events presaged the opening up of the Soviet Union in ways that are discussed in some detail in the chapters that follow. The shooting down of the Korean airliner was the first impetus, as Soviet citizens were able to get more detailed news about the tragedy from the Western radios broadcasting into the Iron Curtain countries. While Russians,

Introduction to Volume One

like citizens of many countries, were naturally skeptical of much that their government told them, it was difficult, if not impossible to get countervailing information in 1980s USSR. We believe that this event represented a crack in the façade of information impermeability that had enveloped the Soviet Union since WWII. By the time of the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986, Gorbachev had initiated the reforms that shook up the country: glasnost, perestroika, and uskorenie. The accident itself forever changed the face of news broadcasting in the country, as reporters finally made their way to the site and live broadcasts were shown throughout the country. Once foreigners arrived to assist in the cleanup and the medical emergency, it was impossible to fully contain the flow of information. The Iran Air incident, as indicated above, signaled a new era in Soviet relations with the West. We examine each of these events in the essays, reviews, correspondence, and excerpts included in this volume, focusing on the rhetorical strategies, successes, and failures, as the Soviet Union began to transform. Many of these studies were written contemporaneously; others are more retrospective. Because they were written at different times—and for different audiences—there is of necessity some overlap and redundancy. But each attempts to examine the rhetoric, the arguments, and the evidence brought to bear on, first, the instinct to control information flow, and then on the use of greater freedom of speech and press to influence the future course taken by Russia. Marilyn J. Young November 2020

NOTES 1. See also (Clines, 114). Clines points out that the emphasis in Aristotle is on rhetoric, rather than logic—hence the notion of all of the available means of persuasion. 2. The irony of the name Info-Wars should be lost on no one, as the site has a reputation for spreading false information and bogus conspiracy theories. 3. The information in this example was reported in (383), following an investigation by the Investigative Fund and the Center for Investigative Reporting. A recent Google search for the terms “pizza Hillary children” found more than six million hits. 4. Until the dawn of the internet age, the biggest challenge in doing research was the availability and access to information. The internet has changed that forever; if anything, both researchers and the public at large are in a situation of “information

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The Rhetorical Rise and Demise of “Democracy” in Russian Political Discourse saturation.” Yet, information is not the same as evidence; in fact, information is not evidence until it is used in an argument to prove a claim. 5. Argumentum ad verecundiam is a rare type of fallacy—not because it is seldom used, but in that it can also be a type of legitimate argument. The determination as to whether a particular argument is valid or a fallacy turns on the authority cited. One can imagine, in this day and age, the complexity of this determination. 6. For a fuller discussion of this point see (491). While the discussion in (491) deals primarily with the function of associative/dissociative constructs in conspiracy argument, there is no reason to assume that such constructs, once accepted, would function differently in other narratives, including the economic narrative that occurs among manufacturer, advertiser, and consumer. 7. In contemporary linguistics this phenomenon is called “deixis.” It is specifically the sum of linguistic resources available to express the speaker’s point of view and assessment of truth value. Recent rhetorical theory seems to have bypassed such language studies. See also (481). 8. There are a number of recent examples of this tactic, most notably in the December 2020 senatorial campaign in the state of Georgia. In particular, television advertising by the Purdue and Loeffler campaigns relied heavily on innuendo reinforced by visual material designed to discredit their opponents. 9. See also (500). 10. This is also an example of the fallacy argumentum ad ignorantiam (appeal to ignorance), the fallacy that a proposition is true simply on the basis that it has not been proven false or that it is false simply because it has not been proven true. 11. Compounding the severe sociopolitical disincentives facing anyone who would challenge the government in an authoritarian state, the closed nature of such information-constrained societies means that citizens there face the same obstacles as do people in more open societies who would challenge technical experts in the policy arena. 12. However, in the 1990s, this attitude allowed nascent democracy in Russia to flounder; thus, this fear became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, leading to chaos followed by the discrediting of democratic institutions and the rise of Putin. This is a discussion for a future volume. 13. See also (450), Weart’s follow-on work. 14. Of course, in the public mind the fact that the claims were paid was proof in itself that the claims were valid. 15. Other foreign broadcast stations that regularly beamed into the Soviet Union from Europe included Deutsche Welle and the BBC. 16. In the United States, this attitude toward government information about specific events probably has its origins in the 1950s, when then President Eisenhower denied that the United States had sent the U-2 on a mission over the USSR, even after the plane had been shot down by Soviet anti-aircraft missiles and the pilot (Francis Gary Powers) captured.

Route R-20

Illustration by Terry Graves Source: US Department of State Office of the Historian

TASS Source: Novosti Press, Moscow

Satellite overlay of KAL 007 route

Ogarkov double loop map

Associated Press Source: The New York Times

CHAPTER 1

Did the United States Suppress Ground-to-Air Communications? Marilyn J. Young and Michael K. Launer Provenance: Originally published as Chapter 3 in Flights of Fancy, Flight of Doom: KAL 007 and Soviet-American Rhetoric. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988. Copyright Holder: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, used by permission Description: One of the controversies surrounding KAL involved whether or not United States military resources had taped Soviet military commanders speaking to their fighter pilots during the interception. Our sources—internationally respected journalists—insisted that they had, whereas American officials would neither confirm nor deny such knowledge. Nevertheless, we have steadfastly believed someone did indeed intercept the ground-to-air messages. And in 2018 Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper Jr. (USAF retired), former Director of National Intelligence from 1992 through 1995, confirmed this was in fact the case. (113: 40) Marilyn Young contends that the United States did not want to admit anything of the sort because doing so would have meant that the government had proof of an act of war.

I

n charting the ebb and flow of information during the political struggle between East and West over the fate of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, one sees the United States constantly wavering in its attitude toward revealing military secrets. It is arguably true, on the one hand, that the American government had never before willingly released so much “compartmented” electronic and communications intelligence. Yet the internal pressures against releasing such information were tremendous: beyond a natural reluctance to do so under any circumstances, leading intelligence officials were rightfully appalled at the almost casual manner with which allimportant “sources and methods” were being compromised.1 For even when spokespersons refused to place the actual evidence in the public

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domain, enough was said to enable the Soviet government to determine whatever it needed to know about specific American intelligence capabilities. As is so often the case, the only ones left in the dark were the American people.2 On one issue, however, the government apparently balked—and that was with regard to the existence of a tape-recorded “order to fire” or other instructions from Soviet flight dispatchers to the interceptor pilots. It is not at all clear that such “ground-to-air” recordings actually exist: the governments of Japan and the United States steadfastly deny this; but many reports (which circulated immediately after the jetliner was downed) claimed that they do. Because the story behind these stories is itself so fascinating, and because the ground-to-air issue may be the only issue on which the United States actively suppressed the news (by clamping down on talkative Pentagon sources and by denying the accuracy of information it had previously admitted to be true), we will detail in this chapter all the relevant reports that were promulgated during the first week of September 1983. In addition, we will attempt to assess the rationale for stonewalling such information when it would seem that the value of a given US intelligence “asset” had already been compromised. As we have noted, one of the features of a crisis atmosphere in the West is the demand for information. Everyone needs or wants details about the event: the government, the press, the public. Only with adequate data can the parties determine the proper context and the appro­ priate response. The atmosphere surrounding the disappearance of KAL 007 was no exception. The difficulty lies in obtaining accurate information, because conflicting disclosure requirements, lack of hard knowledge, and competition among the media often lead to greater confusion and uncertainty. Hence, it is not surprising that in the early morning hours of September 1, with reporters in three world capitals (Tokyo, Seoul, and Washington) scrambling after facts that might help sort out what had happened, a number of inaccurate stories circulated among the press. One report even stated that the airliner had landed safely on Sakhalin Island. Subsequent information, in particular translation of the pilot tapes, proved this story tragically false. Some early reports concerning the pilot (or “air-to-ground”) tape also overstated the information it contained. For example, on September 1, a story out of Hong Kong declared:

Did the United States Suppress Ground-to-Air Communications?

The Japanese Defense Agency monitored a message from the pilot of a Soviet MiG-23 which said he was going to fire on a Korean Air Lines jetliner just before a KAL aircraft disappeared early today, the JIJI NEWS AGENCY reported. … The agency, quoting official sources, said that the pilot messaged his base on the Sakhalin Island: “I am going to fire a missile. The target is the KAL airliner.” (167)

Nothing of this sort was overheard, of course, as the published air-toground transcripts indicate, and the story was not repeated. Nor was it picked up by the American daily press. Other reports, however, had a longer life span. Most prominent among these was the story that the Japanese Defense Agency had recorded both sides of the conversations between Soviet interceptor pilots and flight dispatchers on the ground. On September 1, Kyodo news service (Tokyo) reported that Japanese military intelligence monitored Soviet radio communication suggesting an air attack by Soviet air forces shortly before a missing Korean Airlines jetliner vanished from radar screens early Thursday morning, military sources said. According to the sources, Japanese military intelligence monitored conversation between Soviet aircraft and a ground based radio station around 3:20 a.m. Thursday Japan Standard Time. The conversation was reported as follows: “Take aim at the target.” “Aim Taken.” “Fire.” “Fired.” Three similar communications were monitored, the sources said. Military specialists said that Soviet air force planes are generally controlled by voice command from ground stations. The radio conversation, dubbed as COMINT, is usually monitored by Japanese military intelligence and analyzed, the sources said. … The sources said that the information based on the military monitoring had led to the announcement by the Japanese Government that the jetliner was most likely shot down by the Soviet Union. (168)

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This report was picked up by the Western press, and it received considerable play in the United States. NBC News correspondent Jack Reynolds broke the ground-to-air story in the United States nearly three hours before George Shultz’s press conference. At 8:00 a.m., September 1, John Palmer reported on NBC’s THE TODAY SHOW that Jack Reynolds, our Pentagon correspondent, … told us just a few minutes ago that he has picked up reports, I think, in contacting some of his sources there in Japan, that military officials had picked up word of broadcasts, apparently from Soviet MiG fighters, of course speaking in Russian, and the words, “you are free to fire,” were heard. (Addressing Steven Frazier in Tokyo) Anything like that coming your way? Frazier. That’s not being released officially. We don’t have confirmation of that. (329: 30)3

Apparently, the networks had difficulty confirming the story. It was seven hours from the time NBC broke the news until the story was re­peated, this time by CBS in a 3:05 p.m. Special Report Rather. Appearing angry and concerned at a news conference, Secretary of State Shultz said the Soviets had tracked the airliner for two and a half hours. According to Japanese intelligence sources, the final radio transmissions went like this: Ground. Take aim at target. Air. Aim taken. Ground. Fire. Air. Fired. (108)

CBS reiterated this item in their 3:57 p.m. Newsbreak Rather. Secretary of State Shultz said the Soviets had tracked the 747 jet for 2 1/2 hours before moving in for the kill by air-to-air missile. Japanese intelligence monitored the final Soviet communications.

Did the United States Suppress Ground-to-Air Communications?

Ground. Take aim at target. Air. Aim taken. Ground. Fire. Air. Fired. (106)

and again on the Evening News Rather. Other chilling details of how Flight 007 was destroyed came from intelligence sources. In Japan, sources say monitoring of a conversation between a Soviet SU-15 pilot and Soviet ground controllers shows the following. Ground. Air. Ground. Air.

Take aim at target. Aim taken. Fire. Fired. (103: 2)4

NBC did not repeat the item until their 11:30 p.m. Special Report Marvin Kalb. The Korean 747 did stray into Soviet air space, crossing Kamchatka, and then Sakhalin, two highly sensitive strategic outposts in the Soviet Pacific. For two and a half hours it was tracked by Soviet jets. One of the jets got close enough to see unmistakably that the 747 was a passenger plane. Still, the following exchange between the Soviet jet and its ground control was picked up by Japanese intelligence. Ground. Air. Ground. Air.

Take aim at target. Aim taken. Fire. Fired. (330: 1–2)

At this point the NBC version conformed to that of CBS (which also included the story in its 11:30 p.m. special).5 Meanwhile, the story had begun to appear in the national print media. The first widespread mention occurred in an Associated Press

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dispatch from Strategic Air Command headquarters at Offutt AFB near Omaha. The wire story, a rewrite of an Omaha World-Herald interview with an unidentified Pentagon officer, stated, “surveillance work routinely includes the eavesdropping by U.S. and Japanese intelligence personnel on Soviet military radio transmissions—both ground-to-air and air-toground conversations, the officer said.” (24) Specific mention of the Japanese information was published in the September 2 edition of the The New York Times (the earliest possible issue) The Japanese news agency Kyodo said a Soviet radio communication had been monitored by Japanese military intelligence that gave this exchange, apparently between the Soviet fighter and its ground station just before the airliner’s disappearance: “Take aim at the target.” “Aim taken.” “Fire.” “Fired.” (304)6

The same exchange was reported in The Washington Post of September 3. (109)7 Evidently, ABC was the last to get confirmation; they did not broadcast this story until 6:30 p.m., September 2, on World News Tonight, their regular evening news show. However, ABC stayed with the story longer, rebroadcasting it on September 3 Tom Jarriel. The smoking gun may have been found, according to the Japan Broadcasting Company. That news agency is quoting Japanese government sources as saying Russian ground commanders ordered their interceptor jets to shoot down Kore­ an Airlines Flight 7. According to the Japanese report, Soviet ground control radioed, quote, “take aim at target.” The fighter pilot replied, quote, “aim has been taken.” Ground Control, quote, “Fire.” Soviet fighter, quote, “missile fired, target destroyed.” There is still no confirmation from official US sources of that Japanese report. (38)8

Did the United States Suppress Ground-to-Air Communications?

CBS and NBC had dropped the story after September 1, although, according to Dallin, there were “initially clear indications” from both Japanese and American sources that both air-to-ground and ground-to-air communications had been intercepted. Dallin further stated that Kyodo News Service released several excerpts in Tokyo on September 1. One of these exchanges included the dialogue reported by the US networks. (127: 110) It should be noted that throughout September 1 and 2, Japan Broadcasting Corporation reported this information on several different occasions, each time citing “both Japanese government and intelligence sources.” (235: 169). What is most interesting about this chronology is the attribution of the story and its relationship to the confirmation process. According to Carolyn Smith, assistant director of political operations at ABC News in New York, the networks (and, presumably, the print media as well), not wishing to acknowledge one another’s work if at all possible, attempt to obtain independent verification of a report before airing it. If corroboration cannot be obtained, the rival network’s report is credited; in the absence of such an acknowledgement, one can assume the reporter was able to get the necessary verification. Ordinarily, two independent confirmations are required to air a story, although on a “breaking” story such as this the producer might air the report with only one source. Moreover, Smith said, no network would repeat an item in a subsequent newscast (as all three networks did in this instance) unless it had been verified in the interim and the producer was certain that it was accurate. As reporters succeeded in reaching their sources, the story became more detailed: CBS correctly identified the type of fighter plane, and ABC managed to get a more precise translation of the pilot’s fateful announcement. Thus, the chronology of television reporting implies confirmation of Jack Reynolds’s initial story. In the initial NBC report, the attribution is very vague: “[Reynolds] has picked up reports, I think in contacting some of his sources there in Japan.” By 3:05, CBS was crediting the story to Japanese intelligence, thereby indicating that the network had gotten confirmation. Dan Rather, on CBS Evening News, waffled a bit on the attribution (“In Japan, sources say”), but by the 11:30 p.m. Special Report, Japanese intelligence was again cited as the source. Similarly, on September 2, ABC first attributed the report to Japanese intelligence, but the next day watered that down to the Japan Broadcasting

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Company quoting Japanese government sources. This shift can be accounted for by Tom Jarriel’s note that they had no confirmation from official US sources. The New York Times, too, referred to Kyodo news agency as the source of their story.9 Michael Getler of The Washington Post tried to follow up the issue, but Assistant Secretary of State Richard Burt avoided giving unequivocal answers regarding whether or not US officials possessed evidence of a direct order from the ground command to fire on the airliner. Getler, in the end, reported the story as unconfirmed by US sources and attributed it to “a Japanese news agency.” (176)10 In a recent interview, Jack Reynolds recalled that he was awakened on September 1 at 7:30 a.m. (EDT) by an overseas call from an old friend in the Japanese news media. This friend, Reynolds told us, knew someone in the Japanese military who had actually heard the ground-to-air tape. The Japanese reporter said his agency was going public with the information “in the next ten minutes.” “And they did,” Reynolds stated. Reynolds first called in the story to THE TODAY SHOW, as indicated above, then spent the day at the Pentagon trying to get his regular sources there to provide more information regarding the ground-to-air tape and Western knowledge of the “order to fire.” His stateside sources could not confirm the story; however, he noted, “Because of the specific information I had, I did not get a denial.” Reynolds said that in the past these people had always told him when he was wrong about something. He continued I felt this was tantamount to an admission. If they know you’ve got something, they won’t lie to you because they don’t know where you got your information. If it was definitely not true, my experience was that they would give you some indication that you were barking up the wrong tree.11

Reynolds remains convinced the story was accurate. He described his Japanese source as “absolutely impeccable,” someone with “no axe to grind,” a friend who was just repaying past favors. Moreover, nothing Reynolds subsequently heard or learned contradicted his information. “I was comfortable with it as I got it. I didn’t have any problem with it,” he said. When asked if he has ever doubted the existence of such ground-to-air tapes, he replied without hesitation, “No, not for a minute.”

Did the United States Suppress Ground-to-Air Communications?

George Wilson of The Washington Post said that he, too, tried to follow up the story but encountered a stone wall, not only at the Pentagon, but at the State Department as well. His usual air force contacts provided no help whatsoever. Wilson indicated to us that it was his “working assumption” that the Japanese had the actual tape. He pursued this quite aggressively— “I wanted it badly”—but never managed to obtain a copy.12 Philip Taubman of the The New York Times was equally unsuccessful in obtaining confirmation from State Department officials Richard Burt and John Hughes, who made only very carefully worded denials. According to Getler, Hughes commented that “[t]here was no clearcut transmission like that in the US record of the conversations.” (176)13 In an intriguing exchange on This Week with David Brinkley, September 4, when Sam Donaldson asked Lawrence Eagleburger, US Undersecretary of State, “Have we heard the order to fire yet?” Eagleburger replied Well, you’re pushing me on a subject that obviously gets close to being difficult. Let me simply say we know that the aircraft fired, and I can’t talk about whether he got an order to fire or not. (36: 11)

And so, the story died in the United States. On September 6, however, Japanese government spokesperson Masaharu Gotoda announced that while Japan had recorded the ground-to-air communications, his government would not release the tape Chief government spokesman Masaharu Gotoda released radio communication from a Soviet fighter, monitored by Japan’s Self­-Defense Forces. … Japan and the United States will jointly submit the tape-recorded communication to a session of the United Nations Security Council, Gotoda said. Japan has also monitored communication from the ground to the fighter but will not release it, he said. This will be enough evidence to prove the Soviet shooting down of the South Korean jet. (169)

Gotoda did suggest, however, that if the Soviet Union persisted in denying responsibility for its actions, Japan might release the tape recorded order to fire.14

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Within hours, Defense Vice Minister Haruo Natsume denied the existence of the ground station intercepts The Defense Agency has in its possession the taped communication of only the pilot of the Soviet interceptor …, Defense Vice Minister Haruo Natsume said Tuesday. Natsume denied a remark made by Chief Cabinet Secretary Masaharu Gotoda earlier Tuesday to the effect that Japan also had recorded communication of Soviet ground stations with the pilot. (170)15

Japan did not release the ground-to-air tape, of course, and from this point on officials reiterated the government’s position that no such recordings existed. According to Steven Weisman at The New York Times, the US government also indicated initially that it had the ground-to-air tapes. Among these statements was one made September 6 by Larry Speakes, in which he alluded to “further evidence” in the possession of US authorities which demonstrated that the Soviets knew KAL 007 was a civilian airliner. This evidence would not be released, however, because, according to Speakes, “it would compromise intelligence sources.” Speakes reiterated this position September 7. Interestingly, he also denied that the United States had the ground-to-air tapes. The tapes, he stated, belonged to Japan and it was up to the Japanese to release them.16 This revelation came after the official Japanese denial that the intercepts existed.17 Shortly thereafter, however, it was reported in the United States that Japan had suffered significant losses of intelligence data from Soviet sources It has been pointed out that slips of the tongue by U.S. and Japanese officials must have indicated to Moscow that Japan had monitored not only what the pilots said but the hard-to-obtain ground commands to the pilots, official denials notwithstanding. Japanese military officials, however, have been able to prevent the ground communications from being made public. (226: 15)

Johnson reports that these denials by Japanese government officials did not put an end to “continuing reports in the Japanese press that the government did indeed have such tapes. Privately, Japanese intelligence

Did the United States Suppress Ground-to-Air Communications?

officials admitted that they had the tapes but that it would be too compromising to security to release them.” (235: 171) As late as September 11, in a summary of political events through Ogarkov’s press conference on the 9th, reporters for The Sunday Times (London) who were critical of most aspects of the American government’s version unequivocally maintained that both portions of the Soviet intercept sequence had been recorded There is no evidence that a Soviet fighter pilot clearly identified the target to his ground controllers or that ground control knew it was a commercial airliner. But The Sunday Times has discovered that Japan’s Air Self-Defense Force did intercept ground control transmissions—and, furthermore, supplied the recording to the Americans. This second, unrevealed tape contains no reference to the target which would identify it as a harmless civilian airplane. The Americans maintain, however, that they have only the pilot’s transmissions. (322: 18, emphasis in the original)

This statement in The Sunday Times was the clearest and most adamant assertion to appear in a major communication medium. Yet, the US media dropped this ground-to-air portion of the story. No network broadcast a follow-up report, and the item rapidly faded from the print media as well. Apart from Sam Jameson’s September 19 Tokyo dispatch, the last known repetition occurred in the September 12 issues of TIME and Newsweek.18 Judging by American news coverage, the story had begun to soften on September 3, the point at which ABC’s Tom Jarriel reported no confirmation from “official US sources.” No newsperson had succeeded in getting Pentagon informants to talk about the matter; evidently, significant pressure had been applied by the government. But the final decision against releasing ground-to-air transcripts came very late in the process, providing further indication of a lack of coordination within the executive branch. The story of the order to fire, initially broadcast with the earliest reports of the tragedy, was repeated at least five times between 8:00 a.m. and 11:30 p.m. EDT—a span of some fifteen and a half hours—but no denial was issued during this period.19 The first direct denial apparently came some five days later.

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Obviously, too much had already been disclosed.20 Thus, the primary effect of this indecision may have been to embarrass the Japanese. According to Anthony Sampson The United States reneged on a pledge to Japan to reveal its two-hour radio transcripts of Flight 007 after the Japanese made public their record of the plane’s last fifteen minutes. The US thus embarrassed the Japanese, along with exposing their monitoring capability. (394: 12)

Much had been revealed about US capacities, as well. Yet the fundamental question—did the United States or Japan record Soviet ground personnel directing the aerial interception of KAL 007?—has never been answered. It is difficult for a layman to believe, given the extensive intelligence assets focused on the Soviet Far East Command, that the United States could not monitor virtually anything of military significance. This impression is reinforced by previously cited statements that someone did monitor microwave traffic between local sector commanders and higher authorities in Moscow. (422: A9)21 Indeed, we have been told by a former air force intelligence officer that the United States most certainly has several transcripts of these conversations, that at least ten years ago all Soviet groundto-air as well as air-to-ground transmissions on Sakhalin were available for real-time monitoring from as far away as Anchorage. In addition, a former army officer who had been stationed at Wakkanai told us that even in the 1950s some Soviet ground stations directly across the La Perouse Strait from Hokkaido could be monitored. On the other hand, many observers apparently felt that the alleged recording of an order to fire was erroneous.22 We have directly asked a representative of the US Department of State on several occasions whether ground-to-air transcripts exist and each time have received an unequivocal denial. It is presently the official position of both Japan and the United States that such recordings or transcripts do not exist. The central question raised by this controversy revolves around the natural conflict between politics and security: revealing hard information in order to marshal world opinion runs a genuine risk of compromising US intelligence capabilities. The policy and security issues are intertwined to such an extent that one must examine them together in order to form an opinion regarding the conflicting evidence that has been assembled in this chapter. If one assumes that the United States possesses the technical

Did the United States Suppress Ground-to-Air Communications?

means to have achieved what is claimed, then everything depends on whether or not those assets were appropriately deployed and functioning on the night of August 31–September 1, 1983. It should be stated clearly that the United States does possess such technical means. At the same time, it must be recognized that intercepting ground-to-air radio transmissions is a much more difficult task, from a logistical standpoint, than intercepting air-to-ground. Without getting too technical (thus exhibiting our own ignorance), there are only four ways to situate the appropriate receiving equipment within or near the “cone of radiation” of signals emanating from the ground: in space, in the air, on the Earth’s surface, or under the Earth’s surface. With regard to monitoring Soviet flight dispatchers, the last two means are severely restricted: the listening post must be located close to the transmitting point. Presumably, Soviet authorities can determine which American airborne or space platforms, if any, were in an appropriate position to have intercepted the ground-to-air messages. For instance, the United States may have had an aircraft aloft that night in the Sea of Okhotsk.23 If that or another platform could have monitored the transmissions, even accidentally, it is a safe bet that it did so24—and the Soviets would have to assume that it had.25 The problem for American officials can be set forth in the form of a syllogism that hypothetically might be constructed by Soviet officials If the United States has acknowledged eavesdropping while our ground stations directed the tracking and destruction of KAL 007 … And if we know that there were no satellite or airborne reconnaissance platforms in position to have accomplished this … Then it must be true that the US has situated a surface or subsurface receiving station close enough to our transmitters to succeed in accomplishing this—and we had better start looking around.

This, in real life, is what the spy business is all about. Specific information is perishable—hence, theoretically it is replaceable. (Particularly valuable data may have a very long period of relevance, however.) What intelligence agencies strive most to protect are facts concerning the technical and human collectors from which they obtain information—their much ballyhooed “sources and methods.”26 How do these considerations affect the issue of ground-to-air monitoring and possible government suppression of the intelligence product?

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Analogizing from a courtroom situation, we would say that motive and means have been demonstrated, but opportunity has not been established (although guidelines for determining opportunity have been offered). Still, no smoking gun has been uncovered. All judgments, therefore, are necessarily tentative. Nonetheless, it is our opinion that ground-to-air tapes do (or did) exist, and that somewhere in the US intelligence establishment much more is known about the precise details of Soviet deliberations and actions throughout the two-and-a-half-hour interception than has been made public. On this issue, we believe, the US government is justified in not revealing all it knows. This story may not seem significant on its face; after all, with the pilot tape, the question of whether Soviet ground control had issued an order to fire was moot: there was no doubt that the interceptor pilots had destroyed the civilian airliner. However, the story illustrates the role played by the US media in shaping rhetorical situations in this country and guiding the interpretation process during times of perceived crisis. Initially, the question of the fate of the airliner was paramount; the earliest stories of recorded conversations established a context of veracity for later pronouncements. Secretary of State Shultz indirectly corroborated the rumors that these tapes existed by announcing the United States knew the Soviet plane was in “constant contact with its ground control.” Thus, there was an aura of reciprocal credibility enhancement between the Secretary’s statements and the reports in the media. To the average citizen, there could be no question that American military personnel had recorded every word spoken by every Soviet serviceman who had any connection to the destruction of KAL 007. Some might argue that the demise of the story also exemplifies the symbiosis between reporters and their government sources: when the government decided to kill the story, the press went along. This is certainly possible, although at least two reporters have indicated that they made a serious attempt to follow up the question. In the post-Watergate era, it is more likely that the exigencies of Western journalism took over. According to media representatives we have interviewed, the media see their obligation as reporting developments as soon as they can be confirmed. But circumstances change, new information may surface, and today’s “truth” can become obsolete. In a rapidly developing story such as the fate of KAL 007, other facts may become more important and the press moves on. The ground-to-air story, then, might simply have died of benign neglect.

Did the United States Suppress Ground-to-Air Communications?

NOTES 1. In mid-September, Lt. Gen. Lincoln D. Faurer, then director of NSA, issued a directive forbidding further contact with the news media; he reminded NSA personnel of their legal obligations and threatened them with both loss of security clearance and possible prosecution if his directive were ignored. (In 1986 Faurer’s successor, Lt. Gen. William E. Odom, issued a similar order after an excerpt from The Target Is Destroyed was published in the Atlantic Monthly.) (200) 2. The situation calls to mind a cynical aphorism heard from time to time in the Halls of Washington: “Keeping America Safe from Democracy.” 3. THE TODAY SHOW [transcript], September 1, 1983, 30. According to Tom Shales (402: C13), Palmer, THE TODAY SHOW news anchor, was on the air when Reynolds, NBC’s chief Defense Department correspondent, phoned in this report to the control room. Senior producer Marty Ryan relayed the information to Palmer through Palmer’s earphone, and Palmer “spoke the words on the air as he heard them from the control room.” 4. This report gains credibility because of the change in identification of the Soviet aircraft, indicating an additional source had been consulted. Initially identified as a MiG-23, the plane was later determined by US intelligence to be an SU-15.   Although it has universally been accepted in the West that the fatal rockets were fired from a Sukhoi fighter-interceptor, at least one high-ranking Japanese official disagreed. On September 7, 1983, Agence France Press reported the following in regard to Shinji Yazaki, whom AFP described as the “director general” of a Japan Defense Agency bureau At an unusual 2:30 am press conference, Mr Yazaki said that the plane, code-named “805,” could be a MiG-23 fighter because of its flying path recorded on the radar screen. (U.S. officials have identified aircraft “805” as a Sukhoi-15 and said a MiG-23 accompanied it on the attack as an observer.) But Mr Yazaki noted that the MiG-23 fighter had a greater flying range than the SU-15 and Japanese officials have said that only a MiG-23 could have stayed aloft so long before hitting its target. (171)

5. The CBS News Special Report, “The Death of Flight 007”—which was televised at the same time—opened with the following commentary by Dan Rather The words were picked up early Thursday morning, Tokyo time, by Japanese intelligence officials. Ground. Take aim at the target. Air. Aim taken. Ground. Fire. Air. Fired. (107)

At 3:26 a.m., Korean Air Lines Flight Seven disappeared from the screens. 6. The identical nature of these reports may be interpreted in two contradictory ways: either the story is true and confirmed, or the reporters, faced with deadlines and no independent confirmation, had resorted to a practice known as “black-sheeting”— filing a consistent story, one which was essentially a group effort. For a discussion of “black-sheeting,” see (338: 136) and (186: xvii). 7. The source cited by Chapman is Asahi newspaper quoting Japanese military sources. This article was filed from Seoul.

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Part One: KAL and Cracks in the Rhetorical Wall 8. It is interesting to note that the final transmission of the fighter pilot in this version more closely approximates the remark on the official transcript released by the United States and first read to the nation by President Reagan on September 5. That transcript says, “I have executed the launch. The target is destroyed.” 9. It is curious that the media were not willing to accept the story as reported out of Japan but insisted on confirmation from US sources, particularly since it was Japan (according to the United States government) that had recorded and initially translated the conversations. US spokesmen originally stated that the interceptions had to be translated from Russian to Japanese to English; it was unclear whether the United States had original recordings of its own, or whether the government relied on the recordings made by the Japanese and did their own English translations. According to Japanese Defense Agency officials, “more than half ” of the data released on September 1 by George Shultz came from Japanese intelligence sources. (226: 15) 10. Getler’s resolution of the confirmation problem indicates that the print media use an attribution standard similar to that of the networks. Doug Feaver told us that The Washington Post has a “two-source rule” and that it is the reporter’s responsibility to decide when he has two independent sources and when he has the same ultimate source through two different conduits. Feaver was one of Post editors who dealt with the Watergate revelations. Whenever no source of the information is identified at all, he said, the Post always has gotten independent confirmation. Further, the phrasing “a source said” always means one unnamed source and the paper “will always soften the lead in this instance.” Feaver was interviewed May 27, 1986. 11. Interview with Jack Reynolds, June 18, 1986. In 1983 he was the Pentagon Correspondent for NBS News. Reynolds reaffirmed this account on two subsequent occasions. 12. Interview with George Wilson, June 3, 1986. 13. See the discussion in Chapter Two of Flights of Fancy. (480) 14. Mainichi Daily News, September 6, 1983. Gotoda, speaking at a hastily summoned press conference, was faced with “persistent press questioning” [cited in (235: 169)]. Johnson comments, “It is doubtful if Mr Gotoda realized what a huge cat he was letting out of the bag.” 15. Although reports of the ground-to-air conversations and alleged excerpts from the transcript had been circulating in Tokyo for five days, this was the first government denial of the existence of that recording. On the 7th, AFP reported that Shinji Yazaki had reiterated the Japanese government denial. (172) Yazaki maintained this position in 1985, when an organization comprised of the families of Japanese victims petitioned their government to release all relevant tape recordings. See: Asahi Evening News, “Gov’t Refuses to Release Tape of KAL Jet Shooting Incident,” January 16, 1985, 1. (Cited in (356: 322)) 16. The New York Times, September 8, 1983, A12. 17. According to Rohmer, the pilot transcripts released by American and Japanese authorities were monitored by the Rescue Co-ordination Center of the Japanese Ministry of Transport. (125–29) This center had a voice-activated recorder which constantly monitored “every communications frequency used by the Soviets in controlling their fighters.” Rohmer also comments on a so-called “second tape,” which has never been released in any form According to undisclosed military sources, three such sets of communications were monitored. Apparently this was done by the military who, with their facilities at Wakkanai and

Did the United States Suppress Ground-to-Air Communications?

elsewhere, could reasonably have been expected to have set up a system for monitoring not only transmissions from Soviet pilots to the ground, but ground-to-air instructions as well. In addition to the three two-way conversations between the ground and the aircraft, the Japanese facilities also monitored Soviet orders in dispatching eight ships to the area in the Sea of Japan near Moneron Island, thirty nautical miles off the southwestern Sakhalin coast, where the 747 had probably gone down. (384: 129)

This undisclosed second tape is the ground-to-air interchange. 18. Newsweek’s story bordered on the irresponsible. The magazine stated that “a Japanese listening post heard the pilot discuss the contact [with КAL 007] with his ground control.” (Newsweek, September 12, 1983, 16) In the next paragraph, the article declared The fighter pilot trailed his target for 14 minutes before the attack—and radioed full recognition that his missiles were locked on a civilian commercial aircraft. The fatal shot itself appeared to be no accident: according to reported transcripts published in Japan, every move was carefully orchestrated by ground controllers.   The pilot was ordered to take aim at the target. He replied that he had taken aim. The controller ordered him to fire. Pilot: “The target is destroyed. I am breaking off attack.” [emphasis added]



This is the only known repetition of the report that the fighter pilot acknowledged the civilian status of the “target”, an account that is empirically refuted by the pilot transcript. Although the magazine reportedly “went to bed” more than a week before the cover date, and, therefore, prior to American and Japanese denials of the existence of the ground control transcript, there should have been time to confirm the story. A close reading of the quotation supports this judgment: the final comment of the Soviet pilot—“The target is destroyed. I am breaking off attack”—almost exactly duplicates the official translation, which was not released prior to September 5. While ABC, on September 3, had reported “Missile fired, target destroyed,” Newsweek was the only outlet to report the exact wording. And they were the only one to include the statement “I am breaking off attack.” These facts imply either that the newsmagazine found someone who would talk or, more likely, that the story was rewritten after the transcripts had been made public. The text in Newsweek contains none of the tentativeness of the other US media accounts. Their version is an interesting blend of fact and fiction, a practice one would have hoped the newsmagazines had abandoned long ago.   Nevertheless, the magazine certainly treats the existence of the ground-to-air tape as genuine. Midway through the article, the account states: “Fourteen minutes later, with approval from the ground, he [the Soviet pilot] fired.” (Newsweek, September 12, 1983, 19) 19. Carolyn Smith told us government officials have been known to call and deny stories that had been aired by the network. 20. According to an Associated Press story, Japanese Foreign Ministry sources said that releasing the tape of the Soviet fighter pilots “had led to a two-thirds reduction of information on Soviet military transmissions because the Soviets changed frequencies and started coding.” (1: 6A) 21. See also: George C. Wilson, The Washington Post, September 2, 1983, A15. Such interceptions, achieved by monitoring different Soviet communications networks, would themselves probably not contain the ground-to-air conversations.

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Part One: KAL and Cracks in the Rhetorical Wall 22. See, for example, Wilson, The Washington Post, September 2, 1983, A15. In addition, Seymour Hersh derogated such reports as “spurious” and flatly denied the existence of any intercepted instructions from Soviet ground dispatchers, stating about such accounts, “The line between fact and fiction … had been erased.” (201: 113) 23. Hersh writes: “Soviet aircraft had been alerted in anticipation of a routine … reconnaissance mission, code-named Burning Wind, whose early-morning flight from the American air base at Kadena, Okinawa, passed just east of Sakhalin en route to its normal patrol in the Sea of Okhotsk.” (201: 56) One of the purposes of such flights is to confirm that the Soviets have not switched broadcast frequencies. Hersh claims this flight was cancelled. We believe Hersh is incorrect. 24. For example, Navy P-3 aircraft on submarine detection missions near Soviet territorial waters routinely listen to Soviet ground stations as a precautionary measure. 25. In this regard, one should not ignore Japanese capabilities, not all of which are coordinated with US intelligence activities. In particular, it is known that Japan has a small number of “dedicated” ELINT platforms—that is, aircraft specifically equipped to monitor electronic emissions—but it is not known if any of these craft were deployed in the area of Sakhalin that night. 26. Historically it has been true that the government would not prosecute suspected spies within the intelligence establishment because of the information about sources and methods that must be revealed in open court in order to obtain a conviction. The Pelton trial in 1986 was a noteworthy exception. On the other hand, when the government threatens journalists with prosecution, the issue always involves US intelligence assets, not information, except insofar as the information itself reveals the source. (377: A11)

CHAPTER 2

KAL 007 and the Superpowers: An International Argument Marilyn J. Young and Michael K. Launer Provenance: Originally published in Quarterly Journal of Speech 74, no. 3 (August 1988): 271–295. Copyright Holder: National Communication Association, reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com on behalf of National Communication Association Description: This article introduces the concept of composite narrative to describe the rhetorical campaigns conducted by the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union to persuade their citizens and the world at large that their version of events of August 31–September 1, 1983, was true and believable.

O

n September 1, 1983, when Secretary of State George Shultz announced to the world that the Soviet Union had shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 with 269 people aboard, he set the stage for a superpower argument unique in intensity, as the government of the United States assumed the burden of convincing both its domestic constituency and the international community that the action of the Soviet Union was a natural result of a barbaric communist system. As a rhetorical event, the KAL “crisis” was self-contained—that is, it had no apparent antecedents and it dominated the news for a finite period of time—making it a paradigmatic vehicle for studying the interactive nature of the notions of text and context, rhetorical situation, and public knowledge. The Soviet attack on the airplane instantaneously created a rhetorical situation and served as the catalyst for action. With no warning or campaign to provide a framework for such a discussion, public knowledge consisted only of the preconceptions regarding both superpowers held by auditors throughout the world. It was left to rhetors such as Secretary of State George Shultz and President Ronald Reagan

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to establish the initial context for perceiving and evaluating the Soviet behavior. In his press conference, Shultz disclosed unprecedented detail about US intelli­gence capabilities in the Western Pacific. (232) He also revealed that he had not yet talked with Reagan, which meant that a secretary of state, without benefit of consultation, was playing a role most often assumed by presidents: the bearer of bad news about an international crisis. According to The New York Times reporter David Hoffman, “Shultz had conferred instead with [National Security Advisor William] Clark. Only after Shultz had finished with reporters at the State Department— and was pointedly asked by them if he had talked to Reagan—did the President call to discuss the matter with him.”1 Thus, from the very beginning, the US response to the tragedy demonstrated a lack of coordination that would ultimately vitiate what might have been the greatest propaganda coup for the West since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Ensuing political events demonstrate that the context-defining nature of public discourse reinforces the concepts of rhetorical situation, public, and public knowledge advanced by Lloyd Bitzer. (71; 72) Accordingly, this paper examines American governmental discourse surrounding the KAL incident, using Bitzer’s concepts in combination with textual analysis to provide a construct for exploring the dynamics of superpower rhetoric. Public knowledge, which is simply the accumulated wisdom of the people, serves as the authoritative ground for political discourse. It renders a public “competent to accredit new truth and value and to authorize decision and action.” (72: 68) It provides the framework for any rhetorical situation, defining those exigencies that demand a response and, accordingly, operating as a precondition of rhetorical discourse. The KAL controversy provides a clear example of a situation requiring a response, in this instance from the US head of state. Reagan established the ideological context, capturing the sentiments of millions of people with his vitriolic denunciation of the Soviet attack, his characterization of the Soviet government as “barbaric,” and his pledge to take decisive measures. Yet, from the perspective of rhetorical theory, the case of the Korean airliner also presents a set of anomalies. While public knowledge is relatively stable in the long term, a crisis atmosphere, with its concomitant demand for information, can disrupt this stability. In an environment generated by feelings of crisis, the relationship between text and context, as well as the relationship between rhetors, the rhetorical situation, and

KAL 007 and the Superpowers

public knowledge, exist in a state of flux, altering the dynamic of public knowledge and its authorization process. The unusual circumstance of the secretary of state announcing the shootdown set the scene for such a disturbance in US public knowledge. In modern controversies, argument rarely proceeds in an orderly or formal fashion. The norm, rather, is a multiplicity of rhetors, who typically subject auditors to conflicting information even when aligned on the same side of an issue. When the rhetorical situation includes an atmosphere of crisis, one hears a virtual cacophony of pronouncements and official opinion, particularly in the United States. Nevertheless, in the present instance, it is possible to detect a symbiosis in the rhetorical efforts of East and West, a harmonious ebb and flow of charge and countercharge. This ebb and flow itself underscores how public discourse defines its context: both text and context “are aspects of the interpretation of an audience, and a particular artifact may be used either as text or context at different times.” (82: 21) A crisis occurs suddenly from the perspective of the average citizen, who may be uncertain as to the appropriate reaction; people depend on government officials to provide meaning to the event. In selecting a “fitting response,” officials attempt to define the context within which the crisis is to be viewed. (72: 85) But the texts of such responses also reshape the context in which the event should be evaluated: “Texts are constituted by their enmeshment in contexts, but contexts are themselves created and sustained by texts.” (82: 21) Accordingly, the distinction between text and context becomes blurred. In the West, intense media coverage provides new and often discrepant informa­tion (including the type of data that comes to public attention as the result of press conferences, investigative reporting, congressional hearings, and academic studies), adding to the rhetorical mix and contributing to the dynamism of public knowledge. The result is a mass of detail that overlaps, affects, and perhaps introduces incremental changes to public knowledge but is not yet a part of it. Such texts provide new information, both factual and interpretive, that may act to modify the context in which an event is viewed. This information may be termed “pre-knowledge” because it affects the authorization process described by Bitzer, altering what will be considered a fitting response. Ultimately, it may also change the substance of public knowledge. In a crisis setting, these data consist of the messages created in response to “the urgent need

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for information,” (71: 255) thereby becoming part of the context of the event, part of the rhetorical situation. Pre-knowledge may be actualized into public knowledge through the medium of “shared subjective experience.” (72: 85) For example, when television and newspapers reported that the United States had in its possession a recorded “order to fire” from Soviet ground control to its fighter pilots, the American public was presented with a set of facts that seemed consistent with accepted knowledge about US intelligence capabilities. Subsequent denials of the existence of these ground-to-air recordings conflicted with pre-knowledge. When the denials were offered, they merely conformed to public skepticism, which encompasses the belief that governments always try to protect information about sensitive subjects. Once those expectations are met, skepticism about other elements of the official story becomes more reasonable. In contrast to the situation in the United States, it has been common for the media in the USSR to take considerable time announcing disasters; historically, information about tragedies such as airline crashes has been suppressed.2 In this regard, KAL 007 was no exception: for two days the only news of the shootdown came over the Voice of America and other Western radio stations. This, too, presented an anomalous situation: a factual charge that required a response, but for which no response was forthcoming. Again, a disruption of public knowledge had occurred, this time in the USSR. It seems likely that public knowledge in a controlled society would be different and would play an entirely different role than in Western democracies.3 Where information dissemination is restricted, the authorization process, as Bitzer describes it, is virtually non-existent. Prior to September 1983, little or no interaction had been observed between official public knowledge, upon which rhetorical discourse in Soviet society is based, and the “fund of [historically situated] truths, principles, and values” (72: 68) that make up the unofficial knowledge of the Soviet people. The events that followed the destruction of KAL 007 were important because they attested to a deterioration of the status quo in the USSR: they demonstrate that the Soviet government is not always successful in controlling public information or, therefore, in controlling its domestic rhetorical situation. The present case study traces the development of the US position regarding the destruction of KAL 007 and examines the role of public knowledge in this international debate. The exposition follows the

KAL 007 and the Superpowers

American rhetorical effort chronologically through September 12, 1983 (when the Soviet Union vetoed a US-sponsored resolution of censure in the United Nations Security Council), and outlines the Soviet domestic response to this rhetorical campaign.

THE CASE STUDY September 1–3: Indicting the Soviet Action According to media reports and White House statements, Reagan first learned that the airliner had been shot down at 7:10 a.m. (PDT) on September 1, half an hour before Shultz’s press conference began. But this was fifteen hours after the first preliminary intelligence estimate had been transmitted to the National Security Agency and approximately seven hours after the White House was apprised of it. Judging by this chronology, presidential advisors first considered the event of minor import, not crucial enough to warrant waking the President, and not of sufficient magnitude even for him to talk with his secretary of state prior to Shultz’s informing the public of the tragedy. Moreover, they initially judged that the incident did not justify cutting short Reagan’s Labor Day vacation. Many correspondents com­mented on this apparent lack of urgency.4 Reagan did return to Washington earlier than expected, because of the impression his continued absence was creating and “the need to demonstrate his personal involvement.”5 Steven Weisman, citing White House Press Secretary Larry Speakes, reported that Reagan had been involved in all the Administration responses and had personally approved the initial statement read by Speakes on September 1: “‘As soon as we had the facts, the President was given an update,’ Mr. Speakes said. ‘When the facts became certain, we apprised the President of it.’”6 The domestic political pressure implied in the President’s early return to Washington also dictated the tone of his statements. From a rhetorical perspective, this pressure amounts to a sense of inappropriateness in the initial response. Had the President remained on vacation it simply would not have accorded with the public expectation that he take charge of the situation. This is not to suggest that Reagan was not sincerely angry and disturbed by the Soviet action. Rather, “the Soviet attack on Korean Air Lines Flight 007 had reinforced Reagan’s basic convictions about the Soviet system: that it lacks the basic moral standards of the West.”7 Nevertheless,

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as several observers have pointed out, the President had to find a middle ground between the political realities of the nuclear age and the demands of his most conservative constituency and advisers.8 No doubt this dichotomy led to the striking difference in rhetorical tone between remarks made by the President himself or his personal representatives and those issued by the State Department and Shultz. However, it was the secretary of state who provided the first official US announcement about the event. Shultz made a careful presentation: although exhibiting anger, he limited himself to the facts known at that time. In addition, he foreshadowed many of the positions the government would maintain throughout the crisis. In his opening remarks, the secretary commented, “At approximately 1600 hours Greenwich Mean Time, the aircraft came to the attention of Soviet radar. It was tracked constantly by the Soviets from that time.” (433: 1)9 Thus, at the outset, Shultz established the rhetorical position that the Soviet military had ample time to identify KAL 007 as a civilian airliner. The argumentative nature of this point was emphasized when he announced, “the Soviets tracked the commercial airliner for some two and one-half hours.” (1) These statements also revealed that Western intelligence personnel were reading Soviet radar activity. Similarly, the next statement indicated monitoring of Soviet air-to-ground communications (remarks by the fighter pilots to their ground controllers): “A Soviet pilot reported visual contact with the aircraft at 1812 hours. The Soviet plane was, we know, in constant contact with its ground control.” (1) Shultz identified the very moment when KAL 007 had completely disappeared from radar screens. He did not indicate whose radar he was referring to, although it soon became apparent that the plane had been acquired on Japanese military radar shortly before its final descent. It was unfortunate that the secretary did not think to point out at this juncture that the monitoring (which he clearly implied had occurred) was not carried out in “real time” (that is, by a human operator), but rather (as subsequently claimed) was accomplished automatically by voice-activated recorders and analyzed only later. Such mistakes ultimately blunted the effect of the American rhetorical campaign and contributed to the controversy surrounding allegations of a US role in the incident. The central question revolved around the natural conflict between politics and security. In a crisis such as this, the need to reveal hard information in order to marshal world opinion runs the risk of compromising

KAL 007 and the Superpowers

US intelligence assets. In actuality, the KAL incident “produced an unprecedented glimpse into American electronic eavesdropping capabilities.”10 Unfortunately, this unprecedented look was not close enough to avoid raising more questions than it answered. In the absence of a strong statement by Shultz, there was no reason for the American people to understand that the assets which had been disclosed would not enable American intelligence personnel to follow these events as they actually unfolded. This proved to be the major issue that plagued US credibility in the KAL affair. As a result of his desire to make an airtight case, and undoubtedly motivated by genuine anger and revulsion, Shultz overlooked the caveats and ambiguities that normally accompany discussions skirting the edge of national security issues. In this instance, even well informed reporters such as Douglas Feaver of The Washington Post operated under the impression that the monitoring had occurred in real time11 Shultz indicated in his statement yesterday that somebody’s radar system knew a great deal about the progress of Flight 007 and the fighters that intercepted it. … In Tokyo, the Japan Defense Agency said its radar showed the plane crossing Sakhalin Island, hundreds of miles west of R20, shortly before the plane was shot down. … [T]here [is no] indication that the pilot radioed for help or sounded alarmed.12

In contrast, Getler and The New York Times reporter David Shribman, who were briefed by Assistant Secretary of State Richard Burt after Shultz’s press conference, reported that the monitoring was not accomplished in real time.13 However, in each instance this information did not appear until well into the article and was not emphasized. Shribman quoted Burt as saying, “American officials did not have ‘real-time information.’” It is worth noting the careful manner in which this statement was phrased. As in so many other instances, it prescribed very narrow parameters of truth, for it did not preclude the Koreans or Japanese from having such data. Not until the next day did Shultz finally deny that monitoring of the tragedy had occurred in real time, a possibility left open by his September 1 statement. (1) Coming at this point, the secretary’s denial had the appearance of backing and filling: it was too late to have a

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positive impact on people’s impressions. If nothing else, the primacy effect dictated that the average citizen would remember the elaborate information contained in Shultz’s announcement and the monitoring that obviously had enabled the United States to compile such a detailed reconstruction of the event; one would be less likely to recall later clarifications of the type Shultz and Burt offered. Thus, public consciousness had developed a pre-knowledge about this event, based on a collective impression of US intelligence capabilities, that was inadvertently substantiated by administration officials. Equally important, the whole episode gave the Soviet Union an opening, allowing them to claim that the United States had followed the entire event and to insist, therefore, that the United States could have prevented the disaster, but for political purposes did not choose to do so. Up to this point, the USSR had been typically recalcitrant about the whereabouts of the missing airliner. (Many believe that had the Soviet Union admitted its culpability, apologized, and offered to pay reparations—as Israel and Bulgaria had done years earlier in similar circumstances—the crisis atmosphere surrounding the incident would have dissipated quickly. Instead, the USSR said virtually nothing of substance for the first six days of the crisis.) Shortly after the tragedy, TASS released a brief government statement describing only an attempted interception, which concluded with the “unidentified” aircraft continuing its flight toward the Sea of Japan. It was not until September 6 that the Soviet Union officially admitted having shot down the airliner. By that time it appeared the Soviet government would face the difficult task of orchestrating two campaigns—one for the international front and one for domestic consumption; analysis reveals, however, that most of its effort focused on the domestic audience. Not surprisingly, Soviet commentators took advantage of the confusion over US monitoring of the flight of KAL 007. O. Piliugin, writing in Krasnaia zvezda on September 6, quoted The New York Times regarding US surveillance installations in the Western Pacific. He then concluded: “Why didn’t US and Japanese air traffic controllers, who followed the South Korean aircraft throughout its entire flight, warn the crew that they were violating the airspace of the USSR?” On September 8, political observer A. Bovin commented in Izvestiia Occasionally one hears the following reply: the portion of the route along the Soviet border lies beyond the range of АТС radar. But here

KAL 007 and the Superpowers

is what The Washington Post reports: “The Federal Aviation Administration and the US Department of Defense had an agreement, whereby long range military radar in Alaska would be used to verify that passenger aircraft were not off course when they left Alaska and began the long flight along the Soviet border. Federal Aviation Administration officials reported that a similar agreement exists between Japanese civil aviation authorities and the Japanese armed forces.” Consequently, there were people who could have helped the “straying” aircraft.

Bovin was actually quoting Feaver’s September 2 article in The Washington Post “Dangers of Violating Soviet Airspace Well-Known to Pilots.” The citation was taken out of context, and its use by Bovin was clearly designed for maximum impact on an uninformed Soviet audience; Bovin neglected to quote either the title of the article or this passage contained within: “The radar system … extends coverage about 200 miles from Alaska. … Once a plane goes beyond that 200-mile range, it is on its own for about 3,000 miles, required only to make radio checks with FAA controllers in Anchorage, then with Japanese controllers in Tokyo.” Both of these excerpts from the Soviet press illustrate a recent, and increasingly frequent, tactic: quoting US media to refute American claims. (225) Undoubtedly, this approach strengthened the Soviet position, particularly in the eyes of its own people. Nevertheless, it was not until September 9 that the government of the USSR began a full-scale counterattack in defense of its actions against KAL 007. On that day, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, chief of staff of the Soviet armed forces, conducted a press conference—most unusual in and of itself. A government representative made the following claim, which was reiterated in all Soviet print media Burt’s references to US tracking data in his first contact with us completely refute the position … that US intelligence agencies … reconstructed [what had happened] on the basis of data from other sources. The US chargé d’affaires in Moscow, in his first contact with the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, alluded to the fact that radar contact with the plane had been maintained until the very end.

All foreign governments, including those of the unaligned countries represented at the United Nations Security Council, read the US and Soviet

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press regularly. It can only have been harmful to the American case to have its arguments condemned in the words of its own diplomats. Thus, a crack had appeared in the airtight case against the Soviets, a breach of the Americans’ own making. For, while Burt’s remarks, as reported by the Soviets, did not necessarily preclude reconstructed data, obviously those reconstructions were accomplished very quickly. In the interaction between text and context, discourse of this sort altered the shape of the background against which the scenes were played. One of the long-term consequences of this particular gaffe was the material it gave to the conspiracy theorists, who seized on the monitoring issue as the basis for much of their claim of US culpability.14 Shultz’s statement on September 1 had established the initial context in which the event and the propaganda war that followed would be viewed. It also signposted the American position in a number of ways. In addition to emphasizing the time the Soviets had spent tracking the airliner, Shultz made it clear that US officials were confident they knew what had happened. Moreover, he staked out the moral ground that the United States would occupy for the coming weeks: in reference to the Soviets tracking the airliner, he stressed that KAL 007 was a commercial airliner. Later he referred to it as an “unarmed civilian plane,” an appellation paraphrased in virtually every succeeding US statement. Shultz himself used variants of this phrase four additional times, in response to nine questions from the press: “commercial airliner”; “unarmed airliner”; “unarmed commercial airliner” (twice). (2) This characterization was accurate but redundant, a strategic choice designed to underscore the administration’s major argument: the barbaric nature of the Soviet action. The moral imperative of the US position was summed up when Shultz said: “We can see no explanation whatever for shooting down an unarmed commercial airliner, no matter whether it’s in your airspace or not.” (2) The attitude reflected in this comment allowed the Soviet Union little room to maneuver and, thus, ran counter to most diplomatic strategy. In this way, it foreshadowed the coming attempt to gain a political advantage by mustering worldwide condemnation of the Soviet action. On a number of points, however, Shultz was careful to keep his options open in the face of possibly incomplete information. (Reagan, among others, later closed some of those options.) For example, when asked whether the Soviet Union gave any warning to the airliner, Shultz responded that there was no evidence that they did so. When asked whether or not the

KAL 007 and the Superpowers

United States knew if the Soviets tried to force KAL to land prior to firing on it with missiles, he stated that he had no information on that point. (However, he did underscore the proximity of the fighter planes to the jetliner and the opportunity for visual identification.) Finally, when asked about the level at which the decision was made to shoot the plane down, Shultz characterized his entire presentation: “I’m relating the facts as we have them at this point, and I can’t go beyond the facts that I have here.” (2) A short time after talking with the secretary of state (following the press conference), Reagan released his first statement. Whereas Shultz’s remarks laid the ground for the arguments the United States would make, Reagan set the rhetorical tone. He began with what was to become the primary rhetorical strategy of the campaign—separating the Soviet Union from the community of civilized nations: “I speak for … people everywhere who cherish civilized values in protesting the Soviet attack on an unarmed civilian passenger plane.” (2) The President’s rhetorical style established the manner in which the public should interpret and ascribe meaning to the tragedy. He characterized the shootdown as an “appalling and wanton misdeed,” terming the Soviet actions “inexplicable to civilized people everywhere.” Each of these motifs was elaborated in later speeches and documents both by President Reagan and by US representatives at the United Nations. Those representatives became involved almost immediately, with Ambassador Charles Lichenstein’s letter to the President of the UN Security Council requesting an urgent meeting of that body. The letter essentially reiterated the contents of Shultz’s statement, but took the additional step of charging a violation of international law: “There exists no justification in international law for the destruction of an identifiable civil aircraft, an aircraft which was tracked on radar for two-and-one-half hours, and which was in visual contact of Soviet military pilots prior to being deliberately shot down.” (3) The charge of flouting international order is an additional tactic in the strategy of isolating the Soviet Union from civilized nations. Not only was the act wanton and appalling, it was also illegal.15 The major themes of Soviet culpability were restated as justification for international condemnation of the USSR: the length of time the airliner was on Soviet radar and the physical proximity of the interceptor planes to the jetliner prior to the shootdown. It was on these two claims, with the later addition of the tape of the fighter pilots, that the United States based its case.

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Reagan, in his speech of September 2, continued in the same vein. His rhetoric took on the characteristics of classic exhortation, described by Edwin Black as discourse in which belief follows from an emotional reaction rather than the reverse. (75: 9) Reagan relied on shared public knowledge, not only among the citizens of this country, but of the rest of the world as well: the Soviet government was referred to four times as a “regime,” a term that carries decided negative connotations. In one particular paragraph the President again cast the Soviet Union outside the pale, referring to “civilized behavior” and “the tradition of a civilized world,” stating that “as civilized societies, we ask searching questions about the nature of regimes where such standards do not apply.” (3) The President variously characterized the shootdown as a “terrorist act,” an “atrocity,” and “brutality.” He drew the contrast between Soviet words and deeds, accused them of flagrantly lying about the “heinous act,” and observed, “What can be the scope of legitimate and mutual discourse with a state whose values permit such atrocities?” (3) (How can civilized nations negotiate with barbarians?) In this way, Reagan used tragedy and text to provide a context in which all might view Soviet actions—not only the destruction of KAL, but past and future behaviors as well. Additionally, he justified the inability of the United States to reach accord with the USSR on a variety of issues, both then and in the future, and laid the groundwork for using the tragedy as a springboard to pressure Congress for increased defense spending. The President gave virtually no sources for his information, an indication of the exhortative nature of his speech. His domestic audience would assume that he has resources for investigation second to none and would, therefore, know whereof he spoke. Nevertheless, in typically presidential fashion, Reagan rarely referred to any particular source of information. As Smith has concluded, “The President is, for all intents and purposes, The Source of information on 007. His language reveals a man speaking as if he were an eyewitness to the event.” (415; see also 321) Invoking a long religious tradition of exhortation against evil, Reagan escalated the verbal offensive. This, then, became the form and tone of the American protest against Soviet barbarism. On September 2, Lichenstein delivered the first statement to the UN Security Council in much the same terms as those used earlier in the day by the President. Expanding upon the theme expressed in his previous day’s letter to the President of the Security Council—that

KAL 007 and the Superpowers

the shooting was a violation of international law—Lichenstein said, “Let us call the crime for what clearly it is: wanton, calculated, deliberate murder.” Later, the destruction of KAL 007 was termed “this criminal act of mass murder.” (4) Lichenstein went into considerable detail in recounting the tragedy, noting incidents of Soviet airliners overflying sensitive areas in the United States without adverse consequences, and then describing what one might expect of a civilized government in such situations as this. Lichenstein elaborated the themes initiated by Reagan, while raising the rhetori­cal stakes. He cast the United States as a model of civilized behavior, tolerating overflights by Soviet aircraft, filing protests and suspending landing rights rather than firing missiles, thus justifying the revulsion and horror evoked by the behavior of the USSR. Since most nations would prefer to think of themselves as civilized, Lichenstein enveloped them in a cloak of rationality and left the Soviet Union a lone outcast: “[The Soviet Union] has … behaved with complete—and I must add, characteristic—contempt for the international community and for even minimal standards of decency and civilized behavior.” (5) By setting up standards of behavior for handling situations such as this one, standards with which any nation would find it difficult to disagree, standards which the USSR had clearly failed to meet, Lichenstein created a means whereby all nations could join in condemnation. The pending action of the Security Council was redefined as the maintenance of world order in the face of uncivilized—indeed, criminal—acts. This isolation of the Soviet Union from the rest of the world quickly became the dominant theme of the American campaign. The United Nations is rarely presented with an issue in which the debate itself can make a difference in the vote. The Cuban Missile Crisis was one such unusual situation; the KAL 007 tragedy might have been another. Unfortunately, Lichenstein probably nullified the impact of his strategy—at least as far as the Third World nations were concerned—by going too far, for he concluded with a vivid excoriation of Soviet totalitarianism, a tactic that no doubt served to re-divide opinion along ideological lines. Reagan confined the relentless pursuit of Soviet culpability in his Saturday radio address (September 3), making absolutely clear his intention to isolate the USSR on this issue: “This murder of innocent civilians is a serious international issue between the Soviet Union and civilized people everywhere who cherish individual rights and value human life.” (5) In the

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same language used the previous day, the President restated the disparity between Soviet words and deeds, and added that this was not the first time that the Soviet Union had fired on a civilian airliner straying over its territory.16 With this exception, and the omission of the peroration, Reagan’s address was a condensed version of Lichenstein’s Security Council speech. Coming when it did, the President’s speech probably served an epideictic function, more ceremonial than deliberative. Invoking fundamental American distrust of the Soviet Union, Reagan placed the destruction of KAL 007 into the catalog of Soviet crimes and deceptions, reaffirming the context of the US response.

September 4: The RC-135 At this point in the chronology, the US position began to deteriorate. On September 4, 1983, Congressional leaders, including Senate majority leader Howard H. Baker, Jr. and the House majority leader, James Wright, attended a White House briefing where they listened to the tape of the Soviet pilots. Immediately thereafter, Wright spoke with reporters and indicated that a US RC-135 reconnaissance plane had been in the vicinity of Kamchatka Peninsula the night KAL 007 was shot down and that the Soviets might have confused the two aircraft.17 At least one commentator has contended that this remark gave the Soviets the spy plane argument. (384: 100) Indeed, ample support for this notion exists in the Russian language material concerning the incident. Later that same day, Larry Speakes was questioned closely by the press about this discrepancy. (456)18 Speakes insisted that no reference to an RC-135 appeared on the tape of the Soviet pilots; nonetheless, he appeared to admit that reconnaissance planes were aloft as part of routine US surveillance of the Soviet Union and that the US government had considerably more tape than that portion on which the Soviet pilots were recorded Q: Did [you] mention to the Congressmen at all that the Soviet pilots were referring to it as an RC-135? (8) Mr. Speakes. As I say, without going into detail on what is obviously something we don’t customarily talk about, that if there was any discussion of it, it was considerably ahead of

KAL 007 and the Superpowers

this effort where the Soviet pilot was in close proximity of the plane, had visual contact with it to an extremely close range. … It’s clear from our evidence, which I will not go into, it’s clear from our evidence that the Soviets, for a period of time that extends well beyond this eight minutes, well behind this eight minutes, well in advance of this eight minutes, the Soviets had no reason to doubt that they were tracking a civilian airliner. (8–9)19

Much later in the briefing, a correspondent asked the key question Q: Larry, during this period, was there a U.S. reconnaissance plane anywhere near this area, outside the Soviet air space during the period when the KAL flight was around? (16) Mr. Speakes: I would not say near the area, but the U.S. routinely uses reconnaissance missions outside the Soviet Union in international waters, as do the Soviets use on us. (17)

The question was repeated. Mr. Speakes: They are [there] routinely, but if there was any case of an observance of a U.S. reconnaissance plane, it was well ahead of this. (17)

The press corps kept coming back to the question of the US reconnaissance plane and the possibility of misidentification on the part of the Soviets. Obviously piqued by this insistent questioning regarding US reconnaissance activity, Speakes observed near the conclusion of the press conference: “We have given you more than you ever knew or that we knew about them.” (25) Toward evening, the White House issued a detailed clarifying statement, which indicated that an RC-135 was fulfilling a routine mission off the coast of Kamchatka at the time the Korean airliner was first detected by Soviet radar, two-and-one-half hours prior to the shootdown. The White House claimed that the Soviets were familiar with the flight characteristics of the RC-135, that they had tracked the two planes separately,

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and that they had first identified the Korean plane as an RC-135 and then as an “unidentified aircraft.”20 The statement reiterated the US contention that the Soviets had ample opportunity for visual identification of the airliner—that the two types of aircraft are in no way similar. Finally, the statement points out that at the time KAL 007 was shot down, the RC-135 had been on the ground in Alaska for more than an hour.21 The problem with this episode was that it muddied the waters. Prior to September 4, the United States could claim absolutely that the Soviets had sufficient time, on radar and visually, to identify the intruder as a civilian airliner; now there appeared to be some basis for Soviet confusion, despite Speakes’s insistence to the contrary. This impression was strengthened by the US government’s attempts to clarify the issue, which only served as fuel for those who already believed the United States was directly involved, or at least should have been able to warn the ill-fated airliner. The context that gave meaning to this event was subtly beginning to alter its shape. As it turned out, Wright’s revelation, and the alacrity with which it was substantiated by the Reagan administration (revealing in the process more highly classified information) was tantamount to opening Pandora’s box. Not only did this gaffe expose the US position to ridicule at home and among its allies, it also gave the Soviet leaders a wedge to break out of the disastrous public relations maze that had enveloped them. Soviet commentary in Pravda on the morning of Tuesday, September 6 revealed mostly stagnation and the type of “political invective” indicative of a lack of anything cogent to say. Among customary Soviet tactics employed were ad hominem attacks on the character of the US President and the “slippery slope” fallacy Standing at the conductor’s podium [directing] this hysteria is the White House, whose master has outdone himself in his pathological hatred of the Soviet Union and of our people. It is logical to assume that if today [the American government] defends its “right” to instigate flights of an intruder aircraft, then tomorrow it will try to justify with the same recklessness and cynicism the “accidental” launch of death-dealing rockets against foreign territory.

In addition, Pravda evoked the spectre of Nazi Germany, a standard safety net of its ideological rhetoric. Soviet propagandists rely on this particular

KAL 007 and the Superpowers

tactic in such situations because World War II and the incredibly heavy toll in human life and suffering endured by the Soviet people serve as a rhetorical icon in the USSR: “Anti-communist hysteria isn’t new. These methods are well known, because they completely coincide with those of Hitler’s propaganda, which fabricated Poland’s ‘attack’ on Germany fortyfour years ago.” But evident, too, were the first glimmers of what was to become an effective counterattack. It is important to consider the timing here. The White House briefing attended by James Wright had broken up shortly after noon, EDT, on Sunday, September 4; the congressman’s revelations sent capital correspondents scurrying for their Pentagon sources and necessitated the Speakes press conference in mid-afternoon. Around dinnertime in Washington—after midnight, September 4–5 in Moscow—the White House issued its “clarification.”22 This was the break the Soviet government needed. Its propagandists must have been under tremendous pressure to find a way out of this public relations tupik (dead end). There are no written minutes to consult, of course, but it is easy to imagine the ebullient mood that must have prevailed at the daily planning session of the Soviet propaganda leadership on Monday morning.23 On Tuesday, Pravda quoted CBS television news: “The USSR might have mistaken the airliner for an American reconnaissance aircraft flying off the coast of Kamchatka.” (493: 4) Only once prior to this had the Soviets seriously mentioned US military aircraft as the cause of possible confusion. But even that had not occurred until September 4; it, too, had taken the form of a quotation from the foreign press—specifically, the Sydney [Australia] Morning Herald: “The Soviets might have taken the South Korean aircraft to be a US spy plane because on radar it looks just like a US military reconnaissance aircraft; it might also have been mistaken for a US E4B bomber.”24 Nothing more was made of this report at the time. During its 8:00 a.m. newscast on September 6, however, Soviet TV presented the following item As has become known from the US press, the Americans not only relentlessly tracked the movements of the intruder by satellite, they also sent into the area their own RC-135 reconnaissance plane, which travelled parallel to the intruder’s path.25 The report of the presence

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of a second aircraft has raised new questions concerning this already confusing episode,” admits The New York Times. In this regard, many observers have asked: was the RC-135 supervising the actions of the other aircraft?26

At this point the newscaster quoted Congressman Wright as saying he had heard “several” references by the Soviet pilot to the presence of the RC-135. Once again, the American position had been contradicted, in Soviet eyes, by America’s own spokespersons. During the 4:00 p.m. television newscast that afternoon, Soviet citizens were told that US RC-135s frequently “use foreign civilian airliners as a cover for reconnaissance flights near the USSR.” The newscaster then reported that UPI had commented (in the newscaster’s words), “spy planes loaded with electronic equipment literally poise themselves above passenger liners in order to confuse Soviet air defense radar stations. UPI indicates,” he continued, “that just such a reconnaissance aircraft was airborne alongside the South Korean aircraft that intruded into the airspace of the USSR and [that] it even intersected its path twice.” This report sounded as though the two planes were in close proximity; US accounts differed markedly, claiming that, although the RC-135 had indeed crossed the path flown by Flight 007, the Korean airliner was already a considerable distance away when that intersection occurred.27 What is important here, however, is that Soviet media were beginning to alter the context in which Soviet citizens might view reports of the airliner’s destruction. In the Soviet Union, stories appearing on television or in newspapers carry the presumption of government approval; these items become part of Soviet official public knowledge, thus providing context for future argument. This alteration continued through Ogarkov’s press conference on September 9. Later that evening (September 6), at 9:00 p.m., the Soviet Government released a “Statement,” which was read over the radio and TV and subsequently published the next morning in every major daily newspaper. This statement constituted the first definitive step forward in their campaign to discredit the American version of the KAL incident. It was here, for the very first time, that the Soviet government itself claimed to have monitored the flight of an RC-135 off the coast of Kamchatka Peninsula. John Burns, writing in Moscow on September 6, noted that Washington’s disclosure of the RC-135 “seemed to have had a strong

KAL 007 and the Superpowers

influence in shaping the manner in which Soviet explanations of the incident were presented.”28 Three days later, during the September 9 press conference, Soviet Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov made the first direct Soviet claim that the RC-135 had rendezvoused with KAL 007, flying in tandem with the Korean plane for some ten minutes before the airliner penetrated Soviet airspace. The alleged rendezvous was depicted on Ogarkov’s map as a “double loop” adjacent to the route followed by the airliner. US officials deprecated this assertion, maintaining that the RC-135 had never flown closer than seventy-five miles to the flight path of KAL and had, in any event, departed from the area long before the jetliner approached Kamchatka.29 Nevertheless, allegations concerning the activities of the American reconnaissance aircraft—particularly the contested double loop—became the centerpiece of Soviet contentions that the United States had sent KAL 007 over sensitive Soviet territory on an espionage mission. Without this damaging evidence, provided by representatives of the United States government itself, the Soviet government undoubtedly would not have succeeded in convincing very many people, either at home or abroad, that the events surrounding the destruction of KAL 007 had occurred in any fashion other than that depicted in the US charges. Public understanding of the event was beginning to shift. Most importantly for the propaganda war, the possibilities presented by this new revelation provided the beginnings of the explanation demanded by the nations of the world. Soviet rhetoric began to take on the characteristics of the wounded party.

September 5–8, 1983: Releasing the Tape In his televised address to the nation on the evening of September 5, Reagan continued to elaborate his charges, using the rhetorical style that had become the trademark of the US response to this tragedy. After making reference to the bereaved families, he recalled the KAL 902 incident of 1978, overflights of US military installations by Soviet and Cuban planes, and the details of KAL 007’s last flight. At this point, the President played a small portion of the audio tape of the Soviet pilots (with voice-over translation) and described the scene that the tape recounts. He referred to the Soviet refusal to allow the United States to participate in the search for wreckage, relating this to previous massacres in Czechoslovakia, Poland,

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Hungary, and, most recently, Afghanistan.30 After describing actions the United States was taking in retaliation for the downing, the President then correlated Soviet brutality with the need for a strong US defense system and the necessity for continued negotiation on arms reduction. (433: 6–8)31 Other than the tape and elements of Reagan’s personal style (such as the reference to relatives of the dead), there was nothing new here. It was essentially a repetition of the positions both he and other officials had taken earlier. By this point, one suspects, the US initiative had begun to wane, for the world’s ability to sustain horror is limited once the horror itself is over. But the tape, with its inherent dramatic interest, rekindled feelings of revulsion and curiosity and added yet another piece to the developing contextual mosaic. The United States made an effort to capitalize on this reaction with Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick’s September 6 address to the United Nations Security Council. After vilifying the Soviet Union for lying about the “cool, calculated act,” Kirkpatrick played her trump card, the complete tape of the Soviet pilots. The American presentation was calculated to produce the maximum dramatic effect: while simultaneous translations echoed in the ears of the delegates, the Russian and English texts appeared together on large monitors especially installed for the day’s session. Nothing like this had ever been staged before.32 Following the tape presentation, the ambassador made several claims about its contents: [1] the interceptor had the airliner in sight for over twenty minutes before firing the missiles; [2] the interceptor pilot saw the airliner’s navigation lights; [3] contrary to Soviet contentions, the pilot made no mention of firing tracer rounds (a fateful US error here); [4] there was no indication that the pilot made any attempt to communicate with the airliner or to otherwise signal it; [5] at no point did the Soviet pilots raise the question of the identity of the aircraft. (9)33 Kirkpatrick’s address represented the first direct attempt to refute statements being made by officials of the USSR, and as such it constituted a shift in strategic posture. Prior to this speech, the United States was strictly on the attack; the answering of arguments, however, is primarily a defensive stance which, in this instance, dissipated the moral focus of the US position. In that sense, the Soviet strategy of fabrication had begun to have an effect, for the United States had, at this point, shouldered the burden of proof.34 In retrospect, one can see that this subtle shift in approach

KAL 007 and the Superpowers

did not bode well for US attempts to generate a groundswell of public condemnation and thus to isolate the Soviet Union. Rather, it portended a continued deterioration in the absolute rectitude of the US position. But there was no immediately discernible result, since at about this time the government of the USSR itself gave new life to the US campaign. While Oleg Troyanovsky, the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, was blandly attempting to parry US charges at the Security Council meeting, Moscow released the “Soviet Government Statement,” cited earlier, and admitted that the PVO (its Air Defense Forces) had “terminated” the flight of KAL 007.35 Moreover, on the eve of the Madrid human rights conference (which had long been scheduled for the second week in September), Soviet media carried a report that downing the “intruder aircraft” accorded with the laws of the Soviet Union; and in the future, the report continued, the Soviet Union would comply with those laws. Coming as it did on the heels of Kirkpatrick’s impassioned insistence that “international air travel depends on networks of mutual trust that we will not shoot down one another’s airliners” (10), the Soviet Union’s huffy defensiveness was a serious public relations blunder. It reinforced the Reagan administration’s characterization that “violence and lies are regular instruments of Soviet policy.” (10) In addition, the ill-considered remark gave credibility to the notion that the destruction of Flight 007 was “a deliberate stroke designed to intimidate—a brutal, decisive act meant to instill fear and hesitation in all who observed its ruthless violence.” (10) Soviet timing was terrible. Spokespersons for the United States seized the opportunity to further condemn the Soviet Union, to insist that the statement demonstrated the USSR “is not bound by the norms of international behavior and human decency to which virtually all other nations subscribe” (10)36 On September 7, the White House issued a statement condemning the Soviet position, claiming it demonstrated that “they will shoot down the next off-course unarmed aircraft that transgresses the territory prescribed by Soviet law.” (11) Eagleburger and Shultz made similar remarks to the press. On September 8, Shultz expanded on this position: “This brutal Soviet action has vividly displayed the Soviet Union’s lack of concern for the human lives involved”. (11) The Voice of America also continued to broadcast harsh statements into the USSR. The destruction of KAL 007 was called “a gross violation of civilized behavior and a barbarous act of violence.” (443) Later it was

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reported that Eagleburger had “denounced the Soviet statement [of the previous evening] as lies and half-truths.” (444)

September 11, 1983: Revising the Tape The opening provided by the ill-timed Soviet statements could not overshadow the damage done to the US position by its own equally ill-timed publication of revisions to the tape transcript. A September 11 State Department news release noted somewhat gratuitously As part of the policy of the U.S. Government to develop full information on the tragic shootdown of KAL #007 by Soviet forces on August 31, U.S. Government experts have continued to review the poor quality transmission on the tape which was played at the UN Security Council September 6. That review has now been completed. After efforts at electronic enhancement and hundreds of replays of the tape, U.S. Government linguists were able to interpret three passages more clearly as indicated below. (13)

Among those corrections was one additional line that seemed to indicate that the Soviet fighter pilot had, after all, fired tracer rounds: “I am firing cannon bursts.” The sincerity of this “policy” was attested by the political shortsightedness of releasing such emendations the day prior to the crucial Security Council vote on a provisional resolution condemning the Soviet attack. These revisions marked the lowest point in the US campaign for total international denunciation of the Soviet Union.37 Their cumulative effect, coming on the heels of the impressive performance by Marshal Ogarkov in Moscow two days earlier, can be seen in the UN vote (surely, the goals of Soviet officials in staging the press conference included sowing doubt in world opinion). America’s NATO allies (France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom) unanimously supported the resolution; of course, the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact ally Poland voted no. Among the unaligned nations, however, what should have been nearly unanimous condemnation became instead a vote which was effectively five–four; Jordan, Malta, Pakistan, Togo, and Zaire supported the resolution, while China, Guyana, Nicaragua, and Zimbabwe abstained. The abstention by Guyana, whose representative had been installed as Security Council President just

KAL 007 and the Superpowers

prior to KAL’s destruction, was particularly embarrassing to the United States. The corrections made it appear that the United States had overclaimed its evidence, obscuring the fact that the quality of the intercept tape was exceedingly poor.38 Producing a complete, accurate rendering of the content in such a short time was a monumental task; in fact, NSA transcribers had performed magnificently. The problem was not that the transcript required reinterpretation in spots, but that the government, in first releasing the transcript, did not assert strongly that the text was incomplete and that analysis was continuing; although certain passages in the transcript had originally been marked inaudible, so that further corrections might have been expected, the US government did nothing to prepare the public for this eventuality. In fact, the corrections did not change the essence of US charges, but as a result the American position lay open to suspicion. Apparently because of the perceived need to move quickly and decisively, the Reagan administration failed to take the obvious precautions. In our view, this failure proved to be just as damaging as Shultz’s initial omission of the caveat against real time monitoring of KAL. In Rohmer’s opinion, the release of these corrections “had a profound effect on all the wavering Third World nations that might have gone with the United States and that were apparently prepared to do so up to the time of the announcement.” (384: 171—but see 127: 16, 94) From a rhetorical perspective, the corrections are crucial to understanding the progression of the propaganda campaign. While no one was excusing the USSR, public understanding of the event became clouded: moral certainty gave way to uncertainty. America’s carefully constructed contextual mosaic was beginning to crumble. The manner in which the Soviet government used this propaganda bonanza is most revealing, for it demonstrates more than any other circumstance the fact that Moscow’s primary concern at this juncture had become maintenance of its credibility among its own citizenry. In Dallin’s view, the “overriding priority” of Soviet strategists was the need for “maintaining the facade of infallibility vis-a-vis its own population and … forestalling any doubts in the minds of its own elite on whether the system worked.” (127: 89) Obviously, Soviet officials had arrived at the conclusion that there was no realistic hope of discrediting the tape transcript in the world arena. No serious attempt to dispute the

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authenticity of the tape was made in the Security Council, at Ogarkov’s press conference, or in the Soviet presentation to International Civil Aviation Organization officials during that UN body’s inquiry into the KAL disaster.39 Nevertheless, for internal consumption, Soviet propagandists had a veritable field day, concentrating from September 11 through September 14 on this latest American blunder. Although VOA had initially discussed the tape on September 4, and an article in Pravda had mentioned it almost offhandedly on September 6 (493), the first time that the Soviet people had heard an officially sanctioned public discussion of the existence of the taped conversations was during Ogarkov’s news conference on the ninth (three days after they had been played before the United Nations); not surprisingly, the many embarrassing questions concerning the tape were deleted from the edited Soviet telecast. But Voice of America and Radio Liberty broadcasts undoubtedly had been reaching many people in major cities such as Moscow and Leningrad, where Western programming is particularly popular. The effect of this uncensored news had to be counteracted, if possible. It was fairly easy to make the Americans look foolish The value of such recordings, which were prepared in the USA, is well known. It is hardly accidental that American Congressman Wright maintained that he heard something when he first listened to the tape, but this segment no longer appeared in the recording that was subsequently distributed. (Pravda, September 11) The falsification … is clear and unconcealed. (Pravda, September 12) [T]he State Department has announced that it was distributing what it called a “new version” of the transcript of conversations between the Soviet ground control and the Soviet pilot. This raises a legitimate question: has Washington been operating until now with falsified tapes? It was not accidental that during the Moscow press conference it was noted that one could not trust all these “tapes”, since they were faked from start to finish. Obviously, Washington has tripped up, is trying to save itself, and, caught in its own lie, has been forced to admit this lie, at least in part. We shall see what comes next. (Pravda, September 13)

KAL 007 and the Superpowers

State Department representative Romberg announced that specialists had supposedly studied the tape once again and, having spent much time (hurrah for the “specialists”!), were now able to provide three clarifications and three corrections. Including the clarification that Washington linguists could not previously decipher the words “I am opening cannon fire.” … What further “clarification” will these foreign Russian-language “experts”—disinformation experts, is more like it—provide in the future? (Pravda, September 14)

Who would have thought that the transcript would be released before every possible intelligible statement had been squeezed out? Or that corrections so damaging to the United States would be made public the day before a crucial UN vote?

September 12, 1983: Kirkpatrick’s Speech Whereas the Soviet Union was intent upon salvaging prestige on its domestic front, having made its best effort in the international arena with the Ogarkov press conference, the United States now had to contend with vacillating world opinion. Its overwhelming moral and political advantage had been considerably eroded by time and circumstance. Kirkpatrick again took the rostrum at the UN on September 12 in an attempt to repair the damage, and immediately went on the attack But even more disturbing than the deed itself has been the behavior of the Soviet Government in the days since it shot down that plane. … Instead of admitting error, it has insisted that no error was made. Instead of taking responsibility for the act, it has lashed out with groundless accusations. Instead of taking steps to ensure against a repetition of such an incident, it has emphasized that it would do the same thing all over again. (433: 15)

The ambassador pointed out that the “cannon bursts” were essentially irrelevant; indeed, it was possible that they were not tracer bullets—that is, warning shots—at all, but “regular, normal cannon rounds which are not visible.” The point, according to Kirkpatrick, was that there is no excuse whatsoever for shooting down a civilian airliner, particularly one which “was within 60 seconds of leaving Soviet air space.” (16)40 Thus, she

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attempted to subsume the Soviet position without refuting it—a potentially more effective tactic than the one used in her first address. The high point of this speech compared the KAL incident to the one in which a Soviet submarine had strayed into Swedish territorial waters. Pointing out the double standard applied by the Soviet government, Kirkpatrick commented disparagingly According to [its] unique interpretation of international law, if a Soviet warship—a warship, mind you—invades the territorial waters of another state, that state cannot even detain the warship but must simply escort it out of its territorial waters. But if a civilian airliner with 269 people aboard happens to stray into Soviet airspace, the Soviet Union is justified in shooting it down, even as it is about to exit that airspace. (16, emphasis added)

In this address, Kirkpatrick returned to the exhortative style exhibited in earlier US discourse. She attempted to persuade through indirection and inference, passing over the facts: Soviet warships invade, civilian airliners stray. The speech transcended such niggling questions as cannon bursts and reconnaissance planes, evoking instead the fundamental truths of the American West: good guys and bad guys, guilt and retribution.41 Was she able to recoup the advantage lost by the United States in the miasma of explanations and revelations that followed the initial disclosure of the destruction of KAL 007 and the 269 people aboard? Only history can answer that question. In the short term, however, response to the US request for worldwide action against the Soviet Union was spotty at best. The United States was able to take only limited action itself, in spite of the strong language used by government officials to denounce the Soviet Union. And, certainly, the United States was not able to achieve the resounding condemnation of the Soviet Union that it sought. Even in the Security Council, the United States barely succeeded in gaining a majority vote for its watered-down resolution. Furthermore, there remain in the minds of many, both in the United States and abroad, serious questions about a possible US role, whether passive or active, in the tragedy. And (because the black box was not found) the unanswered questions about Flight 007—why it was off course, whether the crew was aware of their location or of the interception—will probably never be resolved.

KAL 007 and the Superpowers

CONCLUSIONS These two weeks of international jousting provide a fascinating picture of governments reacting to an extraordinary rhetorical situation. US officials approached the conflict with confidence and seized the opportunity presented by what they perceived as a clear moral imperative to make a political statement to the world. At last the Soviets had committed an act for which there was no provocation, no possible justification! Their true nature could be made clear; the political and military position of the United States could regain some of its former luster. In vivid terms, using concrete images, American officials exhorted not only their domestic constituency but the entire world to join in condemnation of the Soviet barbarians. That the United States counted on universal revulsion to produce belief in the bankruptcy of the Soviet position is obvious: no traditional arguments were made, only indignant pronouncements; other than the tape, no evidence was presented. The United States relied on the fact of the shootdown, the callous manner in which it occurred and was denied, and the dramatic loss of life to produce the necessary belief. Exhortation requires public authorization of the emotions it evokes, for it depends upon “weighted facts” (72: 84),42 which in turn depend on public knowledge to authorize those weightings. Without this engagement, the necessary emotions will not be elicited, belief will not follow, and the exhortation will fail. At this level, US strategy was a qualified success, for it drew on the accumulated wisdom of our time. Since World War II, the United States and its allies have viewed the Soviet Union as the ultimate enemy. Additionally, in a mobile world where air travel has become commonplace, fear of flying lies very near the surface of our collective consciousness. It is surely a truism that, as Kirkpatrick stated, “international air travel depends on networks of mutual trust that we will not shoot down one another’s airliners” (10), or, as Shultz put it, “we can see no explanation whatever for shooting down an unarmed commercial airliner, no matter whether it’s in your airspace or not.” (2) Without doubt, these two statements captured the sentiments of most of the people in this country, if not the world. But the strategy was basically flawed, in part because the United States never resolved the dichotomy between political expedience and national security. At critical junctures, the government failed to provide sufficient

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clarification of intelligence capabilities; as a result, the public was misled. Later attempts to correct misappre­hensions had the effect of undermining the American case. In short, the United States handed the Soviet government a scenario of reasonable doubt. Failure to stress at the very outset that monitoring of the Soviet forces was not carried out in real time crippled all subsequent efforts to correct public perceptions. When it became known that an American reconnaissance aircraft, an RC-135, had been patrolling off the coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula, the White House rushed to provide details. The United States also claimed to have recorded Soviet radar data that would confirm the flight path of the RC-135 (thus blatantly compromising the security of our intelligence capabilities in this regard), but refused to release this information when the Soviets alleged that the reconnaissance plane had flown a “double loop” in order to rendezvous with KAL 007. This refusal led many to believe the Soviet version. So, having judged early in the campaign that security interests must be sacrificed for political gain, the United States ended up squandering both.43 At other times (particularly with regard to the transcript errors and to initial revelations concerning the RC-135), the Reagan administration would have better served its own rhetorical purpose had it downplayed the details and not provided even more previously secret information. These disclosures further confused an already perplexing situation, and each new revelation gave the USSR a new argument. From a theoretical perspective what had transpired was a rapidly shifting context. In a crisis atmosphere, the public relies on its accumulated knowledge to define the situation, to put it into comprehensible terms, to determine the most appropriate reaction—to create, as it were, the rhetorical situation in which the rhetor is expected to respond. As soon as the rhetor does respond, however, the elements become interactive. Using text (discourse), the rhetor not only informs, but also establishes the context in which the event should be evaluated. Bitzer extends the interactive nature of this process to include the relationship between the “fitting response” and the situation that determines what such a response must be. (71: 256) The reaction of the rhetor is, to some extent, constrained by the parameters of the situation, unless the context can be redefined. (82: 27) In clear cases of crisis, the context—and, hence, the reaction—is less ambiguous. As examples, consider Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy Assassination, the Cuban Missile Crisis. In

KAL 007 and the Superpowers

each instance, the stability and security of the nation were threatened. When national interests are not so directly involved, however, the context is more dubious and conflicting perceptions may weaken the parameters of the rhetorical situation. In these instances, the public seeks additional guidance. A situation such as the downing of KAL 007 can be handled in a number of ways; the Reagan administration elected to treat it as an international crisis, as a means of exposing the negative side of the Soviet system.44 Based on his dichotomous view of the world, on his perception of the USSR as evil incarnate, Reagan attempted to establish a context in which the nations of the world could join in a groundswell of condemnation of the Soviet Union, isolating that country from the community of civilized nations.45 Thus, the people of the United States—and the world—were urged to view this tragedy as an unprovoked act of wanton murder committed by a government that places no value on human life. The scene played well, given public expectations and the information available. One feature of a crisis atmosphere, however, is the demand for further information; and that spelled the downfall of the Reagan administration’s morality play. For information also redefines context, and as each new datum entered the public consciousness, the contextual delineation provided by the United States slipped further away. The situation was complicated, of course, by multiple texts delivered by multiple rhetors: the revelations by Congressman Wright, the hedging by Larry Speakes, the stories appearing daily in the press and on television turned a clear-cut victory into confusion. While the price was probably greater in terms of world opinion than at home, the Administration never regained the offensive. Momentum had shifted. The difficulties were twofold. First, the administration failed to account for the impact its subsequent revelations (or lack thereof) would have on public perceptions. Once such information entered the public consciousness, it assumed the status of pre-knowledge, and it had to be taken into account. Not surprisingly, a majority of Americans felt the government was withholding information about KAL 007.46 To a great extent, this was undoubtedly justified for national security purposes, but public knowledge that the US government routinely deceives its citizens certainly contributed to growing doubts about US complicity in this particular instance.

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At every opportunity to halt the shifting context and ebbing public belief, the US government made the inappropriate choice: revealing discordant information, failing to reveal data that could have repudiated competing claims on public acceptance. At the same time, the very success of the Reagan administration’s exhortations against the Soviet Union contributed to the eventual erosion of the US position. On the one hand, the United States was so confident, so righteous, so indignant, it seemed the case against the USSR was unassailable. The level of rhetoric was so elevated that it could not tolerate even minimal slippage. As the contradictions and corrections began to mount, American rhetoric began to sound like bombast. On the other hand, while the US government repeatedly asked for an explanation from the Soviet Union, it was clear that no explanation would suffice. Indeed, the possibility of explanation was dismissed, almost from the beginning. As Windt (466) pointed out in another context, “[H]ow can reasonable discussion proceed when one group claims to have truth, righteousness, and authority on its side while portraying its opponents as irrational, wrong, and illegitimate?” Upon examining the language used by Reagan, Kirkpatrick, and Lichenstein, one is reminded of the dictum expressed by Ogden and Richards: “Words are so powerful … that by the excitement which they provoke through the emotive force, discussion is for the most part rendered sterile.”47 The accusatory tone adopted by Reagan from the very beginning of the crisis precluded any explanation, mutual truth-seeking, or negotiation. When the President labelled the Soviets “uncivilized” and “barbarians,” he was limiting the choices of his audience and coercing them into choosing between the USSR and civilized behavior.48 The exhortative nature of Administration rhetoric removed it from the realm of persuasion and argumentation. As Balthrop (57: 246) explains, argument “presumes the possibility for arriving at a shared perception of reality. That is, some motivation exists on the part of each participant to want to understand, to arrive at some meaning about the experience, act, or situation that makes sense to those involved.” By emphasizing that the United States did not know all the answers, Shultz initially left open the door to meaningful dialogue with the Soviets, but the President soon eliminated any possibility in that regard. The carefully preserved options apparent in Shultz’s initial statement were rapidly eroded. At every step of the way there seemed to be no coordination of the flow of information, no agreement among military, diplomatic, and

KAL 007 and the Superpowers

White House personnel regarding a concerted, unified plan of action, and no well-defined goals beyond embarrassing the Soviet Union. Not surprisingly, the USSR responded to the coercive elements in Reagan’s ideological rhetoric, rather than to the persuasive stance exhibited by Shultz in his initial statement. For as Burgess (91: 125–126) commented, “ultimately, the more clearly advocates perceive threats to their moral world and the more openly they are attacked by voices from an alien world, then the narrower are their options for strategic choice and invention, resulting in a striking lack of adaptability within rhetorics that can prevent resolution of conflict between rhetorics.”49 The Soviet Union, for its part, started out bereft of a reasoned position, reacting to foreign reaction, and initially giving little heed, as usual, to domestic considerations. Although the USSR lost much credibility with Western pacifists, it was able to prey upon US blunders with sufficient effect to negate the worst-case impact its actions might have had upon Third World opinion. What is fascinating about the Soviet situation, however, is the extent to which justifying its actions at home assumed such uncharacteristic importance for Soviet strategists. The Soviet government, too, was exhorting its citizens to adhere to its emerging interpretation of the event. The recollections of other American misdeeds, the visions of World War II, the Ogarkov press conference, all were intended to evoke the weighted facts of classic exhortation. One major difference between the US and Soviet campaigns was that the “evidence,” it seemed, had begun to support the Soviet version. As we have noted, the Soviet Union has an official public knowledge, derived from government control of information, which is distinct from the culturally based public knowledge described by Bitzer. On one level, Soviet citizens know only what the state tells them: seldom have official government statements taken unofficial public knowledge into account. The destruction of KAL 007 introduced an anomaly into the Soviet system. Unlike many issues separating the United States and the Soviet Union, this event, at least at first, was factual, not interpretive: interceptor pilots had shot down a civilian airliner with 269 persons aboard. No amount of temporizing could change that. So, officials of the USSR had to confront an unusual situation: they had to accommodate an unofficial, pluralistic public consciousness; they had to combat the factual information their citizens were receiving from the West, primarily through the transnational broadcasting efforts of the United States, Great Britain, and

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West Germany. Indeed, this concern may account for the development of the tactic of quoting US news media—as a means of discrediting Western sources. The result was a rare campaign to win the hearts and minds of the Soviet people, with the government of the USSR attempting to meld both official and unofficial public knowledge in order to gain assent. Public knowledge in the Soviet Union is in transition. Undoubtedly, the initial silence of the Soviet government on the destruction of the airliner contributed to a perception of the need for a policy reassessment: for two days, the only information the Soviet public received about the shootdown came from the West. Under normal circumstances, actions vis-à-vis other govern­ments are largely irrelevant in a monistic society such as the USSR. But the public response of the Soviet government to KAL 007 provided the West with a first glimpse of important modifications. Significantly, recent Soviet news coverage of events in Afghanistan and the nuclear power accident at Chernobyl has demonstrated a continuation of the trend, which augurs well for the future, if only because it denotes that at some level, perhaps, the leadership within the Soviet Union has come to understand that it must account for its deeds and cannot act with total impunity. Nevertheless, in the wake of the KAL tragedy, the rhetoric of both governments could best be characterized as arational. The United States abandoned rationality in order to win a moral victory over its greatest enemy; the USSR responded in kind because its ideology, coupled with the nature of the verbal attack against its action, severely limited the available rhetorical options. Communicating across cultures in a crisis situation is complicated enough, but the abandonment of rationality only exacerbates the difficulty. (58: 350) Clearly, this was the situation in the aftermath of the destruction of the Korean airliner. While it is occasionally true that the rhetoric of outrage is merely a veneer, overlaid on meaningful negotiation for the benefit of a specific audience, that does not seem to have been the case in this instance. Certainly, Shultz left open the door for such a circumstance, but it was quickly closed—a fact that ultimately was as much the fault of Soviet intransigence as of American selfrighteousness. The ultimate irony may be this: the more each government strove to control the flow of information, the more each lost control of the situation. As a result, neither succeeded in retaining the unquestioning assent of the publics most critical to its immediate interests.

KAL 007 and the Superpowers

NOTES 1. The Washington Post, September 2, 1983. Hoffman was covering the President in Santa Barbara and filed his report September 1. 2. See 344: Chapter 8. 3. For a discussion of the influence of world view on rhetorical conventions, see 227 and 142, cited therein. 4. See, for example, Tom Shales, The Washington Post, September 2, 1983, and David Hoffman, The Washington Post, September 2, 1983. 5. Hoffman, The Washington Post, September 2, 1983. 6. Steven Weisman, The New York Times, September 2, 1983. Weisman was also covering the President’s stay in Santa Barbara. 7. David Hoffman and John M. Goshko, The Washington Post, September 3, 1983. 8. See, for instance, the comments of: Undersecretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, quoted by Hoffman and Goshko, The Washington Post, September 3, 1983; Senator Howard Baker, quoted in a wire service compilation, The Washington Post, September 2, 1983; and The Washington Post, September 2, 1983. 9. Henceforth, parenthetical page citations within the text will refer to this document. 10. Michael Getler, The Washington Post, September 2, 1983. Getler wrote these words on September 1. Evidently, everyone in the administration except presidential advisers Meese and Clark was taking this situation quite seriously. 11. Douglas Feaver, The Washington Post, September 2, 1983. In a 1986 interview, Feaver confirmed that this was his impression at the time and that he had seen no information which would cause him to alter his opinion. See also (290: 29). 12. Feaver, The Washington Post, September 2, 1983. Again, Feaver wrote this article on September 1. 13. Getler, The Washington Post, September 2, 1983; David Shribman, The New York Times, September 2, 1983. See also: Bernard Gwertzman, The New York Times, September 2, 1983. 14. It has been claimed, for instance, that Shultz participated in a conference call very shortly after KAL 007 went down in the Sea of Japan. (395) For a compilation of material used by conspiracy theorists to justify their argument that the Korean airliner was on a reconnaissance mission planned and executed by the United States, see (235) and (356). 15. For a discussion of the legal issues involved, see (194). 16. This was the first official reference to a 1978 incident involving another Korean Air Lines flight, KAL 902. 17. Seymour Hersh (201: 84–86) contends that Reagan administration officials knew very early that the Soviets did not realize the aircraft was civilian. This assessment was confirmed recently when Congressman Lee Hamilton released declassified correspondence. (432: 1) 18. Parenthetical page citations in the text at this point refer only to the Speakes press briefing, not to the compilation of administration statements cited above. 19. The words “eight minutes” refer to the fighter pilot tape, which was voice activated, thus eliminating silent periods during the forty-nine-minute interception. 20. See: Richard Halloran, The New York Times, September 6, 1983. This was one of many indications that US military intelligence had monitored Soviet radar operators in the Kamchatka area.

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Part One: KAL and Cracks in the Rhetorical Wall 21. The base for this plane is on Shemya Island in the Aleutians, which is technically in Alaska; most people, upon hearing such a statement, would probably have thought the reference was to a place like Anchorage. See (397). 22. News of the RC-135 was dutifully broadcast in English by the Voice of America at 7:00 p.m. EDT. VOA’s news stories are translated by the various language sections for broadcast in the vernacular. According to Natalie Clarkson, Chief of the Russian Division at VOA, the Russian news broadcast never lags more than three hours behind the English version. 23. The Soviet propaganda organization has been described by Jameson. (225: 25–27). 24. This citation in Pravda incorporated the first appearance of the term “spy plane” in Soviet commentary. 25. This was the first mention of satellite involvement. Although the concept was discarded for quite a while, a major story in Pravda subsequently highlighted this allegation. See: Marshal aviatsii P. Kirsanov, “Fakty izoblichaiut Vashington” [The facts expose Washington], Pravda, September 20, 1983, 4. 26. This and other citations from Soviet radio and TV broadcasts were translated from Russian language materials graciously provided by Jon Lodeesen, director of US operations for RFE/RL. 27. Both sides attempted to create misimpressions concerning the whereabouts of the reconnaissance plane. See note 29. 28. The New York Times, September 6, 1983. During the period September 2–5, Pravda had published only six items relating in some fashion to KAL. During the period September 6–9, however, Pravda averaged five items per day. The figures for other Soviet newspapers are comparable. 29. According to Philip Taubman, The New York Times, September 3, 1983, US information that the RC-135 had never flown within seventy-five miles of KAL 007 came from analysis of Soviet radar activity. The United States never released this evidence, which, if correct, could have totally negated the effect of the Soviet counter-attack and salvaged the Third World vote in the UN on September 12. 30. One might note a similarity of tactics employed by the United States and the USSR: both governments are inclined to recite a catechism of transgressions committed by the other. 31. Further parenthetical page references refer to this document. On the issue of defense spending, Pravda (September 9, 1983, 5) again quoted The New York Times: “Many analysts expect that Reagan will use the KAL incident to achieve passage of his requests to Congress for greater military appropriations for such programs as the MX missile.” 32. Bernard D. Nossiter, The New York Times, September 7, 1983. See also (242: 191–198, et seq.). 33. At the same time, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Burt was retreating somewhat from the official American position that the Soviets knew KAL 007 was a civilian aircraft: “We are convinced that aircraft was a commercial airliner and there was a very good chance the Soviet Union fully understood that when they shot it and destroyed it” [emphasis added]. See (467). 34. Zarefsky found this to be a common thread in conspiracy arguments. He suggested that “successful conspiracy arguments shift the burden of proof to one’s opponent while minimizing one’s own burdens.” (494: 73)

KAL 007 and the Superpowers 35. This statement was read on Vremia, the mid-evening TV news program (9:00 p.m. Moscow Summer Time—early afternoon in New York). 36. This statement was made by Lawrence Eagleburger, September 6, 1983. 37. As Rohmer commented in genuine disbelief, “It was astonishingly incongruous that, although the Soviet Union had shot down the 747 and killed 269 people, the United States should be on the defensive.” (384: 172) 38. Also completely eclipsed was the demonstrable claim that, even today, there is no indication that any other accepted interception procedures were employed by the Soviet fighters prior to firing the missiles. See (279). 39. See (127: 12). Toward the end of the September 9 press conference, Soviet First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs G. M. Kornienko did make a disparaging comment about the authenticity of the tapes. See also (429). 40. Published estimates have ranged from thirty seconds to two minutes. In any event, it was close enough to “escaping” Soviet territory that, on the map utilized by Ogarkov to demonstrate the alleged path of KAL 007 and the US RC-135, the time of the shootdown is claimed as 18:24 GMT, two minutes earlier than that noted in the US transcript for the statement: “I have executed the launch. The target is destroyed.” This was done to ensure that, in the Soviet version at least, KAL was indisputably flying over Soviet territory—hence still an “intruder”—when fired upon; this was a curious move, since no serious allegation disputing the whereabouts of the airliner was ever raised. It is important to remember that a jetliner at cruising speed would require only about eight or nine minutes to completely cross Sakhalin Island. 41. Zarefsky (494: 73) also suggested that, in making a conspiracy argument, inference is more persuasive than evidence. While Kirkpatrick was not arguing for a conspiracy, the strategy was effective in this instance. 42. See also (254: 186). 43. Admiral Stansfield Turner, former CIA director, said, “I was shocked by the amount of detail that the secretary of state gave this morning. … The secretary discussed these techniques in greater detail than I’ve ever heard before in public and certainly gave the Soviets a clear readout on just what those capabilities are in this particular area of the world.” And Admiral Bobby Inman, former NSA Director, noted, “[Y]ou always cringe when sources and methods are being exposed. But there are situations that are of sufficient gravity that those who have the authority to declassify, the principal officers of government, make the decision to do so.” (35: 8) 44. For a comparison of differing presidential treatments of crises, see (368: 194–203). 45. For a discussion of Reagan’s worldview, as expressed in his speeches, see (149; 426; and 128). 46. ABC NEWS/The Washington Post poll. (37) Question 33—“Do you think the Reagan administration has told the public all it should know about the Korean plane incident or do you think the administration is holding back important information?”—elicited these responses: 1) Told the public all it should know—32%; 2) Holding back information—59%; 3) No opinion—9%. 47. Quoted in (43). 48. Andrews (43: 10) defined coercive rhetoric as discourse that limits the viable alternatives available to receivers of communication. 49. See also (58: 350).

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CHAPTER 3

The KAL Tapes Marilyn J. Young and Michael K. Launer Provenance: Originally published as Chapter 4 in Flights of Fancy, Flight of Doom: KAL 007 and Soviet-American Rhetoric. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988. An earlier version of this chapter was presented in 1985 at the Communication Association of the Pacific—Japan conference in Tokyo. Copyright Holder: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, used by permission Description: The primary evidence adduced by the US government in addressing the KAL disaster was the English language transcript of a tape recording containing the Russian language statements by the pilot of the Soviet SU-15 fighter jet that shot down the airliner—the “air-to-ground” tape. Among all those who have studied this issue, we are the only ones to analyze both the Russian and English tape transcripts.

[I]t is imperative to secure original materials. … Otherwise accepted historical “facts” may turn out to be traps for the unwary. —Carey Joynt and Percy Corbett (240)

I

n levelling the charge of murder against the Soviet Union, US officials described a two-and-one-half-hour period of actions in the air and on the ground. References were made to “reflected Soviet radar data” and flight dispatcher messages both on Kamchatka Peninsula and Sakhalin Island. American representatives alluded to other intelligence intercepts (apparently from locations in and around Moscow, or near the Soviet border with China, where Beijing has allowed the Americans to install listening posts) that shed further light on the deliberative procedures within the Soviet military command structure. But the only evidence actually released was a tape recording of the Soviet pilots—particularly one identified as 805—who participated in the

The KAL Tapes

final interception over Sakhalin that concluded with the destruction of KAL 007. The pilots spoke in Russian, of course, which was an unfortunate circumstance for Western commentators—governmental and private—who rushed to analyze Soviet actions on the basis of the tape recording’s presumed contents. Most of the published commentary based on this tape has been hopelessly muddled. As a prelude to discussions of both the Soviet propaganda campaign and the claims of Western conspiratists, we undertake in this chapter to provide an accurate recitation of the meaning of the Russian, comments regarding the accuracy of the two authorized translations1 that have been distributed, and an assessment of the manner in which the facts of the intercept—as recorded by Japanese military intelligence—have been distorted. Such distortion, we suspect, was both witting (when promulgated by the Soviet Union) and unwitting (when highly speculative and overly imaginative interpretations have been proffered in the writings of the conspiratists). An ancillary issue, which will be addressed more directly in later chapters, is the whole matter of factual accuracy. In the empirical studies that follow, we propose three avenues of criticism of both the propagandist and the conspiratist 1. structure of discourse—to expose the rhetor’s Weltanschauung; 2. techniques of argumentation—to situate rhetorical examples along a persuasion/coercion axis; 3. factual accuracy and relevance—to judge the evidentiary value of the data adduced in support of arguments.2 Factual accuracy may seem at first glance to be a shallow notion, but it can play a significant role whenever the rhetorical topic involves complex scientific or technical subjects such as arms control, AIDS, Chernobyl, or KAL. The simple truth is that in its domestic propaganda the Soviet Union places little or no value on factual accuracy as that term is understood in the West.3 Perhaps it is just ethnocentric bias, but Americans do not seem shocked by such a state of affairs, nor, accordingly, is much credence placed in Soviet pronouncements. An altogether different relationship obtains, however, between the Western citizen (at least, the American variety thereof) and the “free” Western press (at least, the English speaking and writing media). The

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difference is a presumption of accurate reporting, regardless of political, social, or philosophical bias; indeed, responsible Western journalism is expected to announce its bias beforehand. Even when the media are severely criticized, at issue is the editorial selection of stories and facts, or (it is claimed) the slanted viewpoint that colors analysis and interpretation. It is well known that the set of all factual information that might be adduced in public argument is never presented by any single rhetor, who purposely selects for use in the framing of arguments that subset of facts deemed to be most persuasive. Nevertheless, one can reasonably expect the facts so chosen to be “true facts.” Thus, it is a salient and damning critique to say someone has gotten the facts wrong. Technological or specialized topics pose unique problems for the average information consumer. One is almost tempted to draw an analogy to the Soviet counterpart in that there are few, if any, means of independent corroboration available to a reader. Of necessity, on technical issues at least, the reader grants the writer an ethos of expertise conferred by the very fact of publication. As we shall see, the writer must stray a long way before confronting the danger of forfeiting that ethos.4 Some questions are quite basic: Is it proper to “win” a public argument with bad evidence? Further, is it not an effective form of analysis to challenge the accuracy or the relevance of data adduced as evidence? This is certainly an accepted method of criticism in other fields, such as history and the precise sciences. There are those, of course, who would reject such a criterion, arguing that only effects are the legitimate objects of rhetorical criticism. But we would counter that such is the case only when, in Fisher’s words, the rhetor is “being reasonable,” when the rhetoric is “non-manipulative, bilateral, deliberative, and attentive to data.” (165: 117) The underlying assumption made by Fisher is one of good will on the part of rhetorical opponents. Such rhetors will have employed special knowledge of the issues, both procedural and evaluative, that they apply in the given case; they will have informed themselves of relevant data, assessed the arguments that can be made for and against the decision, weighed the values that impinge on the matter, and decided to adopt a position that satisfies the tests of coherence and fidelity. In advocating their position, they will exhibit reasonableness. (165: 118–119)

The KAL Tapes

Fisher admits, however, that “in autocratic communities and societies … the nature and rules of ‘coherence’ and the limits of ‘fidelity’ are circumscribed.” (165: 121) The conspiratists who converged on the KAL disaster do not, by and large, meet rigorous tests of accuracy or evidentiary validity. This is a serious charge, we realize, one that must itself be supported rigorously. To begin with, none of the important KAL conspiratists has a technical or linguistic background, although their arguments rely heavily on technical and linguistic evidence. Oliver Clubb (115), R. W. Johnson (234; 235), and Sugwon Kang (244; 279) are all political scientists; David Pearson (355; 356; 357) is a graduate student in sociology; P. Q. Mann (45) is an advertising executive. None of these individuals knows Russian. (Among all the KAL investigators only Alexander Dallin [127] is a Sovietologist.) This is not necessarily debilitating, if knowledgeable consultants are utilized. Unfortunately, critics with specific technical expertise have castigated the level of such expertise evidenced in the writings of the conspiratists. In a discussion of Johnson’s Shootdown (235), Philip Klass has said, “I’ve never read a book so filled with errors.” A Navy specialist who participated in the search for the airliner’s black box told us that Johnson’s description of the recovery attempt relies on simplification and “halftruths.”5 Of David Pearson, James Oberg has written Pearson delivers an avalanche of technical and military terminology which gives a good appearance of true expertise. But … [he] repeatedly makes the most elementary technical errors in his evident eagerness to appear to prove his … case. (343)6

Oberg also authored a rejoinder that was printed by Defence Attaché after Korean Air Lines sued the magazine for publishing the P. Q. Mann article. He wrote: “I believe that careful, precise analysis can show that neither of [Mann’s pivotal] claims has any validity.” (342: 37) Australian journalist Murray Sayle has described one claim made in The Nation as “another technological illiteracy.” (397: 51)7 And Frederic Golden, science editor of Time, offered the following pithy summary: “If the conspiracy theorists want to be believed, they will have to do better than rely on flat-earth physics.”8 One aspect of the KAL story in which the present authors claim expertise is the analysis and explication of the tape transcript that records

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the comments of Soviet fighter pilots during the forty-nine-minute interception, the so-called air-to-ground tape.9 Speculation surrounding a US role in the tragedy has led to numerous attempts to substantiate the basic Soviet position—the spy plane theory—charging the United States with complicity and a reckless disregard for human life. Central to all such theories is the extent to which the Soviet version is believable. Since they have released virtually no data about the events of August 31–September 1, 1983, the best available data are contained in the KAL Tapes. In this discussion, we will address the various claims for which linguistic data are adduced. The primary issues concerning these tapes are listed below. 1. How accurate are the two authorized translations? 2. What do the original Russian tapes reveal about: a. KAL 007’s external lights; b. Soviet attempts to contact KAL 007 by radio on the 121.5 MHz emergency (Mayday) frequency; c. Soviet attempts to attract KAL 007’s attention by firing warning shots? 3. Based on the above information, did the Soviet fighters follow accepted ICAO procedures in attempting a non-lethal interception of the Korean jetliner? In fact, almost none of the Soviet account is substantiated in the Russian transcript (nor in the English translations, for that matter). Before analyzing the evidence of the air-to-ground transcripts, however, mention should be made of a critical limitation of all transcripts: by reducing speech sound to graphemes, a transcript eliminates meaningful signals such as inflection, loudness, and tone, thereby creating a truly mediated communication. In a crisis situation or, later, in the hands of an imaginative writer, the ambiguity generated by the loss of these suprasegmental meaning elements can lead to incorrect interpretation of data. Hersh described the problem as it relates to the KAL Tapes “Those of us in the SIGINT [signals intelligence] business know how fragile SIGINT is,” one officer explained. “You’ve got to listen to (the tape) carefully and go over translations.” One example of misunderstanding, cited later by a number of intelligence officers, revolved around the phrase, “The target is destroyed.” The SU-15 interceptor pilot was overheard making that statement—widely

The KAL Tapes

depicted as a cry of triumph—at the moment his missile impacted. … To a communications expert, “The target is destroyed” means that an enemy interception—whether real or simulated—has been brought to a successful end. “We hear it twenty times a day in training,” one Electronic Security Command officer explained. … “[T]he SU-15 pilot may indeed have been exultant when his missile struck the aircraft, but concluding as much because he said ‘The target is destroyed’ is based on faulty and incomplete knowledge.” (201: 75)10

Johnson committed a major blunder by failing to heed the SIGINT officer’s warning to listen to the tape (or have someone who understands Russian listen to the tape for him). Early in his analysis, Johnson juxtaposed transcripts of two interchanges: KAL talking to Tokyo air traffic control and SU-15 reporting to its dispatcher. (235: 22–24) At 18:23:05 the Soviet pilot requests, “Say again.” Johnson speculates that the Soviet flight dispatcher has relayed KAL 007’s АТС status report to the SU-15 pilot, who supposedly manifests utter disbelief. This makes for very good drama, but it is pure fiction. The actual Russian tape recording does not support this interpretation. What can be heard from the pilot is a routine, unemotional request that a command be repeated, one of six such instances during the interception. Given the manner in which these transcripts were to be utilized, it is doubly unfortunate that the two authorized translations do not always agree. Some of the differences are trivial, such as the fact that the ICAO version does not include a translation of the expletive “Elki-palki,” which the US version translates as “Fiddlesticks!”11 A more significant difference is the fact that the ICAO does not mention cannon fire from the interceptor, whereas the revised US version contains this passage 18:20:4912 US

Daiu ocheredi iz pushek. I am firing cannon bursts.13

On the whole, the US translation accords quite well with the Russian text that has been released. There are several instances, however, where the US version randomly interchanges the noun “target” and the pronoun “it” (without reference to the actual Russian) when the Soviet pilots mention the Korean jetliner. The ICAO translation is more consistent in this regard.

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One of these instances occurred in the translation of an important passage—one that has fueled a totally unfounded controversy regarding whether or not KAL 007’s air navigation lights (called ANOs after the Russian term) were lit throughout its flight or off, as the Soviet government contends. In the disputed passage, the Soviet pilot says 18:10:51 A ponial. Ona s migalkoi idet, s migalkoi. MKL Roger. She [it] is flying with [its] flasher [on], with [its] flasher [on]. U.S. Roger. (The target’s strobe) light is blinking. ICAO Roger. Target is flying with strobe light. With strobe light.14

Kang (244) and R. W. Johnson (235) both claim that it is impossible to tell which aircraft is being described as flying with lights on—KAL 007 itself, the SU-15 that destroyed the jetliner, or another Soviet aircraft— and castigate the American position expressed at the UN by Ambassador Kirkpatrick.15 Pearson, discussing Soviet confusion when they had scrambled interceptors two hours earlier over Kamchatka Peninsula, makes the following statement If K.A.L. 007 was flying with its air navigation lights (ANOs) on at that time, the Soviet fighters should have seen it in the clear sky at 33,000 feet from as little as twenty miles away. That they did not suggests the airliner’s ANOs were not on. (355: 118)

Based on this misapprehension, Pearson incorrectly interprets the Soviet pilot to be saying later (over Sakhalin in this 18:10:51 passage) that he has turned on his own lights as the first step in the intercept procedure. Both Kang and Johnson agree with David Pearson’s contention. Linguistic evidence proves that these claims are wrong. There can be no doubt: the Soviet fighter pilot clearly states that the Korean airliner had its running lights on. When referring to KAL 007, all four Soviet pilots consistently use the feminine pronoun ona (she/it) because the Russian word tsel′ (target) is grammatically feminine. By way of contrast, when referring to their aircraft or to one another, the Soviet pilots always use grammatically masculine forms, including the pronoun on (he/it). Such masculine forms occur no fewer than nineteen times during the fifty minutes of taped

The KAL Tapes

comments. Thus, there is no question that in using ona, the Soviet pilot was referring to KAL 007 and not to himself or any other Soviet plane. Accordingly, Pearson’s conclusion that the Soviet pilot first observed the target’s ANOs at 18:21:35 (a full eleven minutes later, and only five minutes before the airliner was destroyed) is wrong.16 But since he never checked the Russian,17 he cannot tell this. Therefore, his subsequent conclusion also is a total misrepresentation It appears the pilot of K.A.L. 007, realizing he was being intercepted, turned on his lights as a signal that he would comply with the instructions of the [Soviet fighter]. (355: 120)

Because he is wrong here, Pearson provides no evidence in this article that the KAL pilot knew he was being intercepted and, consequently, no reason to believe that he took evasive action except the word of the Soviet government. The Soviets have continuously asserted that the airliner was running without lights, but that is a patent lie. Quite the opposite interpretation is supported by the ICAO REPORT itself The information in the USSR preliminary report states that the aircraft lights were “off.” This contradicted the monitored air-to-ground communications. (429: 43)

Among all the carefully worded and nonjudgmental statements in the ICAO REPORT, this flat assertion of Soviet duplicity stands out. The Soviet government also has claimed that its fighters attempted to contact KAL 007 by radio, as part of careful attempts at nonlethal interception, both over Kamchatka and Sakhalin. The air-to-ground tape does not cover the Kamchatka interception;18 it does, however, provide testimony regarding the Sakhalin interception. The two authorized translations disagree on one line in a manner that the conspiratists have utilized to advantage 18:13:26 US ICAO

A tsel′ na zapros ne otvechaet. The target isn’t responding to IFF.19 The target isn’t responding to the call.

Pearson does not investigate possible reasons for this disagreement in order to develop a basis for selecting one version over the other; rather, he

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only speculates (355: 120) what “facts” might be inferred assuming first that the US translation is correct and then assuming that the ICAO translation is correct. But zapros has the technical meaning “radar interrogation utilizing a transponder” (zaproschik-otvetchik), that is, an IFF radar inquiry. In the context of a fighter pilot talking to his ground controller about a potential enemy aircraft, this is certainly the most likely meaning of zapros.20 Taken out of context, of course, the Russian statement is potentially ambiguous. Zapros has a colloquial meaning of verbal inquiry, and there is a slight possibility the pilot might have used the word in that sense. This ambiguity is heightened by the transcript at 18:17:49 and 18:17:58, where two different verbs are used in the specific context of voice inquiry. One of these verbs (zaprashivat′) is morphologically related to zapros and zaproschik; the other verb is sprashivat′. Still, given the actual situation, there is virtually no chance (in our judgment and that of a professional translator with over two decades of military intelligence experience) that the pilot’s intended meaning was anything other than IFF. Indeed, as early as 1963, in the First Supplement to AGARD Aeronautical Multilingual Dictionary, published by Pergamon Press “for and on the behalf of ADVISORY GROUP FOR AERONAUTICAL RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT/ NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY ORGANIZATION,” one finds the following entry interrogation, noun, radar. The act of sending forth radar pulses to trigger a transponder and receive answering signals; the radar pulses so sent. Also called a “challenge.” (116)

Alongside the French, German, Spanish, Greek, Italian, Dutch, and Turkish equivalents, one finds zapros listed for Russian. The 1980 edition of this manual contains the following definition interrogation. In an SSR or IFF system, the act of transmitting a signal to the target or object to be interrogated. (245)

What, then, is one to make of Kang’s assertion that “the problem with Mrs. Kirkpatrick’s analysis is that the Soviet pilot never said anything of the sort”—meaning “The target isn’t responding to IFF”—or, further

The KAL Tapes

Could it be that the pilot was referring to some radio message he had attempted, without success, on the emergency frequency? All we know for certain is that he did not say “IFF” in his report to ground control. (244: 36–37)

Given the facts as we have outlined them, it is clear that this is an unsupportable statement. In lieu of analysis, however, Kang (244: 36–37) implies, not for the first time, that CIA involvement in handling the KAL Tapes has tainted their evidentiary value. Johnson does likewise It is known that before the tapes were handed over to Charles Wick’s USIA (and thence to Mrs Kirkpatrick) their actual translation was effected by the CIA and it seems not impossible, to put it mildly, that there was an element of positive disinformation involved in the transcript so theatrically produced at the UN. (235: 166)

We should point out that many US officials (particularly the UN ambassadors Lichenstein and Kirkpatrick) had uttered vigorous protestations that the tape contains no indication the SU-15 pilot attempted to make voice contact with KAL 007. But any such attempt would of necessity not be reflected there, since the Soviet pilot would be required to transmit on 121.5 MHz, the international hailing frequency: the intercepted conversations, of course, took place on another frequency. Nevertheless, given the nature of the conversations, some subsequent reference to a call would have been heard on the air-to-ground frequency. It seems clear, then, that no verbal call was made and that it is not true Soviet personnel employed the 121.5 MHz channel.21 Another issue that sparked controversy between the superpowers was the Soviet claim that the crew of KAL 007 had ignored numerous, almost constant Soviet attempts to signal it in the air. A critical factor in the argument is evaluation of the cannon bursts fired by Major Kas′min, pilot of the SU-15 (#805) that destroyed the Korean jetliner. The Soviet government said the cannon bursts were warning shots, containing visible tracer rounds, that constituted the last attempt to signal 007 after the jetliner had ignored wing-waggling (pokachivanie s kryla na krylo) and the flashing of lights.22 It was further claimed by Ogarkov that the tracer shells were “clearly seen by the second pilot, … who during that period, at that moment, reported to the command

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post that he observed the four bursts of tracer shells along the path of the intruder aircraft.” These claims are refuted by the transcripts. At 18:19:02, pilot 805 states: “I am closing on the target.” While there is no indication of how close he is at this point, a minute and a half later, at 18:20:22, he states: “[I] need to approach it [closer].” In seven seconds (18:20:30), 805 radios, “I’m approaching the target.” It is at this point (18:20:49), that 805 tells ground control, “I am firing cannon bursts.” Evidently, 805 is still well behind the aircraft: more than half a minute after firing his cannon, at 18:21:24, he states: “Yes. I’m approaching the target, I’m going in closer,” and eleven seconds later (18:21:35) observes that he is now within two kilometers of the “target.” In another forty-five seconds (18:22:17) the 805 pilot is moving in front of the target and twenty-five seconds after that (18:22:42) finds himself abeam of the airliner, then drops back into an attack position (18:22:55 and 18:23:37). Note that it is eighty-eight seconds after the tracer shells are fired, rather than before, that the 805 pilot makes any attempt to approach the target in a manner which might be visible to the Korean crew. Indeed, US analysts are not entirely convinced that these cannon bursts were not an attempt to fire on the airliner. Given the point at which the cannon fire occurs in the interception sequence, it is difficult to come to any other conclusion.23 Moreover, there is no indication anywhere in the transcripts of a report to ground control by the second interceptor that he saw the tracer shells: this claim is a pure fabrication. As to the wing-waggling and the flashing of lights, not only is there no evidence in the transcripts that these activities ever occurred, there simply was not time between the cannon bursts and the actual shootdown for such elaborate interception efforts. The entire span of time between the 805 pilot’s statement, “I am approaching the target, I am going in closer,” and his falling back covers a minute and a half, from 18:21:24 to 18:22:55. At 18:23:37, the pilot announces that he has dropped back into an attack position and will fire rockets; three minutes later the target is destroyed. The ICAO REPORT concluded, “There was no evidence that complete visual identification procedures were employed.” (429: 23) The ANC REPORT contained an even more forceful statement disputing the Soviet claim [T]he transcript … gives no clear indication that the intercepting aircraft had taken up a position “within view of the pilot of the intercepted aircraft” or “to enable the pilot of the latter aircraft to see the

The KAL Tapes

visual signals given” as recommended. … This has been highlighted because … it is of paramount importance for the interceptor aircraft to ensure that it attracts the attention of the pilot-in-command of the civil aircraft. (430: 13–14)

A unique perspective on the alleged interception sequence has been provided to us by Harold Ewing, the 747 pilot whose reconstruction of possible cockpit actions constituted a significant portion of “The Target Is Destroyed.” In a widely ranging conversation,24 Ewing described the sensation of flying behind a 747 jumbo jet. Even at a distance of six miles, the airplane “looks huge,” Ewing said. When 805 pilot Major Kas′min reported closing to within two kilometers (1.24 miles), KAL 007 would have “filled his windscreen.” Under these circumstances, all changes in relative motion or position would be magnified in the perception of the SU-15 pilot.25 If one assumes that Major Kas′min was relying primarily on his vision—not his instrumentation—at such apparent close range, and that he would have had no experience whatsoever tailing such a large aircraft, then it is easy to imagine that he could believe himself to be situated only two kilometers behind 007 when in fact he might have been much farther away. (Recall that it took eighty-eight seconds after firing his cannon for the swift interceptor to overtake the airliner.) That being the case, he could very well have been trying to shoot down the jetliner at 18:20:49 when he reported, “I am firing cannon bursts.” In this speculative scenario, Major Kas′min would have misjudged his range, failing to destroy KAL 007 because he was trailing the jumbo jet by more than two miles—the effective limit of his cannon fire.26 In this context, an otherwise mysterious passage takes on a perfectly reasonable, if chilling, meaning 18:23:37 MKL US ICAO

Seichas ia rakety poprobuiu. Now I will try my rockets. (emphasis added) Now I will try rockets.27 Now I will try a rocket.

The most likely explanation for saying “now” at this juncture is that an initial attempt to bring down the airplane using cannon had been ineffective. Ewing’s extrapolation is just that—an extrapolation. But it certainly is plausible, and it accords with the testimony provided by the KAL Tapes. Supported by external evidence, analysis of the air-to-ground messages

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leads to the following conclusions, which we accept as a true representation of events 1. Major Kas′min did not refer to KAL 007 as anything but “the target” and “she [it]”; 2. KAL 007 was flying with its ANOs burning, so that it would have been clearly visible in the night sky; 3. No attempt to contact KAL 007 by radio was carried out, but an electronic IFF inquiry from the SU-15 demonstrated that the target did not belong to the Soviet military; 4. Any non-lethal interception attempt was performed in a cursory manner, at best, and—except for the IFF challenge—probably wasn’t performed at all. Certainly none of the claimed wingwaggling or flashing of signal lights is confirmed by the SU-15 pilot, who diligently reported his every action during the interception. Throughout part one [of Flights] (480) we have demonstrated the extent to which American officials selectively presented evidence in support of the allegation that Soviet military leaders knowingly ordered the destruction of a civilian airliner. We have just seen that the arguments presented by many of the prominent conspiratists depend upon evidence, the authenticity of which is particularly doubtful.28 In part two of this study we will demonstrate the extent to which Soviet authorities simply invented a story that, they hoped, would prove acceptable to their citizens. The linguistic analysis offered in this chapter raises a profound, troubling issue for contemporary rhetorical criticism: to what extent (if, indeed, at all) does the role of critic extend beyond a simple explanation of how argumentation persuades to consideration of the purposes for which one engages in public argument or the ethical characterization of argument structure and evidence as it is employed in any specific instance. To historians and historians of science who have been nurtured by Western traditions, the answer to this issue seems self-evident. Joynt and Corbett (240: 115–116) have discussed the matter in great depth as it relates to international conflict, and they have stated the historical perspective succinctly: “The crucial problem which confronts us … has to do with the accuracy of the data. … Respect for the facts is the hallmark of science and in the case of world politics this means historical facts.”29

The KAL Tapes

This issue is less clear-cut among contemporary theorists of rhetorical criticism. In fact, without question, prevailing opinion holds not only that many people will be persuaded by the art and the ethos of the speaker, rather than by the facts of a case (the KAL incident provides an excellent example), but also that assessing the validity of evidence is not a proper function of the critic. “Facts aren’t important—no one is persuaded by facts,” we are told. From this it follows that expertise is to be scorned, for only experts can understand the arguments of other experts and argue against them successfully. Many would exclude the expert from the process altogether, because it is persuasion of the common citizen that matters above all, and the common citizen is incapable of arguing with the expert. Joynt and Corbett view “a very detailed examination of the primary data” as the sine qua non of research. They emphasize “the importance of securing the original text” and warn of the pitfalls that await those who would ignore this advice. (240: 139n28) Applying this standard to the Russian language data available in the taped comments of the Soviet fighter pilots, however, it is evident that the Soviet Union distorted the truth, the United States ignored it when this suited political purpose, and the conspiratists were incapable either of discerning it or evaluating it. And it is regrettably true that neither truth nor reason has reigned throughout public discussions of the Korean airliner. Equally true— and equally regrettable—is the fact that many rhetorical scholars would remain unconcerned by this situation.

NOTES 1. These are (a) the revised official US version disseminated September 11, 1983 and (b) the ICAO version, dated December 30, 1983, disseminated as Appendix D of its final report on the incident. (429) Except as noted, all translations in this chapter follow the revised US version. According to Hersh (private communication), NSA transcribers continued to refine the tape transcript through late 1985, but no further changes were ever announced. 2. This factor has also been called the “Truth Criterion.” 3. See Chapter Five [of Flights of Fancy, Flight of Doom: KAL 007 and Soviet–American Rhetoric] (480) for a discussion of some philosophical and political reasons why this is true. 4. We depend on the very same situation, of course, expecting the reader to accept as accurate the following discussion of Russian, but knowing full well that few will be able to discern any errors we may commit.

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Part One: KAL and Cracks in the Rhetorical Wall 5. Klass, who is now retired, served for many years as Senior Avionics Editor of Aviation Week & Space Technology. Both of these assessments were reported in “007—Conspiracy or Accident?” (478), our review of Shootdown. 6. Oberg is a spaceflight operations engineer at the Johnson Space Center near Houston and a noted science writer. 7. Sayle was awarded the UK’s Magazine Writer of the Year? award in 1985 for his articles on the KAL tragedy. 8. Discover, December 1984, 8. 9. Hersh (197: 264) and Maertens (290: 26), two of the anti-conspiratists, have cited a paper of ours which subsequently appeared in print (slightly modified) as part of “Correspondence.” (275) The present chapter extends the analysis of that study. We will use the term “KAL Tapes” throughout this chapter to refer only to the pilots’ portion of the intercepted communications. Sugwon Kang (279) has publicly stated that the conclusions he originally drew on the basis of the linguistic evidence revealed by the KAL Tapes were largely in error. 10. Hersh continues, aptly, “and simply may not be correct.” This is a veiled way of saying, “and is wrong in this instance” without explicitly revealing that he has discussed this transcript with the transcribers; but elsewhere in the book there are indications (for example, p. 61) that Hersh was shown (or had described to him) the updated NSA transcript. See “Flight 007,” (479) our review article concerning this book. 11. Given the variants “Oh, fuck!”, “Holy shit!”, and “Oh, my God!,” which we provided, Hersh chose the last. (201: 166) According to Paul Turner of the National Transportation Safety Board, “Just before an event occurs, somebody generally says, ‘Oh, shit.’ I see that more, perhaps, than I see any two words. You sit right there with them and you’d say the same thing.” Quoted in the Outlook section of The Washington Post, September 9, 1984. See also (267). Those who read Russian will find of interest: V. Voinovich. (445) 12. A time frame may be helpful. The first transmission on the transcript occurred at 17:56:58 GMT (2:56:58 a.m. local time), the last at 18:46:09. The deadly missiles were fired at 18:26:20; two seconds later the Soviet pilot announced, “The target has been destroyed.” 13. Of course, this constituted one of the corrections made by NSA transcribers after the tape was played at the September 6, 1983 United Nations Security Council meeting. We will return to this passage below. There is no explanation why the ICAO translation omitted this passage. Although it is not clear exactly when that translation was done, it had to be later than September 11. 14. According to both the ICAO REPORT (429: 31) and the ANC REPORT (430: 12), KAL 007 was equipped with a revolving red light on its undercarriage, rather than a strobe. 15. Kang (244: 37) wrote, “I fail to see any evidence in this Russian-language transcript issued by the Press Office of the State Department to support the contention that in these critical statements the pilot was talking about lights on the intruding aircraft, although such a possibility cannot be ruled out. Just as likely, given the sequence of the pilot’s remarks, is that he was talking about lights atop his own Su-15 fighter that he had been instructed to switch on.” Johnson (235: 166) wrote, “There is simply no way of knowing—pace Mrs. Kirkpatrick—whether the Soviet pilot had been referring to 007’s lights, his own or those of another of the Soviet fighters.” 16. Kang (244: 38) tentatively supports this suggestion.

The KAL Tapes 17. Telephone interview, December 1984. 18. A search and rescue satellite (SARSAT) was in position over Kamchatka to hear any transmissions that might have been made on the emergency channel. According to the ANC REPORT (430: 9), “There is no record or other information of any calls on 121.5 MHz having been heard by any civil or military ground unit or by other aircraft within VHF [very high frequency] range of the intercepting aircraft, or any record of such transmissions having been received via the … SARSAT … system.” Duane Freer of the ANC staff in Montreal has stated that the 121.5 MHz frequency was monitored during the Sakhalin interception and that no voice call was made by the Soviet pilot. See (283). 19. Identification/Friend or Foe. 20. According to both the ICAO general report (429) and the technical report of its Air Navigation Commission (430), KAL 007 carried Secondary Surveillance Radar (SSR), not IFF. Moreover, even if an airplane were equipped with IFF—and if the mechanism were turned on, which is not always the case—then an electronic response would be sent automatically, and a pilot would not necessarily be aware that such an inquiry had taken place. In any event, there exist complex technical reasons to believe that Soviet jet fighters cannot trigger the transponders carried by Western civilian aircraft. 21. Moreover, pilots using the emergency frequency are required by standard ICAO procedures, to which the USSR is signatory, to make such calls in English. There has been no indication in the many Soviet media interviews with the pilot who shot down KAL 007 that he speaks English. Granting this constitutes only inferential support for the ICAO position, it is nonetheless obvious that the Soviet government would have gone out of its way to demonstrate the pilot’s ability to speak English. 22. Kang accepts this contention uncritically: “Even if the crew [of the Korean jet] had not noticed anything unusual outside while the Su-15 was shooting off fireworks parallel to 007’s flight path. …” (244: 42) 23. Rohmer has no doubts about this: “In my opinion, when the Soviet fighter pilot fired his cannon he was attempting to destroy the Boeing 747 and had been ordered to do so by his ground control.” (384: 84) It is possible, however, that Major Kas′min was just testing his cannon. 24. Telephone interview, September 30, 1986. 25. To understand Ewing’s point you only need recall the sensation of sitting at a stop light and having the vehicle next to you begin inching forward: it may feel as though your car has rolled backward instead. Whether the interceptor sped up, say, or KAL slowed down, it would have the same visual effect in the environment of a night sky that had no background to provide a point of orientation. 26. In this scenario, the tracer bullets would have fallen to earth unseen by the South Korean crew. 27. The plural form “rockets” is another of the corrections to the US transcript that were made public on September 11, 1983. 28. This is one of several issues that will be addressed in Part Three [of Flights]. (480) 29. They caution, however, that the scientific approach “is not and can never be a substitute for historical explanation.” (240: 115–116)

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CHAPTER 4

BCAS Correspondence: “Flight 007: Was There Foul Play?” Marilyn J. Young and Michael K. Launer Provenance: Originally published in Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 18, no. 3 (July–September 1986): 67–71—accompanied by a response from Sugwon Kang. Copyright Holder: BCAS, Inc. reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com on behalf of BCAS, Inc. Description: This “Letter to the Editor” was written in response to an opinion piece—“Flight 007: Was There Foul Play?”—that had been published by Sugwon Kang in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 17, no. 2 (April–June 1985): 30–48. In his response to our letter, Professor Kang admitted that he was mistaken in much of his analysis.

To the Editors It’s 3:21 a.m. (Korea-Japan time) on 1 September 1983. The fighter pilot, rudely awakened a few moments earlier, has ascended to 8,000 meters and positioned himself below and behind the intruder aircraft—the classic attacking position. Here, above the cloud cover, the night is clear and the aircraft is visible in the light of the half-moon, even from a distance of two kilometers. The pilot listens intently to ground control for several seconds, and then, agitated, exclaims in Russian, “Elki-palki!”—“Oh, my God!” Five minutes later, the intruder—Korean Air Lines flight 007— plunges earthward, mortally wounded. Two hundred sixty-nine people perish in the Sea of Japan. The airliner, which had been tracked for twoand-a-half hours, was less than two minutes from international airspace when the Soviet pilot received the order to fire. Despite initial confusion, the Soviet government stands behind the pilot’s action, arguing that he could not have known it was a civilian

BCAS Correspondence

aircraft, a huge Boeing 747 jetliner. Besides, it was obviously on a spy mission—500 km off course, it was flying without navigation lights, and it refused to respond to intercept procedures. How accurate is this scenario? With the possible exception of a handful of select intelligence analysts and Russian language specialists at Fort Meade, MD, no one in the West will ever know exactly what happened that night. Particularly interesting, of course, is whether the Soviet pilot was responding to some comment or battle order heard over his headphones. Or was it simply the realization that all his years of training and vigilance had brought him to this place, in the skies, at this time—that this wasn’t just another training mission. This was for real.

Much confusion surrounded the tragic incident. Charges were exchanged between the US and Soviet governments. The UN Security Council met in a special session, and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a UN body, conducted an extensive investigation. In the aftermath, many questions have been raised, but few answers provided. The Soviets have maintained all along that the airliner was on a spy mission, that it rendezvoused with a US reconnaissance plane prior to entering their airspace. Yet they have never released any actual radar recordings to confirm this accusation. On the other hand, the United States claims to have intercepted the radar information by monitoring Soviet air defense forces; as Secretary of State George Shultz stated on 2 September 1983, “Our first knowledge of this incident was based on subsequent analysis of Soviet defense activity.” But our government has not released the data either. Many people find it difficult to believe that our military did not have the airliner on radar in time to issue a warning; it is equally inconceivable to many that the Soviets would shoot down an airplane for no reason, making it easier for skeptics to grant some credibility to the Soviet allegations. As a result, the speculation surrounding a US role in the tragedy has led to numerous attempts to substantiate the basic Soviet position—the spy plane theory—charging the United States with complicity and a reckless disregard for human life. Central to all such theories is the extent to which the Soviet version is believable. Since they have released virtually no information about the events of August 31–September 1, 1983, the best available data are Japanese recordings of the Soviet pilots talking to their

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ground controllers. Unfortunately, the two authorized translations1 are misleading and do not always agree. As a result, both the public at large and some investigators have gotten a false impression of their contents. Despite their importance, the transcripts have never been accurately analyzed in the public domain. Two analyses have been published,2 but they have served more to increase the confusion and uncertainty surrounding the events of that night: David Pearson uncritically accepts the Soviet version, in which they conclude that they had little choice but to shoot down the plane; Sugwon Kang essentially reprises much that has been published earlier, but adds certain erroneous interpretations of the tapes which have not appeared elsewhere. We have interviewed both writers and have learned that neither reads Russian. In the course of his research, Kang did, however, consult a recent Soviet immigrant. Pearson, on the other hand, admitted that he had not even sought the help of a translator, but had based his analysis solely on the official English translations. In point of fact, almost none of the Soviet account is substantiated in the Russian transcript (nor in the English translations, for that matter). The Elki-palki passage, while hardly the most significant, is indicative of the discrepancies between the US and ICAO translations. The ICAO eliminated this expression completely, whereas in the US text it is rendered as “Fiddlesticks”—an absurd phrase to use in any context. But Elki-palki is a very emotional expletive used by Russian males in mixed company rather than Ёb tvoyu mat′ (Oh, fuck). In other contexts, such as the one the fighter pilot faced, it can express shock, dismay, anger, or disbelief3—somewhat like the English, “Oh, my God!” or “Holy shit!” It would seem that the Soviet pilot, at least, had a clear understanding of what he was about to do: at 18:21:35 GMT (ninety seconds earlier) he had reported himself to be within two kilometers of the intruder; at 18:22:42 he was abreast of the jetliner (na traverse, “abeam”—wing-to-wing parallel), but apparently still two kilometers to the right of it. Kang is not entirely correct in claiming that “during the few minutes of visual contact over Sakhalin Island until right up to the critical moment, what the Soviet pilots had, essentially, was the airliner’s rearview.” (244: 35) Moreover, as Murray Sayle (397)4 has pointed out in a very persuasive article, it would have been virtually impossible for the KAL copilot, who was sitting on that side of the cockpit, to have seen the fighter even when the two aircraft were abeam of one another.

BCAS Correspondence

Not understanding Russian leads Pearson astray in his analysis of Soviet attempts to identify the airplane. Discussing Soviet confusion when they had scrambled interceptors two hours earlier over Kamchatka Peninsula, he makes the following statement: “If KAL 007 was flying with its air navigation (ANOs) on at that time, the Soviet fighters should have seen it in the clear sky at 33,000 feet from as little as twenty miles away. That they did not suggests the airliner’s ANOs were not on.” Based on this misapprehension, he incorrectly interprets the Soviet pilot to be saying later, over Sakhalin, that he has turned on his own lights as the first step in the intercept procedure. The time is 18:10:51, approximately twenty-five minutes prior to the shootdown. In the disputed passage, the Soviet pilot says A ponial. Ona s migalkoi idet, s migalkoi. MKL Roger. She (it) is flying with [its] flasher [on], with [its] flasher [on], United States Roger. (The target’s strobe) light is blinking. ICAO Roger. Target is flying with strobe light. With strobe light.5

The analyst in The Nation, as well as both official translations, are wrong here, though in different ways. This is one of several instances where the US version randomly interchanges the noun “target” and the pronoun “it” without reference to the actual Russian, when the Soviet pilots mention the Korean airliner. (One might suspect that the United States was trying to make absolutely clear that this important statement refers to the Korean plane—in that, at least, the government is correct.) The ICAO translation is more consistent in this regard, but here it, too, uses the noun instead of the pronoun. There can be no doubt: the Soviet fighter pilot clearly states that the Korean airliner had its running lights on. When referring to КAL 007, all four Soviet pilots consistently use the feminine pronoun ona (she/it) because the Russian word tsel (target) is grammatically feminine. By way of contrast, when referring to their aircraft or to one another, the Soviet pilots always use grammatically masculine forms, including the pronoun on (he/it). Such masculine forms occur no fewer than nineteen times during the fifty minutes of taped comments. Thus, there is no question that

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in using ona, the Soviet pilot was referring to KAL 007 and not to himself or his own plane. Nevertheless, Sugwon Kang chastises the press (244: 37) for failing to use “sufficient care and skepticism” regarding the transcripts, given the “fact” that passages mentioning the ANOs do not “[tell] us anything about the identity of the aircraft upon which the lights were mounted.” Unfortunately, this discussion leads Kang to make the same analytical error that Pearson had made I fail to see any evidence in this Russian-language transcript issued by the Press Office of the State Department to support the contention that in these critical statements the pilot was talking about lights on the intruding aircraft, although such a possibility cannot be ruled out. Just as likely, given the sequence of the pilot’s remarks, is that he was talking about lights atop his own SU-15 fighter that he had been instructed to switch on. (244: 37)

In support of this conclusion, Kang cites the testimony of his informant that “the gender of the Russian word … for machine or, as in this case, aircraft, … is feminine.” While it is true that mashina is grammatically feminine in Russian, the word itself is not used in reference to airplanes, according to another native informant, except shutlivo—that is, as a joke; in addition, two Americans possessing extensive intelligence experience and excellent command of Russian have confirmed that there is no grammatically feminine Russian word for “aircraft.” Accordingly, Pearson’s conclusion that the Soviet pilot first observed the target’s ANOs at 18:21:35 (a full eleven minutes later) is wrong, but since he never checked the Russian, he cannot tell this. Therefore, his subsequent conclusion also is a total misrepresentation: “It appears the pilot of KAL 007, realizing he was being intercepted, turned on his lights as a signal that he would comply with the instructions of the [Soviet fighter].” (355: 120) Because he is wrong here, Pearson provides no evidence in this article that the KAL pilot knew he was being intercepted, and consequently, no reason to believe that he took evasive action except the word of the Soviet government. The Soviets have continuously asserted that the airliner was running without lights, but that is a patent lie. Quite the opposite interpretation is supported by the ICAO report itself: “The information in the USSR preliminary report states

BCAS Correspondence

that the aircraft lights were ‘off.’ This contradicted the monitored airto-ground communications.” (429: 43) Among all the carefully worded and nonjudgmental statements in the ICAO report, this flat assertion of Soviet duplicity stands out. The most serious difficulty Pearson faces because of his admitted failure to verify the meaning of the Russian transcript occurs at the point where the two official translations substantially disagree. 18:13:26 [GMT] A tsel′ na zapros ne otvechaet. United States The target isn’t responding to IFF. (Identification/ Friend or Foe) ICAO The target isn’t responding to the call.

Rather than investigating the possible reasons for this disagreement in order to provide a basis for preferring one version over the other, Pearson provides only speculation concerning what “facts” might be reflected assuming first that the US translation is correct and then assuming that the ICAO translation is correct. Zapros has the technical meaning “radar interrogation utilizing a transponder” (zapro­schik-otvetchik), that is, an IFF radar inquiry. In the context of a fighter pilot talking to his ground controller about a potential enemy aircraft, this is certainly the most likely meaning of zapros. (According to both the ICAO general report and the technical report of its Air Navigation Commission, KAL 007 carried Secondary Surveillance Radar [SSR], not IFF. Moreover, even if an airplane were equipped with IFF— and if the mechanism were turned on, which is not always the case—then an electronic response would be sent automatically, and a pilot would not necessarily be aware that such an inquiry had taken place.) Taken out of context, of course, the Russian statement is indeed potentially ambiguous. Zapros has a colloquial meaning of verbal inquiry, and there is a slight possibility the pilot might have used the word in that sense. This ambiguity is heightened by the transcript at 18:17:49 and 18:17:58, where two different verbs are used in the specific context of voice inquiry. One of these verbs (zaprashivat′) is morphologically related to zapros and zaproschik; the other verb is sprashivat′. It is possible, given the high degree of transmission interference on the actual tape recording, part of which we have heard, that the appearance of zaprashivat′ at 18:17:58, and earlier at

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18:17:34, is a transcription error. Even under the best listening conditions these verbs sound remarkably alike. Still, given the actual situation, there is virtually no chance (in our judgment and that of a professional translator with over two decades of military intelligence experience) that the pilot’s intended meaning was anything other than IFF. Indeed, as early as 1963, in the First Supplement to AGARD Aeronautical Multilingual Dictionary, published by Pergamon Press “for and on the behalf of Advisory Group for Aeronautical Research and Development/North Atlantic Treaty Organization,” one finds the following entry interrogation, noun, radar. The act of sending forth radar pulses to trigger a transponder and receive answering signals; the radar pulses so sent. Also called a “challenge.” (116)

Along with French, German, Spanish, Greek, Italian, Dutch, and Turkish equivalents, one finds zapros listed for Russian. The 1980 edition of the manual (245) contains this definition interrogation In an SSR or IFF system, the act of transmitting a signal to the target or object to be interrogated.

What, then, is one to make of Kang’s assertion that “the problem with Mrs. Kirkpatrick’s analysis is that the Soviet pilot never said anything of the sort”—meaning, “The target isn’t responding to IFF”—or, further, “Could it be that the pilot was referring to some radio message he had attempted, without success, on the emergency frequency? All we know for certain is that he did not say ‘IFF’ in his report to ground control.” (244: 36–37) Given the facts as we have outlined them, it is clear that this is an unsupportable statement. Sugwon Kang’s informant told him that zapros “means a technical or mechanical call for a response, as opposed to vopros, a simpler verbal question or query.” But the informant could not resolve this ambiguity.6 Under the circumstances, there is no way for Kang to have avoided this error. We should point out—despite the protestations of many US officials (particularly U.N. ambassadors Lichenstein and Kirkpatrick) that the tape contains no indication the SU-15 pilot attempted to make voice contact with KAL 007—that any such attempt would of necessity not be reflected

BCAS Correspondence

there, since the pilot would be required to tune his transmitter to 121.5 MHz, the international hailing frequency: the intercepted conversations, of course, took place on another frequency. Nevertheless, it seems clear that no verbal call was made and that it is not true that Soviet personnel employed the 121.5 MHz channel—commonly known as the emergency frequency. This interpretation is supported by the report of the ICAO’s Air Navigation Commission: “There is no record or other information of any calls on 121.5 MHz having been heard by any civil or military ground unit or by other aircraft within VHF (very high frequency) range of the intercepting aircraft, or any record of such transmissions having been received via the search and rescue satellite (SARSAT) system.” (429: 9)7 Moreover, pilots using the emergency frequency are required by standard ICAO procedures, to which the USSR is signatory, to make such calls in English. There has been no indication in the many Soviet media interviews with the pilot who shot down KAL 007 that he speaks English. Granting this constitutes only inferential support for the ICAO position, it is nonetheless obvious that the Soviet government would have gone out of its way to demonstrate the pilot’s ability to speak English. Thus it is impossible, on the basis of the actual transcript, to credit Pearson’s contention that “it seems probable … Soviet ground control stations were laying out, step by step, the interception procedures to be used by Soviet Air Defense aircraft.” (355: 120) This is equally true for the rest of the interpretation in The Nation, up to and including the misinterpretation of the statement at 18:21:35 noted earlier. Kang, in reiterating and extending this analysis, has only further obscured the search for verifiable information concerning the events of that tragic night. Pearson’s assertion that KAL 007 knew it was being intercepted and took evasive action is based on this sequence of erroneous suppositions, stemming from his reliance on a translation rather than the original transcript, and is totally unfounded, given the information provided in The Nation. Rohmer (384: 87) provides further evidence that no such evasion took place. He contrasts the transcript record that KAL 007 was flying over Sakhalin on a heading of 240 degrees (WSW) with the fabricated evidence, presented by Soviet Marshal Ogarkov nine days after the fact, that would require the plane to be flying on a heading of 300 degrees (WNW). Contrary to Soviet claims, there does not appear to exist any credible evidence supporting the notion that KAL 007 was flying without its running lights, that it was aware of the interception, that the fighter pilot

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made a serious attempt to identify or contact the jetliner, or, finally, that KAL took any evasive action which might have justified shooting it down and killing everyone aboard. Quite the opposite. One sees here conclusive proof that, following some initial stonewalling while particulars were thrashed out, the Soviet propaganda and disinformation apparatus rapidly became fully operational. Indeed, helped along by some incredible US blunders, the Soviets were remarkably successful in convincing many individuals in the West.

NOTES 1. These are (a) the revised official US version disseminated September 11, 1983, and (b) the ICAO version, dated December 30, 1983, disseminated as Appendix D of its final report on the incident. (429) 2. David Pearson (355) and Sugwon Kang (244). Pearson and John Keppel published another article the following year. (357) 3. Those who read Russian will find of interest: V. Voinovich. (445) 4. The NYRB subsequently published a lengthy commentary to this piece by Pearson, as well as Sayle’s response, on September 26, 1985. 5. According to both the ICAO report (429: 31) and the February 1984 report of its Air Navigation Commission (430: 12), KAL 007 was equipped with a revolving red light on its undercarriage, rather than a strobe. 6. When we asked Kang to verify this analysis with his informant, he was able to ascertain that the informant had no firsthand experience with such military jargon. 7. This analysis is confirmed by retired Canadian Air Force Major-General Richard Rohmer. (384: 80)

CHAPTER 5

The Need for Evaluative Criteria: Conspiracy Argument Revisited1 Marilyn J. Young, Michael K. Launer, and Curtis C. Austin Provenance: Originally published in Argumentation and Advocacy 26, no. 3 (Winter 1990): 89–107.2 Copyright Holder: National Communication Association, reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com on behalf of National Communication Association Description: KAL was shot down in late 1983. Just before the first anniversary David Pearson, a Yale University graduate student studying under sociologist Charles Perrow, published an exposé claiming to prove that the airliner was part of a CIA plot to gain information about Soviet air defense radar installations in the Far East (355) The article was riddled with errors, but when queried Victor Navasky— then editor of the magazine—and Katrina van den Heuvel—his assistant and currently the editor—stood by their decision to publish Pearson’s account, as well as a follow-on article by Pearson and John Keppel the next year. (357) Chapter Nine in Flights (480) is devoted to analysis of Pearson’s 1984 article. In the study presented here we propose a general methodology for evaluating conspiracy argumentation.

M

any contemporary theorists would have the critic abandon traditional forms of argument analysis and evaluation for an audiencecentered perspective that explains how argumentative discourse operates in a given context. Bormann (78), for example, endorses the notions of symbolic convergence and fantasy theme analysis; Fisher (162; 163) advocates the tenets of narrative coherence and fidelity. Indeed, it is particularly tempting to apply the principles of narrativity to the subject of the present essay—the analysis of conspiratist discourse—because much of the task of the conspiratist rhetor lies in stringing together the anomalies of a troubling situation into a coherent, compelling narrative.3 Nevertheless, in this essay we seek to recreate the responsibility of the critic to fuse evaluation

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with explanation. In so doing, we address two significant questions: How should the critic approach examples of the conspiratist genre—with traditional criteria for evaluating argument or with audience-centered analysis? What evaluative tools will facilitate the critical process? We contend that the most revealing evaluation is provided by close textual analysis that blends the ability of audience-centered approaches to explain the persuasive appeal of conspiratist argument with the ability of formal approaches to assess logical structure and evidentiary strength. In order to demonstrate this process, we have chosen to analyze a specific instance of conspiratist rhetoric—David Pearson’s “K. A. L. 007: What the US Knew and When We Knew It,” an article that appeared just prior to the first anniversary of the 1983 destruction of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 over Sakhalin Island (USSR) by jet fighters of the Soviet Air Defense Forces. (355)4 Belief in conspiracy as the force behind social phenomena is “older than historicism.” (365: 281) Simply put, conspiratism is “the view that an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of the man or groups who are interested in the occurrence of this phenomenon … and who have planned and conspired to bring it about.” (365: 287–288) In recent years, the locus of such rhetoric has moved away from the extremist fringe and closer to the mainstream, becoming a staple of American political discourse. (494) Observations on the argumentative power of the conspiratist interpretations are common. Zarefsky (494) has considered the techniques of argumentation that help make conspiracy arguments credible and the social circumstances that make such charges believable to moderates as well as zealots. He notes that “conspiracy arguments become widely accepted when they explain a pattern of anomalies”; moreover, it is precisely “when a large number of (anomalous) events occurs, and the anomalies seem to have a pattern, [that] the search for an explanation intensifies.” (494: 72) Warnick (447) suggests that Fisher’s notion of the narrative paradigm may provide insight into the description of some conspiracies (such as the “Prince of Evil,” the Nazi explanation of Germany’s problems). Goodnight and Poulakos (181) have furnished a useful explanation of how conspiracy theories that have become accepted by society are integrated into social history. While such literature has been useful in describing conspiracy rhetoric, it has failed to evaluate the arguments propounded. For instance,

The Need for Evaluative Criteria

Goodnight and Poulakos (181) discuss only those conspiracies which are proven to exist; they argue from the a posteriori vantage point of knowing that the Watergate conspiracy actually occurred and was exposed. (Nixon and his forces lost the battle to establish belief in their version of the truth.) Far more common and, therefore, more interesting and compelling to the student of argument, are those claims of conspiracy that are never resolved to the satisfaction of significant segments of society. It is in these instances that the essential nature of conspiratist argument resides, for it is here that the rhetor manipulates anxieties described by Neumann (334), exploiting—even creating—the very ambiguity that attends anomalous situations.5 One means for achieving conspiratorial persuasiveness is to join the characteristic causal deductive claims of conspiratist rhetoric (122: 205–207) with dramatistic form—what Farrell (154) has called a “Burkean syllogistic progression” (see also 480: chapter 8). This melding of logos and pathos gives urgency to the need for critical tools to evaluate conspiratist argument, since “the threshold level of plausibility for conspiracy theories is quite low.”6 We would contend that the argumentative characteristics of the conspiratist text demand the application of formalist criteria to explicate the content or substance of the rhetoric.7 Indeed, as Warnick (447: 176) points out, it is in the case of stories that are “invidiously persuasive precisely because of [their] narrative fidelity” that the critic is not well served by abandoning the conventions of formal and informal logic. Moreover, Rowland (390: 270) has argued that narrative fidelity and probability “must test not merely the story, but the story in relation to the world.” When such tests are applied in this manner “they become essentially equivalent to the tests of evidence and reasoning that are traditionally applied to public argument.” Warnick continues A narrative such as Hitler’s is invidiously persuasive precisely because of its narrative fidelity. … The narrative in Mein Kampf provides a convenient mode for responding to any questions or issues that those who are not “true believers” might want to raise. (447: 176–177)

The example Warnick has chosen is fortuitous. It illustrates the difficulty of disproving the conspiratist claim—what Zarefsky (494) terms “the self-sealing nature” of conspiratist argument—and in so doing, it underscores the necessity for rhetorical critics to address appropriate ways to praise or blame a particular argument. (447: 176–177) This is especially

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true if Zarefsky is correct in observing that conspiracy argument has become a staple of American politics.8 In analyzing Pearson’s essay as a case study of mainstream conspiratist rhetoric, we shall examine the evidence adduced on behalf of this specific conspiracy claim and shall demonstrate that, while factually and logically inadequate as proof, the text nonetheless artfully creates its own internal consistency—one which is seductive to the noncritical reader. Thus, in the analysis that follows, we attempt to assess the communicative factors operating in “K. A. L. 007: What the US Knew and When We Knew It.” (355) The present authors do not presume to know whether or not the airliner was actually engaged in a spy mission when it was shot down over Soviet territory; nor is it our intent to decide a winner in this contest. Our interest is focused on answering the following questions: How did this conspiratist marshal his arguments? Inasmuch as Pearson’s article makes the type of “deductive, causal claim” described by Creps (122), how might one evaluate the components of that claim? How accurate are the technical and linguistic assertions underlying the claim? How do stylistic choices within the text support the rhetor’s conspiratist arguments? How are all of these structural elements drawn together to create a convincing story? Of necessity we examine the extent to which there exists independent confirmation or refutation of specific charges contained in our exemplar, the use to which this rhetor puts any independent confirmation, and the manner in which he deals with seemingly discrepant evidence. To do this requires that a judgment be rendered concerning the extent to which claimed anomalies are indeed anomalous.

CONSPIRATIST RHETORIC: A CASE STUDY On the night of August 31–September 1, 1983, Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was intercepted by Soviet air defense fighter planes and ultimately shot down. All two hundred sixty nine persons aboard perished in the Sea of Japan. Much speculation and controversy surrounded the entire incident: President Reagan, who termed the tragedy a “horrifying act of violence,” stated simply that KAL 007 flew off course accidentally; the Soviet Union, on the other hand, claimed the airliner was on a spy mission purposely planned and executed by the United States’ intelligence services. The world press devoted considerable attention to the story through mid-November.

The Need for Evaluative Criteria

Subsequently, a number of books and articles appearing in the West purported to substantiate the spy plane scenario.9 One of these was “K. A. L. 007: What the US Knew and When We Knew It.” (355) Published on the eve of the first anniversary of the tragedy, the essay is an attempt to demonstrate the culpability of the American government in the destruction of KAL 007. Not only did The Nation highlight this article in an advertising campaign, but the unanswered questions raised by David Pearson caught the attention of such syndicated columnists as Tom Wicker of The New York Times. (458; 459; 460; 461; 462) Pearson’s essay is an excellent example of how one artful construction of a story can be transformed into “evidence” of a conspiracy. It is important because of all the studies that advance the hypothesis of an American role in the KAL tragedy, none has gained greater notoriety and none has had greater influence on other investigators. As Murray Sayle observes, “Pearson … has faced the choice between accident and conspiracy, and he gives us the heaviest possible nudge in the direction of conspiracy.” (397: 49) In the opinion of Sayle, a veteran journalist whose reportage on KAL won praise in England, that article in The Nation was the “serious authority” relied on by Oliver Clubb (115) and “many other conspiracy enthusiasts.” (397: 49) The most recent addition to the list of adherents is R. W. Johnson (235) who used much of Pearson’s material to support his own version of the conspiracy theory in Shootdown: KAL 007 and the American Connection, which became the basis for an NBC television movie.10 Pearson’s article is also important in that it demonstrates the potential power of the conspiracy argument to focus and direct public debate: his interpretation heavily influenced subsequent public understanding of the tragedy.11 In The Nation Pearson contended that the United States government knew (or should have known) the situation into which KAL 007 had flown; the United States government, on the other hand, has consistently maintained that KAL was an “unarmed civilian aircraft” which had innocently strayed over Soviet territory unbeknownst to anyone, including its crew.12 Because of Pearson’s persuasive account of the incident, the government’s position is perceived by at least a part of the public as a fabrication. To be sure, the American government unwittingly did much to erode the believability of its own position, (481; 482) but this merely created an opportunity for conspiratists by establishing a field of battle; as is usually the case, the initial odds of winning such a battle were still stacked in favor of the challenged authority. (181: 306; 415: 1985)

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SIGN REASONING: THE ASSOCIATIVE POWER OF NARRATIVE Textual analysis of David Pearson’s article reveals four underlying themes, or leitmotifs, which he uses to establish a frame of reference for the reader. Intertwined in the introductory section entitled “A Predictable Event,” and continuing throughout the text, these themes provide a skeletal structure on which the author’s arguments are assembled. Simultaneously, they supply the reader with “relevant” history to make sense of the story the author is telling, (229: 513–514) thus providing the basis for a kind of sign reasoning. (424: 222–225) The first of these themes concerns the timing of recurrent intrusions by United States’ planes into Soviet airspace. The second is embodied in Pearson’s observation that the United States “has usually cited radio or navigational difficulties as the cause of such intrusions into Soviet airspace, even when the aircraft took evasive action.” (107)13 Pearson introduces his third leitmotif when, in discussing the interceptions of previous intruders, he emphasizes the care with which Soviet pilots are said to follow accepted procedures—opening fire only when all other methods fail. The author’s fourth and final theme is prophetic of his argument regarding the fate of KAL 007: “[T]he US … places a very high priority on penetrating Soviet airspace, sometimes at the expense of human life.” (107) This quotation is the last statement before, “That is the context in which the tragedy of Flight 007 must be understood.” (107) Accordingly, there can be no doubt about the writer’s intent in this extended introduction, starting with the section title: he has created a scenario in which the tragedy of KAL 007 would indeed be “a predictable event.” In constructing this world view, the author offers no direct proof to support the version of history in which he grounds his argument; he builds his case almost entirely on suggestion and the structural device of narrative position.14 It is significant that narrative structure alone provides the driving force behind whatever plausibility may reside in these assertions. Indeed, the association of disparate ideas in the course of storytelling is the foremost device available to the conspiratist to create the self-sealing argument that is required to proselytize for his beliefs. In other words, Pearson uses the tactic of association to establish the narrative fidelity of his story. As Fisher (163: 364) observes, it is the power of association that makes stories function—as an individual tests the story against that which he or she already “knows.” Lacking documentation,

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the entire fabric of this narrative depends on association. The difficulty, of course, lies in knowing how to determine if the claimed association is legitimate. One may well ask: Wherein lies the capacity of association to produce plausibility in narrative discourse? The answer, it would seem, resides in reasoning from sign—a basic intellectual process that enables humans to order and organize experience. Toulmin et al. state: “Whenever a sign and its referent can reliably be expected to occur together, the fact that the sign is observed can be used to support a claim about the presence of the object or situation the sign refers to.” (424: 223) While sign reasoning does not necessarily suggest causation, or even a time-ordered relationship, it does allow us to assume that certain phenomena are symbols or codes for the occurrence of other phenomena, creating an association. This suggests that the critic might profitably evaluate the reliability of the sign-to­ inference framework established by the conspiratist rhetor. With specific reference to this case study, one discerns the following instances of reasoning from sign in each of Pearson’s leitmotifs 1. He claims that border intrusions have often been timed to “sensitive moments” when important Soviet-American meetings were scheduled, and such meetings were imminent at the time of 007; 2. He associates radio or navigational difficulties with “evasive action” from which he imputes intent, and KAL 007 had reported radio problems throughout its flight; 3. He claims that Soviet PVO forces fire on intruders only as a last resort, and the Soviet forces fired on KAL 007;15 4. He recalls that loss of life has been heavy in the aftermath of several intentional border violations by United States military aircraft, and 269 people died when KAL 007 was destroyed. In this frame of reference, the imminence of bilateral Soviet-American talks, the claim of radio difficulties, the very fact of the shootdown, and the ensuing loss of life are all meant to suggest that the Korean airliner was deliberately sent into Soviet airspace and that the consequences of this deliberate action were indeed predictable. An allied tactic is a variant of the halo effect, one which might be defined for our purposes as “Credibility by Association.” For example, Pearson argues

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A. The Soviets were correct about the location of the mission orbit of the United States reconnaissance plane, an RC-135, that was in the area; B. They were correct about the point at which KAL 007 entered Soviet airspace; therefore, C. The Soviets must also be correct about the RC-135 making a second loop outside its mission orbit in order to rendezvous with KAL 007. (111)16 Pearson cites confirming evidence to support his analysis on the first two points. (107) Unfortunately, no evidence whatsoever is presented in support of the existence of the second loop. Indeed, Pearson’s presentation makes it seem as though the United States government admitted the presence of the RC-135 in response to Soviet charges, which is not the case. Nevertheless, the effect of the 1984 article in The Nation is to create an aura of legitimacy for the entire Soviet version of events, including the unsubstantiated “double loop” theory. The process of assent embodied here is similar to what Burke terms a “qualitative progression” where “the presence of one quality prepares us for the introduction of another.” (92: 124–125) The technique of qualitative progression involves not so much logical entailment—as is the case with syllogistic progression—but the creation of an after-the-fact feeling of “rightness.” Thus, the citation of items A and B (known to be correct) prepares, or perhaps induces, the audience to accept item C as well.17

LESSER FACTS, GREATER FACTS: IN THE ABSENCE OF PROOF In public argument, the lack of direct proof often leads a proponent of a pet hypothesis to adopt an associative tactic one might call “Lesser Facts, Greater Facts.” In using this technique, the rhetor accumulates a multitude of tangentially relevant details in order to give the impression that he knows more than is actually proved, enabling him to overclaim his evidence. As Creps points out, “the persuasive force of the conspiracy case is produced not by a single portion of testimony, but by simultaneous consideration of hundreds of pieces of evidence.” (122: 45; see also 208: 6–37) Pearson’s article contains a great many assertions of evidence which in reality are only tangentially related to the points at issue: Did the RC-135 rendezvous with Flight 007? Did US radar pick up the errant jetliner? Was

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the airliner on a spy mission for the United States government? A clear example of the effect this tactic can have on narrative structure is found in the following reference to an earlier incursion into Soviet airspace [A] U. S. RB-47 reconnaissance aircraft packed with long-range cameras, mapping cameras and electronic equipment for checking sites and frequencies of aircraft detection systems was attacked by two Soviet MiG-17 fighters over the Barents Sea. (106)

The wealth of trivial detail in the participial construction “packed … systems” serves no true informational function—after all, what other kind of equipment would one expect to be carried by a reconnaissance plane? But Pearson, by providing this detailed description and using the verb “packed” (rather than “equipped” or “carrying”) gives the reader the subconscious impression that this RB-47 was somehow different, “extraordinary,” rather than a routine, scheduled mission over international waters. The detail carries the burden of demonstrating the author’s point. In this way, the onus on the Soviets for shooting down the plane is somewhat lessened. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (358) analyzed this stylistic device in their discussion of the “relation between art and argumentation” In order to discern the argumentative use to which a term is being put, it is important to know the words or expressions the speaker might have used and to which he preferred the word he selected. … The terms comprising a [word-] family form an aggregate by relation to which any given term is specifically determined: they are … the background against which the selected term stands out. (358: 153,150–151)18

In the next section of his essay, entitled “The Role of the RC-135,” Pearson asks what might explain the proximity of the American reconnaissance plane to KAL prior to the airliner’s intrusion over Kamchatka. This segment contains the notion of monitoring a Soviet missile test (a function explicitly allowed by the SALT agreements), as well as a more sinister possibility—that the RC-135 was watching as Soviet radar reacted to KAL, an intelligence opportunity the author terms “extraordinary” and a “bonanza.” (113) The passage is dominated by a wealth of technical detail and logistical information, but the question posed at the outset (What was

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a reconnaissance aircraft doing in such close proximity to an intruder in Soviet airspace?) is never actually answered.19 Rather, the author reaches this conclusion Whether the RC-135 was in the area because of the SS-X-25 test or because it was coordinated with KAL 007’s intrusion into Soviet airspace, it must have observed the Korean airliner and had ample time to take steps to correct its course, but it did not do so. (115)

The unanswered question which initiated this segment of the article has been obscured by a proliferation of tangential facts. More importantly, both the initial question and the subsequent conclusion assume the accuracy of the claim that the reconnaissance aircraft rendezvoused with the airliner. As Burke noted in Counter-statement, “[a]trophy of form follows hypertrophy of information.” (92: 144)

QUASI-LOGICAL ARGUMENT: THE FACADE OF LOGIC AS A RHETORICAL TOOL Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (358) have defined as “quasi-logical” those arguments which “claim to be similar to the formal reasoning of logic or mathematics. … [S]ince there are formal proofs of recognized validity, quasi-logical arguments derive their persuasive strength from their similarity with these well-established modes of reasoning.” (358: 193) Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca are not referring exclusively to fallacious arguments; they include all arguments which offer the appearance of logic. Their point is simply this: quasi-logical arguments are persuasive despite failing formal tests of validity. Included in this characterization, however, must be the fallacies most often used by conspiratist rhetors; for, to the extent those arguments are persuasive, they clearly derive their strength from an apparent similarity to rational forms. Thus, a component of the proposed methodology for evaluating the intellectual rigor of mainstream conspiratists must be the analysis of reasoning. Close analysis of the article in The Nation confirms the impression: in addition to more traditional rhetorical strategies, Pearson often substitutes logical fallacy for evidence and reasoned argument. However, the technical detail combined with the anomalies obscures the fallacious reasoning. The overarching flaw is that the entire article amounts to a false

The Need for Evaluative Criteria

dilemma: it is claimed that the failure of American forces to monitor the airliner means one of two things—either this was a major intelligence breakdown on the part of the American military, or the American government actually did know what was going on and is covering this knowledge up. The author argues, in effect, that the United States’ monitoring capabilities are so extensive that the first scenario is impossible. Thus, it must be the case that the United States government is hiding something. And if the government is hiding something, it must be true either that officials decided to take advantage of an accidental situation or that they planned the entire operation. The most charitable interpretation is that US military and intelligence agencies suffered an extraordinary series of human and technical failures which allowed the airliner to proceed on its deviant course. … However, a much more likely and frightening possibility is that a conscious policy decision was made by the US government … to risk the lives of 269 innocent people on the assumption that an extraordinary opportunity for gleaning intelligence information should not be missed and that the Soviets would not dare shoot down a civilian airliner. (106)

Despite the existence of evidence to the contrary to which Pearson had access,20 the article assumes that the US military had the technical capability to track KAL 007 throughout the course of its flight; that any such equipment should have been used in this fashion; that if it was not, this, in and of itself, constitutes a failure. This construction constitutes a form of argument from ignorance, based on a combination of lack of information on the part of the audience and the difficulties inherent in proving a negative—that the United States did not engage in a spy operation. Thus, one is presented here a conundrum on the order of “Have you stopped beating your wife?” Ultimately, the position depends on points which the author never establishes: that the capability exists; that the equipment, if technically capable of such monitoring, was set up to do so; that the monitoring, if done, was done in “real time” (which is necessary if the tragedy were to be averted); and that those watching were aware of what was happening.21 Obviously, many steps are omitted from the overall proof. Hiding those gaps in the enthymematic structure of this argument are masses of irrelevant technical detail and many logical fallacies. For

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example, an instance of false cause occurs in the analysis of the route of the RC-135, the American reconnaissance aircraft that was on station near Kamchatka as KAL 007 headed toward Soviet territory. The Soviets allege that the RC-135 performed a control function in an espionage operation, that both it and the Korean airliner changed course in order to rendezvous. In Pearson’s words, “That loop [in the route of the RC-135] … may have been an anomaly undertaken to bring the aircraft into close proximity to K.A.L. 007.” (110) But the only evidence extant for this “double loop” theory is the reconstructed map (not actual recorded radar data) displayed by the Soviets at their press conference.22 Of course, the existence of this extra loop is essential to proving that allegation that the RC-135 was involved in this event, and a role for the RC-135 is crucial to the conspiracy theory. Despite the absence of any hard evidence (such as radar recordings or independent corroboration),23 the author assumes this Soviet assertion to be true throughout the remainder of the article, justifying this position in part because the United States government has steadfastly refused to release any information concerning the reconnaissance plane’s mission orbit Why would the United States government consider that information sensitive? Because the time during which the two aircraft were in closest proximity was about a half hour before KAL 007 first entered Soviet airspace—plenty of time to warn the jetliner, call ground stations or notify higher authorities. (111)

In this instance of the post hoc fallacy, it is useful to test the negative syllogism (if not B, then not A) yielding the following If (and only if) KAL 007 had not penetrated Soviet airspace thirty minutes after the airliner and the RC-135 were in closest proximity to one another, then the United States government would not consider information concerning the mission orbit of the RC-135 sensitive.

For that statement to be true, reconnaissance routes would have to be public knowledge at other times. This is obviously not the case, since it is highly unlikely that the United States government is willing to make such information public under any but the most extreme circumstances. This passage also represents another use of the false dilemma, for the reader is

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again presented with a binary choice: either the RC-135 was involved in the “spy mission” or the United States government would release the pertinent information about its route.

CIRCULAR REASONING: ASSUMING THE CONCLUSION The strategy of false cause tends to impute conscious behavior when, in fact, none may exist. Such post hoc fallacies may be persuasive when the alleged relationship can be made to appear reasonable. In this section, we examine specific uses of logical deficiencies as a structural device designed to induce the reader’s participation in the rhetorical process, the linguistic means applied to reinforce this effort, and the extent to which discrepant information is ignored by the author. Reasoning from sign—the driving force behind associative thinking— is particularly useful in this process. The associative power of narrative allows circular reasoning to succeed. For example, if there were a conspiracy involving the CIA, the National Security Agency, and Korean Air Lines, the United States government certainly would want to hide the fact of a rendezvous between KAL 007 and any reconnaissance plane that was supervising its actions. But the failure to release information regarding the route of the RC-135 is not, in and of itself, an evidentiary fact leading to the inference that such a conspiracy existed. However, narrativity, which is grounded in reasoning from sign, allows the auditor to create such a relationship. In this instance, the false cause depends on an unproven assumption and the argument becomes circular: that is, the explanation makes sense only if one assumes a priori the existence of a conspiracy and the need to cover it up; yet the refusal to reveal classified information is used as proof of the conspiracy, illustrating the self-sealing nature of the conspiratist argument. Similarly, the refusal to reveal previously classified information cannot be taken as a sign of conspiracy or cover-up. A requirement of sign reasoning is that the sign and its referent can reliably be expected to occur together (424: 223), and only the totally cynical would assert that each instance of such reluctance signals a conspiracy or cover-up. The fabric of much of the argumentation in Pearson’s article follows this formula of assuming conclusions that need to be proven. For instance, in a passage explaining why the “Soviet Air Defense Forces had trouble figuring out what the intruder was,” Pearson accepts the disputed rendezvous as fact

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Because of the complex flight path of the reconnaissance aircraft, its convergence with the flight path of K.A.L. 007, the airliner’s reported change of altitude at the moment of convergence and its changed course shortly thereafter, it is not difficult to imagine at least some confusion. (118)

Although stated as fact by Pearson and by the Soviets, these allegations are specifically left open by the ICAO.24 Of course, the general reader, not having access to this report, is left at the mercy of the author’s interpretation of the two conflicting versions. The conspiracy theory for which Pearson so eloquently argues depends absolutely on two of his allegations: that the airliner was under surveillance by the United States, and that the Korean pilot took evasive action. Unless the flight of KAL 007 was monitored, the alleged “intelligence bonanza” could not materialize.25 Likewise, if the pilot did not take evasive action, there is no evidence to demonstrate he was aware his aircraft was in Soviet airspace. Pearson uses two disputed events to demonstrate his thesis that the Korean plane engaged in evasive maneuvers: the question of whether the airliner was flying with navigation lights extinguished and the issue of a voice inquiry by the intercepting Soviet pilot. The source of the problem can be found in the author’s analysis of the recorded comments of Soviet interceptor pilots; the English language translation of this air-to-ground transmission is Pearson’s sole support for these allegations. With respect to the issue of navigation lights, in reporting the confusion as the Soviets first scrambled fighters over Kamchatka, Pearson states If K.A.L. 007 was flying with its air navigation lights (ANOs) on at that time, the Soviet fighters should have seen it in the clear sky at 33,000 feet from as little as twenty miles away. That they did not suggests the airliner’s ANOs were not on. (118)

But the linguistic evidence provided by the Russian transcript indisputably contradicts Pearson’s allegations.26 Based on this misapprehension, Pearson incorrectly interprets the Soviet pilot to be saying later, over Sakhalin, that he has turned on his own lights as the first step in the intercept procedures. (119–120) Because he is wrong here, Pearson has no evidence that the pilot of KAL 007 knew he was being intercepted and, therefore,

The Need for Evaluative Criteria

no independent reason to believe that he took evasive action, except the authority of the Soviet government. Indeed, according to the ANC Report, “available information suggests that the flight crew of KE007 was not aware of any of the interceptions reported by the USSR. … [There was] no reference to any visual or radio contact by KE007 with intercepting aircraft.” (430: 8) Pearson, however, ignores this information, concluding that the argument he has developed “leaves us with the most persuasive theory: that the airliner made a deliberate, carefully planned intrusion into Soviet territory with the knowledge of US military and intelligence agencies.” (122) Unfortunately, a majority of the allegations in this article, and particularly this last one, are actually unproved. The writer nevertheless assumes their validity and employs them as premises in later arguments, substituting repetition for proof. Only a close textual analysis will reveal the conspiratist’s method of operationalizing this strategy. In the article published in The Nation, clues to the linguistic underpinning of the process can be found in Pearson’s discussion of variant translations of a crucial line in the transcript by the ICAO and the United States government. He writes At 1813:16, the pilot of the SU-15 replied to another instruction from ground control. “Roger,” he said. Ten seconds later, according to the American translation of the transmissions, the pilot reported back to ground control, “The target isn’t responding to IFF [Identification/Friend or Foe].” If IFF, a military procedure, was used, it is clear the Russians believed they were dealing with a hostile military aircraft. But in its final report, the ICAO team investigating the incident translated that message as, “The target isn’t responding to the call.” “The call” might refer to an attempt to contact KAL 007 on the international hailing frequencies of 121.5 or 243.0 megahertz. … If the ICAO translation is correct, the Soviet pilot may well have used the international hailing frequency in accordance with accepted interception procedures. Yet, the transcripts show no response from KAL 007. (120, emphasis added)

Fleshing out Pearson’s reasoning, we arrive at the following 1. If the ICAO translation is correct, the Soviet pilot may have used the International Hailing Frequency.

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2. If the Soviet pilot used the International Hailing Frequency, KAL 007 should have responded. 3. KAL did not respond. CONCLUSION DESIRED: KAL 007 was being evasive. It is the word “yet” that colors the entire passage, because there would be no false reasoning without it: if one were to substitute “in any event”—an equally pedestrian connector—the statement would become one of the co-occurrence, coincidence, rather than causality.27 But claims of causality are essential to vindicate the conspiratist’s stance, for it is precisely coincidences that have no credibility within this world view. As we have noted, a hallmark of the conspiracy argument is its “deductive, causal claim.” Further, it is “the deductive logic of this appeal … that can transform all data into indisputable ‘evidence.’” (122: 96, 100) The importance of this argumentative structure rests on the simple fact that Pearson does not prove the International Hailing Frequency was actually used. Indeed, all hard evidence is to the contrary and the “evidence” on which Pearson relies is hypothetical. The conclusion that KAL 007 engaged in evasive maneuvers does not follow from the evidence presented. Nor does it make any sense: it would clearly have been in the Korean pilot’s interest to respond, identifying his craft as a civilian plane with passengers aboard, particularly if, as the Soviets—and Pearson—allege, a civilian aircraft was specifically chosen as a cover for the spy operation to ensure safety. The obvious conclusion must be that the “call” was not a verbal inquiry made on the 121.5 MHz International Hailing Frequency.28 Nevertheless, this last possibility is not made available to the naive reader. In the context of the building narrative, the hypothetical nature of Pearson’s claim is lost in his attempt to demonstrate that the Soviet pilot was following established intercept procedures. He makes no mention of the ICAO Report, which states that there was no evidence of the interceptor pilot having made any significant effort to follow international procedures for intercepting aircraft. (429: 43) Failure to establish this claim would undermine one of his four leitmotifs. In addition, since a voice call on 121.5 MHz is a requirement of those procedures, Pearson’s entire argument would be vitiated if it could be demonstrated that no such call was made. Significantly, the Air Navigation Commission concluded

The Need for Evaluative Criteria

There is no record or other information of any calls on 121.5 MHz having been heard by any civil or military ground unit or by other aircraft within VHF range of the intercepting aircraft, or any record of such transmission having been received via the search and rescue satellite (SARSAT) system. (430: 9)

EXAMINING THE FOUNDATIONS OF CONSPIRATIST RHETORIC: THE PROBLEM WITH NARRATIVE APPROACHES We began this essay by posing the following question: How does one evaluate examples of the conspiratist genre? A good starting point for analysis is the conspiratist’s world view or frame of reference. As Jamieson states, “a rhetor’s Weltanschauung manifests itself not only in the premises he assumes but also in his structuring of arguments, his rhetorical tone, his use of language and in the types of evidence he educes.” (227: 4–5) Importantly, the very nature of the data can contribute to the plausibility of an alleged conspiracy. In cases such as the Korean airliner disaster, complex scientific, technical, and linguistic evidence is central to any discussion, including claims of conspiracy. The inherent plausibility of conspiracy is undoubtedly enhanced by the highly technical nature of some incidents. Consequently, one reason Pearson’s article succeeds is the author’s reliance on the ignorance of his audience. Fisher tells us that the role of experts in public moral argument is to act as counselors. “Only experts can argue with experts, and their arguments … cannot be rationally questioned by nonexperts.” (165: 72) It is not clear what should be the role or the subject of the “counsel” that Fisher espouses. If experts refute technical error, they are engaging in the discourse-stifling practices that Fisher condemns. On the other hand, failure to so refute leaves the public as ignorant and error-prone as before. (See 390; 66) Unfortunately, Fisher sheds no light on what one should do with a case such as the present one. Although Pearson is not an expert in the sense that Hans Bethe and Edward Teller are experts on nuclear weapons (cf. 390: 72), he nevertheless provides an overwhelming amount of technical detail which helps in the development of the rhetorical world view he is creating. The reader, of course, is in no position to judge the accuracy, the significance, or the relevance of this information. For example, Pearson makes a point about additional fuel taken on by the airliner prior to leaving Anchorage

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According to data contained in the [ICAO’s] final report on the incident, K. A. L. 007’s pilot added 9,800 pounds of fuel at Anchorage which were neither needed for his scheduled flight nor accounted for in his subsequent position reports to air-traffic controllers. (107)

This sounds like a lot of fuel, but in fact it was only 3.8 percent of the minimum required for the flight, and constituted in the view of many experienced pilots a prudent reserve, referred to as “grandmother fuel.”29 As Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca observe, “Generally speaking, absolute figures have a greater impact on the imagination [than relative figures].” (358: 148) The effect of accumulating technical detail is to enhance the believability of Pearson’s story; the naive reader will assume Pearson is an expert, hence credible as a witness. Details such as Pearson provides are crucial for strengthening narrative probability and narrative fidelity, yet their accuracy and relevance can be tested only if experts argue in the traditional mode. When faced with arguments that depend on sophisticated technical knowledge, the American public—which usually is favored with plentiful technical information—is no better off than the Soviet public, which historically has no access to such information. In the case of KAL, the American public could not even determine who the real experts were, since television and the press, which mediated all information concerning the KAL disaster, made no more critical judgments than the public. Indeed, the press tends to seek a complete story, even if inaccurate—favoring those who profess to know what happened, while passing over those who insist the data are inconclusive or incomplete. (Cf. 76) Although the public may be swayed by the ethos or verbal skills of a rhetor to accept such evidence at face value, it must be pertinent to any critical judgment to assess the factual accuracy and evidentiary relevance of all specialized data. (Cf. 60) Indeed, conspiratist argument invites such critique. By its very nature, conspiratist rhetoric purports to be an evidentiary process, though in fact what makes the rhetoric work is its narrativity. Thus, one can assess the world view of the conspiratist—the ground on which the charge of conspiracy rests—by examining the rhetorical use of quasi-logical argument (358: 193–260), the perceived stylistic use of language, and the factual accuracy of technical details adduced as evidence. More specifically, Creps defines the substance of conspiratist rhetoric as its “proposition[al], thematic, logical and evidential content.”

The Need for Evaluative Criteria

(122: 16)30 The evidentiary methodology is particularly significant as a critical tool, because it evaluates the conspiratist claim on its own terms, and cuts through the maze of association obfuscating enthymematic gaps in the proof structure. For example, conspiratist rhetoric characteristically employs the false dilemma (a dissociative construct that imposes upon the auditor a seemingly binary choice). Associative strategies frequently employed by the conspiratist rhetor include a kind of “credibility by association,” reliance on circular and post hoc reasoning, and a variant of the halo effect that we have called “Lesser Facts, Greater Facts” (the use of trivial detail to imply knowledge of more important issues). Each of these associative/dissociative techniques functions effectively within the narrative structure of the conspiratist argument to produce narrative probability. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca explain association in the following manner as a quasi-logical structural device [T]wo terms are presented as if their insertion into the same class went without saying, and there is a formation of a class ad hoc through the union of the two terms on a plane of equality. … [E]lements placed side by side in this way to form a class should react on each other in the [auditor’s] mind, and it is because of this that the technique assumes its argumentative value. (358: 129)

As Warnick has noted, “it is precisely because of the ambiguity and implicitness of its claims that narrative can be used to account for seemingly discrepant facts.” (447: 176) We understand “implicitness” to mean the implicative character of story-telling structure. Ambiguity becomes manifest as the absence of a precise connection between parts of the argument. “The [auditor] is left free to imagine … a relationship that, by its very lack of precision, assumes a mysterious, magical character”—an argument form that Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca term “parataxis.” (358: 157, emphasis added) Once associations are adduced in order to impute causality they operate in the subsequent narrative as if causality were already proved. It would seem, then, that the process of creating narrative probability has the capacity to overshadow the need to demonstrate narrative fidelity. In our exemplar, Pearson effectively associates his hypothetical premises and conclusions with what is known about the incident. Association/ dissociation is probably the most powerful tool of persuasiveness and the most basic human thought process. It is the means by which we classify

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experience. As a rhetorical tool it is not only the standard by which stories are judged; it is the very substance of the narrative act. Thus, the lack of definitive evidence bearing on this case allows association to prevail; and the associative power of stories allows circular reasoning to succeed. Hypothetical premises, as well as the conclusions drawn from them, take on the status of proven fact and can be repeated as such in subsequent arguments. Each argument becomes an artistic element in the narrative development, achieving, finally, a symbiosis of argument and poetic in which traditional rhetorical fallacies are utilized as artistic devices. Consciously crafted language carries the intellectual burden of argument, and the dramatistic elements of the story overshadow the lack of evidence. But such ambiguity, of course, can be misleading, and it is from this absence of formal argumentation that conspiratist narration derives its persuasiveness. The use of association, then, is one characteristic which allows for—indeed creates—the self-sealing attribute observed by Zarefsky (494) and others. Warnick recalls Kenneth Burke’s characterization of Hitler’s power: “If those skeptical of Hitler’s account pointed out the existence of Jewish workers not conforming to his stereotype, his response would be ‘[t]hat is one more indication of the cunning with which the Jewish plot is being engineered.’” (447: 176) Accordingly, discrepant evidence can be dismissed by the conspiratist as some sort of red herring consciously designed by the conspirators to confuse the unwary and the gullible. Because an auditor is constrained to choose between two carefully selected alternatives, employing the false dilemma as a rhetorical tactic serves to delimit choices artificially, hence polarizing the alternatives purportedly available to decision-makers. False dilemmas are simplistic, which is both their virtue and their vice.31 Hence, it follows that the conscious use of false dilemma (or other logical fallacies) as a rhetorical tactic distorts the communicative nature of the rhetorical act. Furthermore, such devices thrive in the medium of narration precisely because of the absence of formal argumentation. The human desire for explanations of all natural phenomena—a drive that spurs inquiry on many levels—aids the conspiratist in the quest for public acceptance. Moreover, the primary characteristic of conspiratist rhetoric that allows it to be adopted by other audiences is its ability to conceal ambiguities and points of contention by means of rhetorical coercion. In contrast, the tests of evidence that we have outlined are specifically designed to reveal those places where a story isn’t sound and, especially,

The Need for Evaluative Criteria

those places where it is not possible to discern the truth on the basis of the available information. Accordingly, we contend that the central task of argumentative analysis lies in determining whether or not the conspiratist’s Weltanschauung interacts with coercive elements in the rhetoric to delimit the rhetorical choices available to the audience. The objects of analysis are a) those textual elements which project the ideology of the rhetor, and b) the techniques employed to convey that ideology. If the critic can utilize the immanent structural characteristics of a rhetorical text to demonstrate the presence of a Weltanschauung that is consistent with the ideology described above, one of the cornerstones of conspiratist rhetoric shall have been discovered. In addition, the “deductive, causal claim” described by Creps (122) can be evaluated on its own terms: Are the purported facts accurate and relevant? That is, what is the quality of the conspiratist’s evidence? If it can be demonstrated that the conspiratist employs false dilemmas, inaccurate technical data, or other flawed tactics to establish consistency, to claim causality where only anomaly logically resides, and if it is claimed that conspiracy is the causal factor, then it is proper for the critic to focus attention on the nature of these tactics. When such devices adumbrate within a well-constructed text, a spurious sort of narrative plausibility— narrative fidelity—may be created. The reader cannot test narrative fidelity—the test against real-world knowledge—unless the reader actually has the requisite knowledge. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca state that the primary requirement of argumentation is that it provide “the means of obtaining the adherence of the audience through variations in the way of expressing thought.” (358: 163) Accordingly, the form of a discourse must not be separated from its substance, nor should stylistic structures be studied “independently of the purpose they must achieve in the argumentation.” (358: 142) Such analysis makes it “possible to track down [i.e., to discern the motive for] the choice of a particular form.” (358: 143) It is, of course, this notion that lies at the root of the generic mode of criticism. We contend that the task for the critic of conspiratist narrative may rightly include the application of universal criteria in assessing that rhetor’s “ulterior motives” (163: 364), particularly if those criteria are applied to evidence that resides within the conspiratist narrative itself. Warnick correctly argues that the internal coherence of a text, its narrative probability, “is inadequate for the judgment of narratives used rhetorically” (447: 177;

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see 408: 22, 36) and further, that it “cannot function as the sole means for … assessing [a] text’s adequacy as the response to a rhetorical situation” (447: 178; see 71), because, simply stated, rhetoric attempts to persuade. Hence, the rhetor who utilizes narrative in order to achieve the goal of promulgating a particular Weltanschauung may be held accountable by the critic for the value criteria which underlie that vision. One may view a conspiratist (e.g., Pearson) as the “critic” of “narrative used rhetorically”—for instance, the United States government’s explanation of the KAL incident. From this point of view, one can see in Pearson a critic with no external criteria other than his own moral values. However, to the extent that Pearson (functioning as a rhetor who propounds his own “narrative used rhetorically”) advocates a particular Weltanschauung, one may also judge that his narrative constitutes “a mask for ulterior motive.”32

CONCLUSION At one level, Pearson’s article is persuasive simply because he tells a better story, successfully exploiting a confluence of public knowledge about past espionage activities, traditional American distrust of government, a concomitant faith in technology, and the administration’s unwillingness to reveal sources and methods of intelligence. And, in an age of skeptics, government complicity does not seem unreasonable. Indeed, conspiracy theories are almost never unreasonable; they are merely too monistic. Nevertheless, we have suggested that it is fruitful to evaluate conspiratist rhetoric from the standpoint of rhetorical behavior intended to expand possibilities for meaningful dialogue and compromise versus strategies which limit real communication. One major aspect of much conspiratist rhetoric that has not been discussed by previous authors is the potential use of the false dilemma as a rhetorical strategy. In our opinion, the use of logical fallacy—particularly the false dilemma—exemplifies coercive communication. Forcing audiences into a simple binary choice between alleged good and alleged evil is a standard ploy which has ancient roots: “He who is not with us is against us.” One can also pose an issue in such a manner that the audience is offered a choice between willful evil and inadvertent evil, but evil nonetheless. Thus, Robert Welch, founder of the John Birch Society, characterized President Eisenhower as either a conscious Soviet agent or

The Need for Evaluative Criteria

an unwitting dupe of the Communist conspiracy. Similarly, David Pearson argues that government claims of failure to monitor KAL indicate a concerted attempt to cover up either a failed intelligence operation, or, at the very least, a major breakdown in American intelligence. After setting up this dichotomy, Pearson then argues for his perception of a malevolent reality, with inadvertent evil reserved as the only refuge for nonbelievers. One arrives at a symbiosis of poetics and argumentation: various logical fallacies are used as artistic devices in the structure of a conspiratist tract qua rhetorical text, while consciously crafted language carries the intellectual burden of argument further by use of emotion than by use of induction. In this way, Pearson can be seen to utilize structural devices— fallacies and argument from ignorance—to create the anomalies which are then explained by claims of conspiracy: technical material and dramatistic style are fused to create internal consistency while the deductive causal form overrides it all to create an image of inexorability. In this way, the rhetor transforms the rhetorical act, distorting its communicative nature, engaging in rhetorical coercion. Of course, this is the traditional, rational view of argument; nevertheless, we would contend that it is the best, perhaps the only, means of coming to grips with conspiratist claims because it is often the case that this type of argumentation consciously violates the standards of rationality. The appeal of the conspiracy story is its self-sealing nature: it provides a world view which is complete, capable of answering—by subsuming—all uncomfortable questions. Its apparent internal cohesiveness provides the narrative fidelity and probability which make it persuasive. Thus, conspiracy argument proves Fisher’s (165) theory correct: auditors test a story by their own lights. Yet, because the narrative paradigm is not normative (165: 66), analysis of conspiracy argument also provides the rationale for resisting the seduction of Fisher’s position.

NOTES 1. The authors wish to express their gratitude to Ray McKerrow for his support and guidance. 2. Subsequently, a revised version was published in (486). 3. The neologism “conspiratist” has been created in order to avoid the pejorative connotations of the phrase “conspiracy theorists” and the awkwardness of repeatedly using “conspiracy proponents.”

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Part One: KAL and Cracks in the Rhetorical Wall 4. 1984 by The Nation Company, Inc. Portions reprinted by permission. 5. Neumann related such movements to anxieties evoked by feelings of genuine threat to institutions such as property, family, religion or morality. As societal change accelerates, anxiety increases, making the false concreteness of conspiracy theories still more attractive to an under-educated and under-informed society. (334: 259) 6. Creps (122: 4) explored the specific characteristics that make the conspiratist argument a unique rhetorical artifact. He isolated three elements intrinsic to this type of rhetoric: a deductive/causal substantive form, a massively documented/dramatistic style, and a stressful situation. (122: 205–207) Creps’ schema adopts Campbell and Jamieson’s (97) definitions: substance is defined as the propositional, thematic, logical and evidential content; style is defined as the manner or mode in which the substantive elements are presented; and situation is defined as the motives and constraints imposed on the rhetor by events, audience, and precedent. (97: 18) Creps (122: 102) argues that without the dramatistic style, conspiratist rhetoric would be devoid of its “emotive and moral content.” 7. It is interesting to note that Campbell and Jamieson (97: 27) explicitly call for close reading of a text as a requirement for establishing the generic character of that text. 8. Indeed, since Hofstadter (208) first introduced the notion of “paranoid style” in 1963, it has become increasingly apparent that extremist elements are not the only ones who avail themselves of the methodology of conspiracy argumentation. To the extent that individuals and organizations as disparate as Ralph Nader, Woodward and Bernstein, Ronald Reagan, and Soviet propagandists have had recourse to this tactic, it must be accorded greater status as a recognized and viable instrument of both intra– and international discourse. As Bunzel (497: 51) noted twenty years ago, “the persistent cries of conspiracy are not just a right-wing phenomenon, but a reflection of the pervasiveness of this way of looking at things.” See also (473: 17). 9. (45; 234; 395) In addition, the Soviet Union published Prestuplenie prezidenta (The President’s Crime), a translation of a Japanese study by one Akio Takahashi (420), the pseudonym for an unknown author. For an extensive listing of publications devoted to explanations of the incident, see (480: xxiv–xxv). 10. The telecast spawned a published claim that the airliner never crashed, rather was forced to land on Sakhalin Island, where all the passengers and crew remained imprisoned. (409; 238) HBO also broadcast a made-for-television movie, “Tailspin,” in 1989. 11. Examples of this public debate are two call-in talk shows: (249—guests included Nicola Truppin, the daughter of two KAL 007 victims) and (137—guests included Seymour Hersh, author of “The Target is Destroyed”; Nicola Truppin; and two other family members of victims). See also (124) and (348). A 1986 survey (328) revealed that twenty-five percent of the public believed “The airliner was equipped with devices for spying and intentionally went off-course to spy.” This information was provided by Ronald H. Hinckley, formerly a Senior Fellow at NSIC. 12. (433: 1) All official administration statements can be found in this document. 13. Page references to Pearson’s argument throughout the remainder of the analysis refer to (355). 14. The term “direct evidence” is used in the legal sense: evidence which directly proves the existence of a fact; that is, testimony of personal knowledge (which may exist in the form of documents) derived through one or more of the five senses and unaided by any process of inference.

The Need for Evaluative Criteria 15. Oberg (344: chapter 3) catalogs numerous instances of Soviet forces attacking border violators without warning. In one case, the Soviet Union actually admitted culpability eight years after the fact in direct response to Oberg’s published charges. See (218; 44). 16. The typical mission orbit of an RC-135 is a figure eight paralleling the coastline of the USSR. The Soviet government contends that as the RC-135 was returning to its base in the Aleutians, it made an unexpected turn in order to position itself near the flight-path of KAL 007 and effect a rendezvous. In a diagram presented by Marshal Ogarkov at a September 9, 1983, press conference, this alleged “second loop” enabled the RC-135 to fly parallel to the route of KAL 007. (20) The United States government, of course, denies the existence of this anomaly in the route of the RC-135. 17. Burke termed qualitative progression one of the “five aspects of form.” (92: 124) Jakobson (224) has demonstrated not only that metaphor and metonymy are the primary organizational principles of poetry and prose, respectively, but also that similarity and contiguity are the fundamental structural principles of language acquisition and aphasic loss of language competence. Taken together, these scholars would seem to have laid the groundwork for the possible creation of a semiotics of rhetoric, which topic obviously extends far beyond the scope of this essay. 18. For an illuminating discussion of the uses to which language is put in the service of argument, see Bosmajian (80), particularly chapter 6 “The Language of War.” (121–132) 19. Much of this information appears to be faulty. In the words of James Oberg (343), a spaceflight operations engineer and noted science writer, “Pearson lets loose an avalanche of technical and military terminology which gives a good appearance of true expertise. But … [his] material appears outrageous, replete with the most elementary technical errors. … In hopes of appearing persuasive, Pearson counts on—and cultivates—the ignorance of his readers.” (36–37) 20. For example, the Air Navigation Commission (ANC) and its parent International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), a United Nations affiliate, investigated the shootdown independently. (430; 429) While questions have been raised about the amount of data made available to both bodies, no authoritative refutation of these reports has ever been published. 21. Hersh has confirmed what many suspected all along: that the tragedy was indeed monitored in real time, but the radar operators did not realize the significance of their intercepts. (201: 64) However, certain knowledge of this information was not available in 1984. 22. Aside from the fervent US denials of the authenticity of Ogarkov’s map, there exists one independent fact which argues for fabrication: as we alone pointed out in Flights (480: 153), on the map the time of the shooting was placed at 1824 GMT, two minutes earlier than that indicated in all American and Japanese materials, including the voice activated tape of the Soviet fighter pilots. No one in the West has ever challenged the authenticity of 1826 GMT as the time at which the airplane was destroyed or that it was still in Soviet airspace when fired upon. Additionally, it was not the Soviets who introduced the variable of the RC-135; the presence of the reconnaissance aircraft was first revealed by then House Majority Leader Jim Wright. 23. In fact, the Soviets never presented evidence to support any of their allegations. As Marshal Ogarkov commented during the September 9 press conference in Moscow, “We see no need to provide any proof for what is completely obvious.” (20: 26) One may infer from the facts in this and the preceding note that the Soviets did not record

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Part One: KAL and Cracks in the Rhetorical Wall their own radar, hence could not know for certain where KAL 007 was at the moment it was hit and did not know what US intelligence might be able to prove. [Documents that became available after the dissolution of the Soviet Union confirm that KAL was, in fact, over international waters when it was fired upon. See also (113: 40)] 24. “No evidence was available to either support or refute the contradictory information from the USSR and the United States concerning the proximity of KE007 and the reconnaissance aircraft.” (429: 40) To date, neither the USSR nor the United States has released the radar traces that would resolve the question. 25. As noted earlier in this essay, Pearson bases his analysis of the technical capabilities of US military intelligence radar installations in the western Pacific on assumptions supported by seemingly relevant, but insufficient, evidence. The issue centers on the question of whether the United States has over-the-horizon radar, an assumption which Pearson never establishes as fact. Instead, once again, he depends on the strategy of “Lesser Facts, Greater Facts,” and the reader is in no position to evaluate the accuracy or significance of his information. For further discussion of the question of surveillance, see (480: chapter 8). 26. For a complete discussion of the errors in this passage, see (279). In a December 1984 telephone interview Pearson admitted that he knew no Russian and had not consulted anyone who did. The fact that analysis of the pilot transcript remains essentially unchanged in Pearson’s book (356)—despite his having had access to contrary evidence—is further testimony, in our opinion, to his conspiratorial Weltanschauung. 27. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca have noted that “[q]ualification, insertion into a class, may be expressed by use of a coordinating conjunction, such as ‘and,’ ‘or,’ or ‘nor,’ instead of by use of a notion already developed.” (358: 128) 28. It should be noted, as Kang has demonstrated (279: 70), that when the United States government supplied evidence to refute the Soviet Union’s claim it inadvertently proved the falsity of its own position, as well. If the Soviet pilot made an IFF inquiry minutes prior to shooting down the aircraft, then it must not be true that Soviet military officials knew all along what sort of aircraft they were dealing with, because the only thing an IFF interrogation could prove was that KAL 007 was not a Soviet military aircraft. Had that been clear for over two hours, there would have been no necessity to complete such an electronic inquiry so late in the interception sequence. 29. (290: 29) This view was confirmed in a private communication from Harold Ewing, a 747 pilot cited extensively by Hersh. (201) 30. This definition would seem to be too narrow because it ignores important stylistic considerations. As has been demonstrated, such matters of style are integral to the effect (i.e., the persuasiveness) achieved by discourse and are best elucidated by textual criticism. 31. Richard Nixon’s Air Force Academy speech (June 4, 1969) demonstrates that mainstream politics is not immune to dichotomous thinking. (466: 249; see also 335) 32. (163: 364) This statement might also apply, ipso facto, to the position maintained by the United States government.

CHAPTER 6

Soviet Media Tactics and the Body Politic: Prevention and Treatment of Communicable Diseases Michael K. Launer and Marilyn J. Young Provenance: Previously unpublished, this paper is a revised version of a lecture delivered in April 1989 at a Freedoms Foundation of Valley Forge conference, The Future of International Broadcasting in the Age of Glasnost. (276) Some of the information contained in that lecture had appeared earlier in Flights. (480) Copyright Holder: Authors Description: Although still hampered by what we term “template journalism,” in the 1980s Soviet media began to respond in uncharacteristic ways to Western government-sponsored shortwave radio broadcasts that were listened to (furtively) by a growing segment of the citizenry. This chapter describes the impact “The Radios” had on Soviet government rhetoric aimed at its domestic audience and delineates the symbiotic relationship between these competing outlets.

WESTERN BROADCASTING AND THE SOVIET MEDIA

T

he goal of this study is to identify specific rhetorical tactics that characterized Soviet media during the first half of the 1980s and examine the extent to which such tactics have been modified in recent years. The origin of this work was an assessment of the effectiveness of Western transnational broadcasting in presenting to Soviet and East European audiences political and social messages that might counter those received through domestic media; such an assessment remains a secondary focus of the current paper. Because of the different ways in which authoritarian and pluralistic societies organize media functions, it was virtually impossible to isolate Soviet international broadcasting from the print and other electronic media. Moreover, one would be remiss not to include the extensive agitprop system of public speakers in any discussion of Soviet information policy. Recent studies have

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demonstrated the degree of emphasis that had been placed on increasing the effectiveness of public agitatsiia; (381; 408; 382) and Radio Liberty’s own research confirms the extent to which Soviet citizens derive important information via the system. (373) Accordingly, our problem became one of assessing the role of the interna­tional radios vis-à-vis the aggregate of agencies comprising the Soviet information network. In an authoritarian society, particularly in the Soviet Union of, say, the mid-1970s, the freedom most cherished and least capable of being exercised is the freedom to hear all sides of an issue, weigh all the conflicting evidence and opinions, and make up one’s own mind. Even today, notwithstanding the greater diversity of views encountered in daily life by the typical Soviet citizen, the weighing of evidence and the respectful exchange of opinions is a rare occurrence. In that sense, at least, one of the most significant functions Western broadcasters can fulfill is simply to present all manner of thought and opinion, regardless of the policies followed by the governments that sponsor them. It seems that the European radio stations may honor this commitment more faithfully than do the American “Voices.” In part this may reflect the tenor of the times; political figures in the United States just seem to have less respect for their opponents. Concomitantly, in America there seems to be diminishing support for the concept of a loyal opposition. These days adversaries rarely lower the tone to their rhetoric enough to listen to one another respectfully, as Reverend Falwell and Senator Kennedy have done. (83) Despite the general lessening of tension in the international arena, the cessation of jamming in late 1988, and even the praise that Moscow News bestowed on Radio Liberty for its coverage of the Armenian earthquake disaster,1 we would argue that there has been little indication from the Soviet side that it prefers to moderate its rhetoric when presenting events of international significance to its domestic audience. However, even if one assumed for the moment that the will to do so existed, the reality of politics makes it difficult, if not impossible, to carry on a measured dialogue with the Soviet Union via international broadcasting. Moreover, if movement in this direction were to occur, it is apparent that at least the American sponsored broadcasters would encounter significant opposition at appropriations hearings. This is particularly true, it seems, during periods when relations between the superpowers are on the upswing. Ironically, funding priorities and the bureaucratic imperative run contrary to rhetorical moderation. One must therefore assume that the current

Soviet Media Tactics and the Body Politic

adversarial relationship between broadcasters will continue indefinitely and must proceed to analyze the relationship on that basis.

SOVIET TEMPLATE JOURNALISM Historically, the role of the media in the Soviet Union or similar authoritarian societies has been based on principles quite different than those underlying that role in a pluralistic society. Indeed, people in the West have little appreciation for the differences in rhetorical function manifested by the two systems of information dissemination. First and foremost within the Soviet system—the postulate that underlies all other considerations—is the very notion of information itself, which is perceived as the inextricable bonding of fact to interpretation. Much of Lenin’s genius consisted in his profound understanding of political communication. Because he was able to “transcend the contemporary modes of communication” it was possible for him to “dominate the development of a new ideology.” (380: 9) Given all the recent changes that have transpired within Soviet society, it is important to remember that the Eighties began with a continuation of this ideological conception. The Leninist ideal was reiterated most succinctly by V. S. Evseev The press, television, radio, oral propaganda, and agitation must … assist the Soviet citizen in orienting himself correctly in domestic life and in international events. (151: 18)

Adams has described the Soviet newspaper as a “tribune for the propagandist and agitator” and as a “disseminator of political information.” (40: 108—see also 184: 6) Matuz has commented, “A [Soviet television] newscast is not a mirror, but a magnifying glass.” (303—cited in 209) We would maintain that in such a system news is the equivalent of public oratory: the news itself is rhetoric. As a result, the news is presented not for its own sake, but rather as proof that the postulates of the socialist state, in general, and the policies of the current administration, in particular, are correct. One suspects that this is the case in most deductive systems, where all knowledge must proceed from first premises and only one universal explanation can be true. (308: 53) And traditional Soviet rhetoric, reflecting such a Platonic system, must stem from universal principles, moving towards greater wisdom and contributing to the goal of perfecting the Communist state. Since true knowledge of historical processes was

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provided by Marxist ideology, the function of a news dissemination system was not to search for knowledge, but “instead to bring the fruits of Marxist analysis” to the people. (247: 6) Times have changed since before the revolution, but remarkably little of Lenin’s communication theory has been modified during the Soviet period. As a result, Meisel has concluded Nothing has a greater effect on the way in which the media deal with crises than the character of the political regime. … The most fundamental distinction is that between [an authoritarian] system in which the media are closely controlled and a pluralist one, where they are given a substantial degree of freedom. There are gradations of freedom and constraint, of course, within each of these modal types, but the importance of the quintessential difference between the two cannot be exaggerated. (314: 66)

Examining Soviet rhetorical behavior in crisis situations, one is struck overwhelmingly by a recurrent tendency: factual events are subjected to evolving ideological interpretation that reflects current policy goals of the government. Moreover, despite other fundamental changes that have occurred in Soviet media over the past decade, news delivery remains a bonding of events to policy, with policy rather than events determining the nature, the extent, and even the timing of news coverage.2 This traditional response pattern is so ingrained that its development can be followed quite clearly through six stages 1. An initial period of silence—no response—while facts are gathered and “spin” options are weighed; 2. A reflexive lashing out at Western news sources, usually including the “Voices” (golosá), for raising a “ruckus” (shumikha) and generating “anti-Soviet hysteria”; 3. Development of the government’s interpretation in a burst of rhetorical activity characterized by well-defined start- and end-points; 4. Culmination of the interpretive process and canonization of the official interpretation via a public statement by the head of government; 5. Dramatic decrease in the volume of rhetorical activity; 6. Enshrinement of the official interpretation in the political culture—that is, relegating the chosen interpretation to longterm societal memory.

Soviet Media Tactics and the Body Politic

This pattern of behavior is evident from the data provided below, which demonstrate both the vulnerability of Soviet media to international broadcasting and the very finite, deliberate boundaries that circumscribe the official Soviet response to a crisis situation. Table 1.  Raw count of VOA broadcast items during the first days of coverage of the 1986 Chernobyl NPP accident Date

Corresp. Report

Central News

Daily Total

Aggreg. Total

M 4/28

6 items

5

11

11

Tu 4/29

25

16

41

52

W 4/30

21

21

42

94

Th 5/1

24

18

42

136

F 5/2

20

14

34

170

Sa 5/3

4

12

16

186

Su 5/4

4

7

11

197

M 5/5

10

9

19

216 items

Table 2. Raw count of Chernobyl-related items listed in FBIS, Daily Report: Soviet Union for the period April 26–May 30, 1986 Period

Number

Period Total

Aggregate Total

17

17

5/5–5/9

185

202

5/12–5/16

181

383

5/19–5/23

26

409

through 5/4 5/5

3

5/6

8

5/7

37

5/8

70

5/9

67

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With specific regard to the Korean Airliner disaster and Chernobyl, for instance, the following time frames obtained Stage Silence Lashing out Development Culmination Drop-off Canonization

KAL Sept 1–2, 1983 Sept 3–6 Sept 6–20+ Sept 28 Sept 21 through Jan ʹ84

Chernobyl April 26–30, 1986 April 30–May 6 May 4–14* May 14 May 16 through summer ʹ87

This phase ended with the claim that the space shuttle Challenger supervised KAL’s “spy” mission. *This phase probably began with Aleksandr Krutov’s May fourth film report on Vremia, the first such telecast from a disaster site in Soviet history. The print media did not reflect this phase until the seventh, however.

+

Obviously, such boundaries are somewhat fluid; they can, for instance, be affected quite severely by useful developments (breaking stories) in the West. Nor is every event packaged so neatly. Moreover, the time frames have on occasion diminished greatly in the Gorbachev era—see, for example, the nearly immediate reporting of the Armenian earthquake disaster, at which time the first two stages were essentially bypassed. With this exception, however, these elements are apparent in each major political and social crisis of the Eighties. Perhaps the ultimate example of evolving ideological interpretation by the Soviet government can be seen in the treatment of KAL. Yuri Andropov’s published statement on September 28, 1983, provided the final, authoritative interpretation to that event. In a month’s time the incident had progressed from a nonevent … to possibly an accident … to a planned spy mission … to a spy mission with the secondary motive of embarrassing the Soviet Union should action be taken against the aircraft … to a provocation designed to entrap the defensive forces of the Soviet Union into destroying the Korean intruder so as to create the public furor that would virtually force West Germany to capitulate to US demands for deployment of Pershing II and cruise missiles.

Soviet Media Tactics and the Body Politic

Three years later, Chernobyl was said to demonstrate the horrors of nuclear war. In this way, the accident could be linked rhetorically to the Soviet testing moratorium, each day of which was numbered in Pravda, and to Mr. Gorbachev’s proposal for the elimination of nuclear weapons by the year 2000. The effect of enshrinement of the official interpretation in the political culture was clearly evident in 1988, when the United States shot down Iran Air Flight 655 over the Persian Gulf in July 1988. The Soviet media rehashed its earlier treatment of KAL 007, including all of the distortions regarding navigation lights, warnings, and course changes that had been featured originally.3 Moreover, despite the tempered rhetorical stance assumed in the international arena, the Soviet domestic press was particularly vituperative, and anti-American editorial cartoons, whose frequency had diminished significantly in the preceding period, appeared prominently in the national dailies. About forty-eight hours after American forces in the Persian Gulf had shot down Flight 655, the Iranian Airbus, Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennady I. Gerasimov pronounced to Western newsmen that “trigger-happy” American servicemen were responsible for its destruction— which, he claimed, was less understandable than the Soviet downing of KAL 007. However, the Soviet Union would not “follow the bad example” of the 1983 “wild anti-Soviet howl by the [Reagan] Administration and the American press.” (Domestically, of course, that is exactly what they did.)4 The New York Times reporter Philip Taubman cited a TASS report claiming that the attack was the inevitable result of America’s presence in the Gulf. So, this interpretation went, “The tragedy … has been far from accidental. … It has been, in effect, a direct corollary of United States actions over the past year.” (422: A9) Obviously, if American forces were not stationed in the Persian Gulf, the passenger plane would not have been shot down. Therefore, in the Soviet view the destruction of this plane was deliberate [T]he risk from the neo-global policies of the US, its attempt to play the role of self-proclaimed international “boss,” and from acts of international terrorism similar to the one which was carried out last Sunday in the Persian Gulf is too great. … At a recent UN General Assembly special session on disarmament the US demonstrated that it places its narrow self-interest above the interests of the world community. The tragedy of Flight 655 was the inevitable consequence of such a policy. (31: 3)

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The Airbus shootdown was repeatedly linked in Soviet reportage to the government’s continuing attack on the development of SDI The clumsy attempt by Washington authorities to reduce the affair to a “mistake” by the commanders of the cruiser Vincennes has been exposed. For a long time American press organs have described this cruiser as “the best warship in the world.” But this naturally raises the [following] question: if the modern electronic equipment with which this ship is stuffed could not distinguish a passenger liner from a supersonic fighter, then what can the world expect if, say, the strategic defense initiative (SDI) is created, where all operations will be carried out by hundreds of thousands of computers? (2: 5) [Q]uestions about the ineffectiveness of the renowned “Aegis” system are being asked in the United States itself, but the twist is that the cruiser on which it was installed cost the treasury a billion dollars. What is striking here, however, is the concern for the wasted money, not the human lives sacrificed before the idol of militarism. All the more so, since—as is becoming clear to many—one might count in the billions the human sacrifices [that would result] from mistakes with the even more complex apparatus that would serve the “Star Wars” system planned by the American administration. (31: 3) [A]ll talk of malfunctions in the computers only undermines faith in the “wisdom” of ultramodern technology, which proponents of expensive electronic systems such as SDI push so intently. (26: 5)

Even in the case of the Armenian earthquake, Soviet spokesmen— including Mr. Gorbachev himself—cautioned nationalist dissidents not to try to exploit the tragedy as a means of promoting their separatist cause in the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh. Just four days after the terrible earthquake struck, Soviet television presented and Pravda reprinted a long interview with the Party Chairman, who had cut short a trip to the United States in order to fly to Armenia and inspect the damage. Despite the gravity of the situation he saw there, Mr. Gorbachev devoted the second half of the interview exclusively to his revulsion at the politicization of the tragedy and the continued preoccupation of

Soviet Media Tactics and the Body Politic

many locals with the situation in Nagorno-Karabakh. Mr. Gorbachev said, in part Yes, we have this problem [in Karabakh]. But, you know, right now Karabakh is being used by unscrupulous people, political demagogues, adventurers, and worse, by a public that has become corrupted. … People toss around slogans about Karabakh. Slogans from the Azerbaijani side—“We’ll die before we give up Karabakh!”—and slogans from here—“We may die, but we’ll take Karabakh!” They haven’t needed Karabakh for a long time, and the situation there hasn’t ever troubled them. They are waging a campaign for power; they need to hold on to power. (17: 1–2)

SOVIET RHETORICAL TACTICS Analysis of the rhetorical techniques utilized by Soviet information specialists reveals primary reliance on three tactics. One of these is well known in public relations circles—it is called the “Inoculation Theory.” In keeping with the medical metaphor, we term the other techniques the “Antibiotic Theory” and the “Snake Venom Theory.” Each of these will be discussed in turn, after which our discussion will focus on techniques utilized by Western broadcasters and on ways in which these may be modified to better accomplish their mission.

INOCULATION THEORY As might be guessed from the name, inoculation theory presupposes that one can wage an information campaign prior to a possible or expected event, so as to minimize the effect of that event when it finally happens. In the realm of persuasion, the technique entails talking about arguments an audience is likely to hear and discrediting them in advance. It is encountered quite frequently in court, where prosecutors and plaintiffs’ attorneys attempt to forestall the claims of the defense. A variant of the tactic occurs when public relations firms create campaigns to counter known or suspected product defects, storing them “on the shelf ” for rapid deployment in case they are needed—a good example being the Suzuki Samurai ads that appeared a few years ago within forty-eight hours of the release of a scathing evaluation in Consumer Reports. An obvious Soviet use of

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inoculation theory occurs in articles such as “Disinformation—A US Specialty,” which purported to be a translation—“with minor deletions”—of a piece that had been published earlier in Paris. (6)5 Another instance can be seen in the passage, cited above, that attempted to forestall comparisons of the Iranian Airbus and KAL shootdowns.6 It is important to realize that inoculation theory represents a cornerstone of Soviet domestic propaganda. For confirmation, one need only look at authoritative statements of correct ideological thought. One such work is a two-volume collection of essays on current US foreign policy, published as recently as 1984 under the imprimatur of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In this volume one finds a study that bears a title which translates literally as “Propaganda in the Service of Foreign Policy.” But in the English-language table of contents at the back of the volume this article is listed as “Mass Media and Foreign Policy.” (70) Not surprisingly, the authors depict Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty as “blatant instruments of ‘psychological warfare’ … preaching the most vicious anti-communism.” (70: 102) The United States Information Agency is correctly described as the “most significant specialized organization in the US charged with directly and systematically carrying out the ideological struggle and propaganda in the international arena.” (70: 97) In addition, however, the authors list National Geographic as an influential element of the US “private sector ideological business.” (70: 103) The Trofimenko collection was not designed for a mass readership: only 5600 copies were printed, a sure sign that a specialist audience was being addressed. Given the sponsoring organization, the book should be considered an authoritative source of prevailing doctrine. In the context of Soviet information, inoculation theory finds its most elegant form of expression when packaged campaigns are mounted through several media outlets. Usually, but not always, such campaigns are directed against domestic, rather than foreign, audiences. Early in the spring of 1986, for instance, a series of newspaper stories was scheduled highlighting accidents that involved Western nuclear submarines and bomb test sites. The first appeared on the morning of Saturday, April 26, when Pravda published a TASS story, datelined Washington, April 25; TASS reported that, after a month of “covering up,” the Pentagon was “forced to admit” that in March a “serious accident” had occurred aboard the Poseidon nuclear submarine USS Nathaniel Green, which was on patrol in the Irish Sea. The incident, it was stated, was

Soviet Media Tactics and the Body Politic

“fraught with the danger of radioactive contamination of the coastal waters of several European countries.” In one of life’s supreme ironies, it is unfortunately true that as the newspaper was being distributed to kiosks in Moscow and Kiev, the No. 4 nuclear reactor at Chernobyl was already spewing radioactivity into the air. On May 3, exactly one week later, both Pravda and Izvestiia cited a The Washington Post story about the USS Atlanta, a nuclear sub that had gone aground in the Straits of Gibraltar. Military spokesmen “were quick to assure [reporters] that no emission of radioactive materials had occurred.” Further details concerning the Nathaniel Green were also provided. On the 4th, both newspapers reported a KLAS-TV (Las Vegas) story concerning the accidental destruction of $70 million worth of electronic equipment during the most recent “Mighty Oak” underground nuclear test. Pravda called the accident “the latest in a series of incidents at the Ranier Mesa nuclear test site.” Krasnaia zvezda, which also carried the “Mighty Oak” story on May 4, had run a report of French nuclear testing on Tuesday, April 29. Although the timing of that first article was surely coincidental, publishing the remaining stories constituted part of a curious propaganda campaign aimed at Soviet readership. For, as the world knows, it was only on April 29—three days after the accident—that the first, four-sentence reference to Chernobyl appeared in Izvestiia, while neither Pravda nor Krasnaia zvezda mentioned the event until Wednesday, the thirtieth. The most surprising aspect of this incident is the fact that Soviet “gatekeepers” did not choose to quash this particular campaign.

ANTIBIOTIC THEORY Persuasive rhetoric is frequently employed to counter negative or derogatory information that has reached an important audience. The “patient” has already been “infected” and needs an “injection” in order to fight the ensuing “illness.” In such an instance, the goal of the activity may be categorized as “damage control”—a fairly common occurrence, given the nature of politics. Not surprisingly, much Soviet political rhetoric falls into this category. One of the clearest examples of the antibiotic theory in action occurred in August, 1986—around the third anniversary of the KAL shootdown. The incident had long since lost its propaganda appeal to

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both governments, and the Soviets, in particular, were much too concerned with Chernobyl to care any longer. In our opinion, everybody wanted the KAL story to go away. And it probably would have, were it not for the publication of Seymour Hersh’s “The Target Is Destroyed.” (201)7 Voice of America took cognizance of the renewed American interest, decided to broadcast a hardline editorial marking the third anniversary (19) and made a big mistake. In the midst of this text there appeared the following statement The Soviets have a new story this year. They now admit 007 was not a spy plane, but say they didn’t know that at the time, so they shot it down.

The Soviet government had made no such admission. We interviewed the author of this editorial and learned that there was no basis in fact for this “new” Soviet position other than rumors of private admissions made to visiting Americans during “walks in the woods, you know how that is.” Of course, VOA editorials are subjected to close pre-broadcast scrutiny, but this gaffe was not caught. Soviet reaction was angry and, by Soviet standards, immediate. During the September 1, 1986, telecast of Vremia, a sharp rejoinder was read by commentator Genrikh Borovik, the newscaster who three years earlier had conjured up the vision of Nazi stormtroopers pushing women and children ahead of them. Borovik’s response (5) said, in part I did not plan to say anything, either in the press or on television, on the occasion of the 3rd anniversary of this tragedy, a tragedy which was used for propaganda, considering, as many others around the world do, that the gist of what happened 3 years ago is today quite clear. However, the other day Voice of America presented the world with a statement which, as it was said, reflects the point of view of the US government, and I was again surprised at the shamelessness of those who have this point of view and those who reflect it. I will quote several paragraphs. … There is falsehood in every sentence. The Soviet statements were not taken back by the Soviet authorities and were not refuted by anyone. Moreover, every day gives them ever more authoritative confirmation from various sources.

Soviet Media Tactics and the Body Politic

A VOA internal memorandum cites the Borovik commentary as evidence that Soviet authorities attach great significance to countering VOA’s message: “Regardless of the hostile content, such a Vremia segment cannot but create (or enhance) interest in our broadcasts.” Nevertheless, the memorandum acknowledged, “even TV watchers sympathetic to the VOA must be wondering what is fact and what is fancy in Borovik’s tirade”; it was suggested that broadcasting a KAL update might be a good idea. VOA did just that. Todd Leventhal, who had written a Focus program commemorating the first anniversary, was assigned to produce another retrospective emphasizing the publication of “The Target Is Destroyed.” (284)8 In contrast to the earlier program, this Focus concentrated on technical, not political, issues. The tone of the broadcast was much more objective than the first, although its content was not any more favorable to the Soviet position. Again the Soviet propagandists reacted sharply. Three days later Krasnaia zvezda published its rebuttal. (77: 3) According to the Russian text, the stimulus for this article was a story that had appeared in the September 1, 1986, edition of U.S. News & World Report. (293) But, judging by the content of the Soviet rejoinder and its timing, there is no question that the true impetus was Todd Leventhal’s Focus program, which had just been broadcast by the Voice of America. This Krasnaia zvezda article is perhaps the best piece of creative writing produced over the entire period of the KAL controversy. We present it in its entirety The primary spy establishment in the USA—the CIA—is diligently covering its tracks. Tracks of the monstrous crime committed on September 1, 1983, when a Boeing 747 operated by the South Korean airline company KAL flew from the USA into Soviet airspace on a spy mission. The CIA chose the famous American journalist Seymour Hersh as the mouthpiece for its new fabrications concerning this anti-Soviet provocation. The CIA knew that for more than two years Hersh had been gathering facts about the ill-fated flight in order to write a book. So he became the object of a certain amount of “attention.” The chief of the US spy establishment himself, W[illiam] Casey, telephoned him. Moreover, according to U.S. News & World Report, the CIA head even provided Hersh access to what was termed “supersecret data

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obtained by American electronic intelligence in the Far East.” As a result, the CIA chief deigned to “personally approve” what appeared in the pages of Hersh’s book “The Target Is Destroyed”. Now Western media have hurriedly, but with noteworthy uniformity, written about the sensational nature of this “work.” It purports to demonstrate a “neutral” version of the tragedy that occurred three years ago; Hersh declares that “no one is to blame” for the death of the Boeing 747 passengers. It was merely “the result of errors.” In the words of U.S. News & World Report, it was Casey who spoon fed these notions to the author of the book. There is no doubt that highly placed administration officials in Washington are completely happy with this new “interpretation” of the events of September 1, 1983. They expect this publication will conceal the truth more securely in a pile of false data from the bottomless pit of the CIA archives. Washington has never conceived of achieving its imperialist pretensions to world supremacy without global espionage. It is well known that prior to the launch of the first American spy satellites the CIA’s top-priority “technical means” for carrying out strategic aerial reconnaissance were U-2 airplanes. As Newsweek wrote on April 2, 1979, CIA director A[llen] Dulles was “ecstatic over photos taken during high altitude U-2 flights over the USSR.” According to directive 10/2 of the US National Security Council, such secret activity was supposed to be carried out in a manner that would make it impossible to prove government complicity. “One of the cornerstones of the plan” D[wight] Eisenhower recalled about the U-2 problem in his memoirs, “was the decision that this airplane would self-destruct should there be unforeseen circumstances, and the pilot would perish.” Only extreme circumstances (the May 1, 1960 capture of the American saboteur G[ary] Powers and his confession) forced the United States government to accept responsibility for its deeds. It also bore responsibility for the fact that, to the satisfaction of “hawks” in Washington, the “U-2 incident” ruined the imminent summit meeting among leaders of the USSR, USA, England, and France, [which would have been] so important for the cause of peace on the planet. And the outcome, more than two decades later, of the latest aerial espionage operation against the Soviet Union is well known. But the CIA is trying to convince people with its new version of events that

Soviet Media Tactics and the Body Politic

responsibility is borne by no one. For if they admitted this premeditated act, the guilty parties would have to answer not only for “tickling” the Soviet line of defense in the Far East, but also for the abrupt deterioration of Soviet-American relations provoked by Washington. Many indisputable facts attest that all of this was the result of a monstrous criminal act by the intelligence services of the USA. For example, the array of aerial and satellite “special technical means” brought to bear on the September 1, 1983, provocation speaks for itself. This includes not only the South Korean 747 purposely sent deep into the USSR, but also the US RC-135 electronic reconnaissance aircraft located in the vicinity, as well as the American spy satellite 1982-41C. And not the least significant role in this incident was played by US, Japanese, and South Korean radar installations. These are the true facts. And no number of clever fabrications can conceal them.9

For the sake of comparison, Manning’s U.S. News & World Report story contained only one reference to the CIA and its director, William Casey: “Hersh’s book … has attracted most attention, both because of his credentials as an investigator of Washington’s secrets and because of CIA Director William Casey’s concerns about his revelations.” (293) Another striking example is provided by David Marples in The Social Impact of the Chernobyl Disaster In July 1987, a broadcast on Radio Stockholm announced that Karl Kimmel, the Estonian SSR State Prosecutor, had confirmed that the head of the Estonian military establishment, Major-General Roomet Kiudmaa, was under investigation for bribery. Kimmel had reportedly informed the Swedish radio station by telephone that a preliminary investigation was under way, but that “final charges” had not been laid. (Radio Stockholm, 6 July 1987, 1700GMT) A Western news agency declared that according to “private sources in Tallinn,” Kiudmaa was accused of selling deferments from duty in Afghanistan for 1,000 rubles, and from duty at Chernobyl for 500 rubles. (Reuter, 6 July 1987) The bribery had reportedly come to the attention of the Estonian Minister of the Interior, Major-General Marko Tibar, who had been “forced to resign” and leave the Communist Party because he had declined to intervene in the scandal. (Radio Stockholm, 6 July 1987)

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Once again, the Soviets responded to the charges. Radio Moscow maintained that the reports of Kiudmaa’s arrest had been “deliberate fabrications.” It admitted, however, that the State prosecutors had been investigating allegations that Kiudmaa had accepted bribes, although it did not state what the bribes might have been taken for. Radio Moscow also rejected Swedish reports that Tibar had resigned for failing to stop the bribe taking. Marko, it declared, was on vacation, and he had no intention of resigning. (Radio Moscow, 15 July 1987 [296: 191]) In 1988, in a variation of the “antibiotic theory,” Soviet spokesmen managed to excoriate the United States Navy for actions that, when taken by Soviet military units, they had earlier praised. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) characterized as “reprehensible” the use of force against a civilian aircraft. A resolution with this formulation was passed during a special session of the ICAO Council in Montreal (Canada), which was convened at Iran’s initiative to examine the circumstances surrounding the destruction of the Iranian passenger airliner. … Speaking during the special session, the Iranian representative Hasan Shafti stated that the actions of the American warship leading to the death of peaceful individuals was a “flagrant violation” of international law. He also accused the United States of trying to avoid responsibility for what happened and attempting to present the affair as if the rocket strike against the aircraft was inflicted in self-defense. “The use of military force against a civilian airliner cannot be justified by any circumstances,” he stressed. … As the Soviet Union’s representative stressed in his statement, the tragedy in the Persian Gulf occurred as a result of a serious international crime, for which the US “bears full responsibility.” (16: 5)

SNAKE VENOM THEORY It has long been known that people who survive the bite of a poisonous snake develop antibodies, which will serve as an antidote to protect them from subsequent snake bites; in addition, it is possible to transmit that immunity to another victim. In like fashion, it is possible for one international broadcaster to exploit an adversary’s information to “protect” its citizenry from the harmful effects of subsequent exposure to similar information.

Soviet Media Tactics and the Body Politic

For example, in Chernobyl and Nuclear Power in the USSR (294: 148), Marples reports that shortly after the Chernobyl explosion a bus driver in Kiev told the London Times correspondent Christopher Walker how residents had been living “a normal life” for over a week after the accident until they were suddenly warned on May 5 that they should be taking numerous pre­cautions. Subsequently, Pravda complained that residents of the city had been “vulnerable to false rumours from the West” because they had not been given complete information about the accident initially. (Pravda, May 9, 1986) This interesting example combines snake venom therapy with justificatory rhetoric. Obviously, the goal of this exercise was to discredit the information being received from the West. There can be no doubt that it was incumbent upon Soviet officials to make the attempt. Marples provides testimony of the lengths to which Kievans would go to receive reliable information concerning the potential dangers they faced Kiev residents began listening to Western radio reports on a mass scale, even traveling as far as the Carpathian Mountains to circumvent the heavy Soviet jamming. Western broadcasts were taped and circulated. Even jammed broadcasts were taped in the hope that a technical means could be found to eliminate the jamming and still hear the original broadcast. At Kiev libraries, all literature on the U.S. Three Mile Island accident of 1979 was withdrawn from the stacks. (294: 151)

One of the best examples of snake venom therapy in recent memory occurred during the first days of the KAL controversy. On September 4, 1983, Congressional leaders, including Senate majority leader Howard H. Baker, Jr., and the House majority leader, James Wright, attended a White House briefing where they listened to the tape of the Soviet pilots. Immediately thereafter, Wright spoke with reporters and indicated that a US RC-135 reconnaissance plane had been in the vicinity of Kamchatka Peninsula the night KAL 007 was shot down and that the Soviets might have confused the two aircraft.10 At least one commentator has contended that this remark gave the Soviets the spy plane argument. (384: 100) Indeed, ample support for this notion exists in the Russian language material concerning the incident. As it turned out, Wright’s revelation, and the alacrity with which it was substantiated by the Reagan Administration (revealing in the process

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more highly classified information) was tantamount to opening Pandora’s box. Not only did this gaffe expose the American position to ridicule at home and among its allies, it also gave the Soviet leaders a wedge to break out of the disastrous public relations maze that had enveloped them. It is important to consider the timing here. The White House briefing attended by James Wright had broken up shortly after noon, EDT, on Sunday, September 4; the congressman’s revelations sent capital correspondents scurrying for their Pentagon sources and necessitated a press conference in mid-afternoon led by the White House press secretary, Larry Speakes. Around dinnertime in Washington—after midnight, September 4/5 in Moscow—the White House issued a detailed “clarification.” News of the RC-135 was dutifully broadcast by the Voice of America. According to information provided by Philip C. Haynes, at the time managing editor of the News Division at VOA, four news items between 11:30 am and 3:30 pm EDT discussed the fact that tape recordings of Soviet personnel were played to participants in the White House briefing. Then, at 16:58:48, the VOA wire carried this text The (White House) spokesman said the Soviet Union may have initially mistaken the airliner for a U.S. spy plane. He said the United States does routinely carry out reconnaissance flights over international waters near the Soviet Union. But reporters were told no U.S. reconnaissance plane was over Soviet territory at the time. The spokesman said the airliner was tracked for up to two hours, and was downed well after it should have been recognized as a civilian airliner. (440)

An hour later, VOA reported Spokesman Larry Speakes told reporters the United States does routinely carry out reconnaissance flights over international waters near the Soviet Union, just as the Soviets do near the United States. He said the Soviets may have thought the Korean airliner was a U.S. reconnaissance plane, an RC-135, when the Korean aircraft was first spotted on their radar. But he said this was approximately one and a half to two hours before the shootdown. And he said that with the visual information obtained by the Soviet fighter pilot in close proximity to the Korean airliner, and the

Soviet Media Tactics and the Body Politic

radar information available to the Soviets, when they shot it down they should have known without a doubt that it was a civilian airliner. Reporters also were told that no U.S. reconnaissance plane was over Soviet territory. (241)

Evening updates carried similar versions, adding that the reconnaissance plane stayed well outside Soviet airspace,11 and that “the spy plane was about … 1600 kilometers away” when the Korean airliner “was shot down as it emerged from restricted Soviet airspace.” (442) This was the break the Soviet government needed. Its propagandists must have been under tremendous pressure to find a way out of their public relations tupik (dead end). There are no written minutes to consult, of course, but it is easy to imagine the ebullient mood that must have prevailed at the daily planning session of the Soviet propaganda leadership on Monday morning.12 It is typical of the lugubrious decision-making process that existed inside the Soviet bureaucracy that no plan to capitalize on the RC-135 revelation was approved in time to have a statement prepared for the Monday evening Vremia newscast. On Tuesday, Pravda quoted CBS television news: “The USSR might have mistaken the airliner for an American reconnaissance aircraft flying off the coast of Kamchatka.” (493: 4) Only once prior to this had the Soviets seriously mentioned US military aircraft as the cause of possible confusion. But even that had not occurred until September 4; it, too, had taken the form of a quotation from the foreign press—specifically, the Sydney Morning Herald: “The Soviets might have taken the South Korean aircraft to be a US spy plane because on radar it looks just like a US military reconnaissance aircraft; it might also have been mistaken for a US E4B bomber.”13 Nothing more was made of this report at the time. During its 8:00 a.m. newscast on September 6, however, Soviet TV raised the issue of the RC-135 As has become known from the US press, the Americans not only relentlessly tracked the movements of the intruder by satellite,14 they also sent into the area their own RC-135 reconnaissance plane, which travelled parallel to the intruder’s path. “The report of the presence of a second aircraft has raised new questions concerning this already confusing episode,” The New York Times admits. In this regard, many

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observers have asked: Was the RC-135 supervising the actions of the other aircraft?

At this point the newscaster quoted Congressman Wright as saying he had heard “several” references by the Soviet pilot to the presence of the RC-135. Michael Getler of The Washington Post commented, “Wright … told reporters that on the tapes Soviet fighter pilots twice referred to the plane inside Soviet airspace as being an RC-135.”15 Once again, the American position had been contradicted, in Soviet eyes, by America’s own spokespersons. During the 4:00 p.m. television newscast that afternoon, Soviet citizens were told that US RC-135s frequently “use foreign civilian airliners as a cover for reconnaissance flights near the USSR.” The newscaster then reported that UPI had commented (in the newscaster’s words) “spy planes loaded with electronic equipment literally poise themselves above passenger liners in order to confuse Soviet air defense radar stations. UPI indicates,” he continued, “that just such a reconnaissance aircraft was airborne alongside the South Korean aircraft that intruded into the airspace of the USSR and [that] it even intersected its path twice.” This report sounded as though the two planes were in close proximity; US accounts differed markedly, claiming that, although the RC-135 had indeed crossed the path flown by Flight 007, the Korean airliner was already a considerable distance away when that intersection occurred. What is important here, however, is that Soviet media were beginning to alter the context in which Soviet citizens might view reports of the airliner’s destruction. Several days later, after the United States government had released amended versions of the air-to-ground transcript, it was fairly easy to portray the tape as phony. Nor was it difficult to make the Americans look foolish The value of such recordings, which were prepared in the USA, is well known. It is hardly accidental that American Congressman Wright maintained that he heard something when he first listened to the tape, but this segment no longer appeared in the recording that was subsequently distributed. (Pravda, September 11)

This is known as having your cake and eating it, too. Sometimes, in an interesting twist of fate, the venom is applied to a self-inflicted wound. Marples shows how Deutsche Welle assembled

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materials from Pravda (September 29, 1986), Sotsialisticheskaia industriia (September 30, 1986), Izvestiia (October 3, 1986), and Radio Moscow (October 6, 1986), drawing the conclusion that an impending energy crisis in the USSR would make it difficult for Soviet homes to receive adequate heating during the winter months.16 The German radio station repeated Radio Moscow’s statement that Egor Ligachev and Vladimir Dolgikh had warned the Central Committee that “extraordinary” measures would be required to ready power plants for winter. Marples comments that [t]he tardiness of repairs … was a direct result of the accident, when the normal repair period was aborted so that other power stations could make up the shortfall. Despite the other factors mentioned, it was the accident that rendered the situation not merely serious, but acute. Western media sources that adopted this somewhat natural conclusion, however, were severely admonished by the Soviet side. (296: 93)

Two days later, Soviet television “replied in fury to the report about the power crisis. Yet [Deutsche Welle] had only taken official Soviet sources to their natural conclusion. The power supply appears to be an issue on which the Soviets will give no quarter.” Marples cites an October, 1987, interview with an unnamed energy official in which the official “adamantly” denied that there had been a power shortage during the preceding winter. Nevertheless, it is true that the authorities reopened Chernobyl Unit 1 in October, 1986, and Unit No. 2 in November, despite the fact that the sarcophagus enclosing the damaged reactor in Unit No. 4 had not yet been completed.17 Other recent examples of “snake venom” theory in action include: Soviet calls for greater cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency and the drafting of an agreement to provide for immediate notification to the international community in the event of a potential trans-boundary radiation release (calls made on the heels of virulent criticism against the Soviet Union’s refusal to announce the Chernobyl disaster or warn neighboring countries, including their Warsaw Pact allies, of the accident); ceremonies in Moscow and Kiev celebrating the twentyfifth anniversary of the IAEA and highlighting Soviet and Ukrainian (!) cooperation with the agency (these were the only ceremonies held anywhere in the world outside of IAEA headquarters in Vienna); and Soviet

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calls for greater interface between civilian and military air traffic controllers in the wake of the Airbus tragedy—the lack of which was a contributing factor to delays in searching for the downed Korean airliner in 1983—in the face of repeated Soviet refusals to respond to Japanese requests for information regarding the fate of the Korean aircraft and the possibility of mounting a joint search inside Soviet territorial waters.

THE ROLE OF WESTERN BROADCASTING At this point we would like to turn our attention to the international radios. Over the last few years we have devoted considerable attention to VOA coverage of major international events. Among Western radio stations there exist at least two models, as exemplified by VOA and RFE/ RL. These two models have different goals, which were described in the following terms by the Presidential Study Commission on International Broadcasting VOA is recognized as the official radio voice of the United States Government. Like all other USIA activities, it gives a preponderant emphasis to American developments. VOA programming contains relatively little information about internal developments in its audience countries. RFE and RL programming … gives citizens of the communist countries information on conditions, attitudes, and trends within their own countries and on international developments as they relate to the special interests of the listeners. (369: 42—[cited in (192: 39])

RFE/RL was described by Sig Mickelson as “a surrogate free press for the captive peoples” and as “all-talk radio.” (318: vii, 3) Julian Hale characterized their function as one of providing “an alternative Home Service in the target areas.” (192: xiv) It seems to us that international broadcasters serve two functions, aside from entertainment: on the one hand, they provide straight news coverage of world events; on the other, they represent the official views of the sponsoring nation. By and large these functions are kept distinct from one another. However, our analysis of VOA news broadcasts reveals that, over and above the obvious gatekeeping influence to which all media are subject, the editorial function encroaches on the news function in a

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variety of subtle and not so subtle ways. This is noticeable in the prominence accorded certain news items (decisions on “must-lead” items), which for the Russian service appears to follow an undulating pattern: some stories rise toward the top of the news sequence during prime listening hours in the European portion of the Soviet Union, then recede on early morning news broadcasts. In addition, the abrupt dropping of certain stories—occasionally in the middle of the broadcast day—would seem to indicate that such decisions take into account criteria other than newsworthiness. Of greater concern, of course, are those instances in which it would appear that information deleterious to prevailing administration policy is purposely omitted from the news. One of the most glaring instances of internal censorship occurred in 1983 after Congressman Wright revealed the presence of the US RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft off the coast of Kamchatka at the time Korean Airlines Flight 007 was approaching Soviet territory. As we have noted, VOA did broadcast this initial revelation, and the administration’s response to it, on the evening of September 4. However, notwithstanding the fact that VOA continued to hammer away at the Soviet action for a prolonged period of time, returning to the event periodically for another three years, and notwithstanding the fact that knowledge about the existence of the RC completely changed the tenor and the course of this international dispute, VOA failed to mention the reconnaissance aircraft again. We have seen no clearer instance of an editorial decision giving way to political considerations. For whatever it may be worth, more than one reporter on the VOA staff has indicated to us the frustration of trying to be a journalist while working in international broadcasting. This first failing, it appears to us, leads directly to a second. To the extent that VOA is indeed “the official radio voice of the United States Government,” of necessity it will ignore the media in its many target areas. Its role is to project outward the image of the administration. As a result, however, it fails to take advantage of the fact that the Soviet media, for instance, engage in such predictable practices as those we have characterized in this study: inoculation therapy; antibiotic therapy; and snake venom therapy. It is well known that the Soviets are not the most efficient people in the history of mankind, but it is equally true that they are not witless. To the extent that they can still command a coherent information

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policy—and they can do so to a very great extent—neither is that policy random or without its own goals. It is evident that the Soviets are prepared to deal with the continued existence of what they perceive to be interference in their internal affairs. This becomes clear to anyone who analyzes the policy decisions that have been made recently by the Soviet Union, as these can be discerned in the rhetorical behavior of the country’s chief ideologists, propagandists, and media leaders: they have begun to adapt their tactics to a more realistic appraisal of their vulnerability visà-vis Western radio broadcasting. As a matter of fact, Radio Liberty has received permission to send its reporters to Moscow to cover important events, and Radio Free Europe has been granted permission to establish permanent news bureaus in some East European capitals. Failure to take Soviet information policy into account can only hinder the realization of whatever goals have been established for Western broadcasting. Fortunately, nearly all the data that are required have been accumulated in London by the BBC and in Munich, in RFE/RL’s daily compilations of Soviet and East European radio and television broadcasting. What seems to be lacking is an understanding of their significance to accomplishing the mission of the combined Voices, plus the resources (both human and financial) required to exploit them. If this data base were made available to academic researchers, much greater benefit would be derived from their existence. Ultimately, however, much of the work must be done in-house, by staff members for whom this work would become a constant preoccupation. As this study has demonstrated, crisis rhetoric in the Soviet Union has remained largely immune to the sweeping changes that have otherwise transformed much of what appears in the media there. Nor is this conclusion surprising: as the system seeks to preserve its legitimacy in the face of growing public skepticism, crises of any sort assume even greater political significance. Evidence of the existence of a civil society divorced from party direction and control mounts steadily, and it is to be expected that entrenched power will endeavor to retain as much control as possible for as long as possible. Accordingly, rather than shrinking in importance—as some politicians have asserted—it would seem that Western transnational broadcasters will need to persevere into the foreseeable future. Despite all the changes that have occurred and are continuing to occur within the

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Warsaw Pact zone, the West would do well to heed these cautionary words of Zhores Medvedev I have some knowledge of the way “pseudo-facts” and misinformation are created in the Soviet Union to serve political and institutional interests. I also understand the limits of glasnost. (313: 3)

Responding to the changing political and social climate in Eastern Europe, the “Voices” must also continually reassess their own outlook, their programming, the role they serve in the lives of their audience. In reassessing the role of international broadcasting in the age of glasnost we would emphasize the following areas 1. Recognizing the fact that an adversarial relationship continues to exist, however much it may have changed and may continue to change in the future; 2. Studying the tactics of the opposition and modifying one’s own tactics accordingly; 3. Endeavoring, as much as possible, to isolate the news delivery system from the ravages of partisan, pro-administration filibustering; 4. Drawing upon the great diversity of political and social opinion within Western societies in order to demonstrate the vitality and intellectual stimulation provided by pluralism; 5. Enhancing access to the voluminous research treasure accumulated daily by the monitoring services of the various Western international broadcasters.

NOTES 1. Moscow News, December 18, 1988. Cited in (410: 1–2). 2. When the Chernobyl reactor blew up, editors at the central newspapers in Moscow were initially forbidden from publishing any reports, and no reporters were dispatched to the scene. 3. See (26), where the two events are explicitly compared What was the incident involving the South Korean “Boeing”? An unidentified airplane intrudes into the air space of the Soviet Union, then flies over Soviet territory for more than two hours. The airplane has the most modem navigational equipment enabling it to carry out the flight accurately on its assigned flight path, but the crew deviates from the

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international air route by 500–600 km. The crew members were highly trained, capable of flying in any weather conditions, but they “stumble around” like novices. Attempts are made to communicate with the intruder, including the use of the well-known emergency International Hailing Frequency. But it doesn’t respond to this signal, nor to other signals and actions of the Soviet Air Defense Force fighters. Moreover, it tries to maneuver and break away, hiding itself using clouds, darkness and poor visibility conditions.   Under these conditions, the decision taken by the Air Defense Force command was completely logical. Carefully analyzing the intruder’s actions, its flight path—which carried it over strategically important USSR installations—as well as the cover provided at that very moment by several American spy planes, it came to the conclusion that what was flying in Soviet airspace was a reconnaissance airplane. The interceptor was given a command, and it fired warning shots using tracer rounds along the path of the intruder airplane, which did not respond to them. One asks why it didn’t. But it’s perfectly clear why: the “Boeing 747” was following orders from the ground. It had special reconnaissance equipment on board which, had the airplane landed on Soviet territory, would have been yet another incontrovertible piece of evidence supporting the charge of espionage.   In view of the fact that the Soviet side had employed every warning measure possible under the circumstances and the intruder airplane refused to carry out the Air Defense Forces’ demand that it land on Soviet territory, in accordance with Soviet law measures were taken by the fighter-interceptor to terminate the flight. Later the full picture of this espionage effort organized by American intelligence became clear. An effort that knowingly sacrificed the lives of people—and was condemned throughout the world and for which the Soviet side expressed deep regret.   The incident in the Persian Gulf looks quite different. (5)

For a discussion of these Soviet claims, see (279—see also 480, chapter 4). 4. The dichotomy between domestic and international stances can be seen quite clearly in this instance. The destruction of the Iranian passenger aircraft by the US cruiser Vincennes was described variously in the domestic press as a “terrorist action,” “terrorist act,” “act of state terrorism,” “nefarious deed,” and “act of piracy” (terroristicheskaia aktsiia, terroristicheskii akt, akt gosudarstvennogo terrorizma, zlodeianie, piratskaia aktsiia). 5. The author was said to be one Schofield Coryell. 6. It is ironic that, because of rhetorical and political constraints domestically, spokespersons for the American government also endeavored to avoid such comparisons. See (475). 7. Prior to publication of the book, a long excerpt appeared in Atlantic Monthly. (200) In the United States, Hersh’s book generated widespread interest in the print media and occasioned more television segments, some of which featured relatives of KAL victims, on Nightline, (33) The Larry King Show, (249) and Donohue. (137) 8. VOA also broadcast, beginning September 18, 1986, a shorter version of this report as a “Close-Up” segment on Focus with the same title. (285) 9. On an ironic note, Hersh reported that during a May, 1984 interview, Soviet Marshal Ogarkov and Deputy Foreign Minister Kornienko revealed that they expected him to find evidence to support the Soviets’ spy plane theory. Hersh wrote Kornienko [told] me why I had been invited to Moscow: he and Ogarkov had agreed to my visa in the hope that they could persuade me, as a journalist, to investigate the Central Intelligence Agency’s role in the shootdown. Taken aback, but realizing that the two senior

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Soviet officials were serious, I asked Kornienko with a laugh whether he was trying to be my editor. His response came in English: “Your assignment is to find that it was an intruder.” The Deputy Foreign Minister added that the American public would never accept the shootdown as a rational act on the Soviets’ part unless it could be proved that the overflight of sensitive military installations was deliberate. I could not decide which was more surprising—his faith in the American First Amendment or the explicit acknowledgment that his government, for all of its public finger-pointing, had no evidence of American involvement in the flight path of the Korean airliner. (200: 47–48)

10. Hersh contends that Reagan administration officials knew very early that the Soviets did not realize the aircraft was civilian. (201: 84–86) This assessment was confirmed in January 1988. See (432). 11. Voice of America, CN-063, September 4, 1983 (no time indicated). 12. The Soviet propaganda organization has been described in (225: 25–27). 13. This citation in Pravda incorporated the first appearance of the term “spy plane” in Soviet commentary. 14. This was the first mention of satellite involvement. Although the concept was discarded for quite a while, a major story in Pravda subsequently highlighted this allegation. See (252: 4). 15. See Michael Getler, The Washington Post, September 5, 1983, A9. Since there was absolutely no mention of any foreign aircraft other than the “target” on the eight-minute long, voice-activated tape recording that represents the forty-nine minute span of the final interception and destruction of KAL 007, Wright’s admission inadvertently revealed the existence of more transcribed conversations than had been known previously. Needless to say, these recordings have never been released. Administration officials have been quoted as saying that the United States possessed fifty-five minutes of tape. See Steven Weisman, The New York Times, September 5, 1983, A6. 16. Deutsche Welle, broadcast of October 26, 1986. Cited in (296: 92). 17. Officials in the Soviet civilian nuclear power industry will now admit that it was, indeed, the fear of an energy crisis during upcoming winter months that led to the hasty restart of the undamaged Chernobyl units. This fact has been confirmed by Igor’ Nikolaevich Kambulov, Chief of the I.V. Kurchatov Atomic Energy Institute’s “Supervisory Expedition” in charge of off-site decontamination in the 30-km zone surrounding the power plant. Units No. 1 and No. 2 were restarted because the Soviet Union had no electrical generating reserve capacity and needed the additional capacity entering the 1986–87 winter season. (Personal interview, May 1989). The engineer who restarted the reactor units, Nikolai Alexksandrovich Shteinberg, is now deputy chairman for Operations at Gosatomenergonadzor, the Soviet agency that regulates civilian nuclear power. Shteinburg has stated, in effect, that even today the USSR faces an energy crisis due to the lack of reserve capacity. (Personal interview, June 1990.)

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CHAPTER 7

When the Shoe Is on the Other Foot: Comparative Treatments of the KAL 007 and Iran Air Shootdowns Marilyn J. Young Provenance: Published in 1992 in Studies of the Reagan Presidency and Public Discourse, edited by W. Barnett Pearce and Michael Weiler, 203–224. This is a slightly modified version of an invited paper, entitled “When the Shoe is on the Other Foot: The Reagan Administration’s Treatment of the Shootdown of Iran Air 655 [or, ‘God is in the Adjectives, but the Devil is in the Detail’],” first presented at the University of Massachusetts National Symposium: “Public Discourse and the Reagan Presidency,” University of Massachusetts-Amherst, April 19–21, 1989. Copyright Holder: The University of Alabama Press, used by permission Description: This paper describes how and why the official US and Soviet government responses to this 1988 event differed from the crisis rhetoric that surrounded the 1983 shootdown of KAL 007. It explores presidential rhetoric in crisis situations as a composite narrative encompassing multiple individual statements. A detailed content analysis of the primary US documents for both incidents is provided.

R

onald Reagan must be the most studied sitting president in the history of our discipline. Yet the impression remains that no one has truly penetrated the veil of success that enabled Reagan—one of the least communicative of presidents—to retire with the label the Great Communicator. If he has a lasting impact on nothing else, rhetoric and the criticism of rhetoric may never be the same. Traditionally, we have considered the artifacts of rhetorical criticism to be individual speeches, the rhetoric of an entire movement, or the rhetorical collection of a single individual. The presidency of Ronald Reagan argues for a conception of the rhetorical transaction as a complex episode: a conception wherein the entire constellation of rhetoric surrounding a specific event is treated as the rhetorical

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text, with each individual transaction regarded as part of the whole. The rhetoric of crisis situations illustrates the significance of this approach. Two such crises occurred during the Reagan years: when the Soviets shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 in 1983 and when the United States shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988. The purpose of this essay is to compare the rhetoric surrounding the destruction of KAL 007 with that following the destruction of Iran Air 655. There are two points of comparison: the Reagan administration’s rhetoric in 1988 with that of 1983; and the Reagan administration’s position in 1988 with the Soviet argument in 1983. These two tragedies are instructive for a number of reasons. They provide impetus to the notion of rhetoric as a series of apparently discrete but related discursive events. Further, they illustrate the ways in which the text of an individual component of the rhetorical episode interacts with its context, the ways in which context, or the discursive environment, constrains discourse options, and so on in an infinitely reflexive progression. In each of these instances, one cannot gain a complete understanding of the situation unless one examines the entire constellation of administration rhetoric surrounding the shootdown. Indeed, I would argue that it is necessary to revisit the Reagan administration’s rhetoric after KAL in order to fully comprehend the rhetorical antecedents and constraints operating in the Airbus situation. These two events were inextricably linked, a circumstance recognized by Reagan and his advisers as they sought to forestall comparisons with KAL and to control public opinion at home and abroad. Tactics used by the administration include the episodic approach itself: multiple speakers (four in this instance), each with a different role; concomitant with this was the low profile of the President (in contrast to his KAL posture). The goal was management of the context through redefinition (recontextualization); the strategy was to salvage Reagan’s Gulf policy by refocusing the debate on the culpability of Iran for pursuing the war with Iraq. This study examines those efforts, concluding that justificatory rhetoric accompanied by attempts to shift blame are hallmarks of crisis rhetoric in general. On the night of August 31–September 1, 1983, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, bound for Seoul from Anchorage, Alaska, strayed some three hundred miles off course, entering Soviet airspace over the Kamchatka Peninsula and again over Sakhalin Island. At 18:26 GMT (3:26 a.m. local time) a Soviet interceptor pilot fired two missiles at the airliner; all two hundred sixty nine

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persons aboard perished in the Sea of Japan. This episode represented a nadir in our relations with the Soviet Union: the President and his administration, spurred by the influence of their own anti-Soviet rhetoric and the horror of the event itself, adopted an essentially exhortative style designed to gain universal condemnation of the USSR from both a domestic and a foreign audience. US leaders excoriated the Soviet Union in every available forum, seizing the opportunity presented by what they perceived as a clear moral imperative to make a political statement to the world. Administration officials hastened to take advantage of what appeared to them to be an act which revealed the “true nature” of the Soviet system, an act for which there was no provocation, no possible justification. American officials exhorted not only their domestic constituency but the entire world to join in condemnation of the Soviet barbarians. (482: 288)1 Examples of such administration oratory abound 1. Ronald Reagan (September 1): … [an] appalling and wanton misdeed … inexplicable to civilized people everywhere. 2. Ambassador Charles Lichenstein (September 2): Let us call the crime for what clearly it is: wanton, calculated, deliberate murder. 3. Ambassador to the UN Jeane Kirkpatrick (September 6): The destruction of KAL 007 was … a deliberate stroke designed to intimidate—a brutal, decisive act meant to instill fear. 4. Assistant Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger (September 6): [The USSR] is not bound by the norms of international behavior and human decency to which virtually all other nations subscribe. 5. Secretary of State George Shultz (September 8): This brutal Soviet action has vividly displayed the Soviet Union’s lack of concern for the human lives involved.2 6. Shultz, of course, set the tone in his September 1 announcement of the tragedy: “The United States reacts with revulsion to this attack. Loss of life appears to be heavy. We can see no excuse whatsoever for this appalling act.” (433: 1) In particular, the language used by President Reagan reveals both his ideological stance and the political position the United States maintained visà-vis the tragedy. Word frequency counts indicate that the term most used

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to describe the downing was massacre, followed by tragedy, attack, crime against humanity, murder, brutality, and atrocity. Of the USSR he says, “They have totally failed to explain how or why”; they “have flunked the test”; “they continue to distort and deny the truth.” (415) In an extended analysis of the aftermath of KAL 007, a colleague and I viewed rhetorical context as a micro concept, exploring the ways in which public knowledge, the rhetorical situation, and rhetorical exigencies (71; 72)3 both shape and are shaped by public discourse, particularly in a crisis atmosphere. Yet the larger context for this campaign is equally important. Reagan came to the office of president with an anti-Soviet attitude, a promise to restore America to glory, and a determination to increase our military strength at home and abroad. Throughout the Reagan administration, the rhetoric of virtually all administration personnel resonated with these themes; September 1983 was no exception. It is significant, for example, that the early players in the crisis—William Casey, Richard Burt, Lawrence Eagleburger—could capture, in the initial Shultz announcement on September 1, the tone of Reagan’s rhetoric. Even though they had not talked with the President, they knew what to say and how to say it. (482: 271)4 Surely, the rhetorical environment for US-Soviet relations was established at least for the near term. On July 3, 1988, almost five years later, the USS Vincennes, on patrol in the Persian Gulf, fired two radar-guided missiles at Iran Air Flight 655; all two hundred ninety persons aboard perished. Obviously, times had changed since the 1983 incident. Relations with the Soviet Union had reached an all-time high as Reagan and the American public courted Mikhail Gorbachev, the charismatic new Soviet premier. In contrast to the KAL 007 incident, when the Americans precipitated an international crisis atmosphere, the US handling of the Airbus tragedy was measured, with the administration deliberately seeking to avert an atmosphere of crisis.5 A closer examination of the disparate rhetoric of 1983 and 1988 is revealing. In order to test empirically the notion that there were salient similarities between the rhetorical stance of the USSR in 1983 and that of the United States in 1988, as well as profound differences in US rhetoric concerning the two tragedies, a colleague and I performed a content analysis of the primary US documents for both incidents. These included all official statements and speeches by members of the Reagan administration.6 The hypothesis for the study was that the administration’s rhetoric would differ markedly between the two bodies of text (that of the KAL

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tragedy and that of the Airbus tragedy); that the 1983 rhetoric would use accusatory and condemnatory language, while the 1988 rhetoric would be primarily justificatory (as was that of the Soviet government in 1983). Coding frequencies appeared to support this hypothesis. Some of the categories developed for the study yielded interesting results. For example, whenever a tragedy of this type occurs, one serious question on the minds of the public is that of intentionality. There are almost no references to either shootdown being unintentional. However, with respect to the KAL incident, there were twenty-eight instances of claims of intentionality. These fell into two types: the first (twelve codings) are all examples of narrative description of the act itself, designed to bring the audience into the action, such as “the Soviet SU15 interceptor deliberately circled back around behind the Korean 747, the better to aim his heatseeking missile.” The remaining sixteen codings are accusations of an intentional massacre, claiming that the Soviets, aware that the aircraft was a passenger plane after tracking it for two and a half hours, simply decided to shoot it down. In contrast, there were no references to the Airbus incident as an intentional shootdown, despite the fact that the United States admitted firing at the airliner after following it on radar and attempting voice communication. A major theme of the US campaign in 1983 was the depiction of the USSR as outside the pale of civilized nations. Eleven of the twenty-eight coded instances indirectly accused the Soviet Union of being uncivilized or barbaric; the remaining seventeen depicted the United States and its allies as civilized. This rhetorical device was designed to draw Soviet client states into condemnation of the shootdown. The key to civility in the Airbus incident is the prosecution of the war in the Persian Gulf; the United States accused Iran of being uncivilized in this context in five of the seven codings and took the opportunity to deplore the use of chemical weapons. In the remaining two instances, the United States used the distinction to shift the blame for the shootdown: Iran (not the United States) endangered innocent civilian lives because of its continued prosecution of the war—a theme redolent of Soviet accusations against the United States for not warning the Korean aircraft, for sending it on a spy mission, and so forth. Shifting the blame for the tragedy seems to be a hallmark of this type of justificatory rhetoric. Twenty-three of the thirty-seven references to moral codes or human rights in 1983 accuse the Soviets of being immoral, of threatening norms

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of civilized behavior, and so on. Four times the administration referred to the USSR’s duty to the families of the victims. Only three instances refer directly to the United States as moral, though the implication is clearly there as a result of the exclusion of the USSR. In contrast, references to moral codes in the Airbus incident are limited to the moral obligation to provide compensation to the families of the dead; both of these codings occur in Vice President Bush’s address to the United Nations and are linked to the value the United States places on human life (perhaps in contrast to Iran and the USSR?). As noted above, the descriptors chosen to reference the act of the downing are indicative of ideological and political stance. Comparison of the language used in describing these two tragedies is illuminating in this regard. In 1983 the terms most frequently used to refer to the act itself were tragic (seventeen references), criminal (ten), brutal (five), massacre (four), atrocity (three), wanton (three), heinous (three), appalling (two), inhuman (two). Other words used to describe the event included horrifying, barbaric, outrageous, shocking, unprovoked, flagrant, callous, unspeakable.7 Obviously, such expressions were used to increase the public’s sense of outrage: at last, the administration believed, the Evil Empire had committed an act that conclusively demonstrated the bankruptcy of its cruel system. Neutral terms (act, shootdown, incident) occurred only twelve times in the entire sample. In contrast, the most frequently occurring terms describing the destruction of Iran Air 655 were tragic (eleven references), incident (ten), terrible human tragedy (two), accident (two), disaster, unfortunate. While not entirely neutral, these terms carry a different affective load, more empathic, compassionate, almost apologetic. The recurring use of incident is especially noteworthy because of the distancing effect of such antiseptic terminology; not surprisingly, it was also the most frequently used word in the 1983 Soviet rhetoric. In addition to descriptions of the act itself, it is useful to consider the most frequently used words in the rhetoric of the Reagan administration, regardless of the referent. When one omits the obvious and unimportant terms, such as articles, the terms used most often, in order of appearance, are KAL: Soviet, aircraft, Union, international airliner, civil, world, civilian, security, law, human, military, incident, 269 [number killed],

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destruction, attack, facts, safety, families, civilized, norms, commercial, community, fact, passengers, responsibility, unarmed, force, shooting, rights, crime, destroyed, target, tragedy, compensation, missile, behavior, peace, shoot, evidence, innocent, tragic, rules, strayed, tracked, obligation, standards, demand, explanation, mission, prevent, violence.

These are the terms that occurred at least ten times; for perspective, international occurred one hundred times; civilian occurred thirty-two times; demand occurred ten times. AIRBUS: Gulf, Iran, war, States, United, policy, hostages, reparations, incident, situation, investigation, security, compensation, information, probes, review, safety, attack, defense, life, premature, report, Stark, tragedy, responsibility, advisories, diplomatic, friends, negotiations, shooting, facts, know, dialogue, interests, answer, appropriate, briefing, claims, plane, shipping, threats, action, airliner, cause, civilian, discussion, downing, informed, international, Iraq, normal, official, accident, Airbus, airplane, arms, danger.

Because of the smaller corpus, I have reported terms that appeared at least five times; for perspective, the term war occurred forty-three times, incident occurred nineteen times, tragedy occurred nine times. In both instances, one of the most frequently used terms is the name of the rhetorical adversary: Soviet in the case of KAL and Iran in the case of the Airbus. In each case, the named adversary was identified as the party responsible for the tragedy (massacre, disaster, etc.). If simple repetition has persuasive impact, and we are told it does, such naming cannot be accidental. Even a casual perusal of the two lists reinforces a sense of difference. Words used to describe the Airbus incident were in almost every instance more detached, more dispassionate than those used in 1983. Indeed, among the high-frequency words, only eleven occurred in both rhetorical episodes: international, civilian, security, incident, attack, facts, safety, responsibility, shooting, tragedy, compensation. Obviously, some of the omissions were strictly context-bound, such as Soviet and Gulf. But it is significant that, for example, the number of dead was mentioned fewer than five times in the US version of the Airbus shootdown; by comparison,

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that was one of the most frequently used references in the KAL rhetoric. Similarly, the Soviets continually referred to the number of dead in its domestic coverage of the Airbus shootdown,8 although they had mentioned the number of passengers and crew killed on KAL 007 only twice during the entire four-year period studied. (480) Other terms that might have recurred in 1988, but do not, include passengers, families, norms, unarmed, target, evidence, innocent, and tracked. Similarly, there were terms used exclusively in 1988, including policy, reparations, situation, investigation, information, review, and dialogue. Some of the terms that occurred in both instances did so in inverse order of frequency. For example, civilian, which is near the top of the list of words used in 1983, occurs near the bottom of the 1988 corpus. Clearly, the United States wanted to play up this aspect of the KAL plane and downplay it in the case of the Airbus. In fact, there were no words describing the aircraft among the most frequently used terms in the Reagan administration’s Airbus rhetoric; indeed, the only term in the Airbus list that clearly characterizes the craft as civilian is airliner, a word that occurred fewer than nine times in the entire episode. By way of contrast, international airliner was among the most frequently occurring terms in the KAL list, appearing nearly one hundred times. Such lexical choices were part of a larger strategy that included themes, claims, and choice of spokespersons—all intended to advance a specific coherent response to a rhetorical situation. Perhaps Reagan’s advisers had learned a lesson from the chaotic days of September 1983, when poor coordination cost the United States much of its rhetorical advantage,9 for the 1988 campaign was more carefully orchestrated. The number of spokespersons was limited, and the military took the lead in dealing with the press. The most striking difference between the two episodes from the US perspective rests in the rhetorical behavior of the chief executive. During the KAL crisis Reagan maintained a very high profile, taking over from George Shultz on September 1 and leading the charge to excoriate the Evil Empire. Of course, in 1988 the United States was on the defensive rather than the offensive; nevertheless, Reagan himself had very little to say beyond his initial statement, a three-paragraph announcement that expressed regret and not much else. In 1983 Reagan had addressed the American public—and the world—with audio tapes accompanied by graphics; after the Airbus

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was shot down, on the other hand, the President made only three other recorded statements: a letter sent to both houses of Congress (452: 896), a brief exchange with reporters in which he misstated the facts,10 and another informal exchange with reporters on July 11, 1988, during which he discussed the question of compensation. (453: 911) There were two other official pronouncements, each attributed to the Assistant to the President for Press Relations: the first, dated July 11, 1988, referred to a presidential decision not to alter US policy in the Persian Gulf and announced the offer of ex gratia compensation; the second, on August 19 announced the President’s receipt of the report of the investigation and expressed support for the actions of Defense Secretary Carlucci. There can be little doubt that a major factor in determining Reagan’s low profile was his unwillingness to promote echoes of KAL; from the beginning, administration spokesmen fended off the invidious comparisons. In an early report, even before Admiral Crowe made the official announcement of the tragedy, Jim Miklaszewski of NBC News anticipated many of the developments to come: “Some folks here at the Pentagon are beginning to try to fashion somewhat of a damage control scenario. They’re afraid that the obvious comparisons will be made … between this incident and the KAL 007 shootdown.” (331: 7) Not surprisingly, someone at Crowe’s press conference inquired about the comparison; Crowe was prepared: “The fundamental differences are, of course, that [Sakhalin] was not a war zone, there was not combat in progress, there was not combat there normally; and, secondly, the KAL 007 was not warned in any way, form, or fashion.”11 Nevertheless, as Eric Engberg of CBS News pointed out, “US officials [were] bracing for an onslaught of criticism from foreign adversaries comparing this shootdown to the Soviet attack on the KAL plane.” Engberg correctly predicted that the US defense would be that the Iranian aircraft had been warned and was shot down only because of erroneous information. (105: 4) In a later report, Engberg noted that US officials were stressing (as an argument against the comparison) the belief that the Iranian plane was taking hostile action. (102: 2) On July 4 Reagan spoke briefly with reporters awaiting him at Andrews Air Force Base; he referred to the shootdown as an “understandable accident” and rejected any comparison to the Soviet downing of KAL

When the Shoe Is on the Other Foot

With regard to the Soviets comparing this to the KAL shootdown, there was a great difference. Our shots were fired as a result of a radar screen of a plane approaching it at quite a distance. Remember, the KAL [sic], a group of Soviet fighter planes went up, identified the plane for what it was, and then proceeded to shoot it down. There’s no comparison.” (333: 2)12

There can be little doubt, however, that the Reagan administration was acutely aware of the potential for comparison for its own behavior in this instance with the actions of the Soviets in 1983. Indeed, sensitivity to this possibility drove much of the response to the tragedy of Iran Air 655.13 The constraints derived from the earlier incident first manifested themselves in the administration’s attempt to avoid a sense of crisis: President Reagan remained at Camp David until his scheduled return to Washington on July 4.14 In addition, early comments stressed the defensive nature of the Vincennes’s action as Reagan’s advisers focused attention on possible retaliation by Iran. (102: 2) The Reagan administration should be given credit for quickly acknowledging the US role in the loss of the airliner; but no one should be surprised that this was done with an eye to forestalling criticism and the comparisons with KAL: “One official said that ‘everyone was mindful’ that the Soviet Union had suffered in world public opinion after shooting down a Korean Air Lines 747 in 1983 because of initial Soviet refusal to acknowledge what it had done or express regret for the incident.”15 One Reagan assistant noted that the President was “determined to avoid the mistake made by the Soviet Union.” Instead, he “went right out and tried to deal with it. And that put us in a pretty good position on the world scale as well.”16 White House aides considered that being open and straightforward was the key to damping criticism and thus retaining administration policy in the Persian Gulf.17 Regrets would be expressed by the White House, but the announcement of the tragedy would be handled by the military, thus distancing the President from the unfortunate actions of the military forces under his command.18 Reagan’s advisers recognized that the audience for any information released about the incident was twofold: in addition to domestic concerns, consideration had to be given to the possibility of condemnation from abroad. In fact, though this was foreshadowed early, it never really materialized: foreign reaction—notably Soviet reaction—was generally

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subdued, particularly when compared to the outcry following the KAL shootdown—an outcry largely orchestrated by the United States.19 Not surprisingly, the event received considerable play on the two US-sponsored international radios: Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. What is interesting for our purposes in this essay is the treatment given to the inevitable comparisons with KAL. Voice of America made no mention of the earlier incident in its rather extensive coverage of the Airbus shootdown, except in reporting the statement of President Reagan disputing the parallels (439). However, VOA offered three “background reports,” which are provided to the foreign-language broadcast services for optional use. The first of these merely restates Admiral Crowe’s response to the question of comparison. A later background report went into more detail on that parallel and mentioned other instances in which passenger craft were brought down by military fire. This dispatch also cited the comments of Thomas Foley, House majority leader I think there are great differences. I think the candor and speed with which we accepted responsibility for the accident, tragic as it was, is important—and I think we should continue to provide to all of our citizens and to the world the fullest information that the investigations disclose. (437)

Interestingly the reporter included the following analysis after the quotation from Foley Representative Foley was alluding to the fact that in 1983 it was nearly a week before the Soviets admitted their responsibility for the disappearance of the South Korean Airliner. The Soviets charged the plane was on a spy mission and they never expressed any regret over the incident. In Sunday’s incident in the Gulf, President Reagan said the United States “deeply regrets the loss of life aboard the Iranian Airliner.” The piece concluded by repeating the comments from Admiral Crowe. (437)

While there is no clear indication how extensively these reports were used by the services, the material did appear in a (news) special Focus program and a condensed version called a “Close-Up.” The “Close-Up” reviewed the events of July 3, revisited US policy in the Persian Gulf, including

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some negative comment on that policy in light of the shootdown, and concluded with the statement from Representative Foley and the observation that President Reagan had ordered a full investigation. (438) Another background report prepared July 4, 1988, summarized worldwide reaction by referring to comments published in the newspapers of various countries. No comparisons to KAL were mentioned, and the reported commentary was generally subdued. Meanwhile, Radio Liberty was taking a very different tack. Although considered by its personnel as an “alternate news source,” most of the discussion of comparisons to the 1983 incident occurred in this forum.20 On July 4, for example RL broadcast a twenty-minute program that brought together a wide range of information and commentary including a statement by a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, who said, in part, that “the US version of the downing is trustworthy and excluded any comparison between this incident and the KAL incident.” (375: 5) The next day, RL broadcast a “roundtable” discussion that focused on the incomparability of the two tragedies. Another program, “Events and People,” featured the views of two French papers contrasting the 1983 and 1988 incidents.21 A program on Thursday, July 7, featured the news that the United States was planning to compensate the families of those who died on Iran Air 655; the comparison to the Soviets’ refusal to compensate the families of the KAL victims was unspoken but obvious.22 The significance of these broadcasts is twofold: clearly they were designed for a foreign audience, since RL and VOA material cannot be disseminated in the United States. One can only conclude that they were part of the larger damage-control scenario—to damp the fires of worldwide reaction. Second, these particular broadcasts were beamed directly into the Soviet Union, an obvious effort to draw a clear contrast between the US action and that of the Soviet government five years earlier. Most observers felt the strategy was successful both at home and abroad. Certainly, if the length of time a story remains in the news is any indication, the efforts of the President’s advisers were enormously effective. KAL was front-page news for nearly a month; by contrast, Iran Air was old news by July 6, reappearing a week later at the time of the United Nations debate and again briefly in early August, when the report of the investigation was released. That the strategy achieved its rhetorical and political goals may be ascribed to the fact that the Reagan administration was acutely aware

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of the context in which the Airbus tragedy had occurred. Reagan himself was conscious that the charges leveled by the United States in 1983 could be turned around, with this country now placed under the glare of harsh international attention; accordingly, the Pesident was constrained by the US role in the earlier episode. Exemplifying what McKerrow has termed “the irreversibility of rhetorical postures once choices have been made,”23 the experience of the KAL shootdown established an unavoidable context within which the Airbus disaster would be viewed by the American public and by the world at large. As such, it could not be ignored by the President. Thus, conscious of the comparisons to KAL and anxious to avoid widespread condemnation, the Reagan administration promised full disclosure of its own investigation and cooperation with that of the ICAO— the United Nations body that had also investigated the Korean Air Lines episode. (See 429; 430) Nevertheless, such comparisons endured—as noted, the earliest occurred during an NBC news brief at 1:22 p.m. on July 3, even before any official announcement had been made. CBS brought in Seymour Hersh, author of “The Target Is Destroyed,” as part of a short piece on the comparisons. (104: 11) In a later broadcast that same day, NBC noted the long memories people have about such incidents and the assurances made about the capabilities of US equipment in similar circumstances. (332) On July 4 The New York Times printed an extended comparison, which went into the details of the earlier tragedy. As noted above, the administration spent considerable time attempting to forestall such efforts, pointing out that the Iran Air shootdown had occurred in a war zone during combat while the aircraft was flying at low altitude.24 Such a response overlooks the points of comparison between the two tragedies, however. In both instances, for example, there were real questions raised about identification of the aircraft as civilian. In 1983 formal investigations concluded that the Soviets did not know they were shooting at a civilian airliner because the fighter pilot had made no attempt to identify the plane before firing his missiles; all Soviet claims of poor visibility due to the nighttime conditions fell on deaf ears. Similarly, Iran expressed surprise that the crew of the Vincennes could mistake an A-300 Airbus for an F-14; US spokespersons pointed out in response that the airliner was nine miles away under conditions of limited visibility (two to five miles).25 Despite all this, there existed in both instances the possibility

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of radar confusion between two aircraft: KAL with an RC-135 reconnaissance plane patrolling the Soviet coast and Iran Air with a C-135 on the ground at Bandar Abbas. Both the United States and the Soviet Union claimed that the two downed aircraft had engaged in hostile behavior before the launch of missiles. The Soviets argued that KAL had flown with its lights off,26 performed evasive maneuvers, and failed to respond to radio signals or warning shots. In like manner, the US government charged that the Airbus had flown toward the navy ship in a hostile manner, had failed to respond to numerous signals to identify itself, and ultimately had failed to alter its course; at one point, the United States even claimed that the aircraft had been descending and increasing speed—an attack mode.27 Both governments claimed the right of self-defense: the United States because of hostilities in the area and the Soviet Union because KAL had flown over sensitive military installations. Tom Wicker effectively summed up the true similarities in these two tragic encounters And what about all those statements that the destruction of Flight 655 was entirely different from the Soviet shooting down of KAL 007 in 1983? That disaster took place in highly sensitive Soviet airspace on the night of a planned missile test, when an overly excited Soviet air defense, acting on inadequate information, fired too hastily. That’s just about what the Navy is expected to report that the Vincennes crewmen did in the Persian Gulf on July 3.28

Still more compelling are the similarities in the way the incidents were handled by the two governments responsible—the Soviet Union and the United States—a similarity that, ultimately, is enlightening. In both instances, the government allowed the military to anchor the public relations effort, diffusing it of any parochial political overtones. In the case of KAL, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, commander of the Soviet air defense forces, made a stunning presentation of the Soviet case to the world press, submitting to questions from both foreign and domestic reporters. Likewise, Admiral William Crowe, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, made the formal announcement of the Iran Air shootdown and submitted to questions from the press. Perhaps the major difference between these two statements was the timing: Admiral Crowe spoke on July 3, the same day the incident occurred, while Ogarkov’s press conference did not take place

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until nine days after the shootdown. It is also important to consider the content of the statements, for while Crowe announced the tragedy to the world, the initial Soviet statement (not made until September 2, two days after the event) was terse and brief and said nothing about their military shooting down anything. Admiral Crowe: After receiving further data and evaluating information available from the Persian Gulf, we believe that the cruiser USS Vincennes, while actively engaged with threatening Iranian surface units and protecting itself from what was concluded to be a hostile aircraft, shot down an Iranian airliner over the Strait of Hormuz. The US Government deeply regrets this incident. A full investigation will be conducted, but it is our judgment that based on the information currently available, the local commanders have sufficient reasons to believe their units were in jeopardy and they fired in self-defense.29 TASS: An unidentified plane entered the airspace of the Soviet Union over the Kamchatka Peninsula from the direction of the Pacific Ocean and then for the second time violated the airspace of the USSR over Sakhalin Island on the night from August 31 to September 1. The plane did not have navigation lights, did not respond to queries, and did not enter into contact with the dispatcher service. Fighters of the anti-aircraft defense, which were sent aloft toward the intruder plane, tried to give it assistance in directing it to the nearest airfield. But the intruder plane did not react to the signals and warning from the Soviet fighters and continued its flight in the direction of the Sea of Japan.30

Despite some important differences, there is similarity between the final paragraph of the Crowe statement and the TASS release. Both presage an effort to distance the government from the tragedy and to shift blame from the military to the hapless airplane and “those who sent it to its fate.” It should not be surprising that the chief executives of both countries maintained a low profile. Andropov’s was so low as to be nearly invisible: not until September 28, 1983—fully four weeks after the tragedy—did the Soviet chief executive offer any public comment, and then he buried it in a more comprehensive, written policy statement

When the Shoe Is on the Other Foot

The sophisticated provocation masterminded by the United States special services with the use of a South Korean plane is an example of extreme adventurism in politics. We have elucidated the factual aspect of the action thoroughly and authentically. The guilt of its organizers, no matter how hard they may dodge and what false versions they may put forward, has been proved. The Soviet leadership expressed regret over the loss of human life resulting from that unprecedented, criminal subversion. It is on the conscience of those who … masterminded and carried out the provocation, who literally on the following day hastily pushed through Congress colossal military spending and are now rubbing their hands with pleasure.31

In 1988 Reagan, following Andropov’s earlier example, issued only a single brief statement. This announcement bears striking resemblance to the terse comment issued by TASS on 3 September 1983.32 Reagan’s statement is quoted here in its entirety. I am saddened to report that it appears that in a proper defensive action by the USS Vincennes this morning in the Persian Gulf an Iranian airliner was shot down over the Strait of Hormuz. This is a terrible human tragedy. Our sympathy and condolences go out to the passengers, crew, and their families. The Defense Department will conduct a full investigation. We deeply regret any loss of life. The course of the Iranian civilian airliner was such that it was headed directly for the USS Vincennes, which was at the time engaged with five Iranian … boats that had attacked our forces. When the aircraft failed to heed repeated warnings, the Vincennes followed standing orders and widely publicized procedures, firing to protect itself against possible attack. The only US interest in the Persian Gulf is peace, and this tragedy reinforces the need to achieve that goal with all possible speed. (452: 895–908)

Both statements focus on the shifting of blame for the shootdown. While Andropov summarizes the Soviet argument, Reagan foreshadows the position of his administration: the responsibility for the tragedy should be laid at the feet of Iran for its prosecution of the Persian Gulf war.

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Transferring the guilt for the event away from the aggressor is not the only result of such an approach; a secondary effect is the distancing of the political arm of the government from the ramifications of the act. It is this distancing process that allows the transformation of a factual event into an interpretive one—a strategy at which the Soviets are past masters and the Reagan administration their contemporary equals.33 The ultimate failure of Soviet strategy in the aftermath of the KAL shootdown was the government’s inability to effect this conversion.34 The United States was more successful: the Airbus became a symbol of the Persian Gulf war. The ultimate fact of the shootdown, and the errors that caused it, were lost in the alchemy. What this means is that the true similarity in the pronouncements of Ogarkov and Crowe, as well as Andropov and Reagan, lies in the use of what Hugo refers to as “cant”—a pious verbal subterfuge.35 In his perspicacious essay on the subject, Hugo further observes that when governments have to choose between different courses of action, they are accustomed to argue either that a particular decision was intrinsically meritorious or else that it was forced upon them by the objectionable act of another government. … Such arguments are often untrue, usually misleading and always irrelevant. The significance of an action depends more on its concrete results than on its antecedents or on the merits of the motives that prompted it. (213: 10–11)

To some extent, of course, the noted similarities between Soviet rhetorical behavior in 1983 and US rhetorical behavior in 1988 existed because the rhetorical exigencies of the two situations were similar. In both instances, after all, the two countries were potentially on the defensive. However, I would argue that the United States—unlike the Soviets in 1983—never really assumed a defensive posture; it is true that US spokespersons justified the attack on the airplane by invoking the wartime environment, but American rhetoric was aggressive and active in shifting the blame and in managing public opinion. It is possible that the similarity of rhetorical exigencies is a true, yet incomplete, explanation; I would suggest that these tactics signify a strategy of avoiding responsibility. Crowe’s press conference and Reagan’s statement are two of four primary rhetorical artifacts which supply the framework—and therefore

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the context—for viewing this event; the third is Vice President Bush’s address to the United Nations Security Council on July 14 and the fourth is Ambassador Vernon Walters’s follow-up address to that same body on July 20.36 Over the three weeks following the shootdown, culminating in Walters’s speech, four primary themes were developed. 1. The action taken by the Vincennes was a proper, defensive move. Immediately upon receiving word of the shootdown—before anyone was aware that the aircraft involved was civilian—the United States went on the offensive in establishing the defensive nature of the attack on the airliner. The earliest reports on July 3, as recorded by NBC News, referred to the downed plane as an F-14—a fighter plane—engaged in hostile action against the cruiser.37 Later bulletins described the airliner as in an attack mode, descending and increasing speed. Virtually all reports referred to the hostilities that had been taking place immediately prior to the shootdown. 2. The United States would accept responsibility but not blame. The claim for the defensive nature of the action taken by the Vincennes laid the groundwork for this position, of course. This was a necessary step to lead the audience to the conclusion found in number 4 below. It also left open the question of payment of ex gratia compensation, which is the driving force behind the dialogue that follows. The statements of Admiral Crowe and President Reagan carefully avoid the question of blame, an approach which is graphically illustrated in this exchange from a State Department press briefing Q: You mentioned that the Iraqis, right up to the attack on the Stark, they admitted responsibility. Are we about to do something similar? Or are we still saying that the captain was justified in shooting down the plane? Phyllis Oakley: We said, clearly, we regretted the loss of life. It was a terrible accident. We have admitted obviously, the airplane was destroyed by a missile from our ship. But beyond that I just have no further comment.

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Q: To put things clearly, we are not accepting responsibility as of now? Oakley: Well, I think that would depend upon how “responsibility” is defined. … Clearly, the Iranian Airbus was destroyed by a missile from the US ship, the Vincennes. That’s very clear. We have expressed our regret over this incident, the loss of life. We are looking at all the facts and trying to obtain them before we get into the exact definition of, I think, what you would mean by “responsibility.” (434: 4)

3. The incident was a human tragedy that could be separated from the question of its appropriateness under the circumstances. This subterfuge allowed the US government to accept responsibility without accepting blame; it also enabled the administration to magnanimously offer compensation to the families of the victims, also without accepting ultimate responsibility for the tragedy—in other words, ex gratia. It is, nevertheless, a step that was not taken by the Soviets in 1983, an important consideration in Reagan’s efforts to avoid the KAL comparison. 4. The real cause of the tragedy was Iran’s refusal to end the war with Iraq. This message, tantamount to arguing that the Cold War was the proximate cause of the destruction of KAL 007, was introduced by Reagan and culminated in Bush’s presentation to the United Nations Security Council. Bush made three major points in this address: the importance of the Security Council and the gravity of the questions it considers; the intransigence of Iran in prolonging the war and refusing to accept UN Resolution 598; and the recklessness of the Iranian government in allowing a civilian airliner to proceed over a combat zone. This last theme deserves special mention, for it represents an old tactic that appears to be endemic in postmodernist rhetoric: keep mentioning it and people won’t notice it isn’t true. From the beginning of this episode, spokespersons for the Reagan administration referred to the lack of concern shown by the Iranians in allowing the aircraft to fly through hostile

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territory. Yet the airplane was well within the approved commercial corridor and was a regular flight whose number appeared on the printed schedule available to US combat vessels, including the Vincennes. Nevertheless, the drumbeat of US rhetoric ignored the practical realities of commercial air traffic control and hammered home the notion that Iran was somehow to blame. Indeed, it is interesting to trace the evolution of Iran’s alleged role in the shootdown: from the belief that the downed aircraft was a fighter plane, to the argument that it was approaching the Vincennes in an attack mode, to the suggestion that perhaps the Iranians had deliberately sent the airliner to its death, to a more generalized responsibility placed on the shoulders of air traffic controllers at Bandar Abbas.38 The completion of the strategy came some seventeen days after the event—July 20, 1988—when Vernon Walters, US Ambassador to the United Nations, spoke to the Security Council following its vote on the draft resolution on the shootdown, the proverbial “slap on the wrist” administered to the United States. In the final four paragraphs of his address, Walters effectively sums up the Reagan administration’s rhetorical position We intend to stick with our effective Gulf policy. As the VicePresident stated in this chamber last Thursday, once tensions decrease and the threat to Western interests dissipates in the area, then the level of our naval presence will naturally be reduced. We reject any suggestion that the current Western naval presence in the Persian Gulf is somehow an intrusion; it is not. It is a force for peace. It is there in support of regional states whose interests and those of the West face a very real threat. The legitimacy of the Western naval presence in the Gulf is simply not subject to question. The Iran Air 655 incident was a tragic accident. The United States has expressed its deep regret over the loss of life and has conveyed sincere condolences to relatives of the victims. As the Council is aware, the United States has offered to pay ex gratia compensation to the families of the victims—not as an act of charity, not on the basis of any legal liability but, rather, as a sincere humanitarian gesture. We do so without apology for the action of the Vincennes, which was taken in justifiable self-defense in the context of unprovoked attacks from Iranian forces, which bear a substantial measure of responsibility for the incident.

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Having initiated our own military investigation, the United States joins in endorsing the actions taken by the Council of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) to commence its investigation of the Iran Air incident. We look forward to cooperating with ICAO in that investigation and in the efforts that the President of the ICAO Council and the ICAO Secretary-General will be undertaking to improve civil aviation safety in the Gulf and to study possible improvements to ICAO Standards and Recommended Practices generally to prevent a recurrence of tragic incidents of this kind. It is in this context that the United States lends its support to the resolution just adopted by the Council today. We believe this resolution puts the unfortunate events of 3 July in proper perspective. It is our hope that this action of the Security Council will serve as an urgent reminder to the international community that we cannot permit this senseless conflict in the Gulf to continue. The risks are too great and the price in human suffering and material destruction is too high. We members of the Security Council bear a special responsibility to provide leadership in this regard. Let us all rededicate ourselves to this vital task and do what we can to encourage the belligerents to walk through the door of opportunity now open before them into an era of lasting peace. (446: 14–15)

The conclusion of Walters’s speech represented the apotheosis of the US strategy. The presence of US warships in the Gulf was no longer even the proximate cause of the tragedy; responsibility had been shifted from the offender to the offended. In short, the United States was able to control the terms of the debate, to redefine the situation so that it encompassed the totality of the Persian Gulf war rather than focusing on the act of the shootdown of an Iranian plane by a US warship. In this way, both Bush’s and Walters’s UN addresses served a normalizing function similar to that of Andropov’s policy statement in 1983: summing up the incident, placing it in perspective, and filing it away in the storehouse of public knowledge.39 Ironically, while the United States worked hard to prevent the invidious comparison to the 1983 incident, they nevertheless exploited existing worldwide public knowledge about Soviet behavior in its aftermath. The actions of the United States stood in clear contrast to those of the Soviet Union five years earlier: the United States had admitted shooting down the airliner, offered ex gratia compensation, initiated an internal

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investigation, and cooperated in the ICAO’s investigation; the unspoken comparison was also unmistakable. But the most remarkable aspect of Walter’s speech is the level of cant, particularly in the closing paragraphs, quoted above. Here, and throughout its post-Airbus campaign, the United States adopted both types of justificatory rhetoric described by Hugo: the intrinsic merit of its own position (the legitimacy of the US presence in the Persian Gulf) and that the action was forced on them by the actions of the Iranian government, first in allowing the plane to traverse hostile airspace and then by engaging in the war at all. Finally, the destruction of the Airbus becomes an icon for the cost of the Gulf war and a talisman for condemnation of the Iranian government. That the Iranians ultimately shouldered most of the blame is evidenced by the inability of that government to secure enough votes to effect a UN condemnation of the American action. As noted, the US campaign to deflect attention from the destruction of the Iranian airliner was more successful than the Soviet effort had been in 1983. Public opinion domestically and worldwide was more accepting of the American action. In concrete terms, both the UN Security Council and the ICAO took action that was much less condemnatory than that taken by those same bodies in 1983.40 Certainly, the Reagan administration was aided by the environment in which the incident occurred: most observers recognized the right of any vessel to protect itself from attack (this point undoubtedly gained credibility in the aftermath of the Stark tragedy);41 the airliner was flying in a war zone, although in an approved commercial corridor; there had been prior hostilities involving the Vincennes and Iranian gunboats; and, perhaps most important, Iran was perceived by many as dragging its feet in negotiating a peace agreement with Iraq. In addition, Italian ships in the area reported monitoring the Vincennes’s attempts to contact and warn the Iranian plane. Thus, the United States escaped much of the condemnation that had been visited upon the USSR five years earlier.42 This last, of course, represents one of the most frustrating aspects of the Reagan presidency. Reagan’s ability to shed responsibility for the outcomes and impacts of his policies (read: rhetorical positions) is legendary. The Airbus incident is no exception, and it is this aspect of the tragedy that is instructive for our purposes here. For it illustrates the manner in which institutional structures may be used to expand or inhibit the range of responses available in an emergency.

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Reagan’s disengagement from the day-to-day operations of his administration is well documented. In this situation, as in others, that tendency served him well, for it was not seen as unusual for him to remain aloof, to allow the military or members of his cabinet and staff to face the public and the press. Thus, his decision not to make an early return to Washington was seen as normal, which defused the situation of any sense of urgency. Sending Vice President Bush to the United Nations was a brilliant move that served many purposes. It was generally perceived as a boost to Bush’s presidential ambitions, but there is no reason to assume that Reagan would have obliged the Vice President had it not suited his own purposes to do so; indeed, the decision was taken carefully. The prestige of Bush’s office allowed the United States to set the terms of the debate, to focus attention on the issue behind the shootdown.43 Bush provided, in effect, a surrogate target, and substituting him for the regular ambassador emphasized the gravity of the event without giving it urgency. Bush’s speech served as the capstone of the rhetorical campaign, a campaign marked by executive disengagement and a diffusion of roles among several spokespersons, with the military taking the lead and UN Ambassador Walters occupying the mop-up position. It resembled closely the Soviet campaign five years earlier, when the military also took the lead, and the thrust of the effort was the shifting of responsibility from the Soviet government and its policies to the United States and its intrusive surveillance. Unlike the Soviets, however, the United States was able first to extricate itself and its policy from the ramifications of this incident, and then successfully to reframe the event in its own terms. This is dramatically different from the approach taken by the same administration in 1983, when the framing, or contextualizing, was established in the first hours following the tragedy; the struggle in that incident was to maintain the context. Nevertheless the differing roles of the United States in those two instances is borne out in the language used to describe them. Despite the desire of the United States to blame Iran for the shootdown of the Airbus, the need to dissociate US policy from the tragedy dictated a different rhetorical style from that used in blaming the Soviets five years earlier. Interestingly, in both incidents, the United States claimed the mantle of civilized behavior for its own, forcing other nations to align with civilization or against it.

When the Shoe Is on the Other Foot

Bush’s role in the Airbus campaign also illuminates the episodic nature of events such as this one and the way in which that attribute informs the protective quality of administrative discourse. The general style of the Reagan presidency—the dissociation of the chief executive from day-to-day operations—was well suited to a decentralized rhetorical approach. It was not accidental that the four primary rhetorical artifacts of the Airbus controversy were delivered by four different individuals. The structure of the executive branch not only shielded the president, it made his isolation seem unremarkable. Thus, the episodic style mirrors the management style that Reagan employed throughout his presidency, offering him the choice of being out front on an issue (as with KAL) or disengaging (as with the Airbus). In those circumstances where protection of the executive is the paramount concern, as usually was the case with Reagan, the episodic nature of discourse does not depend on crises to manifest itself. Reagan’s entire presidency was carefully orchestrated; his advisers were forever attempting to control the context in which his administration, and its rhetoric, was viewed. But the harsh glare of a crisis exacerbates these effects, with its natural demand for information—information that is often in the hands of many different individuals, including reporters. In these circumstances, the public looks to its leaders to establish the context—or meaning—for a given event; the leadership can then elect to step forward or to leave the task in the hands of surrogates. In either case, understanding of cataclysmic events depends on exam­ination of the entire constellation of rhetoric surrounding that event. It is possible, of course, for the episodic approach to expand, rather than constrict, the opportunities for response to a rhetorical situation, as officials are called to account for their actions or to share the knowledge they have accumulated. In the case of the Airbus tragedy, as in that of KAL 007, however, the administration attempted to control the context in order to limit the response. In 1983 Reagan’s advisers sought to fix responsibility; in 1988 many of the same players sought to avoid it. By recognizing and examining the episodic nature of this discursive environment, the critic can more fully elucidate the manner in which the Reagan presidency managed public understanding.

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NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4.

For an expanded discussion, see (480). All quotations are taken from (433). For a discussion, see Philosophy and Rhetoric 3, no. 3 (Summer 1970): 165–168. It is important to realize that Shultz himself had been left out of the planning. Casey, Burt, and Eagleburger had worked through the night developing the initial US response. According to Seymour Hersh, the first time Shultz saw the text of the announcement was in his briefing book on the morning of September 1. (201: 99). 5. Although the administration was successful in avoiding an air of crisis, haste was still present, with its attendant errors of fact and judgment. See (286). As we document in Flights of Fancy, Flight of Doom: KAL 007 and Soviet–American Rhetoric, (480) such haste contributed to the erosion of the administration’s position on KAL. 6. The pilot study, which is reported here, was conducted by Jim Kuypers (a graduate student in rhetoric and public address at Florida State University) for a content analysis class. 7. This analysis includes all examples of official administration rhetoric, unlike the earlier analysis reported by Donald Smith (415), which dealt solely with the discourse of President Reagan. However, these results do not contradict Smith’s findings; rather, they lend support to his primary thesis. 8. Of the approximately sixty texts printed in Krasnaia zvezda, Izvestiia, and Pravda in the weeks immediately following the Airbus shootdown, twenty mentioned the number of dead. 9. Examples include House Majority Leader Jim Wright’s unexpected revelation of the presence of the RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft near the Kamchatka Peninsula and the timing of revisions to the transcript of the Soviet interceptor pilots talking with their ground control. For details and a complete discussion, see (482). 10. See The New York Times, July 5, 1988. Reagan stated that the airliner was headed toward the Vincennes in an attack mode; in fairness, he may not—at that point—have been aware of the contradictory information. 11. Press briefing, July 3, 1988. 12. See also: The Washington Post, July 5, 1988. The truly significant thing about this passage is Reagan’s insistence that the Soviets had identified KAL as a civilian aircraft. Within days of the 1983 shootdown, The New York Times had reported that intelligence analysts believed the Soviets did not realize the airliner was a passenger plane; this ultimately became the official US position and was confirmed by Hersh (201). Final confirmation of the Defense Intelligence Agency assessment was released by Congressman Lee Hamilton in January 1988. President Reagan should have known better in 1983; he certainly should have been aware by July 1988. One can only conclude that it suited his purpose to so misstate the circumstances in this instance. 13. See The New York Times, July 4, 1988. 14. This move was also motivated by a desire to avoid comparisons with the Carter administration’s handling of the hostage crisis, when the President appeared to be “swept along by foreign events.” See The Washington Post, July 4, 1988. An interesting comparison can be drawn to 1983: after deciding initially to remain on vacation in Santa Barbara, Reagan returned to Washington under pressure from media criticism (criticism that did not occur in 1988). One wonders who had made the decision to promote the crisis atmosphere generated after the KAL tragedy: five years later (July 5,

When the Shoe Is on the Other Foot 1988) The New York Times reported that it was Reagan himself who decided to stay at Camp David. 15. The Washington Post, July 4, 1988. 16. The New York Times, July 18, 1988. 17. The Washington Post, July 4, 1988. 18. The Washington Post, July 4, 1988 19. See, for example, The Washington Post, July 5, 1988. 20. VOA and RFE/RL have very different goals: VOA is the official radio voice of the US government; RL, on the other hand, seeks greater neutrality and provides information about conditions, attitudes, and trends within the target countries, as well as news about international developments “as they relate to the special interests of the listeners.” (369: 2) 21. Radio Liberty, Tuesday, July 5, 1988, 1–2. 22. Radio Liberty, Thursday, July 7, 1988, 6. 23. Raymie McKerrow, private communication. 24. The New York Times, July 7, 1988. 25. The New York Times, July 4, 1988. This response raises an interesting rhetorical problem, however. One observer pointed out that Middle Easterners are convinced that US equipment is so sophisticated it could not make such an error. The Soviets made a similar argument in 1983 in claiming that a) the triply redundant inertial navigation system aboard the Boeing 747 was so sophisticated the plane could not fly off course by accident, and b) that the United States had KAL 007 under radar surveillance throughout its flight. Such beliefs go a long way toward explaining the genesis and longevity of conspiracy theories when tragedies such as these occur. 26. For refutation of this claim, see (279). See also (480: 83–100). 27. Such claims were ultimately rejected by the US government; the final report of the naval investigation of the tragedy concluded that the crew of the USS Vincennes had mistaken the radar signal of a distant Iranian fighter for that of the airbus. One needs considerably more technical expertise than I possess to understand how this can happen. 28. The New York Times, August 8, 1988. 29. Press briefing, July 3, 1988. 30. Cited in (384: 76). 31. Pravda, September 28, 1983; see also The New York Times, September 29, 1983. 32. For a description of the Soviet statement of September 3, 1983 (the third day after the shootdown), see (480:140). The original of this statement appeared in Pravda, as a TASS release, September 3, 1983. The relevant portion reads, “TASS was authorized to express condolences regarding the casualties, but resolutely condemns those who, whether consciously or through criminal negligence, had allowed lives to be lost.” The Soviets, one must remember, did not officially admit shooting down KAL 007 until September 6, and did not begin their defensive campaign until three days after that— September 9—when Marshal Ogarkov held his press conference. 33. The most obvious examples of this type of transformation are instances of “military aid” to “requesting governments” such as the Soviets in Hungary and Czechoslovakia and the United States in Grenada; a similar situation obtained with the Iran-Contra scandal. 34. The Soviets suffered a similar failure with the Chernobyl disaster: there was no one else to blame for the accident in the number 4 reactor and the radiation threat that

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Part One: KAL and Cracks in the Rhetorical Wall resulted. The erosion of the strategy in Afghanistan may be largely responsible for the Soviet withdrawal there. The United States is no stranger to this approach either; consider US military police actions in places such as Vietnam, Lebanon, the Dominican Republic, and, of course, Grenada. It is when the interpretation breaks down at home that the operation ultimately fails: as long as we perceived ourselves as helping the government of South Vietnam, or the Soviets saw themselves as assisting the government of Afghanistan, the interpretive fiction prevailed. 35. (213: 10–20). On page 19 Hugo notes: “Cant, therefore, will be considered here as a mode of expression, or a cast of thought, of which the effect—irrespective of the motive—is to create a misleading discrepancy between the natural meaning of words and their practical significance, a discrepancy even more dangerous when, as often happens, the speaker is as much misled as his audience.” 36. Also significant is the final report of the investigation, but its rhetorical importance is not relevant to the purpose of this paper. 37. This version was broadcast by Radio Liberty for several hours following the first reports of the incident. 38. Soviet rhetoric regarding KAL underwent a similar evolution: the shootdown began as a non-event; became an event that might have been an accident but also might have been intentional; then became a planned spy mission; and finally became a spy mission with the secondary motive of embarrassing the Soviet Union. Ultimately, it was characterized as a provocation intentionally designed to trap the Soviet Union into destroying a passenger plane for the United States’ own purposes. 39. For a discussion of public knowledge in this context, see (482; 71; 72). For a discussion of the future rhetorical functions served by such normalizing discourse, see (243). 40. The Soviet Union vetoed the Security Council resolution in 1983, but it was much stronger than the results of the 1988 debate. 41. Certainly, the role of the Stark in establishing the context for the public understanding of Airbus should not be overlooked: there were ten references to that tragic incident in the Reagan administration’s Airbus rhetoric. 42. In fairness it must be noted that the Soviet Union assisted in this, by demurring rather than seizing the opportunity to berate the United States before a world audience. This is the most fascinating aspect of the Soviet side of this episode; undoubtedly its moderate international stance reflects the current rapprochement in US-Soviet relations. Domestically, however, Soviet commentary was predictably quite biting. See The New York Times, July 4, 1988. 43. The New York Times, July 14, 1988.

CHAPTER 8

Of Mighty Mice and Meek Men: Contextual Reconstruction of the Iranian Airbus Shootdown Jim A. Kuypers, Marilyn J. Young, and Michael K. Launer Dr. Jim A. Kuypers is Professor of Communication in the School of Communication at Virginia Tech (Virginia Polytechnical Institute and State University) in Blacksburg, Virginia Provenance: Originally published in Southern Communication Journal 59, no. 4 (Summer 1994): 294–306. An earlier version of this paper, entitled “Textual Reconstruction in the 1988 Iranian ‘Airbus’ Tragedy,” was presented in 1990 at the annual conference of the Speech Communication Association in Chicago, Illinois.1 Copyright Holder: National Communication Association, reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com on behalf of National Communication Association Description: This paper explores the rhetoric of the Reagan administration surrounding the 1988 shootdown of an Iranian passenger aircraft by the US Navy as an example of “composite narrative” demonstrating the interplay of text and context. It highlights the importance of recontextualization of a situation as a means to achieving rhetorical goals.

W

hen the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air 655 (Airbus) on July 3, 1988, the Reagan administration initially reacted in a reserved and perfunctory manner; however, within two weeks the discourse had assumed a more vituperative demeanor. These disparate rhetorical styles suggest the premise that the administration redefined the context from which it communicated to the world. This study analyzes administrative rhetoric of the United States government during the Airbus crisis, examining all written verbatim records produced by the administration within a thirty day period following the shootdown. By studying the interplay of text and context, as this relates to the concept of rhetorical situation, we demonstrate that the administration contextually reconstructed the entire

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incident, that George Bush’s speech before the United Nations on July 14, 1988, was the culmination of this change, and that discourse following Bush’s speech evinced rhetorical qualities characteristic of administrative discourse during the Korean airliner shootdown in 1983. I am saddened to report that it appears that in a proper defensive action by the USS Vincennes this morning in the Persian Gulf an Iranian airliner was shot down over Strait of Hormuz. This is a terrible human tragedy. Our sympathy and condolences go out to the passengers, crew, and their families. The Defense Department will conduct a full investigation. (452: 846)

These muted words by Admiral William J. Crowe Jr. were the initial response of the Reagan administration to the tragic downing of Iran Air 655. In the remainder of this statement, Crowe foreshadows the position subsequently taken by the American government: responsibility for the tragedy should be laid at the feet of Iran for its prosecution of the war with Iraq. The purpose of the present essay is to examine the rhetoric of the Reagan administration as it responded to the crisis. We posit that the administrative “text”2 initially was tendered in a situation that had no stable hierarchy of meaning on which the various participants could draw. Accordingly, one of the goals of administration spokespersons was to effect a modification of the context(s) affecting the initial rhetorical situation so that auditors could view the event through the same interpretive frame. We demonstrate this interplay of text and context in relation to the reconstitution of rhetorical situations. The response of the Reagan administration makes it possible to view US government rhetoric—the “text”—operating within a time-bounded “crisis” context. As such, it permits examination of the delimiting nature of context (the discursive environment) upon text, and text upon context, in a discrete period of time. As noted, text and context are elements that interact and evolve naturally within any rhetorical situation. (71; 72; 73; 74) Examination of the Reagan administration’s response to the downing of Iran Air 655 illuminates this text/context interplay. Further, it allows insight into the process of contextual reconstruction, whereby rhetorical situations are drastically reconstituted to create a new interpretation of the situation—an interpretation presaged even in the first moments of the rhetorical act.

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From this perspective, the Airbus “crisis,” although arguably a self-contained unit, consisted of three stages: an initial situation, a contextual reconstruction, and a closure (reconstituted situation). We examine each stage to elucidate the manner in which contextual reconstruction achieved “damage control” and minimized the potential impact of an international political debacle.

CONTEXT, RHETORICAL SITUATIONS, AND THE ADMINISTRATIVE TEXT Bitzer’s classic definition of a rhetorical situation entails a complex of persons, events, objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential exigency which can be completely or partially removed if discourse, introduced into the situation, can so constrain human decision or action as to bring about the significant modification of the exigency. (71: 252)

Bitzer explains that a rhetorical situation consists of three principle components: exigency, audience, and constraints. (71: 252–254) These concepts are interdependent: they require some type of discourse to fuel their interaction and possible modification. Bitzer calls this discourse an “utterance.” It is the utterance that “participates naturally in the situation, is in many instances necessary to the completion of situational activity, and by means of its participation with situation obtains its meaning and its rhetorical character.” (71: 251) An important, yet often overlooked, distinction in Bitzer’s rhetorical framework involves the difference between “situation” and “context.” Context is a necessary component of human communication, yet it is both more and less than the historical facts surrounding a rhetorical act. Branham and Pearce (82), in their essay on the reflexivity of text and context, argue for an understanding of context as constituted by the various interpretive communities that will apprehend a text. In this vein, they favor Bateson’s (61) definition of context: “a collective term for all of those events which tell the organism among what set of alternatives he must make his next choice.” (82: 21) It is this understanding of context that informs our argument. Rhetorical situations, on the other-hand, are not understood at a general level, but rather are entered into through the rhetor’s (or text’s) interaction

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with audience, exigency, and constraints. Contexts help shape the general level of interpretive precision that produces a text (and its subsequent interpretation); it is this text that enters into the rhetorical situation. Rhetorical situations are a part of the larger context; they “come into existence, then either mature and decay or mature and persist. … Situations grow and come to maturity; they evolve to just the time when a rhetorical discourse would be most fitting.” (71: 258) Contexts allow for the general interpretation of utterances; rhetorical situations provide moments for a “fitting” utterance. Thus we can begin to see the possible interaction between text, context, and rhetorical situations. Many Bitzer detractors argue that the rhetorical situation mandates a conception of text/context interaction that presupposes a rigid determinism and a fixed nature or interpretive pattern.3 A goal of this essay is to demonstrate that rhetorical situations may begin with no stable means for interpreting the discursive surroundings and that one of the purposes of the text is the creation of a stable contextual frame. Thus, text and context become mutually interactive, each influencing the other, ultimately producing an interpretive frame. Branham and Pearce highlight this reflexivity Every communicative act is a text that derives meaning from the context of expectations and constraints in which it is experienced. At the same time, contexts are defined, invoked, and altered by texts. Particular communicative acts simultaneously depend upon and reconstruct existing contexts. (82: 20)

In order for a text to modify an exigency successfully, it must “fit” not only the particular situation into which it enters, but also the context in which it is situated. In fact, the creation of a stable context of meaning may be the first step for the successful modification of an exigency that occurs in a situation composed of multiple contexts. Accordingly, the term “text” in this essay refers specifically to the discourse produced by the Reagan administration in response to the Airbus incident. We view this “administrative rhetoric” as possessing two interacting dimensions. One dimension accounts for the relatively entrenched and stable aspects of administrative systems everywhere, while the other accounts for the “personalities” of various presidential administrations. Murray Edelman’s early work analyzing the “role-taking” characteristic of administrations is illuminating here. Edelman observes

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Factual premises alone are certainly not sufficient to explain administrative decisional choices; but factual premises in conjunction with observable role-taking are: for the role both specifies the value premises operative in a particular instance of decision-making and establishes a probability that these same value premises will be operative in future decision-making in the same policy area. (144: 50–51)

It is the role-taking action that is of importance to this essay. The Reagan presidency had consistently referred to its irenic role in foreign affairs, especially during the Iran-Iraq war.4 Throughout this conflict, the United States had stressed its role as a neutral third party acting in the capacity of peace-broker. This stance in the international arena was a vital one for the Reagan presidency, and it had been used repeatedly to justify various policy decisions.5 Apparently, the need to maintain such a role necessitated rhetorical reconstruction of the Iran Air tragedy. To be sure, the nature of the threat to the United States posed by the Iran-Iraq war was never truly clear in the mind of the American public; nor was it explained clearly by the Reagan administration. Yet this very ambiguity acted to enhance the image the government hoped to project. Edelman observes Only an intangible threat permits this kind of administrative role-taking. In the measure that a threat is clearly observable and subject to systematic study, perceptions of its character and of techniques for dealing with it converge. Polarization and exaggeration become less feasible. (144: 71)

The destruction of Iran Air 655 refocused public attention on America’s presence in the region and elicited calls for a re-examination and even for Congressional oversight of US Gulf policy.6 As a result, it placed the administration’s role in jeopardy. If it was true, as some claimed (34),7 that US forces were actively participating in the Iran-Iraq war as a belligerent, calls for closer scrutiny threatened the administration with a foreign policy defeat. In addition, the government’s political response to events in the Gulf also highlighted the way that role-taking affects presidential administrations. By the roles he has highlighted, each president has attempted to “personalize” his administration.

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In this sense, then, we use the term “administrative rhetoric” to refer to specific governance styles employed by presidential administrations. Through rhetorical grounding of particular actions or policies, each administration will of necessity project the image that it has chosen to highlight and will adopt public roles that are integral to that image. Thus, administrative texts do not necessarily advance procedural aspects of an administration; rather, such texts may function to create and to maintain the roles chosen by a political leader as part of his/her constituted identity.

THE INITIAL SITUATION The July 3, 1988, shootdown of Iran Air 655 can be traced back to a March 7, 1987, offer from the Reagan administration to escort re-flagged Kuwaiti tankers through the Persian Gulf during the Iran-Iraq war; this proposal led to the April 4, 1987, order to increase the American naval presence in the Gulf. The announced goal of the Reagan administration was limited: protecting eleven Kuwaiti tankers and diminishing Soviet influence in the area. Although the Soviet presence was curtailed, protecting Kuwaiti tankers—and the United States’ own ships, as well—proved to be an onerous task. The continued escalation of American involvement was essentially ignored (in the public forum) by the Reagan administration in order to forestall the development of a crisis atmosphere; indeed, after the shootdown, initial discussions between Reagan and his staff took the form of conference calls, and no plans were made for the President, who was at Camp David on vacation, to return to Washington early. The administration understood the importance of avoiding a perception of crisis: after all, during the 1980 election campaign, Reagan’s advisors had skillfully used a different Gulf crisis to propel their candidate into the White House. Discourse emanating from a crisis environment might again be viewed as defensive, or perhaps even justificatory. Public expectations would be affected by this perception, and subsequent administrative discourse would have to take that contextual framework into account. The effort to dampen the crisis atmosphere addressed two major objectives: demonstrating that the administration’s Gulf policy was sound; and separating that policy from the shootdown act itself. Inevitably, questions regarding the efficacy of the Gulf policy arose immediately after the disaster occurred. The administration dismissed all such questions,

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however, when it stated on July 3, 1988, that “the shooting down of an Iranian passenger plane would not lead to any fundamental change of American policy in the Gulf.” (27: A5) Yet the policy was lacking in clarity, and the press made it an issue until Vice President Bush’s speech before the United Nations Security Council on July 14, 1988. The central question involved the apparent expansion of American involvement from protecting freedom of navigation and curtailing Soviet influence in the area to limiting the spread of the Iran-Iraq war. Although the administration decried insinuations that US forces were really acting as “an adjunct of the Iraqi war machine,” becoming in effect “an undeclared belligerent in the war,” a segment of the American public already had begun to question the United States’ purpose in the Persian Gulf. (352: A10) The shootdown only exacerbated the problem, forcing the admini­ stration to reiterate and defend its modus operandi in the Persian Gulf. Starting with an overview of American historical interests in the Gulf region, the administration outlined its commitment to “countering the spread of war across the Gulf toward non-belligerents,” “to support the self-defense efforts of friendly Gulf Arab states,” to ensure the “free flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz,” and its “very important interest in helping maintain freedom of navigation and keeping open the seaways” of the Persian Gulf. (434: 13) The original rationale for America’s escalated Gulf presence— containing Soviet expansion—was mentioned only briefly. Indeed, the Reagan administration may have had a more compelling reason for being in the Gulf: resuscitating US credibility in the region. The perception that America’s Gulf policy lacked consistency led some to describe it as being “shaped more by the needs of United States Navy commanders in the Gulf than by State Department officials.” (352: A10) Further American policy in the gulf has been shaped as much by a short-term desire to restore credibility lost in the Iran-Contra affair as by any careful assessment of US interests and objectives. … Recent … policy toward the Iran-Iraq war has been, at best, confused. (352: A10)

And now destruction of the Airbus threatened to ravel the fragile tapestry—newly rewoven from the tattered fragments remaining after Iran-gate—that the administration had created with its allies in the Gulf region. If Washington hoped to retain its credibility and emerge from the

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new controversy unscathed, the administration had to vitiate this perception. The task required emphasizing the soundness of US policy in the Persian Gulf and focusing attention on the “proper, defensive” nature of the Vincennes’ action. Both of these goals were accomplished by separating the shootdown from the policy. The administration continuously reiterated the success of its policy The objectives of our policy were to maintain the international waters open for navigation—that has occurred; to maintain our presence to the exclusion of Soviet presence—and that has occurred. In addition, we have escorted some 66 escorts [sic] through the gulf successfully, and we believe that the presence of five other nations and their commitment to the gulf in terms of warships and other support is also a confirmation that our policy has been successful. (378: A10)

The initial context of the Airbus crisis provided many reasons for the administration to assume a reserved political stance: the 1983 downing of Korean Air Lines flight 007, which echoed through the present crisis; the Iran-Contra affair and fears of yet another fiasco in the Mideast; and the death of American servicemen aboard the USS Stark, which evoked isolationist attitudes left over from the days of Vietnam.8 Apart from Reagan’s initial comments of sorrow, the chief executive had little to say.9 Into the resulting void stepped the navy, assigned the task of asserting that the disaster reflected only the fortunes of war, and had not occurred as a result of improper policy. By requiring the navy to assume primary responsibility for explaining what happened (and why), the Reagan administration distanced itself from the incident, thereby avoiding direct responsibility. If America were deemed to be at fault, responsibility would be assumed by the navy and its all too fallible personnel, not by the administration and its Gulf policy. The task of facing the media and explaining what had happened was assigned to Admiral Crowe. Crowe stressed the technical aspects of the incident: causes for the disaster, he claimed, were not intertwined with policy, but rather with the overall situation in the Gulf. Relying upon a detailed description of all of the military activity in the Gulf that day, Crowe implicated Iran in the downing of the aircraft. In stressing the combat environment, and the natural uncertainties associated with it, Crowe avoided confronting a central question: What is the administration’s Gulf policy? Rather, he asked, How does one

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understand the responsibility of a country [Iran] that, while it is attacking other ships, making a war zone out of a certain area of the ocean and then goes ahead and flies a commercial airliner over that part of the ocean at the time that attacks and hostilities are under way. (150: A4)

Already the navy was refocusing the issue; the questioners would not ask how the administration’s policies may have caused the disaster, but rather how the Gulf situation inexorably both demanded and excused it.10 This strategy echoes that of Soviet Premier Andropov, who, in 1983, sent Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, commander of the Soviet air defense forces, out to answer questions from the world press about the destruction of KAL 007. It contrasts vividly, on the other hand, with the Reagan administration’s approach to that same 1983 tragedy, when the chief executive led the charge of world opinion in condemning the action of the USSR as an instrument of a policy of intimidation and violence. Indeed, throughout the early period of the Airbus tragedy’s aftermath, the administration operated under several constraints that acted to modify its discourse. The most troublesome of these were the apparent similarities between the destruction of the Airbus and the downing of KAL 007—similarities the Reagan administration vociferously denied. Admiral Crowe bluntly rejected any hint of such a comparison, stating I think there are two very fundamental differences. There are probably a whole host of them, with more thought. But the fundamental differences are, of course, that [Sakhalin Island] was not a war zone, there was not combat in progress, there was not combat there normally; and, secondly, the KAL 007 was not warned in any way, form, or fashion. (27: A6)

Nonetheless, the administration was well aware of the parallels between KAL 007 and Iran Air 655; an unnamed administration official was quoted quite early as stating, “We’re not oblivious to the realities of the media and public perceptions. … We’re dealing with it as a reality. We’ve got a problem here.” (150: A6) Reagan himself was conscious that the charges leveled by the United States in 1983 could be turned around, with this country now placed under the glare of harsh international attention.

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The President’s scope of action was definitely constrained by the US role in the earlier episode. One Reagan assistant noted that the President was “determined to avoid the mistake made by the Soviet Union.” (95: A8) The experience of the KAL shootdown established an unavoidable framework within which the Airbus disaster would be viewed by the American public and by the world at large. As such, it could not be ignored. Nor was it: the spectre of KAL informed every tactical move and every statement made by the Reagan administration during this crisis.11 The denial of similarities between the two tragedies assuaged initial “micro-criticism,” but the world was still waiting to see if the United States would follow the course of action that it had dictated to the Soviet Union in 1983. The simple reality was that in order to extricate itself from a potential public relations debacle, the Reagan administration had to behave differently than the Russians had in 1983. Responding to this, the administration quickly released information and offered ex gratia compensation for survivors of the victims. Moreover, the administration was very forthcoming with data; attempting to avoid invidious comparisons, it made public sensitive military information concerning the navy’s intelligence gathering capabilities in the Gulf.12 Denials notwithstanding, the administration took into account worldwide public knowledge about the Soviet behavior following the KAL disaster. One sees the effect of this strategy in the way Washington handled the question of compensation versus reparations. The initial response of the administration was that the “whole question of talking about reparation/compensation [was] premature.” (434: 2) Apparently, it was felt that paying “reparations” implied accepting the onus of responsibility; yet one of the criticisms of the Soviet Union during KAL had been that it was not willing to admit responsibility or compensate the victims’ families. Accordingly, the administration needed to appear responsive while simultaneously avoiding use of the word “reparations.” Thus, although the United States contend[ed] that it [was] not legally liable for the deaths, on the ground that the actions taken by the … Vincennes were justified in the course of legitimate military operations …, officials said consideration [was] being given to paying compensation anyway as a means of resolving a potential legal dispute with Iran without admitting fault. (233: Al)

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Perhaps the most subtle constraint faced by the administration consisted of Iran’s pre-shootdown willingness to negotiate an end to the Gulf war. Even before the tragedy had occurred, “the speaker of the Iranian Parliament, Hojatolislam Hashemi Rafsanjani, had stated that a priority of Iranian foreign policy would be to break the country’s international isolation.” (216: A4) Tentative overtures were made to the Reagan administration. A spokesperson noted, “We’ve had a number of probes from Iran through various third parties, saying they’d like to talk with us, and we’ve responded to these.” (434: 2) Iran’s willingness to negotiate weighed heavily on the administration: previous hopes of negotiation had been frustrated when the United States sank six Iranian boats in retaliation for the incident involving the USS Roberts April 14, 1988. Past failures to negotiate could easily be repeated in the wake of the Airbus tragedy. This placed the administration in a precarious position: if it openly refused to accept responsibility, Iran might return to isolationism, the war would continue, and US Gulf policy would suffer a severe setback. If, in contrast, the administration accepted responsibility for the tragedy, negotiations might have a chance for success, but America’s new found credibility might suffer greatly. The administration had to accomplish two contradictory objectives. It had to act in a manner that would allow Iran to continue the attempt to reestablish relations with the West and disengage from the war without the taint of capitulating to “the Great Satan.” Further, the United States strove to avoid responsibility for the incident, while at the same time not insulting Iran. These goals were accomplished through a contextual reconstruction of the event.

THE RECONSTRUCTED CONTEXT As we have seen, the administration faced many difficulties prior to the United Nations Security Council meeting. Foremost among these was the spectre of having Reagan’s Persian Gulf policy labeled a failure, thus threatening the administration’s role as peace-broker. In addition, the administration was forced to contend with numerous complications: calls for reparations and apologies; accusations of naval incompetence; similarities to the KAL disaster; and Iran’s apparent willingness to break out of its self-imposed isolation. No stable hierarchy of meaning was available for discussants to draw upon; and without such a hierarchy, the possibility of creating a shared

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context was minimal. (353: 32–66) To extricate itself successfully from this political and rhetorical situation, the administration would have to achieve a reconstruction of the existing context. From the many frames of reference through which various auditors might view the incident, the administration had to create a new, unified, and consistent context that might constitute a shared “vantage point” around which these publics could “orient meaning structure.” (82: 30–31) Indeed, this had become a major goal for the administration as it attempted to achieve damage control over the political repercussions of the shootdown. In this sense, then, the administrative text was to operate as a delimiter of contextual options. This takes on more importance when one recalls Bitzer’s words Political messages … link so closely to historical situations that we must understand details of the situation as a condition of understanding the meaning of the message. Anyone who examines political messages outside familiar contexts will be struck by the fact that context and message are so interactive that they can scarcely be sepa­ rated: The real message, one might say, is a construction consisting of meanings supplied jointly by speaker and audience. … (74: 239)

The enthymematic process implied here necessitates a shared meaning— context from which to view any text. The administrative text, if it is to be believed, must be understood through a single, unified context. The goal of this reconstruction of context is then clear: to reconstitute the possible interpretations of events, thereby providing one unified framework through which differing publics would view all subsequent texts that might enter into the discussion. Redefinition of context for the crisis concluded with Vice President Bush’s July 14, 1988, speech at the United Nations. Although a new context was necessary to overcome the exigencies of the situation, any such utterance probably would be viewed by the rest of the world as unfitting. (71; 73)13 Furthermore, as Branham and Pearce suggest [W]hen expected utterances would be paradoxical (a predicted conflict of text and context), an attempt may be made to expose and thus reconstruct the rhetorical situation which produced these expectations. In these instances, the rhetorical situation itself—a

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conjunction of defined exigency, audience, and rhetorical constraints, according to Bitzer—may be viewed as an object of concern. (82: 30–31)

Nevertheless, the administration did explicate its conception of the situation, one markedly different from that being proposed by Iran: while Iran concentrated upon a micro-level (i.e., questions of the plane’s altitude, its location vis-à-vis the air corridor, and so forth), Bush transcended technical and procedural minutiae, subsuming these details into a more global view. In so doing, he reconstructed and “punctuated” the auditors’ conception of the situation. Punctuation consists of imposing an order on a dynamic experience. The most common forms of punctuation impose a linear order, identifying a sequence with a beginning (“cause”) and end (“effect”). Conventional texts usually result when the rhetor defines a “situation” as pre-existing and determining the content of his/her text. (82: 27)

The “pre-existing situation” had already been defined by the press and various participants: what we term the micro-level of events. Yet this was not to be a “conventional” text, imposing a linear order at the micro-level, but rather an imposition of a new order, a collocation of cause and effect in which the Iran-Iraq war caused the disaster. The text was a departure from the imbroglio of detail into a world of simple understanding. Speaking before the UN Security Council on July 14, Bush formally initiates the process of punctuation and sets the tone of his speech when he states, I have come here today to represent the United States … because of the importance of the issues at stake—not just the terrible human tragedy of Iran Air 655, but the continuing conflict between Iran and Iraq and its implications for international commerce in the Persian Gulf. (94: 49–50)

The Vice President continues, attempting to delimit the nature and role of the Security Council meeting and to develop a new context from which to view the event

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The critical issue confronting this body is not the how and why of Iran Air 655, which I will discuss. It is the continuing refusal of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran to comply with resolution 598 (1987), to negotiate an end to the war with Iraq and to cease its acts of aggression against neutral shipping in the Persian Gulf. … The victims of Iran Air 655 are only the most recent casualties of a brutal and senseless war that has brought immense pain and suffering to the people of both sides. (94: 51)

Responsibility for the tragedy is thrust upon the Iranians. Although the administration admits destroying the plane, the shootdown act itself is subsumed within a larger context: the war between Iran and Iraq. The war assumes the role of “cause” in the new context, with the shootdown becoming an “effect.” Had an end to the war been achieved earlier, Bush argued, there would have been no Airbus tragedy. Bush further illuminates the new punctuation by reiterating Iran’s role in the shootdown act. After an historical account of the events leading up to the disaster, Bush shifts the blame to the Iranian government: “Despite these hostilities, Iranian authorities failed to divert Iran Air 655 from the combat area. They allowed a civilian aircraft loaded with passengers to proceed on a path over a warship engaged in active battle.” (94: 56)14 With “cause” and “effect” established, Bush had, in essence, provided a new frame of reference from which one might view and evaluate the incident. This new context was constructed in the most palatable manner possible: the restated goal for the United States presence in the Gulf was peace—a goal that all nations could accept, enabling them to become supportive participants in the new context. Successful promotion of this reconstruction made plausible the lack of any disciplinary action against the United States; for Security Council members to take action against the United States in the face of this reinterpretation, they would have to denigrate the search for a peaceful conclusion to the Gulf conflict. The construction of this new context incorporated Iran’s earlier willingness to negotiate. It was possible that Iran would reject the new context, therefore the administration provided a way for the Iranians to assume the honorable role of peace-seekers There are three ways for Iran to avoid future tragedies: keep airliners away from combat; better still, stop attacking innocent ships; or,

Of Mighty Mice and Meek Men

better yet—the best way—through peace. And the Security Council offers the best hope of peace right now. … The time has come … for us to dedicate ourselves to the cause of peace. The Iran Air tragedy should reinforce our determination to act. (94: 56)

The Reagan administration offered a powerful incentive. America promised that by accepting peace, Iran would not only accelerate an end to its isolation, it would also achieve another goal—that of removing United States forces from the Gulf: “[I]mplementation of resolution 598 would enable the United States to return to the modest naval presence in the Gulf we have maintained for more than 40 years, with support of the Gulf States.” (94: 60) Thus, through contextual reconstruction, the administration “guided the audience[s]’ punctuation of the pattern of events” (82: 33) and, in so doing, extricated itself from a potentially injurious catastrophe.

CLOSURE—THE RECONSTITUTED SITUATION The aftermath of the administration’s reconstruction was decisive: since no condemnation was forthcoming from either the United Nations or its International Civil Aviation Organization, national and international attention shifted from the shootdown itself to the Iran-Iraq war; and shortly after Bush’s speech, Iran surprisingly announced acceptance of Resolution 598. Seventeen days after the shootdown, on July 20, 1988, Vernon Walters, US Ambassador to the United Nations, addressed the Security Council from the perspective of the reconstructed context. Walters’s speech brought closure to this incident,15 illustrating the benefits of the “new” context and drawing strength from it when delineating the US government’s perspective on the new situation—а situation in which the shootdown was no longer a major factor As Vice-President Bush stressed in his statement to the Council last week and as virtually every member of this Council has noted during the debate, the airbus accident is only part of a much larger human tragedy: the Iran-Iraq war. The legitimacy of the Western naval presence in the Gulf is simply not subject to question. (446: 12)16

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Walters also reiterated the irenic role of the United States in trying to effect a peace in the Gulf region Council debate has taken place against the backdrop of a landmark event in our joint efforts to find a diplomatic solution to the eightyear-old Gulf War. With the Government of Iran’s formal acceptance of resolution 598 … a major step has been taken toward a negotiated settlement. (446: 11)

When viewed through the framework of the reconstructed context, the administration’s Gulf policy assumes an aura of success; the capitulation of Iran appears as a vindication of the US argument; and the naval action that had resulted in the loss of 290 innocent lives is transformed by the UN debate into a by-product of the Iran-Iraq war. Walters’s last few words emphasize this point We believe that this resolution puts the unfortunate events of 3 July into proper perspective. It is our hope that this action of the Security Council will serve as an urgent reminder to the international community that we cannot permit this senseless conflict in the Gulf to continue. The risks are too great and the price in human suffering and material destruction too high. We members of the Security Council bear a special responsibility to provide leadership in this regard. Let us all rededicate ourselves to this vital task and do what we can to encourage the belligerents to walk through the door of opportunity now before them into an era of lasting peace. (446: 15)

These words represent the quintessence of the US strategy. As Young notes, “[t]he presence of US warships in the Gulf was no longer even the proximate cause of the tragedy; responsibility had been shifted from the offender to the offended.” (475: 220–221) In reconfiguring the context, the United States had redefined the situation so that it no longer focused on the specific act of a US warship, but, instead, encompassed the total reality of the Persian Gulf war. Obviously, contextual reconstruction is a valuable rhetorical tool. Indeed, it is an important means for achieving one goal of all deliberative rhetoric—defining the terms of the debate. Politics on every level is about defining issues, and if one rhetor can determine the context—the frame of

Of Mighty Mice and Meek Men

reference through which an issue is viewed—that rhetor has successfully controlled the grounds for debate. Such recontextualization is essential when a government or administration finds itself under verbal attack or otherwise on the defensive. Restructuring perceptions of the event, shifting the blame, is a necessary part of the justification/exculpation process. Indeed, one might even suggest that recontextualization is an essential goal of all government rhetoric. With specific regard to the Airbus tragedy, the new context transfused the Reagan administration with fresh arguments to use against Iran, while concurrently denigrating all other perspectives as inconsequential. Furthermore, the present case demonstrates the significance of the fact that utterances may freely enter into a rhetorical situation. This particular administrative “text” sought to modify an exigency. Yet before any attempt at a “fitting” response could be made, a stable context from which to evaluate the text had to be developed. This attempt at creating a stable context demonstrates the recursive and evolutionary nature of text/ context interplay; text and context can act individually and severally to reinforce or to modify public perceptions. Branham and Pearce stress that critics “should assume neither that all contexts are ‘fittable’ nor that texts should necessarily ‘fit’ the contexts in which they occur.” (82: 33) Indeed, from the present case study we find that a primary consideration for introducing any text into a rhetorical situation is the establishment of a shared context from which to interpret subsequent texts. This position stresses the creative aspects of the rhetor and detracts from those arguments suggesting that rhetorical situations limit, or have a deterministic effect upon, the discursive creations of rhetors. The significance of this textual strategy becomes evident when one considers the role-taking behavior of presidential administrations. The aura of peace-broker informed the whole of Reagan’s presidency, just as the mantle of peace-maker (vis-à-vis the Soviet Union) graced his second term. After the Airbus shootdown, administrative rhetoric in support of its Persian Gulf policy strove to reinforce this persona. For, if America’s foreign policy goals in the Gulf were inspected too closely, the Reagan administration’s constructed identity—and, by extension, its legitimacy— could be brought into question, as well. In the end, then, defense of the self-projected image assumed paramount importance, necessitating the contextual reconstruction.

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One final note regarding contextual reconstruction. If, as Bateson suggests, the context of a rhetorical act is best defined as the various ways it is perceived by the communities that apprehend, interpret, and react to it, that notion has profound implications for future rhetorics and future rhetors. (61) As we become more conscious of the many interpretive communities that make up our society, and as we realize our previously assumed homogeneity of values was inaccurate, the need to restructure context and create stable hierarchies of meaning becomes a paramount goal of the rhetorical act. This would seem to be an important object of study for rhetorical theorists and critics alike.

NOTES 1. See also (264). 2. While texts are usually associated with rhetors, we prefer to think of “rhetor” in broader terms; today a “rhetor” can range from a single individual to a collectivity of individuals speaking on behalf of an organization, institution, or administration. Thus, a “text” can consist of several discrete elements/utterances if the set of such elements was conceived as a unified whole (e.g., an advertising campaign) or if all the set members aim to achieve a common purpose. While such a construct does not deny the instance when members of a collectivity speak as individuals, it recognizes the tendency of such entities to speak with a single voice and permits the analysis of those voices as a collective whole. More importantly, such a conception recognizes the discourse of a rhetorical situation “as a complex episodical conception wherein the entire constellation of rhetoric surrounding a specific event is treated as the rhetorical text.” (475: 203) 3. Indeed, Bitzer’s concern with defining the essence of “rhetorical” discourse and situations opposes those theoreticians concerned with the use of the term “text” “as a generic term for suspending and thus transcending the particularities of a priori evaluative judgements and genres.” (82: 20) If this statement is to be believed, then the assessment of rhetorical discourse presupposes a rigid—a priori—interpretation of text and context; and, ultimately, the rhetorical situation is seen as deterministic. Yet defining the ostensibly repetitive and fluid elements of an interactive process does not imply an algorithmically rigid interpretation. For other critiques of Bitzer’s initial essay see (121; 435). 4. For a detailed analysis of the Reagan administration’s view of its role in the Iran-Iraq war following the destruction of Iran Air 655, see (263). One of the major findings of this study is that the administration felt itself placed in a defensive position even though its only stated purpose for being in the region was to work for peace. 5. Edelman stresses that “once the pattern of role-taking is established within an administrative agency it becomes self-fulfilling and self-reinforcing.” (144: 52) 6. Time, July 18, 1988, 18. 7. See also: Newsweek, July 13, 1992.

Of Mighty Mice and Meek Men 8. The events that predate the Airbus shootdown show a continual cycle of destructive escalation: on May 17, 1987, the USS Stark was damaged by an Iraqi attack; July 24, an escorted Kuwaiti tanker hit a mine; August 8, an American attack plane fired on an Iranian attack plane; August 10, an American tanker hit several mines; August 15, a tanker-tender hit a mine and sank; September 21, an American helicopter attacked an Iranian ship—Iranian prisoners were taken; October 8, American forces sank three Iranian vessels; October 15, an American tanker was damaged by Iranian missile fire; October 16, a Kuwaiti tanker was damaged by Iranian missile fire; October 19, American forces attacked two Iranian oil platforms in the Gulf; April 14, 1988, the USS Roberts hit a mine—ten crewmen were injured; April l8, American forces attacked two Iranian oil platforms—six Iranian ships were sunk or damaged, two Americans were killed, and one helicopter was lost; April 22, the Reagan administration decided to protect all neutral shipping in the Gulf; July 2, the USS Montgomery engaged Iranian forces while defending a neutral vessel; finally, the Airbus shootdown. 9. “[A]fter the Airbus was shot down, … the president made only three other recorded statements: a letter sent to both houses of Congress, a brief exchange with reporters …, and another informal exchange with reporters on July 11, 1988, during which he discussed the question of compensation. There were two other official pronouncements, each attributed to the Assistant to the President for Press Relations: the first, dated July 11, 1988, referred to a presidential decision not to alter US policy in the Persian Gulf and announced the offer of ex gratia compensation; the second, on August 19, announced the president’s receipt of the report of the investigation and expressed support for the actions of Defense Secretary Carlucci.” (475: 210) 10. These actions highlight how little political explanation was given for the incident. Indeed, during the aftermath of the tragedy, very few of the expected rhetors spoke on the issue; instead, reliance was placed upon military experts, and the event initially was treated purely as a battlefield briefing. Concentrating on “the facts of the case” made it possible to ignore policy issues.   The highly technical explanations offered by the military also served to obfuscate any issues arising from the American public. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca state that “such technical terms, which are supposed to be as univocal as possible in the context of the discipline, in fact summarize an aggregate of acquired knowledge, rules, and conventions. Because he is not familiar with these, the layman completely fails to understand these terms, as technical terms.” (358: 99) This suggests that the military explanations would impede popular understanding of the event. This possibility is reinforced by Fisher’s discussion of the dampening effect of experts on public understanding of complex policy issues. See (162). 11. Certainly the administration did not want comparisons made with the 1983 KAL shootdown. What is striking is that the Soviets did not want the comparisons made either. For a description of the Soviet response to the Airbus shootdown. See (264). 12. This information included capabilities and limitations of the Aegis defense system, as well as the navy’s ability to decipher Iranian F-14 transponder codes. Similar revelations were used in 1983 as “proof ” of the correctness of the US position on KAL. See (480; 232). 13. For an analysis that explores the relationship of text/context and of multiple, interacting contexts, see (83). For an example of competing contexts reconstructed into a stable hierarchy of meaning, see (262).

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Part One: KAL and Cracks in the Rhetorical Wall 14. Notice the US argument had been reconstructed slightly, also. The Iranian authorities now should have diverted the airliner because there had been recent hostilities in the area. The language in this passage is also interesting, for it is very similar to that used by the United States against the Soviets in 1983. Only then, the Reagan Administration was vilifying the Soviet Union for shooting down a civilian airliner “loaded with passengers” and asking for worldwide condemnation of that barbaric act. See (480; 482). 15. For an explication of the relationship between Bush’s and Walters’s UN addresses, see (475). 16. Apparently the Iranian representative did ask the United Nations to examine the incident as an issue apart from the war. The request was not granted. See Krasnaia zvezda, July 7, 1988.

CHAPTER 9

“007”—Conspiracy or Accident? Marilyn J. Young and Michael K. Launer Provenance: Originally published in Commonweal on September 12, 1986: 371–372. Copyright Holder: Commonweal, used by permission Description: This is a review of Shootdown: Flight 007 and the American Connection (New York: Viking, 1986), one of the major publications claiming that the CIA was instrumental in sending the Korean airliner over Soviet territory as part of a spying operation. It includes a “sidebar” about Seymour Hersh’s then soon-to-be-released “The Target Is Destroyed” based on an excerpt that had just been published by Atlantic Monthly.

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lthough it has been three years since the Soviet Union shot down КAL 007, events surrounding the airliner’s tragic fate remain shrouded in mystery. Numerous articles and at least seven books have already appeared, with two or three more expected soon. Public interest continues high, but, given the impossibility of definitively determining why the shootdown happened, only disparate, tenuous hypotheses have been advanced. These fall into two classes, the accidental and the conspiratorial. Regardless of orientation, however, all suffer from the fact that no single author commands the technical, political, and linguistic expertise necessary to avoid damaging errors. Beyond that, of course, many of the writers have had a political or ideological axe to grind, which might or might not be announced but is always discernible. R. W. Johnson’s Shootdown: Flight 007 and the American Connection (235) belongs to the conspiracy camp. Mr. Johnson maintains that the Korean airliner was on a spy mission. Viking has marketed the book that way, promising in full-page ads to refund the purchase price to anyone who can “shoot down” Johnson’s conclusions. He does not claim certain

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knowledge of this conspiracy, but it is obvious that he believes it to be true. In December 1983, The Guardian published Johnson’s unsubstantiated claim that intelligence requirements combined with the hope of derailing the Western European peace movement, led the CIA to provoke a violent Soviet action. (234: 15) How better to justify placing Pershing II and cruise missiles in Britain and West Germany? “It is the US,” Johnson wrote at that time, “which owes the USSR an apology.” Shootdown represents his attempt to assemble proofs demonstrating US culpability. In addition, the book posits a scenario in which such a drastic and dangerous course of action might make political sense. We are convinced, however, that Johnson has no solid evidence for his belief. To demonstrate this, we will concentrate on three technical areas, examining the author’s use of sources and his proof. Throughout the book Johnson misuses sources, particularly when discussing the primary reason, in his mind, for executing such a spy mission in the first place: a new radar installation deep within Siberia, well over 3000 km from the areas KAL overflew. Johnson admits that the CIA already knew this radar would not violate the ABM treaty, contrary to claims from the far right. Furthermore, a “passive probe” could have elicited little useful intelligence regarding Soviet radar. Yet, in making this claim Johnson ignores information from one of his own sources, an article by Philip J. Klass, then senior avionics editor of Aviation Week and Space Technology. Klass (253) indicates that KAL’s flight could not possibly have been detected by either this new radar installation under construction or a similar one in operation in Kamchatka because such equipment is designed to ignore the presence of aircraft. This leaves the author without an adequate motivation except, perhaps, that the CIA had fostered the false notion of Soviet ABM treaty violations to appease critics on the far right; then the agency, believing its own disinformation, proceeded to concoct a fantastic scheme to prove it true. Actually, the most interesting parts of Shootdown are directed toward supporting this rationale. Johnson’s discussion of possible US monitoring of KAL relies on mistaken claims of military radar capabilities previously published by David Pearson, also a conspiracy theorist. In following Pearson, the author has to ignore another of his sources, veteran reporter Murray Sayle. Sayle wrote in London’s Sunday Times that the US reconnaissance aircraft patrolling

“007”—Conspiracy or Accident?

near Kamchatka Peninsula could not have spotted KAL or warned it because the RC-135 was not equipped with the necessary radar. In addition, according to civil aviation expert Douglas Feaver of The Washington Post, KAL was not under any Western civilian radar coverage for over 2000 miles of its journey. Johnson, who knows no Russian, is wrong in his interpretation of most of the Soviet materials he uses. His discussion of taped reports by the SU-15 pilot who destroyed KAL and of Soviet claims that they methodically attempted to contact the aircraft by radio are refuted in an article to be published in Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars. (279) Johnson juxtaposes transcripts of two interchanges: KAL talking to Tokyo air traffic control and SU-15 reporting to its dispatcher. At one point the Soviet pilot requests, “Say again.” Johnson speculates that the dispatcher has relayed KAL’s status report to SU-15, who manifests utter disbelief. But the actual Russian tape-recording does not support this interpretation. What can be heard from the pilot is a routine, unemotional request that a command be repeated, one of six such instances during the interception. In addition, the very premise of this section must be challenged; there is no evidence the Soviets monitored KAL’s radio frequency. If they had, it is extremely unlikely that the disaster would have occurred. But the worst technical chapters in the book deal with the crash itself and the search for KAL’s flight recorder—the infamous “black box.” According to specialists in anti-submarine warfare and search-and-rescue operations who participated in the recovery attempt, Johnson’s description relies on simplification and “half-truths.” These and other sources indicate that the Soviet missile probably exploded near the right inboard engine, ripping through the aft pressure bulkhead and destroying most of the steering mechanism. The aircraft would have remained intact, but the crew would have had little control over its flight. Following regulations explicitly, KAL radioed Tokyo that it had lost pressurization and was descending to 10,000 feet, obviously hoping to stabilize the aircraft at this lower altitude. KAL’s crew almost certainly struggled in vain to control the aircraft while plunging to their imminent deaths. The jetliner probably “went ballistic” in the final moments before impact, the effect of which was compared to “running it through a meat grinder.” This explains why almost no bodies or large pieces of the plane were ever recovered.

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Notwithstanding Shootdown’s “exposé” of a US cover-up involving retrieval of the black box, chances of finding the instrument were never good, what with uncertainty over the splashdown location, the rugged underwater terrain, and some of the world’s most complex and little understood ocean currents. Johnson’s assessment of US recovery capabilities is vastly overestimated, our sources say, and his description of sonar techniques grossly simplified. After all, it took ten years to find the Titanic, and a flight recorder is smaller than your proverbial breadbox. Similar criticism could be extended to nearly all of the technical discussions contained in Shootdown. Indeed, Philip Klass had this to say: “I’ve never read a book so filled with errors.” And Harold Ewing, a senior 747 pilot who has studied the KAL records, indicated that Johnson’s analysis of commercial airline procedures—ostensibly the most striking new information in the study—is wrong in many respects. In particular, Mr. Ewing has indicated that changes on the weight and balance manifest made by the pilot have an innocent explanation. What, then, is the merit of Shootdown? For many readers it will probably be the analysis of the Reagan White House and relationships among CIA chief William Casey, National Security Advisor William Clark, UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, Secretary of State George Shultz, and other administration officials. On the whole, these sections (especially where the public relations aspects of Mr. Reagan’s presidency are broached) ring much truer than any of Johnson’s technical discussions. But many of his propositions are too speculative to be accepted readily. Nonetheless, the political material is both fascinating and shocking, particularly the extent to which the President has delegated decision-making to senior staff members, effectively isolating himself from the process. Thus, the best reason for reading Shootdown is as a study of US politics during the Reagan administration. But readers who expect to learn more about the fate of the KAL will be sorely disappointed, for this book contains virtually no original research and no new evidence. So, Viking, about that refund. … * Excerpts from “The Target Is Destroyed” (201)—Seymour Hersh’s forthcoming book on KAL—have been published in the current Atlantic Monthly. (200) Judging solely from this, it appears Hersh argues that KAL 007 arrived over Sakhalin Island as the result of pilot errors plus pure

“007”—Conspiracy or Accident?

bad luck. Further, Hersh contends, Soviet military personnel did indeed believe the airliner was a US reconnaissance plane. Although President Reagan soon learned from intelligence analysts that the Soviets probably did not know what they were shooting at, Hersh claims this information was ignored for political reasons. It is interesting to compare Hersh’s thesis and methodology with R. W. Johnson’s. Johnson concedes that he has drawn his data almost exclusively from the public record, which means he relies on secondary sources, a practice some have labeled “scrapbook scholarship.” Hersh interviewed officials in both the United States and USSR, as well as many individuals at the National Security Agency with intimate knowledge of top-secret information. In addition, he presents Harold Ewing’s reconstruction of events that may have taken place in the cockpit of the airliner. Ewing’s simulation, developed during his own flights over the correct route, Romeo-20, is claimed to duplicate the track that NSA produced after lengthy analysis of Soviet radar activity. Johnson begins with the postulate that only conscious action can account for highly improbable events. Ewing, and a fortiori Hersh, believes that aircraft disasters stem precisely from such a confluence—change any one circumstance and tragedy would be averted. Both Hersh and Johnson incorporate considerable speculation about individual behavior and its decisive role in the Korean Airliner tragedy. But the data surrounding Hersh’s assumptions are real, his sources original.

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CHAPTER 10

Flight 007 Marilyn J. Young and Michael K. Launer Provenance: Originally published in The Washington Book Review, January 1987: 9–11. Copyright Holder: The last known copyright holder is The Washington Book Review, Inc.—a corporation that was dissolved in 2009. After an extensive, but unsuccessful, search for the current copyright holder, we have decided to reprint the text na svoi strakh i risk (“on our own recognizance”). Description: This is a review of “The Target Is Destroyed” (New York: Random House, 1986) by Seymour Hersh, the investigative journalist who had won a Pulitzer Prize for his exposé of the My Lai disaster: My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath (New York: Random House, 1970) and a National Book Critics Award for Cover-Up: The Army’s Secret Investigation of the Massacre at My Lai 4 (New York: Random House, 1972). A pre-publication version of our review was entitled “A Matter of Sources.”

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wo words: “stunned” and “flabbergasted.” These expressions of surprise were used by US intelligence personnel to describe their reaction to the top secret revelations in “The Target is Destroyed,” Seymour Hersh’s investigation of the 1983 Korean Airlines tragedy. Hersh, in the tradition established with his exposé of the My Lai massacre (197; 198) and continued in The Price of Power, (199) has produced another study of the US government, focusing this time on the intelligence community, its capabi­ lities, crisis performance, and influence on policy making in the Executive branch. “The Target is Destroyed” is the ninth book inspired by the Soviet destruction of KAL Flight 007, including a lurid spy novel Le vol 007 ne repond plus. (436) It stands head and shoulders above the rest, however, because only Hersh has used original material to examine the American role in this incident. He is a persistent, intuitive journalist and has demonstrated over many years an uncanny ability to get people to talk.

Flight 007

Nowhere is this more evident than in his discussion of US intelligence assets in the Pacific. Hersh substantiates for the first time allegations that Air Force personnel and transcribers at a supersecret National Security Agency installation did indeed follow Soviet tracking of KAL 007 in “real time,” i.e., as it took place, a matter other authors have only speculated about. Hersh’s narration traces the path of the intercepted information to analysts at NSA and thence to the Pentagon. What follows is a fascinating account of interagency rivalry and careerism. According to Hersh, air force intelligence quickly concluded that the Soviet Union did not know it had shot down a civilian airliner. NSA had its doubts, too, and was searching for more information. Unfortunately, Defense Intelligence Agency personnel reached a different conclusion: the pilot who shot down KAL 007 had flown close enough to make a positive identification of the aircraft, so destroying it must have been a deliberate act. It was the DIA interpretation that prevailed at a White House strategy session, primarily because of CIA Director William J. Casey. Casey spoke “with certitude about what appeared to be hard technical intelligence showing that the Soviet pilot had identified Flight 007 as civilian.” As of that point, however, American intelligence “had not developed any specific evidence showing that the Soviets had knowingly shot down an airliner.” As Hersh was told, “all involved … understood that the real player in the crowd was Bill Casey.” But politicization of KAL 007 had begun even before that flawed consensus was reached: Secretary of State George P. Shultz had already announced the disaster at a news conference. As Hersh’s narration ventures into the White House and State Department, as he moves away from intelligence capabilities, one begins to lose the feeling of solidity that permeated the earlier chapters. In The Price of Power, Hersh meticulously documented his claims through interviews with former staff members of Henry Kissinger’s National Security Council. By way of contrast, judging from the lack of details in his account of the hectic morning hours of September 1, 1983, he obviously had no similar entrée into the Reagan White House. According to the reconstruction of events in “The Target is Destroyed,” Schultz was briefed by Lawrence S. Eagleburger, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, and Richard R. Burt, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Soviet Affairs, between 7:00 and 8:00 a.m. EDT. Although the fact is not mentioned by Hersh, at 8:00 a.m. EDT—5:00 a.m. PDT—the

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Secretary of State conferred by telephone with the National Security Advisor William P. Clark, who was in California. Meanwhile, Hersh notes, Burt’s staff was preparing the Secretary’s “tough talking statement,” which Schultz had ‘no problem’ getting approved by the Western White House around 9:30 am EDT 6:30 a.m. But according to information distributed to the media later that day, Edwin Meese III, Mr. Reagan’s closest personal advisor, did not alert the President to the fate of KAL 007 until 7:10 a.m. PDT—10:10 a.m. EDT— that morning. Nowhere in “The Target is Destroyed” does Seymour Hersh indicate who authorized the release of so much classified intelligence information without clearance from the President. (Mr. Reagan was still asleep when the key decisions were reached—a fact that the author seems to overlook.) Surely it was Clark or Meese, probably after consultation with Casey in Washington, but the author does not—or cannot—say. While it is undoubtedly true that the President had isolated himself from “the loop of decision-making” and found himself “at the mercy of his staff,” exactly who remained inside that loop is shrouded in mystery. Equally mysterious, of course, is what the Soviets knew about KAL 007 and when they put together a coherent intelligence assessment. Air force intelligence concluded that the jumbo jet was destroyed because of a “spastic response” (shoot first and ask questions later) on the part of the Soviet defense commanders “fearful for their careers.” Even today, many American intelligence officials believe that the Soviets “still may not know all the facts.” Nothing Hersh heard during his 1984 trip to the Soviet Union contradicts this opinion; he told us a year later that going to Moscow was a waste of time. Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, chief of the Soviet General Staff, continued to push the notion of a rendezvous off the coast of Kamchatka between KAL 007 and an Air Force RC-135 reconnaissance plane— something American reconstructions of Soviet radar tracking fail to confirm. Marshal Piotr Kirsanov claimed radar operators believed the Korean jet was actually a refueling aircraft and that it was the RC-135 which penetrated Soviet airspace. These contentions are reported without critical comment. What Hersh (like nearly all other commentators who have preceded him) has ignored is a very simple fact: there is no necessary connection between Soviet actions during an international incident and the official charges or explanations generated later. This seems fairly obvious, and was confirmed

Flight 007

once again in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, but even such an astute observer of Soviet politics as Alexander Dallin, author of the well-received Black Box: KAL 007 and the Superpowers, (127) was guilty of the same error. For his part, Hersh apparently accepts Soviet claims that the SU-15 pilot who fired the fatal rockets was “ordered by his ground controllers to try to signal the intruder and force him to land,” although there is no evidence adduced to support this position. When Hersh writes that “some” American analysts believe the Soviet interceptor was ordered “to make a final attempt to signal the intruder with cannon fire and, if unsuccessful, to shoot down the aircraft,” he is stating a minority opinion not confirmed by the Russian language transcript that has been made public. Hersh does not say that he has been shown additional secret information germane to this point, but his apparent verbatim citation of one Russian verb that doesn’t appear in the transcript (notwithstanding that he got the form wrong) is a tantalizing clue which might lead one to that conclusion. With regard to Kirsanov’s claim, Hersh is apparently unaware that in an article prominently displayed in Pravda on September 20, 1983, the Marshal charged that the Soviet Union had obtained evidence linking the flight of KAL 007 to the space shuttle Challenger, clearly an extension of the spy charges levelled with increasing urgency ever since September 2 (not the sixth, as Hersh has stated). In any event, despite five hours of interviews with Kirsanov, this discrepancy is not addressed in the book. The author is betrayed here by his own methodology. In his previous work, Hersh’s procedure has been to report what was told to him, plus any corroborating or conflicting information he could find. Where in the Soviet Union could one find conflicting evidence in this instance? For example, regarding the alleged rendezvous of KAL 007 and the RC-135, Hersh writes, “Ogarkov and Kirsanov were wrong … and either have chosen not to tell the whole story or were lied to by subordinates.” Conservative critics doubtlessly view statements of this sort as proof that the author is “soft on Communism” or guilty of some other type of malfeasance. But there should be no real doubt as to Hersh’s personal opinion in this instance, although that opinion isn’t necessarily relevant to his investigation. Of greater concern should be the frequent journalistic practice of using extensive “not for attribution” material. In the introduction to “The Target is Destroyed,” Hersh acknowledges that the reader will have to make

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a “leap of faith” past the plethora of unidentified sources in the book. It is undoubtedly prudent to withhold the identity of those in the intelligence and military communities who contributed to this work. One wonders, however, whether such caution need extend to sources outside that closed, clandestine circle. By Hersh’s own admission, “key allegations” in his narrative rely on unnamed sources, many of whom are not in the intelligence community or in the military. To be sure, he indicates in his introduction that he tried to “verify and double-check” his information. And Hersh’s reputation as a journalist inclines one to believe that he did just that. However, we would feel much more comfortable about that statement if there were some indication of the methods the author used and the standards he set for accepting unattributed information. Still, even vague attribution is preferable to no attribution at all. In too many instances it appears that Hersh had a source, but none is indicated. For example, “George Schultz was not consulted as his senior aides worked all night trying to cope with the often contradictory flow of information about Flight 007.” The text proceeds to discuss Burt and Eagleburger without indicating any sources for that remarkable statement. A second instance, more significant because the information is more critical to the story of KAL 007, concerns the issue of how much was actually overheard by US and Japanese intelligence. Between September 1–4, numerous reports were disseminated indicating the existence of a tape containing the direct order to fire on the airliner. Hersh derogates such reports as “spurious” and flatly denies the existence of any intercepted instructions from Soviet ground dispatchers, stating about such accounts, “The line between fact and fiction … had been erased.” Although he is contradicting three television networks, American and Japanese wire services, most major newspapers, and Time magazine, Hersh does not justify his position. Nor does he even allude to the existence of a source, much less identify one. In the past, Hersh has been careful to provide such details. Cover-Up, (198) his post-My Lai exposé of Army investigative procedures, relied almost exclusively on private interviews and access to classified documents, yet the author had recourse to citations such as “an Army source in Europe” fewer than a dozen times. And The Price of Power (199) contains an instance where one allegation was “confirmed by a senior member of the intelligence community … whose information on other sensitive activities … has been unfailingly accurate.” Few would question

Flight 007

the credibility of a witness identified in this manner by a reporter of Hersh’s stature. By the same token, Seymour Hersh is not the only journalist with good sources. NBC correspondent Jack Reynolds, who broke the “order to fire” story on the United States, reacted incredulously when apprised of Hersh’s characterization. Reynolds, who is quoted approvingly elsewhere in the book, told us that he obtained the flight dispatcher information by telephone from an “impeccable” Japanese source in Tokyo whom he has known for over twenty years. Reynolds’s informant, contacted recently at our request, confirmed his original story, explaining, “These tapes are rolling all the time up there.” According to this source, it was the Japanese Self-Defense Force who made the recording. It would seem, then, that in this particular instance Hersh has failed to live up to his own standards of proof and attribution. Despite these caveats, “The Target is Destroyed” is vastly superior to other books written about the Korean airliner tragedy. Unlike its competitors, this study contains significant inside information, a minimum of uninformed speculation, and a complex flight scenario developed by 747 pilot Harold Ewing that conforms to known fact. Alexander Dallin has a better understanding of the Soviets, and his book offers a more comprehensive analysis of their motives—one area of weakness in Hersh’s study. In addition, for two distinct points of view on the UN debate (a topic Hersh does not address) we recommend Richard Rohmer’s Massacre 747 (384) and Franz Kadell’s The KAL 007 Massacre (242), although each of these analyses reaches a conclusion to which we do not subscribe. All of the remaining books are seriously flawed by massive speculation, numerous outright errors, and a lack of original research. Hersh, on the other hand, has answered several nagging questions about the events of August 31–September 1, 1983. In the process he has seriously undermined the credibility of the various conspiracy theorists who have alleged that the flight of KAL 007 was a deliberate US attempt to obtain intelligence information. It is difficult to imagine how anyone could adhere to this notion after reading “The Target is Destroyed.” Most of the attention generated by this study has focused on the flight scenario and whether or not the Soviet military knew it was destroying a passenger aircraft. However, the real significance of the book lies in its revelations about the internal workings of the United States government. Hersh charges that key officials in the Reagan Administration

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allowed ideology to color their assessment of the data they had received from intelligence sources: of Schultz, Casey, and the President he writes that “their strong hostility to Communism had led them to misread the intelligence and then, much more ominously, to look the other way when better information became available.” But Hersh does not indicate when Reagan and Schultz were actually presented with the updated intelligence analysis confirming Soviet confusion over the identity of the airliner. Thus, the reader cannot judge the point at which these men rejected such intelligence. The director of Central Intelligence seems to have played the pivotal role. It is likely that Meese and Clark sought Casey’s counsel; it is certain that NSA Director Lincoln D. Faurer would have conferred with his immediate superior before agreeing to any revelation of signals intelligence; and Hersh demonstrates that Casey short-circuited attempts by air force intelligence to present countervailing evidence against the presumption of Soviet premeditation. Indeed, Casey is treated quite gently in “The Target is Destroyed,” no less so than Ogarkov and Kirsanov. But Hersh’s emphasis is not on individual frailty. Rather, as in his My Lai studies, his primary concern is institutional shortcomings. What unfortunately becomes clear from this major study is that entrenched inter-service rivalry, compounded by personal opportunism, cripples the analysis of intelligence during a time of crisis. As Harold Wilensky (464) pointed out nearly twenty years ago The dilemma of intelligence versus specialization is twofold: specialization is essential to the efficient command of knowledge but antithetical to the penetrating interpretation that bears on high policy. … The primary cost of specialization in intelligence is parochialism … each service, each division, indeed every sub-unit, becomes a guardian of its own mission, standards, and skills; lines of organization become lines of loyalty and secrecy.

It is distressing to learn that nothing has changed.

CHAPTER 11

Carlos the Jackal Attacks RFE/RL! Marilyn J. Young and Michael K. Launer Provenance: Originally published in The Slavic and East European Journal 56, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 139–140. Copyright Holder: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL), used by permission Description: This is a review of Cold War Broadcasting: Impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe: A Collection of Studies and Documents by A. Ross Johnson and R. Eugene Parta (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2010). Ross Johnson is a former director of Radio Free Europe, and Gene Parta was director of Audience Research and Program Evaluation for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty; both were later fellows of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

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You’re kidding. No, really.

ne wouldn’t expect a scrupulously researched academic tome to read like a spy novel, but Cold War Broadcasting (231) manages in places to do just that. Based to a very large extent on files from Soviet-era intelligence and security establishments, this book examines the impact of government-sponsored Western broadcasting on societies behind the Iron Curtain and the efforts made to counter that impact. Carlos was indeed contracted by the Securitate, Romania’s secret police, to commit terrorist attacks—including the assassination of specific broadcast personalities—against “The Voices” (particularly, RFE/RL), as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty were known throughout the Warsaw Pact zone. Nor was Romania alone in mounting covert actions that attempted to intimidate or silence the stream of unwanted news, views, and other trappings of Western culture that could not be stopped at border crossings. What is fascinating, however, is the quantitative and qualitative difference in the efforts mounted by different countries: even during the Cold War, the Polish people were allowed

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greater access to Western media, and during certain crisis periods— including December 1981 when martial law was declared and Solidarity leaders were jailed—as much as eighty percent of the citizenry listened to or watched news broadcasts emanating from Western nations. Romania, in contrast, maintained a strong, but lower and more level, listener base throughout the Cold War period, and the government more actively attempted to suppress listenership. This study consists of three distinct parts. The first 140 pages describe the technical capabilities and the audience for Western broadcasting, focusing predominantly on RFE/RL and VOA, as well as Eastern bloc efforts to jam their broadcasts. Much attention is devoted to the indirect methodologies employed by analysts to assess audience size—and the extent to which newly available internal surveys confirm those assessments. The second section (about 200 pages) details the impact of Western broadcasting on the Soviet Union itself and on specific nations in Eastern Europe. These chapters are based on previously secret primary source materials now available to Western scholars. Of particular note is the fact that, as much as they tried to stifle the radios, Eastern bloc elites—including Politburo staff and members of the Soviet bloc intelligence community—relied on the information being broadcast to get a clearer picture of what was actually going on in their own societies. This was particularly true for RFE/ RL, which served as the “surrogate” national public radio in each country (as opposed to VOA, whose message was understood to be more clearly associated with the government of the United States). The last section (also about 200 pages) presents, in English translation, a cross section from the tens of thousands of documents that form the basis for the preceding analysis. The most fascinating study in the book, by Istvan Rev of Budapest, is an introspective and philosophical tract completely out of character with the rest of the analytical chapters. Rev alludes to the fact that both Washington and Moscow intently studied one another’s messages and modified their own messages accordingly—a subtle example of international meta-broadcasting. Our own research (488) confirms a point made elsewhere in this study: quite often Soviet propaganda authorities would respond in print and on TV to information that was available to its citizens only from Western broadcasting. Like many scholars interested in the Soviet era, the authors of this review could not possibly have completed their research into the political

Carlos the Jackal Attacks RFE/RL!

rhetoric that characterized US-Soviet relations in the 1980s and 1990s without the tireless efforts of the US “radios” (including VOA) to record and transcribe Soviet-era news programs (both radio and television) and to develop what amounted to a clipping service for print media. We are particularly grateful to Natalie Clarkson, Helen Jakobson, and Jon Lodeesen (all now retired or deceased) for arranging access to these collections, as well as to staff at both VOA (in Washington) and RFE/RL (in Munich) for their unstinting assistance. And we were proud to be interviewed by the Voices regarding both the Korean Airliner “incident” and Chernobyl. As pointed out in this intriguing study and attested to in the words of the political elites most adversely impacted by Western radio, funding for these efforts constituted the best imaginable bargain in combating Communism, given the pervasive effect such broadcasts had on the course of history. Even CIA analysts relied on information that could be provided only by the radio stations. The world is much changed since the days of the Cold War—more so, perhaps, in media technology than in other ways. Never again will shortwave radio broadcasting attain its former impact. For example, RL has discontinued its shortwave broadcasts into China. In the internet age, with cell phones and social media proliferating around the world, even television has receded in importance in coalescing public opinion, informing broad audiences, or calling average people to action. Nevertheless, the concentrated use of media by government to get out its message—in whatever form those media take now or in the future—is probably more significant than ever before. These days, much of that effort is carried out, anonymously, by the American military through the use of social media and foreign language websites to influence both elites and private citizens in hotspots around the world. Winning the hearts and minds of people has never been more important, and it is disappointing to see how little significance is attached in Congress to the open and acknowledged continuation of such efforts by the Western democracies in general and by the United States, in particular. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said recently, “We are in an information war, and we are losing that war.” (123) There is one question not answered by Cold War Broadcasting that intrigues and puzzles these reviewers. The point is made continuously that listenership increased in specific countries during crisis situations throughout the entire period covered by these studies. However, although

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the Chernobyl nuclear accident is singled out for special treatment in this volume, no explanation is given for the fact that all Western “radios” experienced a significant drop in audience size during 1986, even though jamming had receded in importance as a counter-method and notwithstanding the fact that such broadcasting represented the only reliable source of information concerning the accident and the radiation situation that prevailed in its aftermath. We have only one significant criticism to make regarding this fascinating and informative study. Specifically, it is the poor quality of the translations quoted throughout the investigative chapters of the book and included in the collection of documents supporting those chapters. On the whole, a more satisfying volume would have resulted had the editors of this collection (or, more appropriately, the funding sponsors) engaged professional translators whose native lan­guage is English.

Plaque at the entrance to the Chernobyl AES administration building

Photo credit: Michael Launer (1989)

The original sarcophagus

Photo credit: Michael Launer (1989)

Interior access door to the sarcophagus at Chernobyl

Photo credit: Michael Launer (1989)

A billboard at the Rovno Nuclear Station

Photo credit: Larry Sherfey (1996)

The new secure confinement

Photo credit: EBRD—European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (2019); provided by Andrei Glukhov

CHAPTER 12

Chernobyl in the Soviet Media: Unintentional Ironies, Unprecedented Events Marilyn J. Young and Michael K. Launer Provenance: Previously unpublished, written in May 1986 Copyright Holder: Authors Description: This OpEd piece highlights the evolution of Soviet media policies from 1983, when the Korean Airliner tragedy occurred, to 1986 as a result of the Chernobyl disaster. The different approaches of Yuri Andropov and Mikhail Gorbachev are contrasted.

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n Saturday morning, April 26, as the No. 4 nuclear reactor at Chernobyl was spewing radioactivity into the air, Pravda hit Soviet streets with a TASS story, datelined Washington, April 25, reporting that after a month of “covering up” the Pentagon was “forced to admit” that in March a “serious accident” had occurred aboard the Poseidon nuclear submarine USS Nathaniel Green, which was on patrol in the Irish Sea. The incident, it was stated, was “fraught with the danger of radioactive contamination of the coastal waters of several European countries.” On May 3, exactly one week later, both Pravda and Izvestiia cited a story in The Washington Post about the USS Atlanta, a nuclear sub which had run aground in the Straits of Gibraltar. Military spokesmen “were quick to assure [reporters] that no emission of radioactive materials had occurred.” Further details concerning the Nathaniel Green were also provided. Then, on Sunday both newspapers reported a KLAS-TV (Las Vegas) story concerning the accidental destruction of $70 million worth of electronic equipment during the most recent “Mighty Oak” underground nuclear test. Pravda called the accident “the latest in a series of incidents at the Ranier Mesa nuclear test site.” Krasnaia zvezda, the Soviet military

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newspaper, which also carried the “Mighty Oak” story on May 4, had run a report of French nuclear testing on Tuesday, April 29. Although the timing of Pravda’s first article was surely accidental— and, in retrospect, quite ironic—publishing the remaining stories constituted part of a curiously subtle propaganda campaign aimed at Soviet readership. For it was only on April 28 that the first, four-sentence reference to Chernobyl had been printed in Pravda, while neither Izvestiia nor Krasnaia zvezda mentioned the disaster until Wednesday, the thirtieth. Indeed, throughout the first week, these major Soviet newspapers carried fewer than thirty column inches on the worst nuclear power disaster in history; by way of contrast, Western dailies have been printing that much or more every day. It was only on May 14 that Chernobyl got pushed off the Post’s front page; but almost all of the sparse Soviet coverage has been buried in a corner of a back page under the innocuous sounding title “From the USSR Council of Ministers.” The Soviet government, it seems, began its public treatment of Chernobyl in much the same fashion as it had handled the Korean airliner incident nearly three years ago. At that time, you may recall, the initial statement claimed that an “unidentified aircraft” had entered Soviet airspace over Sakhalin Island but then “continued its flight toward the Sea of Japan.” It was not until six days later that the USSR finally admitted it had shot down the airliner. But there also have been significant differences in the handling of Chernobyl, differences which indicate that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has indeed learned some lessons about public relations. For instance, very little has been said—both on Soviet television and in the newspapers—about “anti-Soviet hysteria.” And the charges that were leveled have been aimed mostly at the press, not at Western governments. In the aftermath of KAL, the vitriol of Soviet statements in this regard had reached levels unseen in many years. KAL also saw a reliance on the print media, which has not been in evidence during the past two weeks. For instance, in September 1983 Pravda alone published over sixty related articles, several of them very long. Moreover, few Western observers have credited Mr. Gorbachev with the political astuteness and courage manifested by his televised address to the nation. There is simply no precedent for such a statement by any Soviet leader.

Chernobyl in the Soviet Media

In 1983 premier Yuri Andropov made no public statement at all regarding the Korean airliner until four weeks had passed; even then he mentioned it only as an example of US aggression in a written attack on the planned deployment of cruise missiles in Western Europe. This time, however, there was no distancing of the political leadership from the tragic event. The calm manner in which Mr. Gorbachev spoke and his careful recitation of facts were intended to demonstrate a new level of Soviet candor. Moreover, the clever linkage of the Chernobyl disaster with an extension of Moscow’s unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing and a renewed call for test ban treaty negotiations between himself and President Reagan “anywhere in Western Europe or even in Hiroshima” demonstrates the Soviet premier’s growing rhetorical sophistication. Both the pointed comparisons and the paternal image presented by Mr. Gorbachev should be understood as evidence that he now perceives the power of television as a communication medium. The message received by the Soviet people is equally clear: it is true that Chernobyl was a serious accident (one must remember how rare public admissions of casualty figures are in the Soviet Union), but all highly developed countries have such accidents (it is not without purpose that reminders of Three Mile Island and the nuclear submarines have appeared side by side with the terse dispatches from the Council of Ministers). That is why the peace-loving Soviet people must continuously urge restraint upon the irresponsible West. That is why the United States must be challenged for callously continuing nuclear testing despite the continued Soviet moratorium. Moscow has packaged this message very skillfully. In so doing, Mr. Gorbachev has succeeded in defusing any potential threat to his leadership that might have arisen from Soviet incompetence or from disregard for safety standards and procedures mandatory for protecting the public. That explains why the local officials singled out for punishment were specifically charged with failing to help the populace in the face of obvious need.

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CHAPTER 13

Redefining Glasnost in the Soviet Media: The Recontextualization of Chernobyl Marilyn J. Young and Michael K. Launer Provenance: Originally published in Journal of Communication 41, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 102–124. Reprinted in Mass Culture and Perestroika in the Soviet Union, edited by Marsha Siefert, 102–124. New York and Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1991. Portions of this chapter were presented as papers at the World Communication Association Biennial Conference, August 1989, and at the Fourth World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, July 1990. Copyright Holder: © Oxford University Press, used by permission Description: This chapter presents a review of news coverage and an analysis of two documentary films in the context of Soviet cultural values and political stakes, suggesting that the rhetorical reconstruction of Chernobyl contributed to the legitimation of nuclear power and the environment as public issues.

I

n March 1985, when Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev ascended to power in the USSR, he promised to reform the Soviet economy. A concomitant feature of the revitalization program would be greater access to the information necessary for effective economic planning. The latter change, glasnost, would facilitate the former, perestroika. As events have transpired, however, both policy initiatives developed far beyond their original, well-limited definitions. Today the impending conversion to a market economy and a combative, nearly uncontrollable, press have rendered the social scene almost unrecognizable. It is difficult to perceive any remnant of those tentative, cautious policy conceptions that ushered in the new age of Soviet political culture. Indeed, one seldom even hears the term glasnost in the USSR. A critical event with enormous repercussions in both the economic and information spheres was the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear station on April 26, 1986. As both popular and scholarly accounts have

Redefining Glasnost in the Soviet Medi

extensively documented, press coverage of this accident was a watershed in Soviet policy. This article assesses how media treatments of Chernobyl changed the developing concept of glasnost while reflecting the existing conception of Soviet media policy. We begin by reviewing news coverage that appeared in three major Soviet daily newspapers and on Soviet television news from the day of the explosion through May 14, when President Gorbachev addressed the nation. We follow this analysis with a brief description of post-Chernobyl reinterpretations—mostly recreations or narratives of the fateful events preceding and following the explosion—that saw light of day as a direct result of the greater freedom accorded by Moscow to editors of journals, magazines, and newspapers. These works provided the Soviet people with far greater detail than had been offered by the news media in coverage of the accident and subsequent cleanup activities. One consequence was the central government’s decision to conduct a continuous campaign in the print media. Over the next three years a variety of powerful academicians, nuclear power ministry officials, research scientists, and health officials were enlisted to reinforce the official government position. In addition, the state released two made-for-television documentary films (one in late 1986, one a year and a half later) as part of a multimedia effort to reassert its control in shaping public perceptions of the Chernobyl accident. Close textual analysis of these documentaries (as well as of an important magazine interview with a leading official in the Ministry of Health) provides evidence that the Chernobyl tragedy was thematically reconstructed as a triumph of techno­ logy and human courage under the guiding hand of the Communist Party. The original glasnost initiative was a response to a complex of policy problems that the party chairman viewed as insoluble without consensus formation. As such, it represented an innovative application of traditional Leninist thinking: The functions of the media were to “change the ethical and moral outlook of the population” and “rouse [the people] to contribute to the economic goals of the leadership.” (319: 27–28) But the centerpiece of the new program was perestroika; glasnost was merely its handmaiden, although the West lost sight of this fact. Conceptually, at least, glasnost had no relationship whatsoever to an event such as a nuclear power plant explosion in the Ukraine. Nor was it intended to fulfill any “grand purpose” of bringing “the truth to the people”1—although one may argue that it has largely achieved just that effect in many areas of public discourse.

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Unfortunately, popular wisdom in the West—created in large part by naive and idealistic assessments that appeared in the press—has christened the nuclear accident a “test” of glasnost (120; 180; 193, 396)2 that the Soviet government failed. In this way, the West defined glasnost to suit its own purposes, which included supporting Gorbachev, who found it useful not to disabuse the West of its misconception. Nevertheless, the disaster we have come to refer to as Chernobyl did present a true crisis of information and information policy for the Soviet Union, both internally and externally. Official treatment of the nuclear accident may be examined most fruitfully as a signpost along the way from an intransigence regarding the negligible importance of public opinion toward a developing ability to manipulate that public opinion through the media for political purposes. Ultimately, of course, the Soviet government lost rhetorical and political control of this process. As a result, the media became much more “truthful” and much more responsive to the needs of the people. Indeed, only in the Gorbachev era—and largely as an inadvertent result of his policies—have the concepts of political culture and public needs distinct from those of the state been expressible within a Soviet context. An examination of traditional Soviet rhetorical behavior in crises reveals that factual events are subjected to evolving ideological interpretation that reflects the government’s current policy goals.3 This response pattern is so ingrained that its development can be followed quite clearly through six stages 1. An initial period of silence—no response—while facts are gathered and “spin” options are weighed; 2. A reflexive lashing out at Western news sources, usually including transnational broadcasters, for raising a “ruckus” and generating “anti-Soviet hysteria”; 3. The development of the government’s interpretation in a burst of rhetorical activity characterized by well-defined starting and ending points; 4. The culmination of the interpretative process and enshrinement of the official interpretation via a public statement by the head of government; 5. A dramatic drop-off in the volume of rhetorical activity; 6. The rhetorical reconstruction, as events warrant, and canoniza-

Redefining Glasnost in the Soviet Medi

tion of the official interpretation in the political culture—that is, relegating the chosen interpretation to long-term societal memory. For the official Soviet response to the Chernobyl incident, these stages can be defined rather precisely: silence (April 26–30, 1986), lashing out (April 30–May 6), development (May 4–14),4 culmination (May 14), drop-off (May 16), canonization (through summer 1987). Obviously, such boundaries are somewhat fluid; they can, for instance, be severely affected by useful developments (breaking stories) in the West. Nor is every event packaged so neatly, of course. The time spans have on occasion diminished greatly in the Gorbachev era—consider, for example, the nearly immediate reporting of the Armenian earthquake disaster. The discussion that follows is based on a review of Chernobyl coverage in Pravda, published in Moscow by the Communist Party and distributed nationally; Izvestiia, published in Moscow by the government and distributed nationally; and Pravda Ukrainy, published in Kiev (the Ukrainian capital) by the Communist Party and distributed primarily throughout the Ukraine. It also draws on television news coverage as represented by translations in Daily Report: Soviet Union, a standard compilation of Soviet news produced by the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, an arm of the Central Intelligence Agency. The coverage of the Chernobyl accident was first characterized by the traditional Soviet response to disaster—silence. As all the world knows, the Soviet government warned neither its own people nor its international neighbors of the danger they faced. The first public announcement regarding the accident furnished to the forty five thousand residents of Pripyat— the “company town” nearest the power station—was issued on Sunday, April 27. It instructed residents to take their identification papers and some money and prepare to board buses that had arrived from Kiev, some 65 miles away. The buses (1,100 of them) were used to evacuate the local population. Up to that moment, life is said to have gone on as usual in Pripyat, with mothers hanging laundry out to dry, going to market for groceries, or watching their children spend most of Saturday, April 26, playing outdoors. (294: 14–15; 391) It is difficult to imagine Americans behaving as passively or timidly with an explosion and major fire occurring less than two miles away. But local radio and television did not cover the fire. Workers who arrived

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in buses, as customary, for the morning shift were told to remain at the plant site. And ordinary citizens, whose lives were bound up with the power plant’s construction and operation, apparently spread no information among themselves through informal channels. If nothing else, such a dearth of public interest demonstrates why it was possible for the Soviet government to maintain nearly total control of information dissemination.5 In June 1986, I. Y. Emelianov, then deputy director of the Institute of Power Engineering, acknowledged that prior to Chernobyl there were no emergency procedures for warning nearby residents in the event of a nuclear power plant accident. However, Emelianov explained official inaction by stating that government and ministry officials had opted for a policy of “selective information”: “In the areas near the power station, where there was a specific danger, people were given instructions as soon as possible. But we could not cause terror in Kiev.” (22—cited in 207) As far as the rest of the country—and the world—was concerned, there was no announcement until April 28, when the now well-known four-sentence announcement by TASS, the official news agency of the Soviet government, was read on “Vremia,” the national evening news program, at 9:00 p.m. Moscow time An accident has occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, and one of the reactors was damaged. Measures are being taken to eliminate the consequences of the accident. Aid is being given to those affected. A government commission has been set up.

The same news release was printed verbatim on April 29 in both Pravda Ukrainy and the afternoon edition of Izvestiia, thus becoming the first story of any sort to appear in the national press. The announcement occupied less than two column inches of text in the lower-right-hand (inside) corner of page two in these four-page daily newspapers. Pravda did not mention the event until Wednesday, April 30. Indeed, throughout the first week, these three Soviet newspapers combined carried fewer than thirty column inches. All printed text was provided by TASS, and there is no evidence that any reporters were dispatched to the scene prior to May 3, when the reactor fire was finally dampened. In fact, news reporters and photographers were initially prohibited from covering the event or even interviewing the evacuees. (296) Indeed, like the initial announcement,

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all of the sparse Soviet coverage during the first few days was buried in a corner of an inside page under the innocuous-sounding title “From the USSR Council of Ministers”; in contrast, it was only on May 14 that Chernobyl was pushed off the front page of The Washington Post. Initial Soviet television and radio coverage was equally terse. Following the April 28 announcement, coverage was limited to short reports on the daily news. For example, on April 29, Radio Moscow stated that a commission had been named to investigate the accident; that evening, both radio and television announced the deaths of two persons in the accident, the evacuation of the area, and the “stabilization of the radiation situation.” These reports, read directly from the TASS wire, were not accorded any prominence; and television did not show a still photo of the accident site until May 1 or the first news film until May 4. (280) Scant and misleading as they were, however, these factual statements were sufficient to indicate Chernobyl’s significance. Up to this point the national press had been focusing primarily on nuclear accidents and incidents that had occurred in the West. On Saturday morning, April 26, 1986, as the Unit 4 reactor was spewing radioactivity into the air, Pravda published a TASS story, datelined Washington, April 25, reporting that after a month of “covering up” the Pentagon was “forced to admit” that in March a “serious accident” had occurred aboard the Poseidon nuclear submarine USS Nathaniel Green. The incident, it was stated, was “fraught with the danger of radioactive contamination of the coastal waters of several European countries.” Similar stories, some of them as much as ten years old, ran in various nationally distributed Soviet newspapers on April 29, May 3, and May 4 (and then again on May 22 and 23). Although the timing of Pravda’s first article was surely coincidental—and, in retrospect, quite ironic—publishing the remaining stories constituted part of a curious propaganda campaign aimed at the domestic audience. Obviously, the print media were “setting the stage,” putting things into perspective, establishing through tu quoque reporting a defense of the system against charges of incompetence. These stories become less anomalous, however, when one realizes that beginning April 28, transnational radio stations had been broadcasting news of the Chernobyl explosion and fire into the Soviet Union. (403; 482) Voice of America first mentioned the incident at 6:28 p.m. Moscow time on April 28, when it broadcast the initial Swedish revelation that an accident had occurred; at 8:47 p.m. in Moscow, VOA carried the

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official Soviet announcement—which had just run internationally on the TASS wire—more than fifteen minutes before that same announcement appeared on “Vremia.”6 From that point on, VOA virtually bombarded their Soviet audience with information and commentary about the accident, beginning with eleven items on the first day alone (April 28), over forty items on the next three days, to a total of two hundred sixteen items through May 5. It is not surprising that a Radio Liberty listener survey (468) concluded that “more Soviet citizens … first learned about the accident … from Western radio broadcasts than from any other source, Soviet or foreign. Nearly half the survey group obtained information about Chernobyl from Western radio, either as a first or subsequent source, even after Soviet sources began to report on the accident.” Beginning with the May 4 telecast, however, the volume and nature of Soviet television coverage were unprecedented, undoubtedly reflecting a policy decision reached at the highest levels of government. What is most remarkable about the broadcast of May 4 is its use of footage shot from a helicopter at the site of the nuclear accident; it is unlikely that such a spectacle had ever appeared on state television. “Film at eleven” (or “nine” in this case) was not an expression with currency in the Soviet Union. As Westerners might expect, it was this May 4 broadcast that stood out in the minds of Soviet viewers. (468) Perhaps the most surprising feature of the period following the broadcast of the first Chernobyl news film is the sheer volume of coverage, particularly in the print media. Although the Soviets are beginning to discover the propaganda potential of television, the national press remains the medium of choice for placing events into proper ideological perspective. (The nuclear accident may prove to be the demarcation point in this area as well, because state television served a clear purpose in the unfolding coverage of Chernobyl.) This volume and acceleration are shown by the number of Foreign Broadcast Information Service reports for this period. Only seventeen items were reported in the first week; during the second week (May 4–May 8) one hundred eighty five items were reported, and one hundred eighty one during the next. The May 4 film on TV signaled a decision to share a minimum of indispensable facts while maintaining a necessary calm. This develop­ mental period—May 4 through May 14—is characterized by items of three types: some factual information regarding the situation; patriotic information about the workers participating in the clean-up; and

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soothing information about the success of their heroic efforts. All of this is interspersed with pieces that highlight the anti-Soviet nature of Western (particularly US) coverage. The clear aim here is to discredit the stories broadcast by Western transnational radio. The overall emphasis is on normalcy and, by extension, control. This phase was also characterized by an attempt to make the propaganda effort a proactive one. Instrumental in the process was the development of television as a propaganda medium, an innovation that depended largely on the talent and professionalism of the USSR’s first media star, Alexander Krutov. Krutov covered the Chernobyl story continuously for a month, his filmed reports appearing nightly on “Vremia.” Unparalleled in Soviet television history, Krutov’s coverage approximated what one might expect from a Western television journalist (taking into account, of course, the constraint that he promote the view espoused by the central government): He interviewed government officials, scientists, and engineers sent by Moscow to coordinate the disaster efforts; he filmed the open reactor fire and the destruction caused by the explosion; besides offering many human interest stories and accounts of individual heroism, he provided Soviet citizens with more factual information and more negative images than they had ever before been shown on any subject. (319: 60–68; 396) Clearly it can be said that Krutov expanded the limits of televised news within Soviet culture. In this phase, television was instrumental in the effort to convey images of calm in the face of danger, of things under control, of people working together in a heroic, patriotic venture to restore normalcy as soon as possible. Mickiewicz points out that Western-style televised news conferences quickly became a prominent feature of the coverage. Typically, however, they were “carefully controlled exercise[s],” with foreign journalists frustrated by their inability to ask searching questions. (319: 62) Gorbachev himself concluded the developmental phase with a primetime national television address on May 14—the significance of which lies in the very fact that it occurred at all. Most commentators have instead focused upon the delay. (207; 237) For example, Mickiewicz sees Gorbachev’s tardy response as a lost opportunity to attack the entrenched Soviet bureaucracy. (319: 65–66) Sanders erroneously attributes the delay to a “cautious approach” (396: 39) that “undercut his own carefully cultivated image as a new, television-age communicator.” (396: 40) However,

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what was overwhelming within a Soviet context was the quantity of factual material recounted by Gorbachev—including information on the specific sequence of events, as well as specific numbers of dead and injured. The fact that Western observers could detect gaps, inaccuracies, and attempts at “spin control” does not diminish the extent of innovation; nor should it obscure the fact that the whole event was quite risky politically. Gorbachev’s May 14 speech was one of the earliest indications that he understood the possibilities inherent in television and in a public relations approach to governance. It is typical of Soviet rhetorical conventions that events are brought to closure by the head of state. Although Gorbachev’s approach was unique—he appeared live on Soviet television, providing unprecedented detail about the tragedy and delivering a stirring address that praised foreigners for their assistance to the Soviet people—the result was the same. Exchanges with foreign governments—so prominent in the May 4–14 period—came to a virtual standstill. While “Vremia” continued to feature Krutov’s daily coverage through the end of the month, by June that too had ceased. Print media coverage in June emphasized the positive, concentrating on stabilization of the radiation situation, the undiminished future of the Soviet nuclear power industry, and the fate of those in charge at Chernobyl. Soviet media coverage in the immediate aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster was still largely reactive, concerned with countering the accusations of  Western media. It conformed to type in concentrating on tu quoque arguments (the focus on accidents and mishaps in the United States and elsewhere). Obviously, this was an oblique effort to exonerate the Soviet system from any blame in the Chernobyl tragedy. Another reversion to type occurred in the effort to “ideologize” the event by attempting to link it to the Soviet proposals for arms reduction and to reinforce the image of the United States as the primary threat to disarmament. Because Chernobyl was said to demonstrate the horrors of nuclear war, it could be linked to the Soviet testing moratorium (each day of which was numbered in Pravda) and to Gorbachev’s proposal to eliminate nuclear weapons by the year 2000. Finally, the coverage sent mixed messages to the Soviet public, particularly television viewers. The attempt to maintain calm, to emphasize a return to normalcy, and to stress heroism depended on images that denied the danger inherent in the situation: workers without masks or protective clothing, green fields and the budding spring.

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Yet, in addition, Chernobyl fundamentally changed what the Soviet media could report. For the first time, television continually informed the citizenry about an event that not only commanded their personal interest but also showed the state in less than the finest light—no matter what the factual gaps or interpretative distortions. Krutov’s reports concerning the clean-up efforts established unprecedented expectations regarding timeliness and facticity in the news. As a result, this national tragedy initiated a radical reappraisal of values such as newsworthiness, information vs. indoctrination as a primary media function, and ultimately even state control of media content.7 When we assess glasnost “by Soviet, not Western standards” (116; 480), changes in acceptable patterns and modes of news coverage are immediately evident in the post-Chernobyl period, as government and media spokespersons treated much more expeditiously and forthrightly the sinking of a cruise ship in the Black Sea and the accident on board a Soviet nuclear submarine patrolling the Atlantic Ocean off the East Coast of the United States.8 The period of canonization began some months after the Chernobyl accident, with several works of fiction and documentary stories based on interviews with participants in the accident and the clean-up. Worldrenowned poets Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Andrei Voznesensky published poems about the accident. In the fall of 1986, the monthly journal Znamia published a play, Sarcophagus (189), written by Pravda science editor V. Gubarev.9 At about the same time, Novyi mir published G. Medvedev’s “eyewitness” documentary narrative, Chernobyl Notebooks. (311) Medvedev had worked in the nuclear power industry and knew many of the individuals who had to extinguish the fire and control the destroyed reactor. Through the fall of 1987, one short novel and five stories or documentary narratives were published in nationally distributed mainstream publications. Within the next year, a long narrative poem and another documentary narrative also appeared. The periodicals that published these pieces fell into two groups—the expected and the unexpected. Among the former, some were topically oriented toward nature and ecological issues, while some—like Yunost, the avant-garde journal of glasnost—were outspoken advocates of reform. But the others were politically conservative outlets, hitherto little affected by the recent wave of social consciousness inside the Soviet Union. Chernobyl remained a prominent topic in the Soviet news media as well. A vigorous and intense battle was waged—remarkably, on the pages

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of the national press. In particular, the mainstream print media became the primary outlet for non-establishment opinion, which had no access to television until nearly the third anniversary of the accident. On one side were ranged the forces opposing unbridled nuclear power development; on the other were representatives of the Ministry of Atomic Energy, the Ministry of Energy, the Ministry of Health, Gosplan (the State Planning Commission), and the “Kombinat” Production Organization charged with administering the plant site clean-up and running the undamaged units at Chernobyl.10 At issue, ultimately, were sci­entific authority, bureaucratic privilege, and official indifference to public welfare. To the extent that Gorbachev saw the entrenched bureaucracy as one of the crucial stumbling blocks to economic reform in general, the rhetorical thrust of nuclear power opponents resonated ideas that the central government wished to promote. But the commitment to a national energy policy based on continued rapid development of all forms of electrical generating capacity—including, but not limited to, nuclear—put the government in an ambivalent position, as conservationists advocating greater efforts to use energy efficiently and to control pollution effectively linked their appeals to the perestroika reforms. By attacking the Ministry of Energy and the Ministry of Nuclear Power as bastions of bureaucratic indifference, technological incompetence, and political conservatism, opposition elements turned Gorbachev’s initiatives against one of his own economic policies. The Soviet government needed a substantial response, one that supplemented and intensified the efforts that had proceeded, understandably, from the very first days of the clean-up. Foremost among the products of this campaign were two made-for-television documentaries: V. Shevchenko’s Chernobyl: A Chronicle of Difficult Weeks, which was released in late 1986 to much fanfare shortly after its director had died of cancer; and the 1988 Central Television production Warning, written by L. Nikolaev and A. Krutov. Krutov, of course, is the newsman who had conducted the post-accident reportage. Accordingly, it can be assumed that the second television documentary enjoyed considerable ethos in the eyes of the public. In promulgating Chernobyl: A Chronicle of Difficult Weeks and Warning the Soviet government clearly was attempting to shape public understanding of the disaster.11 The earlier work has better production values (which is remarkable given its temporal proximity to the disaster); the

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later film has received greater play in the West. While both documentaries reflect the official interpretation of events, that message was not unchanged over the intervening period. Chronicle necessitated heavy editing in order to shape its message to the state’s purposes. Shevchenko objected strenuously to the loss of control over the editing process, and it is probably significant that he did not write the narrator’s script. Surely, paramount among the government’s goals for permitting the documentary’s release were assuaging the fears of the population and reinforcing the predominant ideological message— that the government is in control, the country is coping, everything is returning to normal, and nuclear power is good for you. Chronicle focuses on the weeks following the first reactions to the accident. The documentary intertwines four leitmotifs throughout its fifty-eight minutes: the very real heroism of the clean-up workers; the efforts made at the plant site to contain the magnitude of the disaster— along with the controls exercised in the surrounding area to minimize the spread of radiation; the volunteerism of the people in contributing to the overall effort; and the decision-making process absent the usual bureaucratic obstacles. The film opens with an aerial view of the Chernobyl plant followed by a short excerpt from Gorbachev’s May 14, 1986, speech to the nation. Then the focus shifts to the arrival of clean-up workers at the deserted town of Pripyat. Returning to the aerial view, the narrator engages the viewer in one of the film’s most dramatic moments: With an unidentified crackling noise in the background, he talks of concern that the film was damaged, then the realization that the microphones had picked up the rattling sound of an activated Geiger counter. “This is how radiation looks,” he says, as the camera pans over the entire power plant complex and the Geiger counter chatters away. Shevchenko’s film includes mine workers tunneling under the foundation of the damaged reactor without any form of protection and details the struggle of the army and others to prevent the spread of radiation. In addition, the narrator’s text draws on echoes of World War II—the remarkable stamina of the Russian people and the sacrifices they made to save their homeland from a different enemy. Indeed, the analogy to a war effort is overtly drawn throughout the documentary; this is not, we are reminded, the first time the area had to be evacuated to protect the people from death at the hands of an invader.

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The narration emphasizes the supposedly voluntary nature of the clean-up effort, citing letters from persons far away who offer their assistance.12 And it stresses nationwide cooperation in donating money, living space, clothes, blood, bone marrow, etc., to the evacuees, the injured, those suffering from radiation sickness. The effect is to downplay the nature of the tragedy, making it appear more similar to an earthquake or other natural disaster, different only because it was man-made. A major focus of the documentary is an attack on the party bureaucracy. At one point the narrator declares that the true causes of the Chernobyl accident are complacency, incompetence, careerism, and demagoguery—qualities that the party is battling in the entrenched bureaucrats of the system. In contrast, the clean-up effort was characterized by cooperation, rapid decision-making without the customary “blizzard” of paperwork, and the people’s heroic spirit. This point is underscored in a lengthy segment depicting local Communist Party meetings held following the disaster, meetings at which “meddlers and cowards” were exposed and expelled. One sees here official reinforcement of the national campaign to undercut the established party bureaucracy. It is important to recall that Gorbachev ascended to power barely a year before the Chernobyl accident and that his political agenda (as embodied in the campaign for perestroika, uskorenie [acceleration], and glasnost) was specifically designed to eradicate the bureaucratic stranglehold on the economy and on the process of decision-making and implementation. Interpreting this crisis to support current policy goals conforms to traditional Soviet rhetorical practice. Since no delay could be tolerated in carrying out emergency measures, the campaign to “eradicate the consequences of the accident” afforded a perfect opportunity to demonstrate the party’s essential role in facilitating cooperation among ministries and overcoming the “territoriality” that enveloped the Soviet system. Shevchenko’s documentary also stresses the ready availability of medical assistance for the workers and the care taken to minimize effects on the citizenry. It gives considerable attention, for example, to the fight to ensure the integrity and purity of the water supply. And it devotes significant time to the medical teams that treated firefighters ravaged by radiation burns and radiation sickness. Interestingly, the film erroneously implies that radiation sickness could have been spread from person to person if not for the quick and thorough actions of the army and the

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medical personnel. In the process, it downplays the amount of radiation released and the number of dead or seriously ill. (For instance, it is now admitted officially that over 5,000 children received more than 200 rem of radiation.) Indeed, one gets the feeling that there were no deaths—nor any anticipated—beyond those suffered during first few days (the firefighters who are memorialized in this film). The “medical assistance” theme fails to mention any foreign contributions of equipment or personnel. (This is particularly striking inasmuch as Gorbachev, in his televised address to the nation on May 14, explicitly thanked Armand Hammer and Dr. Robert Gale for their help; moreover, the next day all national dailies published a photograph of a smiling party secretary chatting with the two men.) Although it is never made explicit, the naive viewer gets the distinct impression that there was no international participation as the Soviet Union coped with mitigating the accident.13 The stress on the self-sufficiency of a united Soviet people not only minimized the severity of the accident, as presented by the documentary; it also was intended to reinforce public perceptions of the system’s moral and technological strength and of the Communist Party’s ability and willingness to mobilize the nation in time of need. Thus the entire documentary can be viewed as an effort to legitimate the system in the eyes of a frightened nation. Fittingly, the penultimate visual image is pastoral—fields ripe with crops waiting to be harvested, a vision of normalcy. Warning continues this vision by concentrating on the people affected by the disaster. Its overriding theme, despite the film’s name, is that “life must go on.” The seventy-five-minute-long documentary cuts back and forth between scenes of people and scenes from nature; people engaged in ordinary activities provide the visual emphases. Evacuees are depicted moving into a new home (“Will the cat like it here?”), shopping for groceries, chatting with neighbors. Even the scenes that show aspects of the clean-up are “people” scenes. Heroic figures approach the disaster site in a business-as-usual fashion, then are shown relaxing after hours in their barracks or at the Soviet equivalent of an American USO show. The cycle of death and life is a strong visual image in Warning: dead trees juxtaposed with a mother rocking a cradle, for example. The narrator details elaborate arrangements made for pregnant mothers from the contaminated zone and the attention given to the health and well-being of children born in the home for pregnant evacuees.

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But the overwhelming image is one of normalcy. The first picture of the plant site—the disaster area—appears nearly seven minutes into the film, and the accident never becomes a visual focus as in Chronicle. Even the shots of Pripyat produce the eerie impression that the town awaits the return of its population. This notion is reinforced by the pastoral scenes of rebirth and renewal: trees growing leaves, gentle spring rain, sparrows that left the village after the accident but now have returned. Ultimately, the documentary is a fraud. There is no unity among the purported message of the title Warning, the narrator’s script, and the visual images portrayed. The film’s verbal message is one of a potential disaster controlled by great effort on the part of the government, the scientists, and the clean-up workers. Yet even the scenes that attempt to depict radiation as a silent, invisible killer instead reinforce the overall theme of pastoral normalcy. Indeed, rather than “warning” of danger, this documentary as a whole reinforces the underlying message implicit in the narration: Even this disaster is manageable if we all work together. The people in this film register only one real complaint: that the government did not get information to them promptly, that they had no idea what was going on, no idea what they should and should not do. But after a recitation of these mea culpas, the government is portrayed as moving carefully and decisively to avert further tragedy, provide housing and medical care, and restore the effectiveness of the Chernobyl power plant. The film’s greatest contextual reconstruction comes at the end, when the sarcophagus is transformed into a monument to Soviet technology and organizational effectiveness rather than to inferior design and inadequate safety precautions. Like Chronicle, in the end Warning vindicates technology and lays the problem at the feet of negligent individuals. Nevertheless, this 1988 documentary reveals subtle but important shifts in the government’s message. Not only were specific plant workers guilty of negligence—a crime for which they will pay, the script promises—but health officials and individuals within the local party apparatus are to blame for failing to warn the citizens of Pripyat in a timely fashion. The film narrative specifically refers to local authorities having failed to explain to citizens the immediate steps they could take to reduce their exposure to radiation before being evacuated. And the administrator of the refugee maternity hospital declares that the children born there would base their fundamental opinion of the Soviet government and the

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Communist Party on how they and their mothers had been treated after the disaster. Thus, while both documentaries manage to bring out the mistakes made by officials in the first hours following the accident, Warning gives the impression that in 1988 the national government is seeking to enhance its credibility with the public by appearing to be forthcoming about the withholding of information and the errors that led to the accident in the first place. This effort obscures many other concerns, such as the actual lack of protection for the clean-up workers,14 the delay in evacuating anyone except the families of officials, and the initial withholding of information from the rest of the world as well as from those in the immediate vicinity. Warning is remarkable because it alludes to a sort of social contract between the state and the individual. Although it never directly says so, the documentary seems to be reacting to the complaints raised by the Chernobyl evacuees and by average people throughout the Ukraine and Belorussia. The fact that people everywhere judge the quality of government by how it treats ordinary citizens—a notion that had remained largely unspoken within Soviet political culture—came to the fore in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster. Thus, Warning can be interpreted as the government’s attempt, however feeble, to co-opt that issue and utilize it in Gorbachev’s fight against bureaucratic indifference. The overall effect of the 1988 documentary is the creation of ambiguity. The scenes from nature—and their juxtaposition with the remainder of the film—imply that the restrictions on residence in the Chernobyl area are not permanent. Again, the effectiveness of the medical effort is emphasized. (One sees here a reaction to growing fears—justified, it turns out—that the medical consequences of Chernobyl are much greater than had been admitted. But there is still no mention of medical assistance from abroad; the film presents even the bone marrow transplants as though they are being done by Soviet doctors.) And comparisons to the nation unified against the Nazi invaders are once more drawn overtly, as the narrator of Warning talks about the Pripyat region having suffered some of the war’s fiercest battles.15 In the end, Warning answers the questions raised by Chronicle. “Where will we live?” the people of Pripyat ask in the first film. “We cannot remain lodgers forever. This is not home.” Scenes of rapid housing construction in Chronicle are followed by families moving into their new

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homes in Warning. “Who is responsible for such a thing?” The general accusations raised in the first film are followed by specific charges in the second. And, of course, the ultimate question—whether the Soviet Union’s much-maligned governmental and economic system can rise to the complex challenge such a disaster presents—is a key issue in both documentaries. Besides the efforts at containment and control, resettlement and medical care, both films make much of the restarting of the undamaged generating units—obviously an attempt to restore confidence not only in nuclear power and the Chernobyl plant specifically, but in the Soviet system as a whole. The changes in the official position regarding the accident reflected between Chronicle and Warning are also evident in post-1987 print media discussions of the disaster’s causes and sociopolitical consequences. In part, the government was responding to growing public pressure to curtail or terminate further development of civilian nuclear power. For example, on the second anniversary of the event, academician Andrei Sakharov was allowed to publish an article in Nature and Man (392) calling for undiminished development combined with underground siting of new power plants as a way to protect the population from the effects of future accidents. Sakharov’s article touched off a campaign that, during the summer months, saw the publication of four books and five “authoritative” interviews in nationally distributed, popular outlets (Novoe Vremia, Ural, Argumenty i fakty, and Energiia). To a large extent, statements in these articles regarding the nature of the accident, its causes, and the extent of the damage were couched in vague, generalized terms designed to minimize the seriousness of the situation and to assuage public fear. One of these texts—a June 1988 interview in Novoe vremia by V. Knizhnikov—is particularly telling. Knizhnikov, a physician and member of the National Commission on Radiation Safety, had spent twenty-five years supervising highly classified radiological studies in connection with the 1957 nuclear accident at Kyshtym, a plutonium facility in the Ural Mountains. (312; 315; 344: 211–228; 425) Although hundreds of people are said to have died as a result of radiation exposure after the Kyshtym accident (4; 312—cited in 344: 217), Knizhnikov has been quoted as claiming that his studies “did not discover any correlation between radiation exposure and infant mortality, genetic anomalies, or increased occurrence of malignancy.” (190, 312)

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Knizhnikov told Novoe vremia that he had recently examined the Chernobyl site. His remarks, which present official policy interpretations, are pivotal in assessing governmental candor on the Chernobyl issue. Accordingly, we present a translation of Knizhnikov’s remarks at some length On the whole, the [plant] personnel are not now taking a radiation dose above the accepted norm. Of course, even though decontamination has been carried out, there is still some residual contamination. We want to hope and believe that the Chernobyl disaster will be the last of its kind. Our country has taken all possible measures to ensure this: the structure of the nuclear industry has been changed—reactors like Chernobyl’s will no longer be built; additional protective and monitoring systems have been introduced; personnel have been educated and retrained. Still, you cannot close your eyes to the fact that we live in a world where mountains of fissionable material have been accumulated and no one is insured against all eventualities, including terrorist acts. … The basic problems that trouble us are questions concerning the health of the evacuated population …, as well as that of people who live in contaminated areas located in some instances hundreds of kilometers away from Chernobyl. … Now that two years have passed we can say that with regard to people’s health we have found virtually no unfavorable deviations. Surface waters are not contaminated. More than 99 percent of the population received doses lower than the existing emergency norms; and where such doses were exceeded, this was due primarily to internal irradiation of individuals who ignored our recommendations and consumed milk from their own cows. … Some of the children have experienced significant irradiation of the thyroid gland. This happened in the very first days, before we had gotten a clear understanding of the extent of all the contamination and had time to take the necessary measures. The extent of the accident was unprecedented, so the number of trained specialists and the amount of available equipment were insufficient, as well.

One could critique the statements in this interview almost sentence by sentence. Despite the fact that Knizhnikov provided new information regarding health effects, each non-italicized passage is either self-serving,

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deceptive, or false. For example, it is indeed true that fewer than one percent of all Soviet citizens received significant doses of radiation; but that fact is totally irrelevant to those citizens who were unfortunate enough to live in the path of the radiation plume through Belorussia. The claims regarding the installation of new safety systems and new methods for training power plant workers are simply not true. According to Mikhail Umanets, director of Kombinat, even in August 1989, Chernobyl’s Units 1 and 2 had not yet been retrofitted with improved control rod systems.16 And training methods in the Soviet nuclear industry remain the same today as before the accident: No substantial changes will occur until the USSR acquires Western-built control room simulators in 1992 or later. Knizhnikov’s interview in a popular national outlet represents yet another attempt to contextually reconstruct the post-accident situation. Prior to 1986, Soviet pro-nuclear spokesmen had insisted that civilian nuclear power was totally safe (a position reminiscent of American proponents’ claims that nuclear plants would produce electrical energy “too cheap to meter”). Such a statement also represents the “old” thinking of the Communist power structure, which was trapped in the state’s need to be absolutely correct at all times; unerring certitude was one of the overriding rhetorical conventions of this and all other deductive systems. In 1988, however, Knizhnikov states that “you cannot close your eyes to the fact that we live in a world where mountains of fissionable material have been accumulated and no one is insured against all eventualities, including terrorist acts.” That is to say, one hundred percent security cannot be ensured in the nuclear age, so accidents will happen. This statement represents a significant rhetorical change, not only in how the aftermath of the accident is to be reconstructed but in the rhetorical conventions of the Communist system as well. The new “openness” has been turned to the state’s advantage through the vehicle of rhetorical reconstruction. In this scenario, the Chernobyl explosion was said to have occurred because of an unpredictable sequence of errors by plant personnel. (52; 117, 287) Accordingly, “the extent of the accident was unprecedented.” Knizhnikov claims that this—and not inadequate emergency planning—is the reason “the number of trained specialists and the amount of available equipment were insufficient” to allow clean-up efforts to proceed smoothly. Such a statement ignores the fact, now relatively well known, that the Soviet government made a conscious cost-saving effort to reduce expenditures on engineered safeguards and other safety-related equipment, including fire

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protection. (268) For example, nuclear plant personnel have often had difficulty contacting off-site emergency teams, including firefighters, because Soviet telephones are so unreliable; secure means of communication were never established. (218) Most significantly, however, according to Knizhnikov the ultimate blame for any serious adverse health consequences does not rest with the Soviet government, the Ministry of Nuclear Power, or even local political and health department officials. Rather, Knizhnikov states that ultimate responsibility lies with “individuals who ignored our recommendations and consumed milk from their own cows.” Never mind the fact that alternative food sources were unavailable; events are reconstructed to make victims responsible for their own fate. The Soviet press during this period was awash with the kinds of optimistic projections, misstatements, distortions, and pure falsehoods reflected in Knizhnikov’s public posture. On the whole, official rhetoric contained a number of predictable positions, all of them consistent with specific goals of the power structure 1. Specific individuals who allowed the accident to happen were criminally negligent and derelict in their duty, the ultimate cause was overconfidence wrought by years of smooth, trouble-free operation that lulled the operators into believing that serious accidents were impossible.17 2. Personal heroism, self-sacrifice, and devotion to duty marked the station’s crew and the fire brigades. All affected citizens were efficiently and promptly relocated. The party, and specific party members in particular, played a key role in coordinating emergency efforts. Volunteerism was widespread throughout the country. (These themes were intertwined with other messages of national unity in the face of danger or disaster, a traditional rallying call in Soviet political culture.) 3. Clean-up efforts, though incredibly arduous and dangerous, were carried out with maximum efficiency and effectiveness, using the latest in sophisticated equipment, with utmost regard for the health and safety of personnel (although Knizhnikov’s interview actually contradicted this theme to a certain extent). 4. Clean-up efforts, the entombing of Unit 4, and the restarting of the undamaged units would be ultimately successful. Pripyat and

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other evacuated towns were being resettled, and Slavutich—the new “twenty-first-century city” for station personnel and their families—was being constructed. 5. Beyond those suffered by the emergency crews during the first frantic hours of accident mitigation, health effects were minimal; both evacuees and those not evacuated were being carefully monitored to ensure there were no adverse radiological effects. (This message was simultaneously reinforced, reinterpreted, and mildly undercut by Knizhnikov.) 6. There was no contamination of ground water or the Dnepr, and no reason for the populace—particularly in Kiev—to be unduly concerned over the health and well-being of their loved ones. The jury is still out with regard to Kiev’s water supply. Otherwise, along with statements extolling the incontestable heroism of the emergency workers, only the projections regarding entombment and restart of the undamaged units proved to be accurate. If the radiation cloud that spread over Eastern Europe can be said to have had a silver lining, it is the accidental coincidence of this event with a reform movement headed by an image-conscious Soviet leader. To be sure, the initial rhetorical response to the accident followed ingrained habits: the absence of any public statement for a protracted period, then grudging admission that an event had occurred, followed by reflexive attacks on Western media for defaming the Soviet state. And, while the subsequent treatment also may be said to address traditional strategic concerns—the state attempted to constrict the flow of information (going so far as to declare that data on health effects were classified), to promulgate only the most favorable version of events, and to control the media response in order to shape the public’s knowledge—tactically the means chosen were fairly innovative. From a rhetorical perspective, the significance of Chernobyl was the national leadership’s recognition that the media could fulfill a public relations function in shaping public perceptions. Thus, in the weeks and months following the tragedy, the government and the party attempted to meld Lenin’s notion of the media’s educational function with a recognition of the changed circumstances attendant to the information age. Nearly from the beginning, television was utilized in a new and unconventional manner. Not only were the strict canons of news ideologization tempered

Redefining Glasnost in the Soviet Medi

with dynamic, more or less timely reporting, but the head of state availed himself of television’s immediacy in a way never before attempted in the USSR. Later, the use of televised documentaries to shape perceptions of an ongoing event—rather than to intensify and reinvigorate selected themes from past social history—demonstrated a growing appreciation for the suasory power of the electronic media. But the glasnost policy initiative, itself a creative solution to one problem, spawned other challenges by opening up the system—via the print media—to non-state-sponsored attempts at public persuasion.18 A clever offensive was mounted, wedding an attack on the government’s energy sector development program with the state’s own campaign to combat vested interests in the bureaucracy. Thus, the Chernobyl disaster made it easier for advocates of change to criticize the Soviet system, rather than confining themselves to the traditional practice of criticizing the individuals who ran the system. Meanwhile, the system—the power structure— also broke free of traditional restraints, seeking to preserve its authority and credibility through innovative methods that found expression in a continuing campaign to put the Chernobyl disaster to rest. The result was a fascinating blend of the old and the new. The documentaries, in particular, echoed many themes of the pre-Gorbachev era: national unity, the defeat of the Nazis, the triumph of technology, the spirit of the people, the strength of the system. Also on the antediluvian side of the ledger—in addition to the earliest reactions to the news of disaster— are the persistent attempts to ideologize the situation. Gorbachev’s speech on May 14, 1986, evoked the specter of nuclear destruction: if an accident at a civilian nuclear reactor could create such havoc, the party chairman argued, then surely it was unthinkable that mankind might engage in nuclear war. These sentiments were echoed by Evgeny Velikhov, a physicist and vice-chairman of the USSR Academy of Sciences, in the 1986 Shevchenko documentary. The recontextualization of this argument—the attempt to shift the focus from nuclear power to nuclear weapons—took yet another direction in 1988 when Knizhnikov raised the same issue in the guise of international terrorism. On the other hand, some fundamental tenets of Soviet socialist ideo­ logy were modified by the state itself in the attempt to reassert hegemony and social control. First, the notion of technology in harmony with and benefitting nature contradicted the belief that applied technology could subdue and harness the environment. Second, the role of the state

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as nurturer and protector of the people represents a departure from past themes; it also is inconsistent with the attempt to hold the people of Belorussia responsible for exposing themselves to contamination. The evolution of this motif is especially interesting: the region’s officials and medical personnel were ultimately held responsible for the inadequate emergency information and measures that plagued the earliest days following the accident. Third, the people’s right to scrutinize and independently judge the state’s actions represents perhaps the most significant new theme. Finally, even the very concept of state infallibility—the underpinning of deductive systems such as Soviet Communism—fell victim to the tactic of recontextualization. This development marked the most dramatic step in Soviet rhetorical practice. Whereas, before, the suasory function of rhetoric was exclusively wedded to the didactic teachings of Communism as interpreted by the Soviet system, now that power was viewed as an independent tool with which to manipulate a growing but independent public opinion. The silent killer unleashed by the explosion in reactor Unit 4 at Chernobyl presented a crisis in information policy of a different order of magnitude than any experienced before in the USSR. Gorbachev’s government attempted to recontextualize the event, including the information crisis itself, as a way to reassert governmental control over a changing rhetorical world. In our judgment, however, this campaign created cognitive dissonance—a contradiction among the facts the people knew or believed, the public information campaign waged by the government, and the more memorable subtext conveyed by the visual images of the documentaries and news film. Heretofore, one of the hallmarks of Soviet crisis rhetoric has been the sixth stage—canonization. Typically, this occurred after the head of state issued the final interpretation of the circumstances; at that point, the event would be placed in the Soviet storehouse of official public knowledge, to be trotted out on appropriate future occasions.19 Thus, from the perspective of the national leadership, the canonization of Chernobyl should have taken place following Gorbachev’s May 14, 1986, address to the nation. However, too much remained to be discovered and revealed about this worst of nuclear accidents; the international nature of the explosion and its aftermath continued to fuel a growing public reaction. The government’s response was a continuing campaign through the summer of 1988,

Redefining Glasnost in the Soviet Medi

at which point the symbolic “entombment” of Chernobyl should have been as complete as the physical entombment of Unit 4. Ultimately, however, the continued debate over nuclear power, environmental issues, and the health effects of radiation reflects the Soviet government’s failed attempt to restructure public knowledge concerning the Chernobyl accident and its various economic, medical, and social impacts on Soviet life. In fact, government efforts had the opposite effect, contributing instead to the development of a context in which public opposition to nuclear power could flower and even burst into the political spectrum. And legitimation of this issue in the public arena made it possible to raise other issues (up to and including dissolution of the Soviet state). The result has been a complete operational redefinition of glasnost and the creation of a vestigial civil society. A policy designed to spotlight bureaucratic ineptitude and obstructionism as a way to facilitate economic reform was transformed into an invitation to engage in public debate over government policy and even over the form of government itself. Undoubtedly, it is an exaggeration to claim that none of what has transpired in the Soviet Union over the past few years would have occurred without Chernobyl, or that Chernobyl alone made all of this happen. But it is clear that the pace of change within the USSR would not have been nearly as rapid had April 26, 1986, passed quietly and uneventfully.

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NOTES 1. The Washington Post, May 6, 1986, 1. 2. See also Wall Street Journal, April 23, 1987, 28. Some, of course, have opposed this interpretation—most prominently, Ellen Mickiewicz, who has written that Chernobyl coverage on Soviet television manifested all elements of the control, the persuasive, and the hortatory functions expected of the media by the new regime. (319: 214) William Luers, former US ambassador to Czechoslovakia, has stated succinctly that Gorbachev “is not setting out to make the Soviet Union an open society.” (289) 3. The Soviets are hardly alone in this, of course, but they are perhaps less self-conscious of the inconsistencies such behavior entails. In 1973, when Israeli fighters shot down a Libyan passenger plane during the Yom Kippur War, Soviet spokespersons described the event as an “act of piracy” and a “crime against humanity and the norms of international law.” A radio broadcast compared the Israeli action to “four bandits attacking a blind man who had lost his way.” (480: 118–119) Similarly, in an early commentary on the 1988 Airbus tragedy, TASS stated, “Cold-blooded murder has been committed in the sky over the Persian Gulf ” (Pravda, July 5, 1988, 32). However, in 1983 the Soviet government claimed that KAL 007 was engaged in a spy mission for the CIA; it was repeatedly declared that the Soviet Union, like any other sovereign nation, was entitled to defend its airspace and would continue to do so. (480) 4. This phase began with A. Krutov’s May 4 film report on “Vremia.” The print media did not reflect this phase until May 7, however. 5. Judgments regarding the “severity of … the public relations crisis” and Soviet disregard for “the public’s right to know” (391: 54–57) seem to use Western standards to evaluate Chernobyl coverage rather than considering it in the context of past Soviet media behavior. 6. Typically, this Council of Ministers bulletin was buried as the seventh item of the evening newscast. See (396). 7. Of course, no social phenomena occur in a vacuum. The preceding year had seen greater candor in reporting from Afghanistan (138), which undoubtedly created an environment conducive to innovative reporting in the aftermath of Chernobyl; and this, in turn, facilitated subsequent editorial decisions favoring more balanced domestic consideration of the war issue. 8. For a pre-Chernobyl baseline comparison, see (344). 9. Sarcophagus became an immediate sensation in the West. Not surprisingly, it was not produced within the Soviet Union until three years later. 10. Two of the reactor units at Chernobyl were restarted in November 1986, prior to completion of the Unit 4 sarcophagus. Unit 3 was restarted in the fall of 1987. (296: 203–212) According to Soviet sources, Units 1 and 2 were restarted so quickly because the country had no electrical generating reserve capacity and needed the additional capacity entering the 1986–1987 winter season. This information comes from an interview at Chernobyl in May 1989 with a source who wishes to remain anonymous. 11. Restructuring public perception of events and shifting blame for any negative consequences is a necessary part of the political process in any political system; the Soviet government’s response to its shooting down of KAL 007 in 1983 and the US government’s response to its shooting down of Iran Air flight 655 in 1988 (475; 482) are just two examples. But the phenomenon goes deeper than that; it is a fundamental need and goal of any system. The political process in general involves shaping the rhetorical

Redefining Glasnost in the Soviet Medi landscape in ways favorable to the rhetor, either to convince the electorate or simply to prevail in the internal policy struggles that occur within all governmental bodies. 12. More is known today about the extent to which individuals were conscripted, particularly from the ranks of the military, police forces, and KGB internal troops, nearly three hundred of whom have perished during the as yet incomplete clean-up effort. (18) See also (296: 183–193). 13. In contrast, when Armenia was struck by the terrible earthquake in December 1988, the government thanked the international community for its help, and all such efforts received considerable coverage in the Soviet press. (Moscow News, December 18, 1988; 410) 14. An engineer who participated in the clean-up effort stated that many of the workers were issued little or no radiation protection equipment and that, in particular, the mine workers who shored up the cement foundation of the damaged unit followed a three-hours-on, six-hours-off work regime for several weeks without relief or time away from the thirty kilometer special zone. (This information comes from an interview in Leningrad in August 1989 with a source who wishes to remain anonymous.) Warning (like Chronicle) contains scenes of these mine workers, as well as one compelling scene of clean-up workers running across the roof of Chernobyl’s Unit 3, picking up highly radioactive chunks of graphite, and throwing them into the open maw of Unit 4. Unstated is the fact that the radiation field on the roof exceeded 10,000 rem per hour. (313: 171) 15. Even today, a Nazi hanging tree located within sight of the power plant is shown to visitors, who are invited to photograph the tree with Chernobyl’s sarcophagus looming in the background. 16. Personal interview, Chernobyl, August 1989. 17. Such was the position of Soviet officials in Vienna. It was accepted without question by Western experts, in part because it accorded with their own self-serving analysis of factors that contributed to the Three Mile Island accident. Marples, however, paints quite the opposite picture of the Soviet situation. (294: chapter 5) 18. Access to the electronic media was not generally available to those espousing alternative political and social ideas until 1989, when a number of discussion shows were regularly aired. Since then, in what may represent the first signs that the Soviet Union has entered the post-glasnost era, many of those shows have been cut off. 19. With respect to the shootdown of KAL 007, for example, the canonization stage occurred some four weeks after the event, when Andropov made his first and only statement on the tragedy. (480: 142, 179) All nations have such a storehouse; in the United States we witness it whenever Congress debates a US-Soviet treaty and opponents reiterate the litany of Soviet “violations” of past treaties.

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CHAPTER 14

Chernobyl: From the Ashes a New Society? Michael K. Launer and Marilyn J. Young Provenance: Originally published in Forum for applied research and public policy 6, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 104 Copyright Holder: The University of Tennessee Energy, Environment, and Resources Center and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, used by permission Description: This is a brief commentary to an article by David Marples, “Chernobyl: Its Effects in the USSR,” published in Forum for applied research and public policy 5, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 5–16.

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avid Marples’s discussion of Chernobyl sheds light on data little known in the West, data essential to any meaningful discussion of worldwide energy policy and ecology issues. He addresses three important questions: the radiological effects of the accident itself; the forthrightness (or lack thereof) manifested by Soviet government and medical officials; and the ramifications for political culture within the society. Each exemplifies the impact of ideology and economics on all aspects of Soviet life. The ideology of party infallibility, combined with persistent economic woes and a systemic indifference to public welfare, had allowed a reactor design featuring on-line refueling, no primary containment, and little regard for operator training or engineered safety systems. When the disastrous accident did occur, primitive research facilities meant it was impossible to assemble an accurate data base; and chronic shortages of food and housing made it expedient to force thousands to consume irradiated foodstuffs and remain in contaminated areas, thereby immeasurably compounding the long-term health effects. As Marples mentions, the evacuation of many individuals was merely planned for 1992! And because of the critical need for electricity,1 two of Chernobyl’s undamaged units were restarted before the sarcophagus around Unit 4 had been completed. Until early 1989, official statements consistently de-emphasized the accident’s physical and economic consequences. Heroism and optimism

Chernobyl

were the watchwords. Based primarily on truly selfless sacrifices by Chernobyl’s operators and firemen, the incongruous themes of renewal and technology’s triumph over Nature dominated the media mythology. Aiding in this effort were continuous misstatements of fact: the IAEA received misleading estimates of radiation fields; cleanup workers and miners brought in to tunnel under the damaged reactor endured prolonged radiation exposure;2 and by July 1989 only one Chernobyl reactor had been retrofitted with an improved scram system—despite repeated public statements to the contrary.3 Notwithstanding the economic cost (over one hundred billion rubles, with no end in sight) and health effects, it is the political consequences that may prove more significant in the long term. Chernobyl changed the nature of news in the Soviet Union and served as the first locus of legitimate dissent and criticism aimed at the system, rather than at individuals within the system. The accident transformed the social definition of glasnost, converting it from the impetus behind economic restructuring to a vehicle for openly challenging the legitimacy of the party and the state. It may have created civil society in the USSR. In addition, Chernobyl has become a rhetorical icon representing the venal bureaucratism and indifference to the individual that had characterized the Soviet state.4 In 1988, after the attempted cover-up of a devastating library fire in Leningrad, Dmitry Likhachev, the venerable Soviet historian, termed the loss of over four hundred thousand priceless books and documents a “cultural Chernobyl.” (46; 47) In June 1989 the popular magazine Nature and Man published an exposé on the desperate situation in the Aral Sea. Its title—“A Silent Chernobyl.” (147) In time, Chernobyl will be seen as the dawning of a new age in Soviet society.

NOTES 1. Interview with a deputy chief engineer for operations in the Soviet nuclear industry. 2. Interview with a ventilation specialist in the Soviet nuclear industry. 3. Interview with Mikhail Umanets, director of Kombinat. By the way, it is not true that reducing the scram response time from twenty (not twelve) seconds to two will prevent a repeat accident. 4. “Incompetence” has come to signify the Soviet nuclear bureaucracy; and “nonspecialist” is code for the burgeoning anti-nuclear lobby. The former term was popularized by G. U. Medvedev, (311) the latter by A. Adamovich. (39) The publicistic work of these men, among others, has had a profound impact on Soviet society.

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CHAPTER 15

Nuclear Power in the USSR Michael K. Launer Provenance; Originally published in Forum for applied research and public policy 6, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 79–87. Copyright Holder: The University of Tennessee Energy, Environment, and Resources Center and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, used by permission Description: This article describes the then-current state of the nuclear industry in the Soviet Union, highlighting both the positive and negative technical qualities of its reactor units, followed by a discussion of the systemic difficulties in the Soviet system that impinge on all aspects of society, including the civilian nuclear power sector.

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he Soviet Union’s civilian nuclear power system has improved dramati­ cally since the 1986 Chernobyl accident. According to US industry and government specialists, Soviet performance in critical areas such as radioactive waste disposal and worker radiation protection surpasses that of Western facilities. Nevertheless, US industry observers agree that Soviet nuclear power plants do not meet current Western standards for reactor design, construction, operation, or operator training. The shortcomings are true not only for the ill-fated graphite-moderated (Chernobyl-type) RBMК reactor units, but also for the pressurized light-water reactors (PWRs, or VVERs in Soviet parlance) that will play an increasing role in the development of the Soviet Union’s nuclear power program. The critical question is this: to what extent can the deficiencies be ascribed to the technological/manufacturing base within the Soviet Union’s nuclear industry and to what extent are they indicative of prevailing economic and bureaucratic characteristics within Soviet society? With regard to technology, the medium-term outlook is encouraging because of substantial international assistance and cooperation and

Nuclear Power in the USSR

because both the operators (the Ministry of Atomic Energy and Industry (MAEP) and the regulators (known as GAEN) are committed to improvement.1 However, to the extent that systemic difficulties are impinging on the nuclear industry, significant change will depend upon the enactment of laws and the adoption of fundamentally different relationships among bureaucratic entities.

THE GOOD Soviet power stations are exceptionally “clean”—that is, radiation free— and in-plant systems for measuring ambient radiation are excellent. James Miltenberger, manager of Nuclear Safety Assessment for Pennsylvania Power & Light Company, recently obtained a reading of only one-half millirem in areas adjacent to the turbines at the Kursk (RBMK) Station, as compared to the “several hundred” millirems typical of US plants in similar locations. Miltenberger assessed N-16 gamma radiation levels as “excellent,” and he praised the hand-held dosimetry available to station employees. In part, such low readings result from the capacity for on-line refueling—one of the few design advantages of the RBMK reactor.2 Any fuel tube that experiences a small leak can be replaced immediately; station personnel do not have to wait for the next refueling outage. A US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) inspector team reached the same conclusion regarding the radiation levels in VVER units at the Zaporozhe Station in the southern Ukraine. The levels of radioactive contamination in the plant seemed very low. In particular, radiation levels inside containment and around radwaste equipment were very low, even by [US] new plant standards. These low levels may be partly attributable to the reactor coolant system’s on-line, high-temperature titanium filters. Further, representatives from the plant staff noted that the units were constructed with steel that had low levels of cobalt impurities by US standards. The processes for control of solid and liquid radwaste appear to be very effective and were designed to eliminate [the need for] essentially all solid or liquid releases or shipments from the site. (96)

The decision to use large cooling ponds rather than to construct expensive cooling towers, while not without its own ecological consequences, also may contribute to the low levels of in-plant radiation.

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In addition, the Soviet Union seems to be making significant strides in several important technologies, especially metallurgy and water chemistry control. Prolonged exposure to radiation degrades the elastic characteristics of metals. As a result, reactor pressure vessels experience embrittlement and metal fatigue. This process, more than any other, limits the useful life of a nuclear power station. All licensees are intensely interested in extending the life of their plants for economic and technological reasons. Life extension delays the calculable expense of building replacement capacity and the possibly incalculable expense of decommissioning an existing facility, which in the West entails returning the site to its pristine state. The effects of embrittlement can be reversed by applying a hightemperature treatment known as annealing, which allows life extension by seventy to one hundred percent. Thus, it is significant that the Soviet Union has annealed nine reactor units, including several in Eastern Europe, whereas in the West not a single pressure vessel has undergone this process. Brian Sherron, director of the Division of Systems Research in the NRC Office of Nuclear Regulatory Research, heads a group of US government and industry specialists who are learning a great deal from their Soviet counterparts. He agrees that Soviet technology is more advanced in this area. As is typical of much Soviet experience, however, successful annealing represents a double-edged sword: the Soviets have accumulated more experience dealing with the problem precisely because their reactors have become embrittled more quickly. Similarly, Soviet researchers appear to be making headway in retarding the effects of corrosion and erosion of the inside walls in the pipes that carry vast quantities of water through a nuclear power station. Water-chemistry control is a crucial safety-related problem because corrosion can lead to wall thinning, which increases the risk of a pipe rupture. According to James Richardson, director of NRC’s Division of Engineering Technology, the Soviet Union claims to have achieved laboratory success suppressing chemistry problems through the use of a compound known as ODA. Corrosion is a potential problem in all water-metal systems, but it is particularly important to the Soviet Union because it conceivably could undermine the country’s extensive program to develop VVER units. For political reasons, the USSR is relying on a successful VVER program to

Nuclear Power in the USSR

supplement and ultimately replace existing and once-planned RBMKs. RBMK units have been subject to expert criticism for technological reasons, as well as to overwhelming social opposition. In fact, to the extent that the Soviet government has chosen to pursue a policy of intensive energy development rather than conservation and increased fuel efficiency, future economic progress will be held hostage to successful implementation of this nuclear energy program. But corrosion and erosion in VVER steam generators threaten to stymie the program. In a recent discussion, Anatoly Shvoev, deputy director for operations at Zaporozhe, admitted that the steam generators in the VVER-1000 design suffered from a generic corrosion problem. Asked to describe the predicament, he responded obligingly, “They go out of kilter a lot!” In a more serious vein, Shvoev described a situation severe enough in its potential consequences to necessitate replacement of the steam generators in both Unit 1 and Unit 2 of the Zaporozhe Station, a process requiring an unplanned outage that lasted more than one year.3 He was not aware of the experimental success with ODA that Soviet researchers elsewhere had described to American experts. The problem is generic, and the affected equipment at Zaporozhe had been operating commercially for fewer than five years. Thus, it can be anticipated that the same situation will recur soon in Units 3, 4, and 5. Moreover, the VVER-1000 design installed at this station has been adopted as the standard for all new installations throughout the country. More than twenty are currently in operation, but a redesigned steam generator is not anticipated in the near future.4 Presumably, it will be necessary to replace the steam generator in each of these units twice: once when the existing equipment fails, then again—some years later—when a redesigned steam generator may be available. Under such conditions, disruption of electricity production certainly will continue. Without conservation measures, the Soviet Union will experience significant energy shortages, particularly during its long, severe winters. To place this situation in perspective, consider that excess generating capacity in the United States now approaches seventeen percent—historically a low figure that troubles energy officials here and threatens potential brown-outs in the Northeast during summer periods of peak demand. The Soviets, in contrast, have essentially no reserve. Nikolai Shteinberg remarked recently, “We know our reserve capacity is 1 percent. We just don’t know if that’s plus one or minus one.”5

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Knowledgeable observers of the Soviet system will discern a familiar pattern: successes wrought from the necessity to overcome failures. Exigency has affected even the safety-design philosophy within the industry as a whole, placing primary emphasis on accident mitigation. Plant design typically features three independent safety trains (as opposed to two in the United States) to compensate for lower levels of automation. The Soviets have conducted full-scale tests of the emergency core cooling system at Zaporozhe (which is never done at Western stations), and emergency diesel generators are subject to regular start-up surveillance testing, as opposed to the US practice of simulating the loss of offsite power supply. Each VVER unit is equipped with three diesels (versus two in the US). The third is housed separately. Incidentally, Soviet diesels are built like their tanks and machine guns—that is, they are simple, efficient, and durable. PP&L’s Miltenberger said that a Soviet diesel can generate greater power than comparable Western models and at lower rotations per minute; he said that the Soviets might even find a ready export market for them. Callan and Brochman were impressed by the extensive maintenance facilities at Zaporozhe, which included a fully operational forge; Miltenberger was surprised to find that personnel at Kursk Station regularly rewound motor cores. Such facilities are needed to compensate for the lack of quality control at the supplier level and the absence of spare parts. Callan and Brochman discovered that local conditions have affected the work of the regulating agency as well GAEN also oversees the fabrication and manufacture of equipment used in reactor plants. … As a consequence of chronic quality control problems, GAEN now assigns resident inspectors at factories producing safety-related material for civilian reactors. In terms of manpower, the factory resident inspector program is almost as large as the reactor site inspector program in the Kiev regional office. (96: 5)

In addition, inspections upon delivery have been intensified, with GAEN’s participation a prominent activity. Zaporozhe resident inspectors claim that equipment inspections at both the supplier and plant levels have reduced shipments of defective equipment by twenty percent. Thus, GAEN has found a way to employ economic levers throughout the industry to improve operational safety at the plant level.

Nuclear Power in the USSR

It would seem, then, that significant technological progress is being achieved within the Soviet research establishment, but that in many instances these successes have yet to impact the industry. Because it takes a long time in the Soviet Union for new ideas to receive practical application, the current situation in the civilian nuclear industry should come as no surprise. It is important, however, to stress the quality of the best research facilities in the USSR. Richardson describe Prometei, an advanced materials laboratory near Leningrad, as “world class.” Scientists there conduct “very impressive” failure tests on thick-section pressure vessels. By testing large-scale models to destruction, they gain important insights into the behavior of such vessels under high-pressure thermal loading. The I. V. Kurchatov Atomic Energy Institute in Moscow has an outstanding “swimming pool reactor” facility that allows researchers to conduct multiple simultaneous experiments on materials behavior, particularly in the areas of irradiation and corrosion. And Sherron was highly complimentary of work being performed in Elektrogorsk, outside Moscow, on hydrogen deflagration and detonation. In fact, the United States and the Soviet Union have agreed to conduct joint research projects on hydrogen behavior, as well as experiments involving the heat-transfer loop in reactor units.

THE BAD Not surprisingly, research with possible military applications always has received a high priority in the Soviet Union. Laboratories such as Prometei, which used to develop sonar-defeating coatings for nuclear submarines, are better outfitted in all respects, especially with computers and imported precision-measuring equipment. Gerald Smith, a technical systems manager in the mechanical maintenance group of the nuclear production department at Duke Power Company, has contrasted that situation with the position of civilian nuclear stations. The industry, Smith notes, “has to compete with all other needs in the country for new or advanced technology. … [W]ith very limited resources available, they often do not get the latest or the best [equipment].” What results is inconsistency. Although Soviet achievements in plant construction times are superior to the West and the use of technology in plant control systems is innovative and thoughtful, “newer technology

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is not available to the … industry.” Specifically, Smith noted that certain computer applications “are more advanced than ours. … We do not allow complete computer control over reactor operation,” as occurs at Soviet VVER installations. Soviet computers, however, “seem to be several generations behind the West.” Indeed, virtually all foreign observers point to the dearth of computers, and the slowness of those that are available, as the most serious drawback in the Soviet civilian nuclear industry. Brochman was struck by the analog displays in the Zaporozhe control rooms and by the use of punch tape readouts. Existing computers and CRT displays function primarily to monitor reactor status: little analysis and no predictive modeling is performed. Control-room computers cannot provide the level of assistance a Western reactor operator normally would receive during unit evolutions. On the design level, the lack of high-speed computers means that severe accident analysis simply cannot be performed to Western standards. Sophisticated probabilistic risk assessments, an essential component of reactor-safety design, can be accomplished only with the aid of detailed computer codes requiring the availability of supercomputers. Lacking such equipment, Soviet designers cannot accurately provide safety assurances against a major earthquake, for example.6 Should an accident occur, Soviet response teams would not have the sophisticated data registration and post-event projection capabilities that officials at a Western plant could rely upon. Likewise, control-room simulators—an essential component in contemporary reactor-operator training—require a sophistication currently unavailable in the Soviet Union. Only the best computers can adequately model the various transients and other events that might confront an operator during a real accident. Fortunately, as political relations between the United States and the Soviet Union improve, restrictions on the export of such advanced technology have eased. The Control Data Corporation recently received government authorization to sell sophisticated computers to the Soviet Union. In conjunction with this development, NRC has provided many of its severe accident modeling codes so they may be modified to run on the Control Data equipment. In return, the Soviet government has agreed to join the International Code Assessment Program, which entails providing design data for its commercial nuclear reactors to the United States and running computer codes against those data. With that information,

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Western specialists can refine and improve the predictive abilities of the codes themselves. As a result, Western understanding of Soviet reactor designs will improve enormously. Furthermore, specialists at the Kurchatov Institute will possess, for the first time, the computing power to perform Level I probabilistic risk assessments and assess the core physics status of Soviet reactors throughout various evolutions. A similar quantum leap will soon occur in reactor operator training. For about a year, the Link-Myles Corporation and the USSR All-Union Nuclear Station Research Institute have worked jointly to develop modern simulators for Soviet VVER reactor units. Although not site-specific, the new simulators will revolutionize Soviet training methods, which consist of informal lessons only.7 Any discussion of the technological deficiencies of the VVER design must include one other factor—the possible inadequacy of control rods to shut down the reactor in case of emergency. Western specialists currently do not possess a sufficient understanding to the physical characteristics of the VVER unit to form a certain judgment, but it seems possible that some Soviet reactors cannot be shut down through the use of control rods alone. NRC inspectors were surprised by the large volume of tanks containing borated water, and they learned that “[a]ll startups, not just initial criticality, are done with almost all rods fully withdrawn, and boron is added or removed to control reactivity.” (96: 5) This in and of itself is not particularly evidentiary, but it conforms to the belief stated by Viktor Koltunov, GAEN’s chief resident inspector at the Zaporozhe Station, that such is the case. On the other hand, Valery Gal′berg, the physicist in charge of reactor physics at the Kursk RBMK Station, has emphatically denied that control rods were insufficient to shut down a VVER-1000 unit.

THE SYSTEM Any technology assessment of the Soviet civilian nuclear power industry must take into account the overall situation in the country. In many respects the Soviet Union must be considered a Third-World economy. For example, according to Sviatoslav Dudko, an anti-nuclear advocate from the Ukraine, Soviet factories use three to four times more energy per product unit than plants in the industrialized world. (341: 6) Ze’ev Wolfson, one of the world’s leading ecologists and a Soviet émigré at Hebrew University in Tel Aviv, Israel, contends that one reason for the

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catastrophic situation in the Aral Sea basin is the fact that Soviet irrigation techniques use six times as much water to grow a kilogram of cotton as the West. (471) Soviet industry is notorious for its low production standards. Therefore, it should not be surprising to learn that power plant construction sites receive defective equipment. Nor should it be surprising to learn that the Soviet steel-rolling industry cannot produce seamless piping. Therefore, more time and effort must be spent on on-site installation and inspection to ensure that pipe sections are welded correctly. All in all, a reasonable case could be made that the Soviet economy is simply not sufficiently advanced to support a civilian nuclear power program. On the other hand, experienced industry people such as Gerald Smith would disagree. Smith, who has just returned from his second working visit to the Soviet Union, clearly believes that the Zaporozhe staff is well educated, knowledgeable about the station, and concerned that it operates safely. Furthermore, he maintains that the plant itself is safe and is operated in a prudent manner by competent professionals. His conclusion: “I did not feel uncomfortable at this site.” Nonetheless, older reactor units—which the Soviets term “first generation”—are admittedly unsafe. This is true not only for the RBMK design; early versions of the VVER reactor need to be closed, too. Just such an opinion was expressed recently by A. Kontsevoi, deputy head of operations in MAEP’s Nuclear Division. The problem, of course, is economic. Not only would installed capacity be reduced significantly if all first-generation units were close, but many “nuclear cities” that have sprung up near remote plant sites would have to be abandoned because no work would remain for the residents. These people cannot be sent anywhere because there is no housing for them. Indeed, the six thousand-megawatt Zaporozhe Station was located within sight of a three thousand megawatt conventional plant because the local Communist Party leadership decided to utilize the construction base and experienced workforce already at hand. National ecology laws prohibiting such decisions were ignored, and the residents of Energodar now must cope with all the health and environmental effects of both plants. That such a political decision can be taken, despite the opposing legal and scientific arguments, is indicative of fundamental reality in the Soviet Union. GAEN does not have the authority to countermand political

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decisions, nor does it have the legal right to force the Ministry of Atomic Energy and Industry to change its ways, because there is no Soviet law equivalent to US legislation that establishes NRC preeminence in the area of nuclear safety regulation. Both GAEN and MAEP have the status of ministries; hence both are bureaucratically equal. GAEN can achieve improvements only through negotiation: in effect, MAEP must agree to be regulated by the regulators.8 Given national policy decisions regarding energy development, it is difficult for GAEN to convince the Council of Ministers to vote for safety over production. Speaking in Obninsk before the Nuclear Society of the Soviet Union last summer, GAEN Deputy Director Shteinberg made an urgent plea for a solution to this legal impasse. In his mind, without the authority to enforce nuclear safety regulations, GAEN is limited in the extent to which it can implement change. But the social consensus required to rectify this situation has not yet been formed.

CONCLUSION There is no reason to doubt that the Soviet government is making significant efforts to improve the safety of its civilian nuclear power program. It has recognized the technical concerns of the international community and the fears of systemic mismanagement and indifference held by its own citizenry, who have only recently been allowed to voice their opinions in the political arena. Not surprisingly, the regulators and many academic scientists have joined forces with the public. All these factors give rise to cautious optimism. On the other hand, the government has been unable to overcome either the debilitating poverty or economic stagnation enveloping the nation or the entrenched bureaucracy that succeeded in creating such a mess. Were it not for the economic situation, unsafe “first generation” reactor units could be closed immediately, with the generating capacity replaced temporarily and the work force relocated. Were the bureaucracy not so powerful, then perhaps GAEN—and Goskompriroda, too—would have achieved their political agenda: legislation that would give these regulatory bodies the power to enforce their regulations. (Leading environmentalists have announced that passage of such legislation is their primary goal for the upcoming session of the Soviet parliament.) In addition, perhaps it would be politically feasible to embark upon a campaign of

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environmental protection, fuel conservation, and fuel efficiency. In that case, it might be possible to eliminate wasteful practices that have polluted and/or desiccated rivers and seas throughout the country and to halt reliance upon continued expansion of installed electrical capacity. In the meantime, the most encouraging factor is the willingness and the ability of government officials to discuss the existing situation candidly. Unsafe nuclear units will be closed, but not in the near term. All the world hopes that until then the Soviet nuclear industry manages to be both good and lucky.

NOTES 1. The Soviet Union currently participates in many bilateral exchanges designed to enhance civilian nuclear power safety. Although little-known by the American public, Soviet-American cooperation was initiated in 1985. The first safety-related visit by a delegation of Soviet specialists occurred in late 1987; the first reciprocal visit occurred in spring 1998. Since then, more than 20 joint meetings have been held. See (117; 118). 2. CANDU reactor units also feature on-line refueling, but the procedure is carried out horizontally rather than vertically as in the RBMK design. One consequence of choosing vertical refueling is that any secondary containment design will be large, cumbersome, and expensive to build. Therefore the Soviets eliminated the containment as a cost-cutting measure. 3. In 1989, I spent five weeks at the Zaporozhe plant. For much of the time, Units 1 and 2 were under repair; Unit 3 was down for a planned fuel outage, Unit 4 operated at full power, Unit 5 experienced significant delays during its initial start-up (because personnel were unable to perform emergency shut-down tests successfully within required time limits), and Unit 6 was under construction. One day, when Unit 4 experienced an unscheduled trip (a malfunction resulting in a shutdown), not a single kilowatt of power was generated. By July 1990, Unit 5 had been brought on-stream, while Units 1 and 2 were again operational but still functioning at less than full power. 4. In a July 1990 international conference in Obninsk, USSR, sponsored by the Nuclear Society of the Soviet Union, an official from MAEP was criticized by personnel at another nuclear station because of the ministry’s inability to provide new steam generators. The problem, it was claimed, had been recognized for more than four years. The ministry official admitted that the complaint was valid but had no immediate solution. 5. Shteinberg is GAEN’s Deputy Chairman for Operations, a position essentially equivalent to that of executive director for operations within the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. 6. Considerable circumstantial evidence exists to conclude that no seismic analyses were performed even for reactor sites, such as in Armenia or near Krasnodar, known to be susceptible to earthquakes. In addition, although VVER plants require huge cooling ponds, there has been no way for Soviet designers to model the long-term water table changes that would result from plant construction. Not surprisingly, some sites have begun turning into swamps, a process that takes approximately ten to fifteen years to become evident.

Nuclear Power in the USSR 7. By comparison, US reactor operators currently undergo a year-long training program before licensing. Regulations require continual retraining, and US plants maintain a full extra shift of employees so that one group is always free to receive additional simulator practice. Interestingly, Soviet regulations specify that licensed operators be degreed engineers, something not required in the West. 8. Not surprisingly, the same limitation circumscribes the activities of Goskompriroda, the newly create Soviet equivalent to the US Environmental Protection Agency. See (132; 133).

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CHAPTER 16

Civilian Nuclear Power in the Commonwealth of Independent States: A Case of Cognitive Dissonance Michael K. Launer and Marilyn J. Young Provenance: Unpublished paper written in 1993 Copyright Holder: Authors Description: This paper discusses the political ramifications of Chernobyl and other environmental catastrophes in Russia and in the states of the “near abroad”—the former republics of the USSR.

C

ivilian nuclear power development can be an emotional political issue: this has been the situation in the Western world throughout recent memory, and it rapidly became the case in the Soviet Union following the 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power facility. Prior to the Chernobyl accident, however, nuclear power simply did not elicit the same emotions in a politically passive Soviet society that have been observed elsewhere. As proof, one need only point to the equanimity, if not outright indifference, with which the population of Pripyat—the town where all of Chernobyl’s plant workers lived with their families—initially reacted to the explosion, fire, and resulting chaos. It is impossible to imagine that Western counterparts would have behaved in a similar manner. And, given the course of events since 1986, one could hardly expect that scene to be repeated today in the territory previously known as the Soviet Union. Accordingly, this essay attempts to depict the current political status of civilian nuclear power in Russia and the other republics of the former Soviet Union. We begin with a description of events that preceded the collapse of the country and its disintegration into separate governmental entities.

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In the West, where political trade-offs are the norm, nuclear facilities offered specific advantages over other forms of electricity generation STRATEGIC. The development of civilian nuclear power, a spin-off from military uses since its inception, could be utilized to enhance the production of weapons-grade fissionable materials; GEOPOLITICAL. Greater reliance on nuclear power would lessen dependence on oil imports (or increased domestic production) and, therefore, decrease the importance of the world’s oil producing states; TECHNOLOGICAL. Developing nuclear capabilities entailed the ability to create and apply cutting-edge technology; in addition, available petroleum feedstocks could be utilized in a variety of other industries, such as plastics and medicine, and not simply be burned to produce heat or electricity; ECONOMIC. Because of predicted cost factors per unit of electricity generated—as compared to fossil fuels—nuclear power was supposed to offer the prospect of electricity “too cheap to meter”; ENVIRONMENTAL. One look at any industrial skyline would demonstrate that fossil plants had a much more deleterious effect on air quality than did nuclear power plants; hydroelectric facilities had their own drawbacks, not the least of which was the flooding of large tracts of fertile land; PSYCHOLOGICAL. Nuclear power plants enhanced national pride and conferred international prestige upon the nations that operated them.

The primary drawbacks (which, of course, were not willingly discussed by proponents of nuclear power anywhere in the world) included the following SAFETY. A severe accident at a nuclear facility could conceivably affect large populations and could render useless large tracts of

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territory; should an accident occur, of course, most of the putative benefits derived from nuclear power would evaporate in short order; WASTE STORAGE. Nuclear facilities generate a large volume of radioactive waste, both liquid and solid, that must be stored permanently and safely; a related issue is facility decommissioning at the conclusion of a plant’s useful life; FEAR. For whatever reasons, many people have an inordinate fear of radiation in any form and object to its use for almost any nonmedical purpose.

In the Soviet Union, the negative factors were probably ignored—as they were to a significant extent elsewhere—or were simply irrelevant. For example, state subsidies in the energy sector and bureaucratic obstruction probably made it impossible to predict costs accurately; then, too, planners never let environmental concerns impede fulfillment of production targets.1 However, despite the passivity characteristic of Soviet society generally, there never has been any doubt that the governmental structure was intensely political at the policy level. Thus, it is probably true that in the beginning the most decisive factors shaping Soviet nuclear policy were strategic, technological, and psychological. After Chernobyl, of course, the whole situation changed dramatically. The earliest instances of publicly expressed dissatisfaction seem to have occurred in Estonia where, within three months of the Chernobyl accident, newspapers began printing articles about the harshness of conditions in the disaster zone and about the treatment being accorded disgruntled clean-up workers.2 The Estonian print media claimed that local residents were virtually being kidnapped to help in the cleanup, that tours of duty were extended illegally for up to six months, and that military authorities dealt viciously with workers who objected to the living and safety conditions. It was reportedly possible to bribe officials to exempt relatives from participation in the clean-up efforts, just as it was possible to ensure through bribery that one’s son did not have to serve in Afghanistan. (296: 183–93) Over the next three years, ecological issues generally, and nuclear power production in particular, became a focal point for nationalist and anti-Russian sentiment throughout the constituent republics. The clearest

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expression of these ideas was found in the Ukraine and in Byelorussia— not surprisingly, as these were the areas hardest hit by the medical, social, and economic consequences of the Chernobyl disaster. In January 1988 Literaturnaia gazeta published The Seven, a narrative poem by the esteemed Ukrainian poet Borys Oliynyk; this work honored the firemen who had lost their lives in the first hours of the disaster. Oliynyk’s poem was the first tangible expression of a political movement that was forming against nuclear power and the “nuclear mafia” that had become entrenched within the Soviet Union’s ministerial system. It was far from the last. By 1989 a full-fledged green movement had developed under the leadership of D. Grodzinsky, a radiologist by training. Other previously non-political individuals such as Ales Adamovich, a Byelorussian writer, and Yuri Shcherbak, a physician in the Ukraine, became nationally prominent as advocates of environmental protection. Indeed, it was difficult, if not impossible, for even staunchly conservative Party-backed candidates for the new national Congress of Deputies to wage a successful campaign without a pro-ecology plank. (277) Moscow fought a losing battle with public opposition, eventually relenting on its ambitious plans to develop civilian nuclear power as a means to spurring further growth in the industrial manufacturing sector. A program was established to retrofit existing Chernobyl-type RBMK reactors to make them less unstable, and work was stopped on all such units under construction, even though billions of rubles had been invested and several plants were nearing completion. Non-RBMK reactors were affected, too: work was stopped at some sites, particularly those that were intended to provide district heating for apartments and public facilities and were therefore located near major cities. At some sites, permission was granted to complete construction and equipment installation, but a moratorium against commercial use of these units was instituted. In Armenia the existing nuclear power plant—which had continued to operate during the disastrous December 1988 earthquake—was closed due to intense public pressure. Apparently, the station had been designed without taking local seismic conditions into account. Construction at a site near Krasnodar in the RSFSR was halted for the same reason. Residents on the geographical and political periphery throughout the country viewed the national government as a racist, colonial power. Nuclear power was not, of course, the only source of profound

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dissatisfaction. If anything, local dissension in Kazakhstan over the desiccation of the Aral Sea as a result of the intensive irrigation of cotton fields adjacent to the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers posed a greater threat to the government’s prestige there than Chernobyl did in the Ukraine. It was the fertile ground of resentment toward Moscow as the center of both Soviet political hegemony and Russian nationalist superiority that spawned anti-union feelings where none could have survived in earlier years. Over a very brief span of time, separatist groups in the various republics developed a notion that can be termed “ecological imperialism”—the systematic depredation and degradation of the ecology in the periphery for the economic and political benefit of the center. In response, the Soviet government created Goskompriroda, a super-agency that was supposed to combine all nonnuclear environmental protection efforts under one bureaucratic umbrella. Moreover, the existing Soviet nuclear regulatory agency, Gosatomenergonadzor [GAEN], was strengthened.3 As the deterioration of the nation’s economy began to accelerate and inflation became a significant threat, people naturally turned their concern away from environmental issues. Indeed, as early as 1991 visitors to the USSR found that it was difficult to engage their friends in discussions of any non-economic topics. The mass media, of course, continued to analyze the increasingly unstable political situation, particularly as the country disintegrated after the August coup, but even so, most ordinary citizens retained their focus on economic issues: How many government employees would be laid off as a result of planned cutbacks? How could those whose jobs technically were not lost cope with not receiving any pay for three months or more, as happened in mid-1992 at most educational and research institutions in the country? When would prices stabilize? Now that over a year has passed since Mr. Gorbachev departed the political scene, along with the country that he had led, it is appropriate to assess the current political and psychological situation throughout the former Soviet Union with regard to the issue of nuclear power. We shall discuss, in turn, Lithuania, Armenia, Belarus, the Ukraine, and the Russian Federation. LITHUANIA. Circumstantial evidence suggests that after the Chernobyl accident Lithuanians were subjected to the same treatment as were Estonians. (296: 183–93) In any event, with little or no faith in Soviet technology and industrial safety practices, Lithuania’s non-Slavic population initially viewed the nuclear power plant at Ignalina as a symbol of

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Soviet domination no less odious than the omnipresent military garrisons. Indeed, although equipped with pressurized water reactors—and not the infamous RBMK design—Ignalina’s first-generation units are not very safe or reliable. However, sentiment seems to have shifted toward grudging acceptance, although the reason for this change has nothing to do with the technical characteristics of the power plant itself. Rather, they harken back to the geopolitical concerns that dominated this issue in the west during the late 1960s and early 1970s. What happened was very simple. In early 1991, Mr. Gorbachev’s vacillating policy decisions swung in favor of conservative elements, including the military. Not only did he fail to object when military commanders (apparently unilaterally) decided to occupy broadcasting facilities in the Baltic republics in order to intimidate the population and suppress separatist leaders in the mass media, he also authorized economic retaliation against the area: specifically, he significantly reduced shipments of crude oil to the republics and disrupted the delivery of those supplies that were allowed to be transported from the Russian republic. This partial domestic embargo occurred during the coldest months of the year, and the local population was spared even worse deprivation only because the nuclear plant continued its operations throughout the crisis period. ARMENIA. During 1989–90, Armenians were among the most fervent opponents of civilian nuclear power, having been outraged by the fact that operating regulations promulgated by the Ministry of Nuclear Energy had included no provisions for shutting down the Armenian station in the event of a serious earthquake. Soviet officials vigorously denied this, but their statements were viewed with suspicion and disdain. For example, it was claimed that the December 1988 earthquake was not severe enough to warrant an emergency shutdown of the reactor units. To buttress this position, officials cited the official figure for the severity of the quake, ignoring the fact that the Soviet Union categorizes earthquakes according to post-event damage estimates, rather than with a Richter scale reading that measures acceleration of the earth due to seismic disturbances. What this meant, in effect, is that plants were not equipped with devices that could sense seismic activity and automatically trigger a plant shutdown. Indeed, Western specialists now generally concur that seismic analysis was not part of the Soviet design process: only in 1990 did the United States government allow the export of high-speed computers that might

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perform such analysis; at the same time, it provided the requisite sophisticated computer codes to Soviet scientists at Moscow’s I. V. Kurchatov Nuclear Power Institute. At first, the local population in Armenia viewed the closing of the nuclear plant there as a tremendous political victory. Then the war with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh heated up. The only major railroad line into Armenia starts in Baku, and virtually all of Armenia’s petroleum was supplied by the Azerbaijanis, who embarked on a systematic campaign to starve out the Armenians: the railroad was blown up repeatedly, leaving an airlift from outside the republic as the only reliable means of providing the population with energy supplies, foodstuffs, manufactured goods, and anything else that the Armenians could not produce for themselves. The energy situation in this mountainous republic has become disastrous. At first, local authorities decreed that electricity be cut off for six hours every day. Then, according to Georg Brutain, a professor of communication at the university in Yerevan and president of ISSA, the International Society for the Study of Argumentation, by the end of 1991 the blackout had been extended to twelve hours daily.4 In Professor Brutain’s opinion, most Armenians now wish the nuclear station had never been closed; but at this point it would take at least a year, if not longer, to bring it back into service. BELARUS. As can be seen, Lithuania and Armenia represent instances wherein economic need overcame the local population’s reluctance to tolerate the presence of a nuclear power plant on its soil. Not so Belarus. On the whole, the general feeling there is one of anger: anger at the nuclear mafia in Moscow for allowing Chernobyl to happen; anger at the former Soviet government for ignoring the perceived medical needs and economic losses of the affected population (the bulk of whom lived in Byelorussia); anger at the current government of the Russian Federation for repudiating the economic burden of Chernobyl that now must be borne by Belarus and the Ukraine. The price of independence from Moscow has included the assumption of all responsibility for financing the prolonged medical care required by Chernobyl victims and for continuing efforts to rid the country of radiation hot spots and to resuscitate the whole environment. In the summer of 1990, academician N. N. Ponomarëv-Stepnoi, director of the Kurchatov Institute, offered the opinion that it would be impossible to find a locale anywhere inside the Soviet Union that would approve the siting of a new nuclear power plant in its midst.5 Nowhere is

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that statement more accurate than in Belarus. Of course, the economic situation in Belarus is not nearly as desperate as in Armenia, which may be a factor perpetuating the antipathy toward nuclear generation of electricity. Nevertheless, the country is a net importer of energy, and the operational status of its limited nuclear capacity is not likely to change in the nearer mid-term. THE UKRAINE. If economics is a critical factor in determining the extent of residual opposition to further development of nuclear power, the situation in the Ukraine portends stagnation, if not actual contraction, of the total installed capacity. Actually, the Ukraine presents a complex and interesting set of circumstances. On the one hand, because of the economic devastation caused by hyperinflation over the past two years, industrial output in the country has shrunk at about the same rate as in the Russian Federation—that is, at about fifteen to twenty-five percent a year. Since household consumption of electricity has always been a minor percentage of overall energy consumption in the USSR/CIS, and has never grown fast in absolute terms, the rapid shrinking of the Ukrainian economy has had the curious effect of creating a significant surplus of generating capacity over current demand, an unprecedented situation in the region. This factor alone makes the nuclear issue somewhat moot. Not only is expansion of installed capacity not required, the surplus makes it possible to seriously foresee that the Chernobyl station might actually be closed by 1995. (Previously, it would have been difficult to identify a single observer in the nuclear establishment, the regulatory agency, or the government who believed that the mandate of the Ukrainian parliament would actually be implemented.) Bluntly stated, however, the Ukraine can make do at the moment without the electrical power, and the ability to export surplus electricity for hard currency, to use it as a bartering tool in negotiations with the Russian Federation, or to maintain the capacity to support renewed economic growth when that becomes feasible again has not yet attained the status of an important policy consideration. Interestingly, no country in the region—Russia included—currently is doing more than is the Ukraine to improve the quality of operation at its nuclear facilities. Even prior to the official breakup of the union, when the ministerial system had unraveled in Moscow, the Ukraine hired away the deputy minister in charge of operations at GAEN, N. A. Shteinberg, to head an independent nuclear regulatory body for the republic.

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Shteinberg, the reactor engineer who restarted Units 1 and 2 at Chernobyl in November 1986 even before construction of the sarcophagus covering the destroyed reactor in Unit 4 had been completed, has been an outspoken advocate of tough inspection standards.6 As a result, the Ukrainian nuclear regulatory agency, unlike that in the United States, is generally perceived by environmentalists to be an ally, not an enemy. Even plant operators are actively involved in this process, although there is no doubt that they reflect the traditional distrust of all operators for all regulators. Nevertheless, plant personnel have been instructed to cooperate in writing the operating rules under which they will be regulated. In addition, Mikhail Umanets, formerly director of the Kombinat organization that headed the Chernobyl cleanup and now the Ukrainian minister of nuclear power, is leading efforts to attract international assistance. For example, French and German analysts are currently studying the sarcophagus, which must be redesigned, repaired, or replaced in the near future. Umanets recently attended a special seminar on the safety of Soviet-designed reactors that was held in Chicago in conjunction with the American Nuclear Society, where he solicited bids from American firms as well. Both the Ukraine and Russia are actively seeking Western help within the framework of the recently signed Lisbon Initiative. Ukrainian cooperation between operators and regulators is evident also in a ruling that has enabled the Zaporozhe nuclear station to continue equipment installation in Unit 6, despite the existence of a legal moratorium against construction and start-up of any new commercial reactors. According to Vladimir Bronnikov, director of the Zaporozhe station, regulators have agreed that the unit can be used as a personnel training facility until such time as highly sophisticated simulators, which have been ordered from the United States, become operational.7 Despite all of this activity on the governmental level, the fact remains that the Ukrainian legislature has steadfastly refused to lift the moratorium. As long as the energy situation remains favorable—whatever the economic dislocation creating that situation—it seems unlikely that there will be much impetus to change the status quo. On the other hand, there also appears to be little or no current opposition to the continued functioning of existing pressurized water reactors in the country. The population, it seems, has drawn a clear distinction between these units and the despised RBMKs; and the recent fires in the turbine building at Chernobyl

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will certainly not enhance the nuclear industry’s political position anywhere in the CIS or Eastern Europe. THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION. As far as public opinion is concerned, most of the factors operating in the Ukraine are evident in the Russian Federation as well. Fear centers on the RBMKs, particularly the Leningrad station at Sosnovy bor, since that is the oldest such plant in the CIS. The accidental radiation release that occurred at the site last summer rekindled apprehension among the six million residents of St. Petersburg: the power plant lies almost due west of the city about two hours’ drive away. Given the prevailing winds in the area, no one is sanguine about the prospects of a severe radiation accident, because it is unlikely that St. Petersburg would be as lucky, from a meteorological point of view, as Kiev had been in April 1986. Not that any other wind direction would result in less danger to people living in Scandinavia or Eastern and Central Europe. From a technological point of view, the accident could easily have become much more serious than it turned out to be, despite having had a seemingly trivial initiating event. The event, however, had not been envisioned during the safety analysis design review, and specialists in the US Department of Energy believe that engineers at the power plant had no way of predicting the course or consequences of the accident. These facts notwithstanding, there is currently little reason to believe that the RBMK units at the Leningrad and Kursk stations will be closed in the foreseeable future. Given the recent promise by the Russian Federation Supreme Soviet to halt runaway inflation and put an end to the precipitous decline in GNP, the expectation must be that no generating capacity will be removed from service voluntarily. Rather, as in the Ukraine, RBMK units will continue to run at no more than seventy percent of their design capacity. This compromise, reached at the USSR Council of Ministers level during the fall of 1990, was based on economic exigency more than political expediency. Moreover, on the political level, Russia has instituted protectionist measures in auxiliary areas of nuclear power production that will hinder cooperation with other CIS republics and will do nothing to dissuade those governments from believing that Russia intends to maintain its primus inter pares status. For example, Soviet and American expert working groups have been cooperating for a few years in an initiative that is intended to organize reactor operator training along Western lines by developing so-called “symptom-based operating procedures”

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for Soviet-designed pressurized water reactors. The venture, originally funded in part by the Soviet Ministry of Nuclear Power and Industry, has been taken over on the CIS side by the Russian kontsern Rosenergoatom. Despite the wishes of leading specialists at the Russian (formerly Soviet) national nuclear training center in Novovoronezh, all participation by the Rovno plant in the Ukraine has been terminated at the insistence of the Russian Federation government.8 Similarly, the dissolution of the union has not diminished Russia’s ability (or desire) to exercise economic colonialism in the nuclear industry. For a variety of geographic and economic reasons, the Soviet Union located its nuclear fuel fabrication facilities and its spent fuel reprocessing plants in the Sverdlovsk area of the RSFSR. All Soviet nuclear facilities received shipments of fresh fuel bundles from one source, and all spent fuel was sent back for reprocessing and long-term storage. Now that the union exists no longer, neither does the cooperation with former colleagues. According to Mr. Bronnikov, payment for fresh fuel must be made in hard currency only, unless the purchaser is located within the Russian Federation. As for reprocessing, that service is no longer available to power plants in the Ukraine at all, and the country is frantically trying to develop, with Western help, permanent dry storage facilities before the short-term storage capability of the spent fuel pools at its nuclear plants is completely exhausted. Even for more mundane items such as spare parts and replacement supplies, which usually need to be ordered from producers in the Russian Federation, Ukrainian power plant managers are forced to create fourway barter deals. Such items could be purchased for rubles, but Ukrainian kupony are convertible only at a tremendous discount—upwards of twothirds of the purchasing power of the kupon would be lost in the process.9 Instead, a Russian non-nuclear enterprise that wants to purchase Ukrainian goods—say, wheat—must be found; that enterprise contracts with the Russian Federation producer of nuclear-related parts to buy the items needed at the Ukrainian power plant; these are paid for in Russia in rubles; the spare parts are then bartered for the Ukrainian wheat, with no currency changing hands; and the wheat producer, finally, sells the Russian-made spare parts to the Ukrainian-run power plant, which pays for them in kupony. Needless to say, this procedure is not only cumbersome—it is also very expensive, although not nearly as expensive as the direct conversion method. Such deals are essentially illegal, but all parties

Civilian Nuclear Power in the Commonwealth of Independent States

benefit in some way, and the Russian enterprises, bereft as they are of government subsidies, need the business as much as the Ukrainian power plants need the parts and supplies. Obviously, much of the difficulty could be resolved through intergovernmental negotiation and treaty agreements. But the Russians, at least, show no inclination at present to cooperate in these matters. As a result, the Ukraine currently faces the necessity of creating a vertically integrated nuclear industry, expanding the design and manufacturing facilities that do exist on Ukrainian soil and building its own facilities to replace the ones no longer available to them due to location in Russia—now a different and not particularly well disposed country. What is most significant, however, in this and all the other situations described above, is the extent to which attitudes and policies are bound by economic constraints. Such constraints provide an additional layer of complexity to an otherwise convoluted set of relationships. It is unlikely, for example, that the public in Eastern Europe or any of the CIS countries—Russia included—will ever develop much faith in nuclear facilities designed by the Soviet Ministry of Nuclear Power, built by Soviet construction trusts, equipped with Soviet-made hardware, and run by Soviettrained operators.10 Nor is it likely that the governments involved will settle their differences anytime soon, based as they are on generations of animosity and distrust. And, where nuclear power is concerned, the psychological residue of the Chernobyl disaster will continue to damage the relationship between Russians and all the other nationalities within the former Soviet Union, because nuclear power is viewed everywhere else in the CIS as an instrument of Russian, not just Soviet, domination. However, electricity is electricity, and modern life is inconceivable without an abundant supply—particularly in the winter in the mountains of Armenia or on the Gulf of Finland in Lithuania at 59° North latitude. For the time being, at least, the existing generating facilities—nuclear and conventional alike—will remain in operation as long as it is technologically possible to keep them in operation, no matter how fearful the local population. As noted, however, the one exception may be the infamous Chernobyl station itself.

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NOTES 1. See (320; 372; 427; 495). 2. These reports contrasted vividly in tone with the news stories being carried by the national media; the latter extolled the efficiency of the clean-up operation, the care taken to protect the “liquidators,” and the generosity of all the workers, who—it was said—had volunteered to help their unfortunate countrymen. 3. For a discussion of the practical and legal restrictions that circumscribe the activities of GAEN (and Goskompriroda, for that matter), see (268; 257). 4. G. Brutain, private conversation, St. Petersburg, Russia, January 1992. 5. N. N. Ponomarëv-Stepnoi, private conversation, Moscow, USSR, July 1990. 6. Speaking in Obninsk before the Nuclear Society of the Soviet Union in July 1990, Shteinberg decried a legal situation in which GAEN was virtually powerless to regulate the activities of the Ministry of Nuclear Power and Industry (as it had been renamed) without the consent of the latter, since both agencies were equivalent in status and the USSR lacked a law that might establish the preeminence of GAEN in the area of power plant safety. 7. V. Bronnikov, private conversation, Chicago, IL. November 1992. 8. Private conversation with a specialist who wishes to remain anonymous, Pismo Beach, CA. July 1992. 9. Reasons of national sovereignty and military security aside, the economic issue of currency conversion was certainly a decisive factor in Kiev’s refusal to sign the new Commonwealth charter in January, 1993, since one of the pivotal provisions of the charter was the creation of an international ruble trade zone (similar to EC attempts to institute a unified currency for trade relations among member states). 10. Often overlooked in both the west and the CIS is the fact that Soviet nuclear techno­ logy is not universally horrid. For example, it is generally agreed in the nuclear industry world-wide that one of the best plants anywhere—in terms of safety, reliability and availability—is the Finnish station at Loviisa. Loviisa consists of a Soviet-built pressurized water reactor combined with Western (mostly German) monitoring and emergency equipment.

CHAPTER 17

Soviet News Media: Uncertainty in the Throes of Change Marilyn J. Young and Michael K. Launer Provenance: This unpublished analysis was prepared in March 1989 at the request of the Washington Journalism Review Copyright Holder: Authors Description: This brief paper describes the startling changes that took place in Soviet media policy and practice over the three years following the Chernobyl nuclear accident.

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mong the most startling changes taking place in the Soviet Union are those affecting the media. To everyone’s amazement, the central press has begun dealing in Western-style front page news—like earthquakes and politics. Nor has TV been ignored: one can now see news footage less than forty-eight hours old. Like other segments of Soviet society, the media are reveling in this unaccustomed freedom. In some instances, editors and reporters have boldly tested the ill-defined new limits. Western reporters based in the Soviet Union have reacted with an enthusiasm that approaches euphoria. In their rush to catalog recent societal changes and to idolize the charismatic Soviet Premier, observers have consistently underestimated the significance of Mikhail Gorbachev’s approach to television. At the same time, they have severely exaggerated his commitment to freedom of expression. After the 1917 Revolution, Lenin restricted the new Soviet press to just one role—proselytizing the ideology and the policies espoused by Bolshevik Party leaders. In 1980, over sixty years later, so little had changed that an ideologist bragged the Soviet constitution “could guarantee free speech and freedom of the press” precisely because all opposition

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“had been totally eradicated.” (151: 18)1 Such control of the media was a prerequisite for the misstatements and lies that characterized the Soviet response to the KAL 007 tragedy. Only in such a climate would Izvestiia’s editors have to fight to publish an account of the Chernobyl accident in the next day’s edition. They lost: Nothing was run at all. On the second day four sentences appeared, and over the next four days fewer than thirty column inches were printed. But change is in the air. No longer must Soviet editors wait for permission from politicians to print every story. The evolution can be documented quite explicitly. As recently as 1986 nothing specific could be reported when the populace of Kazakhstan’s capital rioted after a corrupt local Party boss was replaced by a Moscow apparatchik of Russian national origin. The only indication was the Alma-Ata dateline over a series of innocuous articles buried inside Pravda each day for over a week. The real tip-off for sophisticated Soviet readers started on the third day: Pravda reported that a Politburo member had traveled thousands of miles ostensibly to meet with factory workers and teachers for discussions of “negative manifestations”! In contrast, when violence erupted last summer between Armenians and Azerbaijanis in the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, with five hundred thousand people regularly jamming the streets, Soviet radio and television reported the massive strikes and the killings—including the death of three soldiers, who perished when a hand grenade was thrown at their feet. Nagorno-Karabakh and the nationalist hatred that has plagued life there for decades became the continuing lead story on Vremia, the Soviet Union’s nightly news program. To be sure, the extent of unrest was underplayed, as was the brutality of government attempts to control the situation: most observers believe the actual number of dead and injured far exceeded figures quoted in the Soviet press. Nonetheless, the fact that editors felt free to cover the violence in detail—and with no discernable time lag—is unprecedented. As a news story the riots far outlasted the Iranian Airbus incident, which occurred at the same time. Unlike his predecessors, the current party chairman has come to understand television’s influence as an image builder. In 1986 he was roundly criticized in the West for waiting nearly three weeks before addressing the Soviet people about Chernobyl. But that “belated” speech demonstrated he had learned much from the 1983 public relations debacle,

Soviet News Media

when Yuri Andropov never spoke in public about the Korean airliner. Last December, after the terrible earthquake hit Armenia, Mr. Gorbachev broke off a successful summit meeting to rush home, inspect the devastation by helicopter, and speak to the nation in somber tones. Every move was covered by live TV and described in detail by the domestic press. It was pure PR—with the Soviet Premier assuming the role of the Great Communicator! Mr. Gorbachev was building on the tidal wave created in June of last year when Soviet television provided “gavel to gavel” coverage of the extraordinary Party Congress, an event of such staggering proportions in Soviet society that even America’s rapt attention to Watergate pales by comparison. The Congress demonstrated Mr. Gorbachev’s command of both the political process and the media. A few months earlier, he had allowed Boris Yeltsin free rein to criticize the slow pace of reform in the press, then had Mr. Yeltsin humiliated in public, seemingly to appease the powerful conservative faction opposing perestroika. In March, when the leader of the conservatives, Egor Ligachev, utilized his position as the second leading figure in the government to arrange for a newspaper attack on the rapid pace of change, Mr. Gorbachev struck again, denouncing the stratagem and orchestrating Mr. Yeltsin’s return to the public limelight to attack Mr. Ligachev at the Party Congress. But old habits die hard, if at all. After Chernobyl, the Soviets never admitted in public that the reactor design was a primary culprit, blaming criminal negligence instead. In the spring of 1987, TASS released false information to foreign news outlets regarding the lifting of food controls. The contamination of drinking water was never acknowledged. Today, Chernobyl has become enshrined in Soviet political culture as a major triumph of science and socialist reconstruction; yet the village of Pripyat remains a ghost town. Audience segmentation was equally apparent after the Iranian Airbus was destroyed. Internationally, spokespersons pointedly refrained from drawing comparisons to KAL, citing improved relations with the United States. But no such restraint was exercised domestically in the mili­tary newspapers. Moreover, stories in the general press were replete with accusations of “piracy,” “terrorism,” and “planned provocations.” Casualty figures, barely mentioned in 1983, were trumpeted in headlines and on television.

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Mr. Gorbachev has demonstrated that his priorities lie in furthering the economic reforms and in enhancing his political control. This is not to denigrate the real changes that have occurred in Soviet society; like every good politician, however, the Premier has turned even these relaxed press strictures to his advantage. Indeed, one suspects such was his intention all along.

NOTE 1. See also (247: 6).

CHAPTER 18

Nuclear Power and Ecological Debates in the Soviet Press, Mid-1988 to Mid-1989 Marilyn J. Young and Michael K. Launer Provenance: Originally published in Current World Leaders 35, no. 4 (August 1992): 695–716. Copyright Holder: The last known copyright holder of this journal is the International Academy at Santa Barbara (http://www.iasb.org.), which seems no longer to exist. After an extensive, but unsuccessful, search for the current copyright holder, we have decided to reprint the text na svoi strakh i risk (on our own recognizance). Description: This paper provides a detailed analysis of the extent to which Chernobyl sparked an upsurge in environmental concerns throughout the Soviet Union, which developed into an eco-nationalist movement in Ukraine.

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urely it never occurred to Mikhail Gorbachev that perestroika would lead to the breakup of the USSR. But the Soviet Union is gone, and it seems appropriate to examine the rhetoric of the Gorbachev period more closely, seeking the wellsprings of discontent that precipitated these drastic changes. One such area, without question, was the debate over civilian nuclear power, whose development within the borders of the former Soviet Union has been subject to official moratorium since early 1990. The ability of Chernobyl to crystallize dissent within a legitimate framework was instrumental in accelerating the changes experienced by Soviet society.

INTRODUCTION The 1980s witnessed an upsurge in public discussion of ecological issues within the Soviet Union, a tendency that began slowly, but intensified markedly in the aftermath of the April 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. Obviously, events of the past year have brought about a true restructuring (perestroika) of Soviet society far beyond

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anything that Mikhail Gorbachev might have conceived; so it seems appropriate to examine the rhetoric of the post-Chernobyl period more closely, seeking the wellsprings of discontent that precipitated these drastic changes. One such area, without question, was the debate concerning civilian nuclear power production. Debates over ecology served as a convenient and legitimate battleground for expressing center-periphery tensions within Soviet society, even quite early in the Gorbachev period. This statement, while true generally, is particularly descriptive of the growing antinuclear (“Greens”) movement. Through the second anniversary of the accident, official descriptions and interpretations of the Chernobyl event predominated in Soviet media—as one would expect. However, at about that time, expressions of public pressure in Byelorussia, the Ukraine, and the Caucasus republics turned very negative, reaching the point of attributing blame to the Soviet system itself, rather than to specific individuals or organizations. Starting in mid-1989, mainstream national media began to echo the dissatisfaction that initially had been expressed mainly in the regional press. This paper will assess the development of ecology (specifically, the antinuclear power movement) as an independent, nonestablishment focus for the formation of public opinion. The Chernobyl accident was perhaps the first event to be covered as a continuing news story in the Soviet Union since the end of World War II. It created the first TV journalist media star, Alexander Krutov, whose taped reports aired nightly on Vremia after the initial week of silence. A television documentary by Volodymyr Shevchenko (the first of many produced since the accident) chronicled the hectic events of the immediate response to the disaster. Although heavily edited against Shevchenko’s wishes and released only after his death, Chernobyl: A Chronicle of Difficult Weeks retained visual images that proved to be highly unsettling. By the first anniversary, Christine Bohlen of The Washington Post reported that more than four hundred Chernobyl items had appeared in the Soviet national press. It almost goes without saying that no other event in the last forty-five years has generated nearly this volume of journalistic coverage. Chernobyl proved to be a fascinating topic not only for news reporters and social commentators. It spawned works of fiction as well as documentary povesti that closely bordered the Soviet genre known as publitsistika (issue-oriented, including investigative, journalism). In the fall 1986, Novyi mir published G. Medvedev’s “eye-witness” documentary povest “Chernobyl Notebooks.” (311) Medvedev worked in the nuclear

Nuclear Power and Ecological Debates in the Soviet Press, Mid-1988 to Mid-1989

power industry and was personally familiar with many of the individuals who had to deal with the immediate problem of extinguishing the fire and controlling the destroyed reactor. At about the same time, the monthly journal Znamia published, Sarcophagus a play written by Pravda science editor V. Gubarev. (189)1 Within the next year, several other povesti appeared in the mainstream Soviet periodical press. The periodicals that published these pieces fall into two groups—the expected and the unexpected: Ural is a monthly that features many nature stories; Novyi mir and Literaturnaia gazeta have a long history as prestigious, “quasi-liberal” descendants of the prerevolutionary “thick journals,” and Yunost had become one of the most outspoken Soviet periodicals—the avant garde, as it were, of glasnost. But others, including Znamia, Nauka i zhizn, Druzhba narodov, and the Ukrainian Vitchizna, could hardly be classified as anything other than politically conservative outlets, hitherto little affected by the wave of social consciousness that had arisen inside the Soviet Union. Coverage of Chernobyl remained a prominent feature of the Soviet media through 1991. In this discussion we would like to highlight the mainstream print media in the period beginning after the second anniversary (April 1988) and continuing through the summer and early fall of 1989. This was the crucial time frame, with results pivotal not only for the USSR’s nuclear power development program, but ultimately for the fate of the nation itself. A vigorous and intense battle was waged—remarkably, on the pages of the regional and national press. On one side were ranged the forces opposing unbridled nuclear power development; on the other, representatives of the Ministry of Atomic Energy, the Ministry of Energy, the Ministry of Health, Gosplan, and the Kombinat Production Organization charged with administering the plant site cleanup and running the undamaged units at Chernobyl.2 At issue, ultimately, was scientific authority, bureaucratic privilege, and official indifference to public welfare—encapsulated in the code word vedomstvennost (establishmentarianism). To the extent that Mikhail Gorbachev saw vedomstvennost as one of the crucial stumbling blocks to economic reform in general, the rhetorical thrust of nuclear power opponents resonated ideas that the central government wished to promote. But the commitment to a national energy policy based on continued rapid development of all forms of electrical generating capacity—including but not limited to nuclear—put the government in an ambivalent position visà-vis the proposals supported by Soviet “Greens” advocating greater efforts

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in the areas of conservation, fuel efficiency, and pollution control. As will be demonstrated, antinuclear forces effectively linked their appeals to the perestroika reforms. Due to the limited scope of this paper, we will concentrate on two early television documentaries and on the monthly periodical press. But one must also keep in mind during any such discussion the prominent role played by the national dailies, republican newspapers such as Sovetskaia Estonia, and national weekly/fortnightly publications such as Literaturnaia gazeta. We will begin with a rhetorical analysis of two films: Shevchenko’s Chernobyl: A Chronicle of Difficult Weeks, which was released posthumously in 1986; and the 1988 state television production Warning, written by L. Nikolaev and A. Krutov. Then the discussion will turn briefly to the inaccuracies and contradictions inherent in mainstream “official” descriptions of Chernobyl and its aftermath. We will conclude with an analysis of the extent to which the anti-establishment forces succeeded in challenging this version and redefining the very terms of public debate on this most important issue.

RECONTEXTUALIZATION OF A DISASTER: TWO SOVIET DOCUMENTARIES Contextual reconstruction seems to be an intrinsic element in government rhetoric generally, regardless of political system. Restructuring public perception of events and shifting blame for any negative consequences is a necessary and customary part of the political process. For example, when Korean Airlines flight 007 was shot down over Sakhalin Island in 1983, the Soviet Union blamed the tragedy on American intelligence, which was said to have sent the aircraft into Soviet airspace on a spy mission. Five years later, after American naval forces in the Persian Gulf shot down Iran Air flight 655, the Reagan administration contrived to blame the Iranian government for having sent a civilian airliner into a war zone. (480; 475) But the phenomenon goes deeper than that; it is a fundamental goal and need of any system. The political process in general involves shaping the rhetorical landscape in ways favorable to the rhetor, either to convince the electorate or simply to prevail in the internal policy struggles that occur within all governmental bodies. One way in which the Soviet government attempted to shape public understanding of the Chernobyl accident was to promulgate the

Nuclear Power and Ecological Debates in the Soviet Press, Mid-1988 to Mid-1989

documentaries Chernobyl: A Chronicle of Difficult Weeks (1986) and Warning (1988). The earlier work is the better of the two, from the standpoint of production values, which is all the more remarkable given its temporal proximity to the disaster. Both films, however, reflect the treatment accorded the nuclear accident in the print media at the time—that is to say, the official interpretation of events. (276; 483) Indeed, given the extent to which the government maintained control of the media in 1986, any other state of affairs would have been highly unlikely. Chronicle necessitated heavy editing in order to shape its message to the state’s purposes. Surely, paramount among the goals for releasing it at all had to be assuaging the fears of the population and reinforcing the predominant ideological message—that the government is in control, the country is coping, everything is returning to normal, and nuclear power is good for you. Status quo ante. Nonetheless, as we shall demonstrate, both documentaries contributed to creating a social environment conducive to the development of quite contrary feelings. Chronicle focuses on the weeks following the first reactions to the accident—after the evacuation and the earliest attempts at controlling the damage and containing the radiation. The documentary has three overt emphases: the heroism of the cleanup workers; the decision-making process along with the efforts made at the plant site to contain the magnitude of the disaster; and the controls exercised in the area surrounding the plant to minimize the spread of radiation. These themes are intertwined throughout the film’s fifty-eight-minute running time. Chronicle opens with an aerial view of the Chernobyl plant followed by a short excerpt from Gorbachev’s May 14, 1986, speech to the nation. Then the focus shifts to the arrival of cleanup workers at the deserted town of Pripyat. The narrator engages the viewer in one of the most dramatic moments of the entire effort: with an unidentified crackling noise in the background, he talks of concern that the film was damaged, then the realization that this was simply the microphones picking up the rattling sound of an activated Geiger counter: “This is how radiation looks,” he says, as the camera pans over the entire Chernobyl power plant complex and the Geiger counter chatters away. Shevchenko’s effort includes remarkable film of the mine workers tunneling under the foundation of the damaged reactor without any form of protection. It details the efforts of the army and others to prevent the spread of radiation. In addition, the documentary draws on echoes of

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World War II—the remarkable stamina of the Russian people and the sacrifices they made to save their homeland from a different invader. The narration emphasizes the supposedly voluntary nature of the cleanup effort, citing letters from persons far away who offer their assistance.3 And it stresses the nationwide cooperation of the people in donating money, living space, clothes, blood, bone marrow, and so forth, to the evacuees, the injured, to those suffering from radiation sickness. Much is made of the fact that many of the cleanup workers were individuals from the regular staff at the plant, indicating that most personnel did not fear the place, despite the terrible experience they had there. Indeed, the engineer in charge of restarting Chernobyl’s undamaged units, N. A. Shteinberg, implies on film that those who left were cowards and the effort was better off without them. The effect of all this is to downplay the nature of the tragedy, making it appear more similar to an earthquake or other natural disaster, different only because it was man-made. A second focus of the documentary is a thinly veiled attack on the party bureaucracy. Or, rather, on individuals who muck up the party bureaucracy. At one point the narrator declares that the true causes of the Chernobyl accident are complacency, incompetence, careerism, and demagoguery—qualities that the party battles in the entrenched bureaucrats of the system. In contrast, the cleanup effort was characterized by cooperation, rapid decision-making made possible by the suspension of regular paperwork, and a heroic spirit on the part of the people. This was underscored by including a lengthy segment depicting local Communist Party meetings held following the disaster, meetings at which “meddlers and cowards” are exposed and expelled. The early departure of some not up to the effort validated these characterizations and the comments by Shteinberg. One sees here official reinforcement of the national campaign to undercut the established party bureaucracy. It is important to recall that Gorbachev ascended to power barely a year before the Chernobyl accident, which represented the first major crisis of his administration. His political agenda (as embodied in the campaign for perestroika, uskorenie, and glasnost) was specifically designed to eradicate the bureaucratic stranglehold on the economy and on the process through which decisions were reached and implemented. Since no delay could be tolerated in carrying out emergency measures, the campaign to “eradicate the effects of the accident” afforded a perfect opportunity to demonstrate the essential

Nuclear Power and Ecological Debates in the Soviet Press, Mid-1988 to Mid-1989

role of the party in facilitating cooperation among ministries and overcoming the “territoriality” that enveloped the Soviet system.4 Shevchenko’s documentary also makes a pointed effort to stress the ready availability of medical assistance for the workers and the care taken to minimize the effects felt by the citizenry. Considerable attention is given, for example, to the fight to ensure the integrity and purity of the water supply. And a significant amount of the film’s running time is devoted to the medical teams that treated firefighters ravaged by radiation burns and radiation sickness. It is interesting to note that the film contains the erroneous implication that radiation sickness could have been spread from person to person, but the quick and thorough actions of the army and the medical personnel prevented that from happening. In the process, the amount of radiation released and the number of dead or seriously ill is downplayed.5 A significant feature of the “medical assistance” theme is the failure to mention any foreign contributions of equipment or personnel. (This is particularly striking inasmuch as Gorbachev, in his televised address to the nation on May 14,1986, explicitly thanked Armand Hammer and Dr. Robert Gale for their help; moreover, the very next day all national dailies published a photograph of a smiling party secretary chatting with the two men.) Although never made explicit, the viewer gets the distinct impression that there was no international participation as the Soviet Union coped with the accident mitigation effort.6 The editors seem to have made a conscious decision to stress the self-sufficiency of the Soviet Union to cope with the disaster. This tactic not only served to minimize the severity of the accident, as presented by the documentary, it also reinforced public perceptions of the moral and technological strength of the system, as well as the ability and willingness of the Communist Party to mobilize the nation in time of need. Thus, the entire documentary can be viewed as an effort to legitimate the system in the eyes of a frightened nation. Indeed, the overall effect of the film is to minimize the serious effects of the accident. The clear impression is given that the sarcophagus represents the culmination of the effort, despite the verbal disclaimer that the work of Chernobyl will continue. The scenes of “controlling the silent enemy”— all of the efforts to contain and “control” the spread of radiation—give the impression that this effort was successful. Fittingly, the penultimate visual image to fill the screen is a pastoral one, fields ripe with crops waiting to be harvested, a vision of normalcy.

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The later film Warning, continues this vision by concentrating on the people affected by the disaster. Its overriding theme, despite the name of the film, is that “life must go on.” This is conveyed in the scenes of ordinary people adjusting to their altered life circumstances and in those depicting the cycle of life and death. Indeed, the impression of a return to normalcy is conveyed even in the portions of the film devoted to the disaster site itself and the cleanup effort. As presented by this documentary, the world’s worst nuclear accident is treated in very matter-of-fact fashion by a nation used to dealing with adversity. Despite a few inexcusable mistakes in the beginning, everything is now under control. Scenes from everyday life—people engaged in ordinary activities— provide the visual emphases in Warning. The documentary cuts back and forth between people scenes and scenes from nature. Evacuees are depicted going on with life as usual—moving into a new home, shopping for groceries, chatting with neighbors. Even the scenes that show aspects of the clean-up are “people” scenes, as those heroic figures approach the disaster site in a business-as-usual fashion, then are shown relaxing after hours in their barracks or at the Soviet equivalent of an American USO show. The cycle of life and death is a strong visual image in this work: dead trees are juxtaposed with a mother rocking a cradle, for example. The narrator details elaborate arrangements made for pregnant mothers from the contaminated zone and the attention given to the health and well-being of children born in the home for pregnant evacuees. But the overwhelming visual image is one of normalcy. The first picture of the plant site—the disaster area—appears nearly seven minutes into the film, and such images are kept to a minimum. Even the shots of Pripyat produce the eerie impression that the town awaits the return of its population. This notion is reinforced by the pastoral scenes of rebirth and renewal: trees growing new leaves; gentle spring rain; sparrows that left the village after the accident, but now have returned. Ultimately, the documentary is a fraud. There is no unity among the purported message of the title Warning, the narrator’s script, and the visual images that are portrayed. Indeed, the notion of “warning” is played down and seems almost gratuitous when the film is considered as a whole. Even the scenes that attempt to depict radiation as a silent, invisible killer fail to convey that message; instead, they reinforce the overall theme of pastoral normalcy. The verbal message of the film is one of a potential disaster controlled by great effort on the part of the government, the scientists, and the cleanup workers. And the visual

Nuclear Power and Ecological Debates in the Soviet Press, Mid-1988 to Mid-1989

effect provides no lasting impression of any warning. Rather, it reinforces the underlying message that the narrator was attempting to convey: even this disaster is manageable if we all work together. The only real complaint that the people in this film seem to register is that the government did not get information to them in a timely fashion, that they had no idea what was going on, no idea what they should and should not do. But after reciting these mea culpas, the government is portrayed as moving with care and decisiveness to avert further tragedy, to provide housing and medical care for the people, and to restore the effectiveness of the Chernobyl power plant. The greatest contextual reconstruction of all comes at the end of the seventy-five-minute film, when the sarcophagus, built to contain the spread of radiation from the mortally wounded reactor, is transformed into a monument to Soviet technology and organizational effectiveness, rather than to inferior design and inadequate safety precautions. In the end, technology is vindicated, and the problem is laid at the feet of negligent individuals. Nevertheless, one can discern subtle, but important, shifts in the government’s message. Not only were specific plant workers guilty of negligence—a crime for which they will pay, the script promises—but health officials and individuals within the local party apparatus are to blame for failure to warn the citizens of Pripyat in a timely fashion. The text makes specific reference to the failure of local authorities to meet their obligations to the citizenry by not explaining the steps they could take immediately to reduce their exposure to radiation prior to being evacuated. And the administrator of the refugee maternity hospital declares that the small children who were born there would form their fundamental opinion of the Soviet government and the Communist Party (!) based on the manner in which they and their mothers had been treated after the disaster. Thus, both documentaries manage to bring out the mistakes made by officials in the first hours following the accident. But Warning gives the impression that in 1988 the national government is seeking to enhance its credibility with the public by appearing forthcoming about the withholding of information and the errors that led to the accident in the first place. This effort functions to obscure many other concerns, such as the actual lack of protection for the cleanup workers,7 the delay in evacuating anyone except the families of officials, and the initial withholding of information from the rest of the world as well as from those in the immediate vicinity.

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Warning is remarkable because it alludes to a sort of social contract between the state and the individual. Although never directly verbalized as such, the documentary seems to be reacting to complaints raised by the Chernobyl evacuees and by average people throughout the Ukraine and Byelorussia. The fact of the matter is that people everywhere do judge the quality of government by the way it treats ordinary citizens. To be sure, such a notion had remained largely unspoken within official Soviet political culture. But it came to the fore in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster. Thus, Warning can be interpreted as an attempt, however feeble, on the part of the government to co-opt that issue and utilize it in Gorbachev’s fight against bureaucratic indifference. The overall effect of the 1988 documentary is the creation of ambiguity. As in Chronicle, much emphasis is placed on the Soviet Union’s ability to cope with the accident. In Warning, moreover, the scenes from nature—and their juxtaposition with the remainder of the film—imply that the restrictions on residence in the Chernobyl area are not permanent.8 Both documentaries chronicle remarkable efforts on the part of the government to aid its people: the massive evacuation of the thirty kilometer zone, the volunteerism of those who drove the buses. Again, the effectiveness of the medical effort is emphasized. One sees here a reaction to growing fears—justified, it turns out—that the medical consequences of Chernobyl are much greater than had been admitted. (101; 125) Comparisons to the nation unified against the Nazi invaders are drawn overtly, as the narrator of Warning talks about the Pripyat region having suffered some of the war’s fiercest battles.9 The impressions left by the film are those of heroism and self-sacrifice, here juxtaposed with scenes of camaraderie and leisure-time pleasures. Finally, each documentary devotes considerable attention to scenes from nature and everyday life—a clear effort at reassurance. Much is made in both films of the restarting of the undamaged generating units— obviously an attempt to restore confidence not only in nuclear power and the Chernobyl plant specifically, but also in the Soviet system as a whole. However, the inability of films such as these to overcome either the national trauma induced by the Chernobyl accident or the almost primal fear of radiation experienced by many people was evident in the growing opposition to nuclear power throughout the Soviet Union. What is created is cognitive dissonance, the lasting effect—a contradiction among the facts we know, the text that the narrator recites, and the

Nuclear Power and Ecological Debates in the Soviet Press, Mid-1988 to Mid-1989

more memorable subtext conveyed by the film’s visual images. Ultimately, then, Chernobyl: A Chronicle of Difficult Weeks and Warning reflect the Soviet government’s failed attempt to restructure public knowledge concerning the Chernobyl accident and the various economic, medical, and social impacts the event had on Soviet life. As a result, they had the opposite effect of contributing to the development of a context in which public opposition to nuclear power could flower and even burst into the political spectrum.

THE OFFICIAL PRESS VERSION—THROUGH YEAR TWO To a large extent, official statements regarding the nature of the accident, its causes, and the extent of the damage were couched in vague, generalized terms designed to minimize the seriousness of the situation and to assuage public fear as unfounded. In a June 1988 interview to Novoe vremia, V. Knizhnikov, a physician and member of the National Commission on Radiation Safety, stated I was last at the station not long ago at all. On the whole, the personnel are not now taking a radiation dose above the accepted norm. Of course, even though decontamination has been carried out, there is still some residual contamination. We want to hope and believe that the Chernobyl disaster will be the last of its kind. Our country has taken all possible measures to ensure this: the structure of the nuclear industry has been changed— reactors like Chernobyl’s will no longer be built; additional protective and monitoring systems have been introduced; personnel have been educated and retrained. Still, you cannot close your eyes to the fact that we live in a world where mountains of fissionable material have been accumulated and no one is insured against all eventualities, including terrorist acts. … The basic problems that trouble us are questions concerning the health of the evacuated population … as well as that of people who live in contaminated areas located in some instances hundreds of kilometers away from Chernobyl … Now that two years have passed, we can say that with regard to people’s health we have found virtually no unfavorable deviations. Surface waters are not contaminated. More than 99% of the population received doses lower than

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the existing emergency norms; and where such doses were exceeded, this was due primarily to internal irradiation of individuals who ignored our recommendations and consumed milk from their own cows. In 1987 produce from personal plots—vegetables, potatoes, berries, fruit—fell completely within guidelines. Unfortunately, however, one cannot say the same for milk and meat products, although even here the cleansing process is ongoing. … Some of the children have experienced significant irradiation of the thyroid gland. This happened in the very first days, before we had gotten a clear understanding of the extent of all the contamination and had time to take the necessary measures. The extent of the accident was unprecedented, so the number of trained specialists and the amount of available equipment were insufficient, as well. (emphasis added)

One could critique the statements in this interview almost sentence by sentence. Despite the fact that a reasonable amount of new information regarding health effects was provided here for the first time, each of the highlighted passages is either self-serving, deceptive, or false.10 For example, the contention that “more than 99% of the population received doses lower than the existing emergency norms” is indeed true—fewer than one percent of all Soviet citizens received significant doses of radiation; but that fact is totally irrelevant to those citizens who were unfortunate enough to live in the path of the radiation plume through Byelorussia. As for the claims regarding the installation of new safety systems and new methods for training power plant workers, these are just not true. According to M. Umanets (1989), then director of Kombinat, even in August 1989, Chernobyl’s Units 1 and 2 had not yet been retrofitted with improved control rod systems. And Soviet training methods in the nuclear industry remain the same today as they were prior to the accident: no substantial changes will occur until the Soviet Union acquires Western-built control room simulators sometime in 1993 or later. Knizhnikov’s statement, published in a national outlet by a ranking individual in the health services establishment, represents an obvious attempt at contextual reconstruction of the post-accident situation. Prior to 1986, Soviet pronuclear spokesmen had insisted that civilian nuclear power was totally safe, a position reminiscent of American proponents

Nuclear Power and Ecological Debates in the Soviet Press, Mid-1988 to Mid-1989

who claimed that nuclear plants would produce electrical energy “too cheap to meter.” In 1988, however, Knizhnikov states “you cannot close your eyes to the fact that we live in a world where mountains of fissionable material have been accumulated and no one is insured against all eventualities, including terrorist acts.” That is to say, one hundred percent security cannot be assured in the nuclear age, so accidents will happen. In addition, the explosion was said to have occurred because of an unpredictable sequence of errors on the part of plant personnel. Accordingly, “the number of trained specialists and the amount of available equipment were insufficient” to allow cleanup efforts to proceed smoothly because “the extent of the accident was unprecedented”—not because emergency planning was inadequate for a serious accident. This statement ignores the fact, now relatively well known, that the Soviet government made a conscious cost-saving effort to reduce expenditures on engineered safeguards and other safety-related equipment, including fire protection.11 For example, nuclear plant personnel have often had difficulty contacting off-site emergency teams, including firefighters, because Soviet telephones are so unreliable and secure means of communication were never established. (218) Most significantly, however, according to Knizhnikov the ultimate blame for any serious adverse health consequences did not rest with the Soviet government or the Ministry of Nuclear Power or even with local political and health department officials. Rather, much like the American explanation of the Iranian Airbus tragedy, Knizhnikov states that ultimate responsibility lay with “individuals who ignored our recommendations and consumed milk from their own cows.” Once again, events are reconstructed in such a way that the victim is responsible for his own fate. The official press during this period was awash with the kinds of distortions, misstatements, optimistic projections, and pure falsehoods reflected in Knizhnikov’s public posture. On the whole, official rhetoric contained a number of predictable positions, all of them consistent with specific goals of the establishment. 1. criminal negligence and dereliction of duty on the part of specific individuals who allowed the accident to happen; the ultimate cause was portrayed as overconfidence wrought by years of smooth, trouble-free operation that lulled the operators into believing that serious accidents were impossible;12

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2. personal heroism, self-sacrifice, and devotion to duty on the part of the station’s crew and the fire brigades; efficient, timely relocation of all affected citizens; emphasis on the role of the party in coordinating all emergency efforts and on the valor of specific party members; 3. cleanup efforts that, while incredibly arduous and dangerous, were carried out with maximum efficiency and effectiveness, using the latest in sophisticated equipment, with utmost regard for the health and safety of personnel—said to be thousands of civilian and military volunteers; 4. optimistic projections regarding the ultimate success of cleanup efforts, entombing Unit 4 and restarting the undamaged units, resettlement of Pripyat and other evacuated towns, construction of Slavutich—the new “twenty-first-century city” for station personnel and their families; 5. minimal health effects beyond those suffered by the emergency crews during the first frantic hours of accident mitigation; careful monitoring of evacuees and those not evacuated to ensure there were no adverse radiological effects; and, 6. no contamination of ground water or the Dnepr, and no reason for the populace—particularly in Kiev—to be unduly concerned over the health and well-being of their loved ones. The jury is still out with regard to Kiev’s water supply, although it is known that the sediment at the bottom of the city’s major reservoir—a section of the Dnepr known as the Kievskoe more—is particularly radioactive. Otherwise, aside from statements extolling the incontestable heroism of the emergency workers, only the projections regarding entombment and restart of the undamaged units proved to be accurate.

CONSCIOUSNESS-RAISING: FORMATION OF A SOVIET ECOLOGY MOVEMENT The people, of course, believed little or none of the tranquilizing rhetoric emanating from the authorities. One of the first signs of how little effect the unprecedented barrage of information was having was the campaign to paint growing fears among the population as “radiophobia.” Still, there was little that erupted into the media: from the summer 1987 (when the

Nuclear Power and Ecological Debates in the Soviet Press, Mid-1988 to Mid-1989

last of the documentary povesti was published) until the new year, almost nothing of a controversial—that is, anti-establishment—nature reached the public. But this began to change. Early in January 1988, Literaturnaia gazeta published a narrative poem “The Seven,” by the esteemed Ukrainian poet Borys Olyinik, in honor of the most celebrated of the firemen who lost their lives during the battle to contain the fires sparked by the explosion. It would still be some time before the mainstream press began publishing significant amounts of antinuclear power, antibureaucracy material; but at about the same time, predating this event somewhat, a movement was forming against nuclear power and the “nuclear mafia” that had become entrenched within the nation’s ministry structure. This movement took hold among the intellectual elite in the Ukraine and, most clearly, in Byelorussia—and Olyinik’s narrative poem was its first tangible expression.13 Accordingly, it can be seen that the Soviet antinuclear movement foreshadowed events in Eastern Europe, where the force of political dissent was propelled by intellectuals from other walks of life—predominantly the verbal arts. The Byelorussian-Ukrainian movement was unique, however, in that the literary elite was joined by scientists, often specialists in physics or the health sciences, so that the arrogant charges of “nonspecialist” leveled by the technical elite could be parried effectively. The names of these people have become legendary in the Soviet Union. A. Adamovich, writer G. Medvedev, nuclear engineer M. Gitman, electrical engineer B. Olyinik, writer D. Grodzinsky, radiologist Yu. Shcherbak, physician V. Gubarev, journalist V. Yavorivsky, writer B. Kurkin, law professor

Subsequently, some found themselves elected to the Supreme Soviet and/ or Congress of Deputies—an irrefutable demonstration of the extent to which politics in the USSR had changed. Kurkin and Grodzinsky became leading forces in the Soviet Union’s Greens Movement.

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Mostly, the writing style of these individuals is straightforward and neutral, with the weight of the argument carried by the factual material presented. In the case of Kurkin, however, there is a decided undercurrent of cynicism tending toward the snide. This attitude irritated several of the Ministry and Institute representatives who were drafted to argue for continued acceleration of the Soviet Union’s nuclear power program. One of the singular achievements of this dissident group was its ability to create symbols that appealed to a broad audience. Indeed, by attaining such success, the antinuclear movement succeeded in passing beyond the bounds of dissidence, emerging as the first legitimate locus of unofficial political culture in the history of the Soviet Union. It was Kurkin (1989) who wrote “Letters from a Hostage,” alluding to all of society held hostage by the nuclear power industry. In an article entitled “Honest, They Won’t Blow Up Anymore,” Ales Adamovich (1988) spoke of himself with pride as a “nonspecialist”; as such he represented a counterpoint to the bureaucratic insistence that the public—particularly dilettante writers— had no right to challenge the authority of scientists, engineers, and ministry officials. This argument is reminiscent of similar claims made in American rhetorical studies to the effect that on many issues technical elites have eliminated public opinion from the policy formation mechanism.14 Medvedev, on the other hand, managed to tar the Ministry of Atomic Energy and the prestigious Kurchatov Institute with the sobriquet “incompetence.” As a group, these and other activists attached themselves to Gorbachev’s attack on the bureaucracy and its “command-administrative structure;” in so doing, they brought under intense public scrutiny the derogatory notion of “bureaucratic imperative” (i.e., vedomstvennost). These terms became code-words for a completely new phenomenon in Soviet political culture—a concerted attack on the institutions of power, a major political and economic policy, and the legitimacy of the system itself. This attack was directed not just against specific individuals whose corruption or malfeasance could be blamed for the ills of society— to the extent that such ills ever were discussed in public forum. Remarkably, all of these features found expression in the mainstream print media beginning in late 1988. After the new year, they appeared with ever greater frequency, and led to a fundamental reassessment of Soviet energy policy, at least insofar as questions of design adequacy,15 siting requirements,16 and enhanced operational safeguards are concerned. In the opinion of academician N. N. Ponomarev-Stepnoi (1990), deputy director of the

Nuclear Power and Ecological Debates in the Soviet Press, Mid-1988 to Mid-1989

Kurchatov Institute, it would not now be possible to propose any site for a new Soviet nuclear power plant without generating intense opposition from the local population. Since the spring of 1988, when Gorbachev ordered live television coverage of the Party Congress, the Soviet people and western observers have witnessed ever greater challenges to the legitimacy of the system. The party was rocked by previously unthinkable upheaval, whose groundwork was laid quite carefully by the president: sensing the trend throughout Europe, Gorbachev deliberately removed the reins of power from the party apparatus to the government per se, particularly to the office of the presidency. In our view, however, the wellspring of these systemic changes, and the atmosphere in which such challenges could be uttered in public, stemmed from the truly revolutionary steps that had occurred in Byelorussia and the Ukraine during 1987 and 1988.

ANALYSIS AND CONCLUSIONS This 1988–89 period is particularly interesting because it demonstrates the extent to which popular pressure from below (specifically, from the Ukraine and Byelorussia) affected public discussion of a vital issue nationwide—the future development of nuclear power production—and the extent to which the “official” establishment was incapable of maintaining rhetorical control of public perception or even continuing to define the parameters and limits of the discussion. In terms of its indirect effect on the social fabric of Soviet life—setting aside the radiological and economic consequences of the accident—one may state with some trepidation the following conclusions 1. Chernobyl gave direct impetus to a nascent ecological consciousness throughout the nation. The fact that the accident occurred just a year after Gorbachev assumed power and declared a state policy promoting perestroika, uskorenie, and glasnost was a direct contributing factor; so was the fact that the astounding costs crippled whatever chance might have existed for turning around the Soviet economy.17 2. The antinuclear faction of the ecological movement—the “Greens”—rose to prominence in the republics, specifically in Byelorussia and the Ukraine, as a direct result of state

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3.

4.

5.

6.

indifference to the fate of individual citizens and concerted ministry attempts to continue “business as usual” without taking into account the barely latent fear of radiation among the populace. Leadership of the movement was drawn from both humanist intellectuals and scientists—a pattern to be seen throughout Eastern Europe in subsequent years. The ecological movement broke through the shackles of dissidence, becoming the first legitimate expression of unofficial political culture opposed to policy goals established by the party and government hierarchies. Concern for the fate of the Aral Sea has also burgeoned recently. The establishment unwittingly played into the hands of the movement by adamantly linking civilian nuclear safety with Gorbachev’s proposals for curtailing atomic testing and attempts to limit the deployment of nuclear weapons in Western Europe;18 by classifying all radiological and health-effects data; by forbidding—and instituting criminal penalties for—the production or distribution of personal dosimetry; and generally by carrying out a concerted information campaign minimizing the effects of the accident. Quite surprisingly, the forces opposing nuclear power production took advantage of the existing political climate— characterized by Gorbachev’s campaign against establishment privilege as a means to salvage the floundering economy—and managed to change the terms of the political argument. They reached beyond individual guilt and broadened their attacks to the ministry level. In this way, they challenged the very legitimacy of Soviet institutions, particularly centralized planning and party control of civil society. They succeeded, moreover, in creating rhetorical icons around which the population at large could rally: the citizenry as hostages to nuclear power; the nuclear bureaucracy—ministries, design bureaus, and research institutes—as arrogant defenders of bureaucratic privilege, dismissing the opinion of the masses and ignoring their welfare; this same nuclear bureaucracy as the last bastion of incompetence protected by laws enforcing secrecy in the nuclear industry; and antinuclear advocates proud of being nonspecialists—because that meant they were not corrupted like the bureaucrats and technical experts.

Nuclear Power and Ecological Debates in the Soviet Press, Mid-1988 to Mid-1989

7. The result was a complete operational redefinition of glasnost—a term that had lost its currency as early as 1990—and the creation of a vestigial civil society. Undoubtedly, it is an exaggeration to state that none of what transpired in the former Soviet Union over the past few years would have occurred without Chernobyl, or that Chernobyl made all of this happen. But it is clear that the pace of change within the USSR would not have been nearly as great and the results not nearly as cataclysmic.

NOTES 1. Sarcophagus became an immediate success in the West. Not surprisingly, it was only three years later that the play was produced within the Soviet Union. 2. Two of the reactor units at Chernobyl were restarted in November 1986, prior to completion of the Unit 4 sarcophagus. Unit 3 was restarted in the fall of 1987. See (296). According to I. N. Kambulov, Chief of the Kurchatov Atomic Energy Institute’s “Supervisory Expedition” in charge of off-site decontamination in the thirty kilometer zone surrounding the plant, Units 1 and 2 were restarted because the Soviet Union had no electrical generating reserve capacity and needed the additional capacity entering the 1986–87 winter season (interview, May 1989). N. A. Shteinberg, now chairman of the Ukraine’s nuclear regulatory agency, recently stated, in effect, that the USSR was facing an energy crisis due to the lack of reserve (interview, June 1990). 3. Of course, much more is known today about the extent to which individuals were conscripted, particularly from the ranks of the military, police forces, and KGB internal troops—many of whom have subsequently died. (18; 125) 4. In fact, much more has now been published regarding the bureaucratic and administrative foul-ups that occurred during the hectic months following the accident. For example, Gubarev has written During the first days in Chernobyl I was amazed at how few professionals were working in the (restricted) zone. Oh, yes, there was lots of equipment and personnel. … (But) in the nuclear workers’ town, Pripyat, only a few individuals knew what needed to be done … and the first time I saw in Chernobyl the specialists who had eradicated the Urals accident was May 20. Whereas in the Urals catastrophe we paid the price, first and foremost, for lack of knowledge, in Chernobyl we paid for ignorance and negligence. (190: 19)

5. For instance, it is now admitted that more than five thousand children received more than two hundred rem of radiation. See also (125). 6. By way of contrast, less than two years later, when Armenia was struck by a terrible earthquake, the government and Gorbachev himself thanked the international community for its help, and all such efforts received considerable coverage in the press. News clips of George Bush’s son and grandson were televised nationwide, and the government even praised Radio Liberty for its helpful, concerned coverage. See Moscow News, December 18, 1988; and (410: 1–2). 7. An engineer who had worked at Chernobyl prior to the accident and who participated in the clean-up effort during the summer 1986 stated that many of the workers were

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Nuclear Power and Ecological Debates in the Soviet Press, Mid-1988 to Mid-1989 15. Older reactor units—which the Soviets term “first generation”—are admittedly unsafe. This is not only true of the RBMK design; early versions of the VVER reactor need to be closed, too. Just such an opinion was expressed by A. Kontsevoi, then deputy head of operations in the Nuclear Division of the Ministry of Atomic Energy (interview, June 1990). The problem, of course, is economic. Not only would installed capacity be reduced significantly if all first-generation units were closed, but many “nuclear cities” that have sprung up near remote plant sites would have to be abandoned, because no work would remain for the residents. Although Soviet manpower needs are staggering, these people and their families can’t be sent anywhere, since there is no housing for them. 16. Considerable circumstantial evidence exists to conclude that no seismic analyses were performed even in the case of those reactor sites, such as in Armenia or near Krasnodar, that are known to be highly susceptible to earthquakes. In addition, although the standard Soviet VVER plant design requires huge cooling ponds, the lack of highspeed computers meant there was no way for Soviet designers to model the long-term water table changes that would result from plant construction. Not surprisingly, some sites have begun turning into swamps, a process that takes approximately ten to fifteen years to become evident. 17. Officials formerly serving in the Soviet Ministry of Atomic Energy and Industry have admitted privately that the social costs, which continue to mount, far exceed anything imagined by the Soviet public. It would not be an exaggeration to state that Chernobyl, in and of itself, drove the Soviet budget deficit totally out of control and propelled the tottering economy over the edge of bankruptcy. According to Carothers, (101: 8) Shcherbak has estimated the total cost will reach four hundred billion dollars. 18. In retrospect, the association of Chernobyl with the destructive potential of a nuclear war, an ideological position strongly pushed by the Soviet government in order to diffuse initial anger over the failure to inform the world about the accident, may have lost much more from a strategic standpoint than it gained as a tactical move.

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CHAPTER 19

The Final Days: The Development of Argumentative Discourse in the Soviet Union Marilyn J. Young and Michael K. Launer Provenance: Originally published in Argumentation 16, no. 4 (January 2002): 443–458. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Fourth International Conference on Argumentation, International Society for the Study of Argumentation (ISSA), Amsterdam, The Netherlands, June 1998, and published in the Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation, June 16–19, 1998, edited by Franz H. van Eemeren et al., 903–908. Amsterdam: SICSAT, 1999. Copyright Holder: © Springer Nature Switzerland AG (Springer-Verlag), used by permission Description: This study presents a rhetorical analysis of political discourse in the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster leading up to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

T

he value of argument in the public sphere and its relation to social change is a concept that is shared by most communication scholars— the idea that argument in some form is an intrinsic part of democracy or, at least, that it is a necessary concomitant to democracy. In Johnstone’s words, “[d]emocracy rests upon the use of discourse as an instrument of political change.” (236: 320) Indeed, the very attempt “to marshal public opinion or public support for some policy” implies acceptance of “forms of political action that prevail in a democratic society.” (236: 318) Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (358: 55) apply this notion specifically to argumentation. We suggest that the Western tradition of democracy entails doing the public’s business in public. This is an important concept, one that marks a fundamental distinction among societies. While recognizing that even in the most stable democracies little of what is considered the public business actually is conducted in the open, one must nevertheless keep in mind

The Final Days

the fact that in many authoritarian or totalitarian states there has existed no concept of the public’s business apart from the government’s affairs, so there is no thought of addressing concerns in the open. The idea that some essential portion of civic business should be played out in public is the concept that provides the philosophical ground upon which policy argument may occur: in a real sense it creates space for policy argument to exist. Argument, then, may be seen as a necessary part of the process of doing the public’s business; where the ground for that argument does not exist, it must somehow be created.1 But where there is no history of such a process, how does the concept develop, how does the tradition take root? Many of the observations made in reference to Western pluralist societies assume even greater significance when applied to the role argument has played in the socio-political changes that have in recent years transformed the former Soviet Union. In this paper we intend to explore some of the ways in which social change and argumentation interact: in particular, we will consider the way governmental information policies, accepted argumentative structures, and the notion of public discourse develop as society undergoes fundamental transition. By way of background we shall review the beginnings of pluralist public policy argumentation in a specific society where none had existed previously: the Soviet Union of the pre-disintegration period. Before turning to more contemporary events, we will concentrate on two critical media incidents: the 1983 downing of the Korean airliner and the 1986 Chernobyl explosion. One must keep in mind that, all other differences notwithstanding, most political communication in the former USSR, as in the United States of America, was and is a mediated phenomenon that relies on mass dissemination.2 For that reason we will focus on the media as the primary source of information and opinion formation. Our methodology is historical/critical, and our corpus is drawn primarily from official print media during the period 1983 through 1991. Of particular relevance to this discussion is the process whereby public argumentative space comes to be created. In this discussion, we explore at least one of the ways this may happen: in the movement from an authoritarian to a pluralist form of government, the space for public argument arises from the citizens’ loss of faith in the existing governmental structure.3 As this loss of faith intensifies, the ground for argument begins to expand and continues expanding until the process becomes

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self-sustaining. At this point, every incremental change in the amount of public argument intensifies the loss of faith that initiated the process, because groups and individuals begin seriously questioning the ability of their government to secure the welfare of the people. The process is recursive: opposition becomes more influential as it becomes more frequent, providing ever greater opportunities for the continued extension of argumentative ground. Significantly, an authoritarian government’s best course is to ignore the opposition. For if government participates in the discussion, it legitimates the notion of argument as part of the process of governing. Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca state that “[t]o agree to discussion means [a] readiness to see things from the viewpoint of the interlocutor.” (358: 55) Thus, merely by participating in the argument, government sanctions the concept of oppositional debate, including the risk of losing. Moreover, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca note, “the use of argumentation implies that one has renounced resorting to force alone, that value is attached to gaining the adherence of one’s interlocutor by means of reasoned persuasion.” Consequently, authoritative regimes typically do not engage in public argument; they neither justify nor provide a rationale for the actions they take. Rather, “by the use of such measures as censorship, … [political leaders] will try to make it difficult, if not impossible, for their opponents to achieve the conditions preliminary to any argumentation.” Obviously, denying access to all state controlled media constitutes a significant restriction of the ability to engage in argumentation. That certainly was the traditional mode in the old Soviet Union. As an example, consider the plight of Soviet dissidents. Virtually everyone in the society knew they existed; many may have even thought they had a point. Nevertheless, they continued their protests—including underground publication, or “samizdat”—in obscurity; the only public acknowledgment emanating from the government was the occasional arrest and trial of a writer, followed by imprisonment or exile. With no access to the media—including nearly total news blackout of court proceedings— dissidents had no means at their disposal to engage the state in public debate. Thus, their efforts had little social impact within the borders of the Soviet Union. So, while there was a kind of subterranean discourse, the mechanisms for expanding that discourse were generally unavailable. Few people had shortwave radios, the only source for external information, and almost no one outside official ministries had fax machines. Even ham

The Final Days

radios, which were responsible for disseminating both information and misinformation in the confusing days following the Chernobyl nuclear accident, were not widely available. It is our claim that the Soviet government was forced into a public debate first over Chernobyl, then over the issue of nuclear power, a situation which was unique in the history of that society. Further, at the point the state felt constrained or compelled to engage in argument, the upheaval that occurred in 1991 became inevitable.4 Although the rapidity with which events transpired and their specific form were unpredictable, over time some sort of fundamental change had become necessary. Nor should one be misled by the rapid, almost precipitous, nature of the transformation, for no movement of this magnitude occurs without the seeds having been planted many years before. There has been much commentary both in the media and among scholars about the Soviet Union’s economic problems and the role that those problems played in all subsequent events. In fact, Steven Cohen (116) had predicted that if something was not done about the Soviet economy it was only a matter of time before the structure would collapse.5 But there were other factors one must keep in mind, and it would be wrong to focus exclusively on economic problems as the cause of the break-up of the Soviet Union. In the international arena, the Soviet government experienced continuing problems in negotiations with the United States. Domestically, the Soviet people were grappling with the social impact of the war in Afghanistan; and, in addition to other factors, they were deeply affected by the aftermath of the nuclear accident at Chernobyl. On the other hand, it is important to keep in mind the way those factors interact with the economy. For example, the war in Afghanistan was a drain on the Soviet economy, much as the war in Vietnam was on the US economy. As for Chernobyl, the economic impact of that disaster still has not been measured accurately, but surely the social and financial costs will continue to burden the people of Belarus and Ukraine through many generations to come. Prior to 1986 there was very little social activity in the public sphere of Soviet life that scholars would recognize as argument. The postulate that underlay all other considerations was the very notion of information itself, which was perceived as the inextricable bonding of fact to interpretation. No fact was presented on its own; rather, it was explicitly linked to some political interpretation. Traditional Soviet rhetoric stemmed from

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universal principles; its purpose was to move towards greater wisdom, thus contributing to the goal of perfecting the Communist state. Since true knowledge of historical processes was provided by Marxist ideology, the function of the information dissemination system created by the Bolsheviks was not to search for knowledge but, instead, “to bring the fruits of Marxist analysis to the people.” (247: 6) As recently as the beginning of the 1980s, Soviet theories of mass communication were still imbued with this ideological conception. The Leninist ideal for an information system was reiterated most succinctly by Evseev in a semi-official publication: “The press, television, radio, oral propaganda, and agitation must assist the Soviet citizen in orienting himself correctly in domestic life and in international events.” (151: 18) Hence, in a way, the entire system was a propaganda network designed to interpret selected events in the world. In the wry comment of one observer, Soviet television newscasts were described not as a “mirror” but as a “magnifying glass.” (303; 209) We would maintain that, in a system like this, the news itself performed an even greater rhetorical function than it would ordinarily have, for example, in the United States, and that it becomes the equivalent of public oratory in a society which has no traditional forms of oratory.6 Even during much of the Gorbachev era, news was not presented for its own sake, but as an interpretation and as proof that the postulates of the socialist state generally, and the current administration particularly, were correct. Political and social crises always test the strength of such systems, and there have been a number of particularly significant events in the preceding two decades. What is most striking about such crises is the greater— rather than lesser—reliance on traditional communication mechanisms. In the traditional Soviet mode, crises, tragedies, disasters were typically not reported until an appropriate interpretation could be provided. Many incidents, particularly natural disasters and man-made tragedies, were not reported at all; on the other hand, political and social crises were given the interpretation most in tune with current policy goals of the state. Moreover, despite some fundamental changes that had occurred in Soviet media, news delivery remained a bonding of events to policy, with policy rather than events more instrumental in determining the nature, the extent, and even the timing of news coverage. The traditional response pattern exhibited by the Soviet information apparatus was so ingrained that its development can be followed quite clearly through six stages: initial silence;

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attacks on Western media sources; a burst of rhetorical activity setting forth the government’s position (interpretation); a public statement by the head of government; decrease in the volume of rhetorical activity; and elevation of the official interpretation into the long-term memory of the state.7 In our opinion the process of overt change—or the beginning of the end, in terms of this analysis—really started with the 1983 Korean airliner incident. When this tragedy occurred, Russia was still part of the USSR and, hence, was operating under the old Soviet system. Indeed, that incident illustrates the way in which that system operated whenever a factual event occurred—understanding that until the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident, a disaster such as the destruction of KAL 007 was typically not reported in the Soviet press at all. One of the unique things about the airliner incident was that ultimately it was discussed at great length. The same cannot be said for earlier catalytic events that may have altered citizens’ perceptions of the infallibility and benevolence of the state. Some commentators, for example, date the earliest seeds of change from the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968—Prague Spring, as it is known in the West. The peacetime invasion of an ally, while not discussed in the Soviet media of the time, shocked many who learned of it. Certainly the Soviet war in Afghanistan was a factor. Again, little was said in the media, but the body bags concealing the remains of Soviet youth made a profound impression. Nevertheless, in the early stages, each of the six phases of the traditional pattern of response to crises was illustrated very dramatically in the KAL incident. First there was an initial period of silence, that is no response at all, no indication that anything had occurred, while facts were gathered and interpretations were considered. Then there was a typically reflexive response to Western news sources including the various government supported radio stations that were broadcasting into the Soviet Union telling the populace that these events had occurred; this response was critical of Western sources for raising a “ruckus” and generating anti-Soviet hysteria. The third stage would be development of the government interpretation of the event; at this point there would be a burst of rhetorical activity characterized by well-defined starting and ending points. Fourth, there would be a culmination of the interpretive process via a public statement by the head of government, after which the rhetorical activity would dramatically drop off; finally that official interpretation moved into the canon

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of public culture to be brought out again at appropriate times as proof that the interpretation of the new event was, and remained, correct. This last is the process of historical analogy, which Hinds and Windt (203) argue is the essential characteristic of rhetoric. Typically, the United States engaged in very similar behavior every time an administration submitted a treaty with the Soviets [now Russians] for Congressional approval and opponents would bring out all the past treaties that the USSR had allegedly violated. One can conclude that the phenomenon is probably not culture-specific; nevertheless, it was very noticeable in Soviet rhetoric. As we have indicated, the KAL incident followed the traditional pattern very clearly. In a month’s time, the incident progressed in stages from a nonevent which was completely ignored (initially there was a three line statement in Pravda followed by virtually the identical statement in Izvestiia), to a deliberate provocation designed to entrap the Soviet Union into destroying the Korean intruder. (276) The development of those arguments is clearly traceable in the Soviet press through a number of iterations. (483) Yuri Andropov’s published statement on September 28, 1983, provided the final, authoritative interpretation of that event The sophisticated provocation masterminded by the United States special services with the use of a South Korean plane is an example of extreme adventurism in politics. … The guilt of its organizers, no matter how hard they may dodge and what false versions they may put forward, has been proved. (Pravda, September 28, 1983, 5)

The official Soviet government position was never completely believed by the Soviet people. Radio Liberty polls found that a significant percentage of Soviet citizens traveling in the West did not believe the government version of what happened to the Korean airliner. (374)8 Such dissonance was an indicator of the beginning of erosion, particularly since, in 1983, those who were allowed to travel abroad were party members whose loyalty had been vetted. Further, the survey found that nearly half of those surveyed had gotten their information from Western radio—a forbidden source in Brezhnev’s USSR—indicating a willingness to defy prevailing authority. From the tragedy of KAL 007, the Soviet information apparatus learned a bitter lesson regarding its vulnerability to Western propaganda. In response, the government chose to target domestic propaganda at an

The Final Days

incident that otherwise might never have been mentioned in the media at all. The confrontation also demonstrated that in a crisis situation, because of the need to interpret events ideologically, the Soviet propaganda mechanism was largely reactive rather than proactive: (225; 276) the lag time in the response simply allowed others—specifically the West—to get their interpretation in first. And, this episode underscored the importance of public image—something Gorbachev was able to take advantage of later on. Finally, and for this analysis, most significantly, Soviet rhetoric in the aftermath of the KAL tragedy took on a justificatory tone that was an early sign of the need to engage in public argument. The debate itself must have seemed very strange to much of the Soviet public, because the state-controlled mass media were responding to allegations available only via shortwave radio, technology that was not available to the vast majority of Soviet citizens. Nevertheless, the fact that the government felt compelled to respond to reports about the shootdown that were being broadcast into the USSR signaled a vulnerability that would become manifest some three years later. The rather public discussion of the incident, complete with unprecedented press conferences, coupled with a measure of cynicism regarding the official version of events, indicated that the seeds of change were in place. Less than three years later, the Chernobyl nuclear accident again challenged the constraints of the Soviet information system. Once again an event that had occurred within the borders of the Soviet Union was generating extensive coverage worldwide as a catastrophe of international proportions. Like KAL, Chernobyl presented a true crisis of information and information policy for the Soviet Union both domestically and internationally. Predictably, the initial response of even the progressive Gorbachev government was to follow the traditional model. The entire world was scandalized by the delay before the accident was announced: the reactor blew up at 1:04 am on Saturday, April 26, 1986 (22:04 GMT on April 25) but was first reported by the Swedish government on Monday afternoon. The Soviet government issued a terse press release via the official news agency TASS shortly before the 9:00 p.m. national newscast, Vremia.9 Editors at the central newspapers in Moscow were initially forbidden to publish any reports, and no reporters were dispatched to the scene for several days. Local radio and television did not cover the explosion or the fire. Soviet national television did not even show a still photo

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of the accident site until May 1, and the first news film was presented only on May 4. (483: 105–107) It is now apparent that the Soviet information apparatus had lost control of the situation almost from the beginning. Nevertheless, despite the fundamental changes that would ultimately be wrought in the Soviet news dissemination system, the government persevered in attempting to interpret the event to political advantage. Chernobyl was said to demonstrate the horrors of nuclear war. In this way, the accident could be linked rhetorically to the Soviet testing moratorium, each day of which was numbered in Pravda, and to Mr. Gorbachev’s proposal for the elimination of nuclear weapons by the year 2000.10 The impact of Chernobyl as a rhetorical event, as an event that forced the government to justify its actions to a disbelieving public, has not been analyzed fully and certainly has been under-appreciated. The amount of material that was generated by the Soviet media with regard to this one incident is almost overwhelming. And the behaviors that were manifested by the Soviet government were unprecedented in the country’s history. Nevertheless, because there were no institutionalized means for disseminating the kind of justificatory rhetoric that became necessary in the aftermath of the disaster, the government found itself engaging in a wide range of efforts to re-focus the people’s perceptions of what had happened. In dozens of interviews published in regional newspapers, ordinary citizens complained that they had not been warned of the danger. These comments reflect a startling realization among the populace that the government was not interested in protecting them, but was much more interested in smoothing things over and making it appear as if nothing were wrong. This crisis was the sort of jolt to public trust that can easily cause an erosion of faith. It occurred in a society vastly different from societies familiar to Western scholars, a society much different even from the Russia and Ukraine of today. Forty five thousand people lived in the workers’ village of Pripyat, within three miles of the Chernobyl nuclear station, the lives of most of them inextricably bound to the plant itself. Reactor Unit 4 exploded with a force sufficient to completely destroy the huge building that housed it. A concrete cover for the reactor vessel head, weighing about one hundred thousand pounds, was blown off to one side, landing on edge. Yet no one in Pripyat reacted. All the next day, despite the fact that smoke was billowing up from the disaster site, life seems to

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have gone on as usual, with mothers hanging out laundry and doing their shopping, with children playing outdoors, and teenagers and adults sunning themselves on apartment house rooftops in the early spring warmth. (294: 14–15, 27) No one seemed to be aware of a problem until the 1100 evacuation buses arrived during the night of April 27–28. One can only speculate about the degree of trust—or fear—required for people to ignore the dramatic events occurring nearby, but it is difficult to imagine such passivity anywhere in Europe or the United States, for example. And some measure of the breach of the social compact between the people and the government of the USSR—the faith that they would be taken care of— can be gauged by the utter panic that ensued throughout Ukraine once the people became aware of the accident and its magnitude. In the first few days following the April 28 announcement (two full days after the explosion), parents threw their children onto any train leaving Kiev, often without even knowing where it was going. Over and over again in interviews people complained “they didn’t tell us,” “they didn’t tell us we were in danger.” During the next two weeks, people crammed into outbound trains, headed anywhere they had relatives who could shelter them. Chernobyl forever changed the way information is handled in the states of the former Soviet Union. News reporting of the massive clean-up effort ultimately became almost immediate. There were television cameras on the scene of the accident after the first week; there have been movies made about it; there have been documentaries; there are plays, there are poems, there are novels. And while some of that was unofficial, much of it was also official. There was a whole series of documentary films that came out after Chernobyl, at least two of which, Warning and the Chronicle of Difficult Weeks, constituted a type of ideological advertising for the government’s political message.11 At the same time, the government was constrained because it did not really have an institutionalized way of making its arguments; the films represented an attempt to change people’s perceptions indirectly. It does not appear that they were very successful. Over time, Chernobyl inspired debate, not just about the relationship between citizen and state with respect to the danger resulting from the accident itself. It also spawned an unprecedented debate about the environment and the role of the individual in ecology. In many ways this was a safe debate for the government to engage in—or so officials thought— and it represented the first step toward true public discourse. Gorbachev had opened the door with his policy of glasnost, announced just one year

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earlier; yet, while glasnost signaled a change in the relationship among the citizen, the state, and the public realm, it was never intended to address a situation such as a nuclear accident. Thus, Chernobyl became an argumentative wedge, a wedge that overtly separated the state from its control over public information and knowledge. It is this separation that created the space for argument to occur. The aftermath of Chernobyl illustrates the point that where ground for debate can be created, it will gradually expand. For, in the period following the accident, there was an explosion of discussion about ecological issues. To a great extent, debates over ecology served as a convenient and legitimate battleground for expressing center-periphery tensions which already existed in Soviet society, but which previously had no discursive outlet; by allowing these debates to occur, the government appeared to sanction them.12 An example is the 1988 decision taken by the Khmelnitsky oblast soviet in the Ukraine to halt construction of the nuclear station being built there. This was an unprecedented action that was replicated across the republic: “Suddenly people demanded the right to make their own decisions on such critical questions as whether they wanted a nuclear power station in their area.” (131: 94) Nevertheless, through the second anniversary of the Chernobyl accident, official descriptions and interpretations of the tragedy predominated in Soviet media. Dawson notes [A] detailed survey of the Soviet and Ukrainian press during the 1986–87 period indicates that information on the accident was still highly restricted and published reports were often intentionally falsified to obscure the true magnitude of the disaster. While the high-circulation press permitted publication of articles dealing with the progress of the accident cleanup and investigation into its causes, no articles were published which questioned Moscow’s competence to safely operate nuclear power stations or the government’s plans to dramatically expand nuclear power facilities in Ukraine. (131: 68–69)

However, in mid-1988, expressions of public pressure in Belorussia, Russia, the Ukraine and the Caucasus republics turned very negative, reaching the point of attributing blame to the Soviet system itself rather than to specific individuals or organizations.13 Then, starting in mid-1989, mainstream national media began to echo the dissatisfaction that initially

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had been expressed only in the regional press. Coverage of Chernobyl remained a prominent feature of the Soviet media for five years. Even today, each anniversary of the event spawns features in all the mass media. Also after the second anniversary, an intense argument was waged on the pages of the national press over the related issues of scientific authority, bureaucratic privilege, and official indifference to public welfare. The public, of course, believed little or none of the tranquilizing rhetoric emanating from the authorities; one of the first signs of how little effect this unprecedented barrage of information was having was the development of a government-sponsored campaign to paint growing fear of nuclear power among the population as mere “radiophobia.” At about the same time a movement was forming among the intellectual elite in the Ukraine, Russia, and Belorussia against nuclear power and the “nuclear mafia” that had become entrenched within the nation’s ministry structure. And, to the extent that what Gorbachev called establishmentarianism was one of the crucial stumbling blocks to economic reform, the rhetorical thrust of nuclear power opponents resonated with ideas that the central government wished to promote. In other words, the antinuclear forces successfully linked their appeals to the perestroika reforms. But the government’s national energy policy, which was based on rapid development of all forms of electrical generating capacity, including nuclear power, put the ministries in an ambivalent position vis-à-vis conservation, fuel efficiency, and pollution control—all programs advocated by the Soviet Greens. One of the singular achievements of the antinuclear group was its ability to create symbols that appealed to a broad audience. Indeed, by attaining such success, the antinuclear movement succeeded in passing beyond the bounds of dissidence, emerging as the first legitimate locus of unofficial political culture. In an article entitled “Honest, They Won’t Blow Up Anymore” (39) Ales Adamovich spoke of himself as a nonspecialist (nonexpert), and as such he challenged the bureaucratic insistence that the public and particularly dilettante writers had no right to question the authority of scientists, engineers, and ministry officials.14 These terms became codewords for a completely new phenomenon in Soviet political culture—a concerted attack on the institutions of power, on a major political and economic policy, and on the legitimacy of the system itself. Remarkably, all of these features found expression in the mainstream print media beginning in late 1988. They soon led to a fundamental reassessment of Soviet energy policy, at least with regard to questions of design

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adequacy, siting requirements, and enhanced operational safeguards, leading to a moratorium on new construction and the abandonment of several sites then being built. In the opinion of one prominent scholar, it would no longer be possible to propose any site for a new Soviet nuclear power plant without generating intense opposition from the local population.15 Despite the anti-intellectual tenor of much movement rhetoric, in many places scientists joined the chorus of critics. One such place was Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod), where the government was constructing a nuclear-powered heating plant. A group of scientists from the physics institute led the opposition, convincing their audience that “the absolute safety of the Gorky AST could never be achieved.” (131: 104) In July 1988, other scientific institutes joined in a publicity campaign against the heating plant that, after some resistance, ultimately received extensive local television coverage (see 131: 104). This 1988–89 period is particularly interesting because it demonstrates the unprecedented extent to which popular pressure from below affected public discussion of a vital issue—the future development of nuclear power production—and the extent to which the establishment was incapable of maintaining rhetorical control of public perception or even of continuing to define the parameters and limits of the discussion. As a consequence, Chernobyl had a substantial effect on the social fabric of Soviet life—even ignoring the radiological and economic consequences of the accident. Leadership of the ecological movement16 broke through the rhetorical shackles of dissidence—its isolation from society’s information dissemination system—becoming the first legitimate expression of unofficial political culture opposed to policy goals established by the party and government hierarchies. In this way, the movement challenged the very legitimacy of Soviet institutions—particularly centralized planning and party control of civic society. Writers such as Adamovich even succeeded in creating rhetorical icons around which the population at large could rally: 1) the citizenry as hostages to nuclear power; 2) the nuclear bureaucracy—ministries, design bureaus, and research institutes—as arrogant defenders of bureaucratic privilege who dismiss the opinion of the masses and ignore their welfare; 3) this same nuclear bureaucracy as the last bastion of incompetence protected by laws enforcing secrecy in the nuclear industry; and 4) antinuclear advocates proud of being nonspecialists because that meant they were not corrupted like the bureaucrats and technical experts.

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As a result, in the aftermath of Chernobyl there emerged a space within which, for the first time, policy argument on the part of ordinary citizens could occur. The Green movement promptly occupied that space, developing an ecology argument that provided the basis for a growing lack of trust in the institutions of government, which provided in turn more ground for argument to occur. And ultimately it foreshadowed the events of August 1991. The crumbling of the Soviet empire had begun two years earlier, of course, with the breaking away of Eastern Europe and the destruction of the Berlin Wall. Perhaps, these events, too, are the direct descendants of changing information policy in the USSR; certainly, these incidents did little to bolster the Soviet people’s faith in the ability of their government to secure the common welfare; rather, circumstances signaled the continued erosion of the autocratic Soviet state. But surely no one could have predicted the events of August 1991. Indeed, the coup attempt itself indicated just how far change had already penetrated the Soviet state. The attempted deposing of Gorbachev was thwarted in part because the new freedom of information enabled the domestic and foreign press to carry the story immediately, with no intervening period for interpretation and analysis. The bumbling ineptitude of the coup plotters was no doubt to some degree the result of their utter failure to comprehend the new situation. Their initial—and traditional—tale of Gorbachev’s “illness” was not only disbelieved, it was ridiculed in the world media. The world, which was suddenly on their doorstep looking in, was horrified at the turn of events. The plotters hesitated; and into the breach rushed Boris Yeltsin. The rest, as they say, is history. Yet, one cannot imagine these events playing out in the same way even five years earlier. The rhetorical situation had changed dramatically in the years following Chernobyl. The press had begun using the national media to discuss issues of significance. New outlets were springing up daily, despite the chronic shortage of paper. Television was flexing its muscle; even the now defunct Vremia, once the most watched television news program in the world, developed a new look, with modern graphics and on-location reporting. Talk shows that criticized the government became popular fare. In short, there was an information revolution, not in the technological sense, but in terms of content and control. In the process, the ground for public discourse continued to expand, until it encompassed and challenged the existence of the state itself.

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In the 1960s, communication scholars in the United States talked about “body rhetoric” and activists talked about putting yourself on the line in the civil rights and antiwar movements. During those same years, Soviet citizens used nonverbal communication to avoid drawing attention to themselves: visitors from the West were struck by the unwillingness to make eye contact, people looking at the ground, shrinking within themselves to avoid notice. Recalling that period, which continued until only a few short years ago, remembering how oblivious the residents of the Chernobyl region were to the drama unfolding within sight of their doorsteps, the vigorous ecological debates following Chernobyl become all the more remarkable. But the rhetorical behavior exhibited in the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg in August 1991 demonstrates the extent of change. Debates about ecology are silent now, overshadowed by other (largely economic) concerns. Interestingly, it appears that the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the achievement of independence on the part of the republics dissipated the fervor of the antinuclear debate; decisions about nuclear power were now in their own hands and this, coupled with the economic crisis, put the issue in an entirely different perspective. Currently the debates center on the economy, the constitution, and the balance of power between the President and the parliament: how much socialism, how much capitalism, what sorts of social safety nets should there be. And there are still threats of censorship, even, in some cases, indirect forms of censorship.17 But policy discussions proceed in the public media and on the street, as well as in private in the halls of government. One need only look to the most recent Russian tragedy—the loss of the submarine Kursk and its crew—to see both echoes of the old and promise of the new. Initially, President Putin turned a cold shoulder to public cries for information and action, continuing his vacation on the Black Sea. But the force of the public outcry, coupled with the insistence of the media, resulted in an about-face. Within days, the President accepted Western help with the rescue attempt and even visited Murmansk, the home port of the Kursk, where he comforted the families of the dead sailors and promised an investigation and recovery of the bodies. One cannot envision such a scene twenty years earlier. Nevertheless, what we see today in Russia is still only the beginning of a civil society, and it may yet fall apart under the weight of economic collapse, corruption, and criminal activity. Many of the rhetorical choices sound disturbingly familiar, from

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reactionaries’ open yearnings for the days of Communism to reformers’ inability to shake off their deterministic roots. Most recently, politicians from heads of state to legislators and parliamentarians are wondering where Vladimir Putin, the new President, will lead the troubled country. It is still difficult to predict whether there ever will be anything truly resembling a Western-style democracy in any of the states of the former Soviet Union. But things will never again be the way they once were.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors are grateful to Alexander I. Yuriev, St. Petersburg (Russia) State University; David Cratis Williams, University of Missouri at Rolla; and Bruce Gronbeck, University of Iowa, for their advice and support. Scott Elliott, our research assistant, also provided invaluable help.

NOTES 1. In Western democracies, this sometimes is manifest as an exposé or, in its milder form, an investigative article that reveals previously hidden information about governmental decisions, plans, expenditures. In totalitarian or authoritarian states, such materials usually emerge as part of a coordinated effort to implement specific governmental policies. 2. In the USSR, as in most parts of the world, it was impossible to completely control the word-of-mouth spread of news. What we are concerned with, however, is the control of public information and the authoritarian binding of information to policy as described by Kenez. (247) 3. Governments in many of the nations deemed by Westerners to be the most pernicious nevertheless enjoy the support of an overwhelming majority of the citizenry. 4. Even by 1990 rhetorical conditions within the country had changed to such an extent that all sessions of the new Soviet parliament were televised live throughout the nation “from gavel to gavel,” with deputies openly challenging the policies of the Gorbachev administration. 5. Professor Alexander Yuriev, a political psychologist at St. Petersburg University, made a similar prediction at a Party Congress in 1982. Private communication, October 1996. 6. One might argue that the current histrionic tone adopted by even the mainstream media in the United States has altered the traditional rhetorical function of the press. 7. For an extended discussion, see (276). 8. The figures in the survey represent unweighted frequency counts and the sample is biased in favor of urban educated males of Russian nationality who were members of the Communist Party. Consequently, the results of the survey cannot be projected to the Soviet population as a whole. In addition, those with the proclivity to defy the government and the party by listening to Western radio in the first place, might have

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Part Two: Chernobyl, Eco-Nationalism, and Loss of Rhetorical Control a proclivity to reject the official Soviet version and disapprove of the government’s action. 9. “An accident has occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, and one of the reactors was damaged. Measures are being taken to mitigate the effects of the accident. Aid is being given to those affected. A government commission has been set up.” 10. The Soviet government used a similar strategy in 1988, following the US downing of Iran Air 655 in the Persian Gulf. In this instance, the Soviets, through official print media such as Pravda and Krasnaia zvezda, argued that the failure of the Aegis radar system to differentiate between the civilian airliner and a fighter plane foretold potentially disastrous problems with the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), were that antiballistic system ever to be built and deployed by the United States. See, for example, Pravda, July 4, 1988 and Krasnaia zvezda, July 8, 1988. 11. For an extended discussion, see (483). 12. For a thorough discussion from the perspective of resource mobilization, see (131). 13. There is a striking resemblance here to the developmental steps of radical organizations in the United States—for example, Students for a Democratic Society. A turning point in the evolution of that organization occurred in 1965, when its leadership “named” the established social mechanisms for making policy decisions as the inherent cause of society’s ills. Much of that rhetoric, albeit in a milder form, was subsequently reflected in the mainstream press, and echoes of that era remain today in references to “the system.” See (473). Perhaps it should not be surprising that the Russian ecological movement would follow a similar path, for within the constraints of the Soviet system they were clearly becoming radicalized—and losing faith in the system is an essential step in that process. 14. This argument is reminiscent of similar claims made in American rhetorical studies to the effect that on many issues technical elites have eliminated public opinion from policy formation. 15. Academician N. N. Ponomarev-Stepnoi, Deputy Director of the Kurchatov Institute. Personal interview, June 1990. 16. Significantly, this leadership was drawn from both humanist intellectuals and scientists, a pattern to be seen throughout Eastern Europe in subsequent years. 17. Most recently, the offices of ITV television, part of the Most Media Group, were raided for “tax purposes”—a common ploy during the Communist years. And one of the most popular television shows agreed to drop its Putin puppet because the President’s advisers found the characterization of the President to be offensive. Shortly after the raid, the head of Most Media, Vladimir Gusinsky, was arrested, held briefly, then charged with embezzlement. Moscow Times, June 14, 2000.

CHAPTER 20

Ukraine Nuclear Power Struggles for Survival V. M. Kramchenkov1 and Michael K. Launer Provenance: Originally published in Forum for applied research and public policy 11, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 113–117. Copyright Holder: The University of Tennessee Energy, Environment, and Resources Center and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, used by permission Description: This article describes the technical, diplomatic, and socio-economic difficulties facing Ukraine’s civilian nuclear power program a few years after the country achieved independence.

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kraine’s civilian electricity industry currently boasts five nuclearpower facilities whose future is tangled in an intricate web of economic woes, international disputes, and public fears.2 As a result, long-term prospects for the country’s nuclear-power industry remain uncertain. Ukraine’s nuclear industry is coordinated by GOSKOMATOM, which is a ministry level government agency that oversees the development of nuclear power. Meanwhile, officials at the power stations themselves retain responsibility for the day-to-day operation of the units. Regulatory oversight is provided by the ministries of health and environmental protection. The latter houses the Nuclear Regulatory Agency, which is charged with responsibility for ensuring nuclear safety and radiation protection at nuclear power stations and other facilities, such as hospitals, that handle nuclear materials. Before the collapse of communism and the breakup of the former Soviet Union, nearly one fourth of all electricity generated in Ukraine came from nuclear power. The five unit Zaporozhe plant—Ukraine’s largest producer of nuclear power—contributed about one-seventh of Ukraine’s total output of electricity.

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Nuclear power’s contribution to Ukrainian electricity has since doubled to nearly fifty percent because many fossil-fuel plants have been shut down—largely in response to rising fuel costs. Zaporozhe currently generates between twenty and twenty-five percent of all electricity produced in the country. Both figures will increase when Zaporozhe’s sixth unit comes on line, which is scheduled for March 1996. On a darker note, however, runaway inflation has led to the nonpayment of bills, a problem that now afflicts every market segment. Manufacturers do not pay suppliers; suppliers do not pay transporters; and employers often do not pay workers for several months at a time. Such trends lead to two conclusions. First, nuclear power will become an even more vital force behind Ukrainian industrial strength; as a result, the health of nuclear power will be an essential prerequisite to the nation’s future economic well-being. Second, the economic woes currently plaguing Ukraine—including persistent rampant inflation—will continue to affect every aspect of Ukrainian society, including the energy sector. Although industrial production throughout Ukraine continues to decline dramatically, power plants are struggling to keep pace with user demand for electricity. Consumption of electricity has declined considerably, but generating capacity has declined even more precipitously, due to the shutdown of fossil-fuel plants because oil and coal have become so expensive. The result is periodic brownouts and rolling blackouts throughout many regions.

SHRINKING LABOR POOL Not surprisingly, living standards in Ukraine have plummeted with the decline in industrial production. Ukraine’s economic decline, in turn, has affected the nuclear industry. Indeed, large numbers of skilled personnel are abandoning the government utility and its meager wages to enter the private sector or to emigrate to Russia where equivalent work generates nearly ten times the purchasing power. For many, returning to Russia means returning home. In the centralized economy of the former Soviet Union, utility officials assigned new college graduates to work at specific installations where they were most needed—many of them in Ukraine—rather than allowing them to choose where they would settle. Once in place, the central government made it next to impossible for workers to return home.

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The Soviet Union’s successor states no longer can resort to such administrative restraints to prohibit individuals from moving. As a result, many nuclear workers have left Ukraine. The ramifications of this trend are as obvious as they are severe. Each nuclear unit requires several work shifts, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to staff the required number of shifts. With Zaporozhe’s sixth unit now approaching full operation, staffing problems will only worsen. Furthermore, Ukraine’s dismal economy will cripple the efforts of the nuclear power industry to recruit the next generation of power plant personnel. Deteriorating living standards, coupled with the continuing decline in prestige accorded the profession—a direct and lingering effect of the 1986 Chernobyl accident—have discouraged young people from majoring in nuclear physics and engineering, the disciplines needed to qualify for work as an operator. To reverse the decline in available power-plant personnel, the government has made an important concession to nuclear-plant workers by offering them tax breaks once enjoyed only by coal miners. Nuclear workers’ monthly incomes that exceed six million Ukrainian rubles—about forty dollars US at the current exchange rate—are taxed at forty-five percent instead of the ninety percent tax rate applied to workers in noncritical industries. The government hopes this initiative will help stem the loss of qualified people—especially those with computer or design skills—to the private sector. Despite such efforts, the overall level of training and skills among operators at Ukrainian nuclear-power plants is declining rapidly, largely because the most experienced operators are being recruited to work in Russian plants. Although it is difficult to conclude that the loss of qualified personnel has adversely affected nuclear plant safety in Ukraine, the trend is alarming.

OTHER WOES The faltering Ukrainian economy also makes it difficult, if not impossible, for nuclear plant operators to purchase equipment and nuclear fuel. In fact, supplies and equipment for nuclear plants in such safety related areas as water treatment, fire protection, and instrumentation are available only from Western companies and only for hard currency.

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These financial requirements effectively eliminate Ukraine’s hopes of upgrading plants without substantial foreign assistance. Though assistance is being provided—especially by France, the United States, and Germany—efforts to obtain foreign aid to purchase equipment are fraught with misunderstandings, delays, and uncertainties. Compounding an already difficult situation are strained intergovernmental relations between the Russian Federation and Ukraine. The two countries, as part of the Soviet Union, shared defense-related facilities for more than seventy years. Fuel fabrication and reprocessing plants were located in Siberia. They are now situated on Russian Federation territory, and Russia has denied Ukrainian power producers access to them. Consider, for instance, that the Russian government has increased prices for its nuclear fuel to match prices in the international marketplace. Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, fuel purchases were largely subsidized by the central government. Today, unsubsidized fuel prices are beyond the reach of Ukraine’s electric power plants and thus continue to require government subsidies. Because prices are higher, subsidies must be higher. All of this is unfolding at a time when the Ukrainian government faces unprecedented economic stress. Energy prices in Ukraine simply cannot be raised high enough or fast enough to keep pace with the true cost of energy production and distribution. Indeed, any attempt to charge either utilities or customers the true cost of nuclear fuel would bankrupt the national economy. As a result, much of the cost is borne by the central government. In November 1994 it cost two hundred thousand rubles (forty-four US dollars) to purchase a five gallon can of gasoline in Ukraine. At that rate, one gallon of gas at the pump exceeded three percent of the median monthly income for the country’s workers. This trend does not apply, however, to electricity. The price of a kilowatt-hour of electricity has increased only modestly, from 4.2 percent of the average worker’s income to 4.5 percent over the past six years. The Ukrainian government has held the cost of electricity nearly constant for the consumer. Given the hyperinflation that afflicts every aspect of the economy, “somebody” must be shouldering the difference. That somebody is the power plant itself. Power plants currently receive from the government less for their electricity than the cost of producing it.

Ukraine Nuclear Power Struggles for Survival

WASTE DISPOSAL The other significant impact of changing national borders within what was once the Soviet Union involves the issue of spent fuel storage. When the Soviet Union’s first commercial reactor units were being designed and commissioned in the early 1970s, officials ordered construction of a centralized offsite facility near Sverdlovsk in western Siberia for the storage and reprocessing of spent fuel assemblies. Such a strategy enabled plant designers to minimize the size of spent fuel pools attached to each unit. After a relatively short holding period—which allowed the fuel’s heat and radioactivity to dissipate partially through natural decay—fuel would be loaded into casks and onto trains for removal to the storage site. Once the Soviet Union was dissolved, utilities in Ukraine lost the right to ship spent fuel assemblies to the centralized storage facility. Nuclear officials decided twenty five years ago that spent fuel assemblies should be put inside containment structures for additional safety, and government regulations require that the fuel pools into which the assemblies are placed must have enough “free” space to accommodate an off-load of the entire reactor in case of an emergency. All of this means Ukrainian nuclear officials have a decreasing amount of space in which to store an increasing number of spent-fuel assemblies. Other events further confounded Ukraine’s access to Russian fuel and storage facilities. After the Soviet Union split apart, for instance, politicians of the Russian Federation—angered over separatist aspirations that had propelled the political situation out of control—passed legislation prohibiting transportation of low-level nuclear waste across the new national borders. This act eliminated Ukrainian access to the only possible storage site for its radioactive wastes. Meanwhile, Ukraine lacked both the technology and the wealth to recreate the required infrastructure. With nowhere to turn, nuclear plant officials began to violate the on-site limits for the storage of nuclear waste. If these rules had been strictly enforced, they would have led to the immediate closure of two Zaporozhe units. Moreover, all nuclear capacity in the country would have to be shut down in the not-too-distant future. The problem has reached crisis proportions in Ukraine. A consortium of US companies, headed by Duke Engineering & Services, has offered its assistance and is currently designing a spent fuel dry storage facility for the Zaporozhe nuclear station.

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Despite this aid, deadlines are approaching rapidly as spent fuel assemblies continue to pile up. Delays over financing and regulatory approval for additional storage have only aggravated the situation. Meanwhile, a dry storage facility may not become operational in time to prevent plant shutdowns unless the government intercedes to offer temporary dispensation from licensing regulations. Public opinion in Ukraine—largely owing to the Chernobyl disaster—opposes exempting the nuclear power industry from any regulations. Nevertheless, Zaporozhe was authorized to start Unit 6 without engineering upgrades that would have modified its design, which conforms to older nuclear-safety and environmental-protection standards. N. A. Shteinberg, former head of the Ukrainian nuclear regulatory body and the chief engineer who restarted the undamaged Chernobyl units in 1986 and 1987, had issued stern warnings to the industry that all current licensing regulations would be enforced after January 1995. Apparently, political realities led to Shteinberg’s removal, and enforcement of the new standards at Zaporozhe was waived because of the country’s critical need for electricity during winter months. It remains to be seen what other sorts of compromise among nuclear safety, public opinion, and economic reality will be forged in the cauldron of Ukrainian politics or how the long-term prospects for the nuclearpower industry will evolve.

INTERNATIONAL RESOURCES The future of nuclear power in Ukraine may ultimately depend on the amount of financial and technical assistance furnished by the international community. Such aid traces its roots to collaboration between the United States and the Soviet Union in civilian nuclear power safety that began very tentatively in 1987. Plans to improve safety procedures for the Ukrainian nuclear power industry and to install modern equipment first flourished in 1989, even before Ukraine had regained its independence. With the help of Western nuclear experts, reform efforts have continued at an increasing tempo ever since. Collaboration also has taken place in the areas of operations and regulations, utilizing both public and private resources.3 The umbrella for current intergovernmental assistance in Ukraine’s civilian nuclear power industry is the Lisbon Initiative, which funds

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efforts in several areas, most notably fire safety and development of emergency operating procedures.4 In addition, US congressional appropriations administered by the Department of Defense and Department of State are directed at military conversion in several post-Soviet countries. Some of this money is earmarked for storage facilities for nuclear material recovered during missile dismantling. Meanwhile, private US industry—including Public Service Electric & Gas, Pennsylvania Power & Light, and Florida Power & Light—has underwritten the cost of exchange programs conducted by the World Association of Nuclear Operators (WANO) since the organization’s inception in 1989. WANO is an international organization of private and governmentowned electric utilities/ministries that operate nuclear plants. The agency provides a forum for electricity producers to interact, discuss problems, and share information about their industry. It was created in 1989 after the Soviet government “declassified” much of its civilian nuclearpower industry and expressed a willingness to cooperate with the West to avoid another Chernobyl-like accident. International commercial efforts also are under way, both on projects of current importance and future needs. For instance, given the lack of political consensus in Ukraine regarding the feasibility and siting of a geologic repository—a problem shared by the United States—it seems likely that an above-ground, long-term storage facility will have to be constructed. The site for that facility most likely will be located in the Chernobyl region. There’s not a lot one can do with Chernobyl or the land surrounding it. The land was not productive to begin with—one reason the site was chosen for a nuclear complex in the first place—and contamination is now so great that there is not any likelihood of making it so. Moreover, people throughout Ukraine are frightened of nuclear waste. In fact, the not in my backyard (NIMBY) syndrome, which is so common in the United States, is alive and well in Ukraine, as well. Finally, about fifty thousand people—including highly skilled plant workers and those who provide for their daily needs—live in the Chernobyl area. These people cannot be moved elsewhere because of shortages in housing, schools, and jobs throughout Ukraine. For all of these reasons, the Chernobyl site—Ukraine’s own version of a “sacrifice zone”—seems a good place to store nuclear waste.

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The international community, particularly France and Germany, also have funded several scientific research projects and engineering feasibility studies, including post-Chernobyl surveys on health effects. All of this funding is appreciated. Nevertheless, some Ukrainian researchers feel the interests of the country’s nuclear power industry are not being well served. Ukrainian researchers believe three factors limit the usefulness of such investigations. First, they contend, these research efforts involve little input on the part of Ukrainian government or industry experts. As those closest to the problem, these experts believe they know what is needed; yet, few Western donors have asked them for their opinion. Second, foreign governments that fund research studies and provide technical assistance often insist the technologies come from home companies. These governments in part regard assisting the Ukrainian nuclear power industry as a way of boosting their own national economies. Third, little is being done to support Ukrainian technicians during this difficult economic transition, or to help develop a technological infrastructure that undoubtedly will play a critical role once foreign aid is no longer available. In fact, the best international assistance any outside government or international lending institution can ultimately bestow on Ukraine will be in a form that lingers—and keeps the nation’s lights burning long after the donor has returned home.

NOTES 1. Vladimir Mikhailovich Kramchenkov is deputy head of the technical department at “P/O Zaporozhe AES,” which operates the Zaporozhe nuclear station in Energodar, Ukraine. 2. Four of the nuclear-power facilities—Khmelnitsky, Rovno, South Ukraine, and Zaporozhe—are equipped with pressurized water reactors. The nuclear units at Chernobyl are equipped with graphite-moderated reactors. 3. For a survey of the early development of international programs to enhance civilian nuclear power safety throughout the former Soviet Union, see (118). 4. The Lisbon Initiative (so named because it was approved at a 1990 international meeting held in Portugal) is a multinational effort to provide financial support for safety improvements in the design, operation, safety, and reliability of nuclear-power equipment.

CHAPTER 21

Nonrational Assessment of Risk and the Development of Civilian Nuclear Power Marilyn J. Young Provenance: We present here, in slightly abbreviated form, a paper originally published as the Introduction to Nuclear Energy and Security in the Former Soviet Union, edited by David R. Marples and Marilyn J. Young, 1–17. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997. This book was re-published in 2018 by Routledge. Copyright Holder: Taylor and Francis Group LLC (Books) US, used by permission Description: An earlier version of this paper was presented in August 1995 at the Fifth World Congress of the International Council for Central and East European Studies (ICCEES) in Warsaw, Poland. It examines the concept of risk as it relates to the nearly palpable fear of radiation—the so-called “Silent Killer”—in all its forms, but particularly as manifested by nuclear weapons and nuclear power generation. There is no question that “nuclear fear” is pervasive around the world. But how rational is that fear? Further, how do people assess risk as it pertains to other modern technologies?

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n April 26, 1996, the world observed the tenth anniversary of the accident in reactor Unit 4 at the V. I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant near the village of Chernobyl in what is now Ukraine, an occasion most remarkable in the United States for the lack of fanfare; as human tragedies go, the Chernobyl anniversary was overshadowed by the first anniversary of the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City.1 Quite naturally, most media attention in the United States focused on events commemorating that latest tragedy. This is not to suggest that the Chernobyl anniversary was totally ignored, but the coverage was significantly less than might have been expected for such a momentous event, particularly since the reverberations of that explosion in Ukraine are still being felt around the world today. Thus, it seems appropriate at this juncture to reflect on the state of nuclear power in the post-Chernobyl world.

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To this end, we have collected a series of essays addressing diverse aspects of the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident. This volume grew out of a program at the Fifth World Congress of Central and East European Studies held in Warsaw, Poland, in August 1995: “Chernobyl and Nuclear Issues in the Post-Soviet States.” It is sometimes difficult to realize that the history of nuclear power is a short one. Uranium fission was achieved in 1939, although its theoretical foundations had been the focus of scientific inquiry since the beginning of the century. The first chain reaction was attained in 1942, and the first experimental production of electricity occurred only nine years later. Even so, by the 1950s, nuclear power was seen as the future of energy production in the United States and throughout the world. According to proponents, it would provide limitless power at minimal cost (“electricity too cheap to meter”), replacing conventional sources of electricity generation in homes and businesses and, ultimately, in various types of transportation, as well. Commercial nuclear power was the focus of an intense US government policy initiative, which was grounded in President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1953 “Atoms for Peace” speech before the United Nations.2 Just forty years later, the commercial viability of nuclear energy is in serious doubt. While it provides a substantial percentage of energy production in the United States and worldwide, no new plants are foreseen in North America and there are no plans to expand the uses of nuclear energy into the transportation arena beyond the military uses already in existence. Even utility executives are pessimistic about the future of nuclear power. A recent poll conducted by the Washington International Energy Group documents a sharp drop in executives’ level of confidence regarding the future of nuclear energy. In this new poll, thirty-nine percent of the executives surveyed indicated that nuclear power cannot be competitive; only two percent indicated that they would consider ordering a new nuclear plant (down from ten percent as recently as 1995); and only eight percent believe there will be a resurgence of nuclear power (down from thirty-one percent in 1995). (448) In other words, as things stand now, there will never be a nuclear-powered automobile, train, or commercial airplane. After such an auspicious beginning, it is fair to inquire, “What happened?” First, what has become of nuclear power worldwide? Most of the rest of the world seems to view nuclear power differently than does the United States. While nuclear plants provide about twenty-two percent of all electricity in the United States, in France that figure is closer to eighty

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percent. China is undertaking a concerted program to develop nuclear power capability; India and Iran are purchasing nuclear plants from Russia; Kazakhstan is building a plant; and Romania recently brought its first nuclear unit on line.3 The Metzamor station in Armenia was restarted in 1995 in an effort to combat the dramatic energy deficit in that country. Even Ukraine continues to operate the undamaged reactors at Chernobyl.4 In contrast, the Watts Bar facility in Tennessee, which came on line early in 1996, is the first US plant to open in many years—and it was ordered in 1970. The development of nuclear power slowed to a trickle after the accident at Three Mile Island in 1979.5 According to an official at the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations in Atlanta, GA because of TMI some eight to ten reactor units that had been ordered by US utilities were never built—the orders were canceled. Construction of the Shoreham plant on Long Island (New York) was completed and the facility was granted a Low Power Operating License (start-up) in 1985, but after many years of legal delays it became clear that the plant would never be operated. Due to liability concerns, the facility was sold to the State of New York for one dollar, and local utility customers had to absorb the total cost of the project without receiving a single kilowatt of electricity; the plant was shut down in 1991. (204: 14) If TMI severely affected the development of civilian nuclear power in the United States, that development came to a virtual standstill after the 1986 Chernobyl accident. In the ten years that have passed since then, not a single order has been placed in the United States for a new reactor unit and seven reactor units have been shut down by their owners. Most of the closings occurred because the plants were not competitive with other sources of electricity; other plants, such as Rancho Seco, were closed for political rather than economic reasons. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), the nonprofit governmentowned corporation that operates Watts Bar, has been beset by problems for many years. Once one of the major operators of nuclear plants in the United States, TVA has permanently shut down two facilities (Bellefonte and Sequoyah). In addition, a three unit plant (Browns Ferry) has been closed for years due to technical reasons. Virtually all US plant closings have been voluntary, based in large part on financial considerations: given the price tag for bringing old plants up to current safety standards, the refurbishing of aging facilities often

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makes no economic sense. For example, Trojan nuclear station required new steam generators, but the cost could not be justified given the plant’s relatively short remaining service life. Regulatory concerns can also be decisive: Yankee Rowe, the oldest commercial nuclear plant in the United States, was closed because the operator faced the expensive (and, at the time, untested) task of annealing an embrittled reactor vessel, and company officials were not at all certain that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would authorize restarting the unit after the process had completed.6 It is quite ironic that nuclear power—which was once touted as the low-cost power source of the future—has become exceptionally expensive. Prior to 1982, the cost of commercial plants was approximately one thousand dollars per kilowatt of installed generating capacity; by 1987, that cost had risen to more than four thousand dollars. Yet, if costs had continued to increase at the pre-1982 rate, the expected 1987 cost would have been closer to fifteen hundred dollars. Needless to say, the increased cost of bringing the plant on-line has been passed on to the consumer.7 The cost of building a nuclear unit has become prohibitive, some believe, because of changes in the regulatory environment8 combined with the political situation in most localities—both factors the result of a heightened sense of risk that seems to accompany the use of nuclear power in the United States. This phenomenon has attracted the attention of several analysts, whose work will be discussed below. As background to such a discussion, consider public attitudes toward the construction and operation of nuclear power plants in comparison to perceptions of other risky endeavors. With respect to exposure of the general public to radiation, nuclear power plants have a remarkable safety record in the United States and Canada. Even the Three Mile Island accident, the worst ever at a commercial facility in this country, resulted in no documented casualties.9 But the fear of radiation-induced cancer as the result of a potential nuclear accident is rampant among significant elements of the American population, even while they bake themselves in the rays of the warm sun. At the same time, coal-fired plants have produced significantly more effluents than have nuclear plants, and many of these effluents are linked to increases in cancer. Yet there has been no public outcry on this score: rather, the objections to coal-fired energy production have centered on other issues—pollution, environmental degradation, and the health and safety of miners.10

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Outside the energy field, much greater risk is tolerated in the face of demonstrable harm. The national campaign against smoking, for example, has been slow and has suffered many setbacks. And, even in areas with strict antismoking ordinances, the actual incidence of smoking, after dropping for many years, has remained virtually constant and even increased among some populations, most notably teenagers. Europeans generally, Russians in particular, and—especially—Ukrainians who panicked in the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident continue to smoke in great numbers, with virtually no public outcry. Similarly, physicians have been exhorting their patients for decades to avoid excessive exposure to the sun, its radiation a known cause of potentially fatal skin cancer. Yet on any beach, whether Malibu, the Riviera, or the Crimea, one can find on any warm summer day hundreds, even thousands, soaking up the sun’s deadly rays. While smoking and sunbathing may be considered individual behavior, and the consequences suffered a matter of personal choice, there is no question that automobile casualties cost the lives of tens of thousands of innocent individuals every year. Traffic deaths take a huge toll around the world and are on the rise virtually everywhere. Yet no one has suggested outlawing the automobile. Indeed, it would appear that some technological systems enjoy far greater public tolerance for accidents. In any technology, some margin for error must exist—what Charles Perrow has called a “normal accident.” (360)11 It is not possible for a technology to exist, to interact with human beings, and for there to be no inadvertent failures of the system or its operators. Yet there seems to be a disparity in the way different technological systems are viewed: the automobile is granted greater leeway than is the airplane, for example. What is it that people fear about nuclear power? If it is increases in background radiation, there are no data to suggest that the operation of power plants has increased radiation in the atmosphere; indeed, the operation of coal-fired plants has been responsible for more radiation release than have nuclear plants.12 If it is operator error resulting in accidents, the risk is no different from the risk assumed when operating an automobile in the presence of other vehicles. In other words, to put it bluntly, the fear of nuclear power appears to be nonrational. US nuclear plants are among the safest in the world; even Three Mile Island—which was technologically more serious than even Chernobyl—resulted in virtually zero radiation release because of the reinforced concrete containment system surrounding all US commercial reactors.13

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Further, the abandonment of nuclear power makes little economic sense in the present energy environment. In the 1970s, in the aftermath of the oil embargo and the ensuing energy crisis, there was a flurry of activity directed toward the development of alternative sources of energy. Today, that effort has all but disappeared, and in the United States the percentage of fossil fuel which is imported is at an all-time high, eclipsing by far the portion of imported oil prior to the embargo. Yet one hears almost nothing about the dangers of the United States being so dependent on foreign sources of oil to satisfy its energy needs. The one group which is paying attention is the US oil industry: this author recently participated in a random survey designed to test attitudes toward increased off-shore drilling and exploitation of wilderness areas including Alaska’s North Slope. The survey was premised on the alarming percentage of oil which is imported, but did not allow for suggestions that alternative sources of energy needed to be developed. The agenda was pretty clear—and it did not include considerations of nuclear, solar, hydro, or other alternatives.14 In the remainder of this essay, I will examine some of the explanations which have been offered for the nonrational fear of nuclear power. These explanations break down into five categories: the link between nuclear and nuclear weapons; the anomalous position of the US government in touting nuclear power while creating fear of weapons of mass destruction; the public relations environment in which nuclear power companies must operate; and, of course, the incidence of nuclear accidents. A major factor in each of these categories is the general lack of credibility afflicting governments in general and the US government in particular, the perception that the government has been willing to endanger civilians in order to achieve unspecified—and perhaps unjustified—ends. The fifth, and in some ways most interesting, category is the association between nuclear (atomic) power and popular mythology as captured in science fiction and science fantasy. Almost as soon as scientists began thinking of the benefits of harnessing the atom, their attention was turned to creating weapons of mass destruction. Shortly after the discovery of nuclear fission, the world was rent by war: Science, spurred by fear of the Nazi war machine, marshaled its considerable intellectual resources in support of the Allied war effort.15 Thus, the public’s first real introduction to nuclear science was through atomic explosions, death and destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, mushroom clouds whose images seared the minds of an entire generation,

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power unlike any the world had known before.16 For the first time, mankind possessed the ability to destroy itself and to make the earth uninhabitable. The task of dissociating nuclear power from nuclear weapons would prove to be a daunting one.17 Much of the difficulty came about because of the anomalous position of the government vis-à-vis nuclear power. On the one hand, the government was in the business of promoting peaceful uses of the atom. In his analysis, Parsons traces the economic effects of a US government policy encouraging civilian nuclear power development. As Parsons describes it, the government took an activist role in stimulating research and development. For example, AEC commissioner T. Keith Glennan openly campaigned for private industry to take the initiative in developing the nuclear generation of electricity, writing articles and making speeches aimed at getting utilities on the commercial nuclear power bandwagon.18 Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace plan to the contrary notwithstanding, most government rhetoric during the cold war era was designed to create fear of weapons of mass destruction, that is, the nuclear threat posed by the Soviet Union.19 Given the horrific demonstration that introduced the public to nuclear fission at the end of World War II, the subsequent political emphasis on the destructive power of nuclear missiles and bombs could only have reinforced the association between peaceful and aggressive uses of atomic energy. This is particularly true if one considers that part of the rhetoric of the Atoms for Peace initiative was based on the realization that the by-products of nuclear fission for energy production could be used in bombs. This fact did not escape the attention of what would later become the antinuclear movement. Finally, the very “conditions of contest” within which nuclear plants operate reinforce the potential for disaster. Consider the amount of time and effort the utilities put into disaster control, informing local residents of what to do in case of an accident—how to evacuate, how to protect themselves.20 It is, in some ways, reminiscent of the old air raid drills that frightened school children during the height of the Cold War. Those children have grown up to be regulators and activists, as well as nuclear engineers and physicists. It is true that nuclear power plants are not the only enterprises required to give safety warnings and instructions to their customers and constituents. Cigarette and alcohol packages carry warning labels, and airlines are required to instruct passengers regarding evacuation techniques

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prior to each flight. But these have a documented history of risk: cancer and heart disease in the case of tobacco; the ravages of alcoholism and the effects of small amounts of alcohol on developing fetuses; the large number of lives lost in each airplane crash. Indeed, the question of airline safety provides a parallel case. Americans, and perhaps other societies as well, are inordinately affected by airline disasters. In part, this may be a function of the 1991 destruction of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, and the increase in international terrorism. But, to a large extent, it is the suddenness and the shockingly large number of instantaneous casualties that affects public perception.21 As a result, and despite all statistical evidence to the contrary, much of the public believes that air travel is more dangerous than other forms of transportation—most notably, the automobile. The facts, however, are quite different. Out of the thousands of flights each day, and even on the days when an air tragedy does occur, it is almost certainly true that a greater number of people will have died in automobile accidents throughout the world. This phenomenon is a function of the perception of risk, which does not take into account empirical evidence of risk and which, therefore, fails to conform to Western standards of Cartesian logic. This ability to hold fast to beliefs in the face of contravening evidence is a fascinating topic in itself, but one far beyond the scope of this essay. However, if there is a common thread, it probably lies in the perception of control: generally what people fear about airline travel is the inability to control their own fate in an emergency; most feel that they have greater control in an automobile, despite the unpredictability of drunk and/or reckless drivers, the variables of bad weather, and the growing number of cars on the road, many operated by increasingly aggressive drivers. Similarly, radiation—characterized as “The Silent Killer” which can be neither seen, felt, smelled, nor heard, and which is under the command of a few powerful utility corporations, government agencies, and university research facilities—represents an inability to control one’s own exposure should an accident occur. In this sense, Chernobyl embodied the worst nightmare of both the proponents and opponents of nuclear power: people everywhere tracked the cloud of radiation that, literally, circled the globe, affecting not only the Soviet Union (especially Ukraine and Belarus), but Europe and even North America. The explosion at Chernobyl released far more radiation into the atmosphere than Hiroshima and

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Nagasaki combined and brought back images of such movie thrillers from the 1950s and 1960s as Nevil Shute’s On the Beach. (412) And the world’s population could do nothing except watch, wait, and measure radiation levels. It is, thus, a feeling of helplessness which fuels fear of flying and fear of nuclear power; and, in the case of nuclear power, that helplessness moves in tandem with distrust of government. Nevertheless, in North America, at least, there exists no incontrovertible documentation for casualties related to civilian nuclear power.22 Several cases involving people and animals living downwind of the test sites in Nevada and on Pacific Ocean atolls have been documented, but these resulted from weapons testing in the open atmosphere; Western nuclear plants, in contrast, have primary and secondary containment vessels to prevent the release of radiation into the atmosphere. Each time a nuclear accident is reported, however, the image of the silent killer is reinforced, along with the spectre of increased cancer, deformity, and mutation. Perhaps the distinction is one of assumed risk: the smoker, the drinker, and even the airline passenger make an affirmative choice. Those downwind of Chernobyl or the Nevada test site had no choice. The problem with nuclear accidents, of course, is the public’s lack of confidence that its government will be open about the extent and effects of any radiation release. Walter Pasedag, for one, was struck by the open skepticism that greeted his public statements regarding the status of cleanup efforts at TMI.23 Readers may recall that this distrust was borne out in the Soviet Union’s initial handling of information regarding the Chernobyl accident.24 And while Americans have always had a healthy distrust of their government—any government, for that matter—it may well be that the modem era of suspicion was born in the deserts of Nevada and, nourished at Three Mile Island, reached maturity after Chernobyl. Indeed, the aftermath of atmospheric testing within the continental borders of the United States may have been the first time Americans became conscious that their government had lied to them about something which directly affected their health and safety.25 As a result, few people have confidence in the credibility of the government’s information with respect to domestic nuclear incidents. Fear of nuclear power is based on the incidence of accidents, questions about security, and problems of waste disposal. But each of these comes back to the fundamental concern about radiation, the invisible killer. Historian of science Spencer Weart has traced our concern with

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radiation to deep-seated, ancient images which, encouraged by early scientists, have been brought to bear on modern nuclear energy. (449: 3–74) Weart traces the image of nuclear power through four chronological stages. In the first, “Years of Fantasy, 1902–1938,” he examines some of the images that have informed our reactions to the development of nuclear science. Among the most striking are the “white cities of the future” and the quest for transmutation. Virtually every culture has its version of the white city—pristine, perfect, without pain or dirt or hunger. In the earliest days of nuclear discovery, many thought that nuclear power might make the white city a reality; science fiction supported this notion with stories set in perfectly functioning atomic-powered futures. Similarly, “scientists” almost from the beginning of time have sought the secret of turning metal into gold; because scientists, in creating fission, altered elements, the association to ancient alchemists was easy to make. Other myths that operated alongside these include the notion of the doomsday machine, the death ray, the life-giving ray (one of many two-edged phenomena in the world of scientific development)26 and the real mutational power of radiation to produce alterations in the genome. In the conclusion to his volume, Weart notes Most of the beliefs and symbols that gathered around nuclear energy were already associated with one another centuries earlier, in a highly structured cluster centered on the tremendous concept I have called transmutation—the passage through destruction to rebirth. By the nineteenth century the themes had become separated from one another, attaching themselves to the new wonders of electricity or to occultism or fantasy tales, surviving only as isolated cultural fragments. But in the early decades of the twentieth century the cluster drew together again around the discovery of nuclear energy. By the 1930s most people vaguely associated radioactivity with uncanny rays that brought hideous death or miraculous new life; with mad scientists and their ambiguous monsters; with cosmic secrets of death and life, with a future Golden Age, perhaps reached only through an apocalypse; and with weapons great enough to destroy the world, except perhaps for a few survivors. In sum, nuclear energy had become a symbolic representation for the magical transmutation of society and the individual. (449: 421)27

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For every good scientist in a white lab coat, there is, lurking just below the level of consciousness, the mad scientist, ready to blow up the world. In one sense, the love/hate relationship between the public and nuclear power symbolizes public ambivalence toward science itself: for every advance there is a downside, an unintended consequence, an unforeseen side effect. Value-free science, responsible for so many discoveries that have improved our lives, left the moral and ethical questions to a public ill equipped to understand the science behind personal decisions. Nuclear power might create energy to turn deserts into gardens, but that same power could reduce the most verdant garden to wasteland in a matter of seconds. Indeed, Weart documents the irony: the very images that were supposed to demonstrate how much care is taken to protect the public instead reinforced the deadly nature of radioactive materials. Atoms for Peace publicity itself cast inadvertent shadows. For example, countless exhibits, films, and photographs showed concrete shields with thick glass windows, workers hidden in white protective suits, and mechanical “slave” hands for manipulating radioactive substances from a safe distance. … The images were supposed to show how carefully experts protected everyone, but they carried a more archaic message. (449: 177)

As one French author noted, referring to a picture of a face “peering intently through glass at robot hands opening a bottle of isotopes,” that very image symbolized “an ever more mechanized Humanity, avid to tear from Nature her eternal secrets, and at the same time fearful of the unknown that can escape from a simple bottle, a modem representation of Pandora’s box.” (302: 250) For the people of Pripyat and the surrounding villages, Pandora’s box was unprotected and now lies entombed in a crumbling sarcophagus. The tragedy which this volume commemorates was not the first nuclear accident in the former Soviet Union. Information concerning the 1957 disaster at Kyshtym did not surface until many years later, and that involved nuclear waste rather than reactor failure. Nevertheless, as Weart notes, “the minority of nuclear experts who had insisted that radioactive wastes could do serious harm, if badly enough mishandled, were right.” (449: 299)28 The fears epitomized by events such as that at Kyshtym nearly forty years ago found their culmination in the aftermath of the explosion

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in the Unit 4 reactor at Chernobyl in 1986. More than one analyst has commented that the Chernobyl accident may well have been the nail in the coffin of nuclear energy production in the United States. For fifty years, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics embodied our fears and our notion of evil; psychologists might argue that the United States’ morbid absorption with the power of Communism was predicated on a vision of the Soviets as a mirror image of itself: to borrow a phrase, they were our “evil twin”—just like us, only venal. Thus, Ronald Reagan’s characterization of the USSR as the “evil empire” struck a resonant chord in the United States and sometimes with the rest of the Western world, as well. More temperate characterizations of the Soviet Union focused on its role as the West’s nuclear adversary, possessing, as did the other powers, the ability to destroy us all through the use of nuclear weapons. For a generation that grew up under the mushroom cloud of atomic holocaust, Chernobyl reinforced deep-seated fears about the omnipresent silent killer. And nothing that has been learned about the accident in the intervening ten years has dispelled those fears. Much of the fear and fascination directed toward the Soviet Union was predicated on its perceived technical competence and ability to compete militarily. The launch of Sputnik I and the flight of Yuri Gagarin shocked the West out of its technological complacency. Furthermore, with its tight control of information and the inability of Soviet citizens to travel to the West unless vetted as trustworthy and circumspect, the USSR was able to maintain a facade of success and efficiency. But when the Unit 4 reactor at Chernobyl blew out the roof of the building which housed it, the explosion took with it the Soviet government’s aura of technical competence. Chernobyl and its aftermath exposed the incompetence, corruption, and manufacturing inefficiency that have left Russia, Ukraine, and the other former republics in such a sorry economic and political state. Thus, an unforeseen consequence of the tragedy we know simply as “Chernobyl” is a new fear of the former Soviet Union, born of the potential for what we have always dreaded most: the technological accident and the threat of technological blackmail. Each of these ideas is touched on by the essays that comprise this volume. There are many, this author included, who believe that one ultimate result of the Chernobyl accident was the break-up of the Soviet Union.29 The demise of the USSR as the dominant enemy of the West broached new

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problems, including the disposition of the Soviet nuclear weapons stockpile and the resultant fears regarding diversion of weapons-grade fissionable material. The notion of nuclear contraband in the hands of terrorists or outlaw states raises in a different forum the spectre of contamination by exposure to radiation. The essays in this collection offer varying perspectives on the aftermath of the Chernobyl accident, underscoring the eloquence of Yuri Shcherbak Chornobyl has taught the nations of the world a dreadful lesson about the necessity for preparedness if we are to rely on nuclear technology. Humankind lost a sort of innocence on April 26, 1986. We have embarked on a new, post-Chornobyl era, and we have yet to comprehend all the consequences. (404: 49)30

Tallahassee, Florida April 29, 1996

NOTES 1. The explosion at Chernobyl occurred April 26, 1986; the Oklahoma City bombing occurred April 19, 1995. 2. A terse history of this initiative can be found in (350). Parsons links the fortunes of commercial nuclear power generation to the waxing and waning of governmental technology policy. 3. This is not to suggest that nuclear plants are built without controversy elsewhere in the world. Austrian television, for example, has broadcast numerous commercials opposing the plant at Mohovce, in neighboring Slovakia; the public outcry in Austria, however, has not curtailed construction of the plant. In the old USSR, construction was stopped at many locations, particularly for nuclear-powered district heating facilities, and in recent years some projected construction has been postponed because of Russia’s economic situation; and Ukraine imposed a moratorium on construction in the aftermath of Chernobyl, although this was lifted in late 1993. 4. Western governments have been trying for several years to persuade the Ukrainian government to close the Chernobyl plant completely, but Ukraine’s chronic energy deficit makes that unlikely. To this end the G7 nations pledged significant sums in support of the closure. In a recent conversation, Yuri Shcherbak, Ukrainian ambassador to the United States, indicated that Unit 2, badly damaged in a fire, would be opened in the near future (personal communication, August 1996). Unit 4, of course, remains entombed in the now infamous sarcophagus. The future of the two remaining units is unclear.

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Part Two: Chernobyl, Eco-Nationalism, and Loss of Rhetorical Control 5. Parsons traces the change in the pace of development to the creation of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1974. Says Parsons, “[The NRC] issued only three operating licenses in addition to five construction permits for nine reactors during their first year of operation. This is compared to fourteen operating licenses and construction permits for twenty three reactors issued the previous year. The number of plants planned, under construction, or in operation by the utilities declined drastically after the creation of the NRC—from two hundred eighteen at the end of 1974 to one hundred twenty in 1990.” (350: 91–92) However, Parsons also believes that there was a marked difference after TMI, characterized by increased cancellations (personal communication, April 1996). 6. The Soviet Union was the first country to anneal aging reactor vessels, conducting such remedial efforts in a number of Warsaw Pact countries. 7. According to Parsons, “added measures in the licensing process significantly increased the scope and complexity of engineering, construction, inspection, and documentation. The cost of the measures, when added to the hardware costs of the TMI backfits and the costs of higher inflation during the period, caused total plant costs to escalate much more than previously experienced.” (350: 93) Comanche Peak (TX) and Diablo Canyon (CA) each cost approximately six billion dollars for two eleven hundred-plus megawatt units. The final Diablo price tag was nearly ten times the original planned cost, in part because of seismic upgrades that the NRC required after construction of the plant had almost been completed. On the other hand, some plants remain cost effective when compared to conventional fuels. In Wisconsin and Minnesota—the Point Beach, Kewanee, and Prairie Island stations are competitive with the cheapest sources of electrical generation. 8. “In the writer’s experience, the NRC’s regulatory attitude caused at least four major impacts on a plant’s costs. … Finally, the new way of doing business with the NRC increased the level of documentation and verification to extraordinary levels. … [C]oping with regulatory change was the most significant factor in increasing the cost of nuclear plants.” (350: 95) 9. Over the years, the operator of TMI has paid millions in damage claims, none of which was documented as valid. Nevertheless, the operator deemed that settling these claims was more predictable and less expensive than protracted court action. 10. The health and safety of uranium miners was neglected for years, until it came to national attention that this population was suffering adverse consequences on at least the same scale as coal miners. 11. See also (359). 12. Keep in mind, however, that the greatest source of increased background radiation throughout the Northern Hemisphere has been the above-ground testing of nuclear weapons conducted by many nations over the past several decades. 13. Ironically, criticisms from the antinuclear lobby notwithstanding, TMI proved that well-conceived protection systems can shield the public from the potential harm of a severe accident. 14. Walter Pasedag, a physicist with the US Department of Energy, has indicated that, in any event, our ability to exploit hydroelectric power is pretty much exhausted (personal communication, April 1996). The number of geographic areas with appropriate topography for hydro is limited, and dam construction faces many of the same ecological constraints that nuclear operators do.

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15. The conventional wisdom is that their Nazi counterparts were on the verge of creating nuclear weapons. 16. In his essay for this collection, Gert-Rüdiger Wegmarshaus (454) uses as the foundation for his analysis the thesis developed by Gar Alperovitz (42) that the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki for largely geopolitical reasons having more to do with a vision of the post-war world than with the reduction in US casualties. For a dissenting analysis of the decision to drop the bombs, see (336). 17. Some observers believe that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was created in order to separate civilian applications of nuclear power from military ones. For others, the fact that the Atomic Energy Commission functioned both as operator and regulator— an inherently inconsistent situation—was a paramount consideration. In any event, the effect achieved by passage of the 1974 Energy Reorganization Act was to regulate civilian plants without hampering military research and development. However, as far as separating perceptions is concerned, the effort came too late, for the link was already forged in the public mind. 18. The irony here is that, according to Parsons (350: 87), the electric companies were not particularly interested until the government made it financially attractive for them and, in some instances, hinted that failure to comply would result in increased regulation. Another scholar takes a different perspective, arguing that a small number of businessmen and industrialists, “chiefly from the electrical industry, resolved not to be left behind when the atomic revolution arrived. … In the early 1950s, they began to urge Congress toward new legislation that would lower secrecy and other barriers.” See (449: 161) and the references cited therein. 19. Interestingly enough, one scholar has argued that Eisenhower’s proposal was disingenuous: the real motivation was to find a way to control nuclear weapons proliferation; the only way to do this was to have inspection rights, which would be possible only as a condition attached to a grant of nuclear energy technology. See (309). 20. For an excellent analysis of the inconsistency inherent in letting nuclear utilities create the materials used to transmit risk information to the public, see (191). 21. Perception is also affected by media coverage: the constant repetition of the images of disaster and tragedy magnify that news to the exclusion of the thousands of uneventful flights occurring daily. By bringing disaster into high relief, the incidence of such tragedies is distorted against the background of safe travel. 22. In the 1950s and 1960s, after the opening of the Shippingport reactor in Pennsylvania (1957), there were assertions of adverse effects on fetuses and children downwind of the facility. The documentation for these claims, while receiving much public attention, was never scientifically validated. 23. Personal communication. May 1996. As part of his assignment, Pasedag—who then worked for the TMI operator—often spoke in public, providing information to the media and to ordinary citizens in the Harrisburg, PA area. 24. Many observers, including at least one contributor to this volume, feel in retrospect that the subsequent openness of the Soviet government as the tragedy of Chernobyl unfolded consisted more of smoke than substance. At the time, however, the change from the original knee-jerk regression to pre-glasnost practices was taken at face value by even the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). 25. Most commentators trace the loss of innocence to the Gary Powers incident, when the Soviet Union shot down a U-2 spy plane overflying their territory and then-President Eisenhower initially lied, claiming that the United States had no such surveillance

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Part Two: Chernobyl, Eco-Nationalism, and Loss of Rhetorical Control program. Eisenhower later admitted the lie, acknowledging both the program and the captive Powers; ultimately, the United States exchanged a captive Soviet spy for the American pilot. I would not dispute this chronology, for it was long after the U-2 incident that the American public became aware of the effects of atmospheric weapons testing; however, the direct effects of that realization, I would argue, are more far-reaching and continue to affect perceptions of government credibility today, particularly where nuclear facilities are concerned. Ironically, many believe that the government response to Chernobyl broke the social covenant between that government and the people of the USSR. 26. Radiation itself reinforces these images in the form of radiation therapy which, properly applied, can eliminate incidences of cancer; but when misapplied, it can itself produce deadly cancer in addition to the unpleasant, sometimes horrific side effects of the treatment. 27. The image of transmutation—the passage through destruction to rebirth—is reminiscent of the Russian legend of the firebird, immortalized in the ballet by Stravinsky. 28. For more information about Kyshtym, see (312). 29. See (483: 102–104). See also (404). 30. Ambassador Shcherbak uses the Ukrainian spelling Chornobyl, rather than the more common Russian rendering: Chernobyl.

CHAPTER 22

Ukraine, Russia, and the Question of Nuclear Safety Michael K. Launer and Marilyn J. Young Provenance: Originally published in Nuclear Energy and Security in the Former Soviet Union, edited by David R. Marples and Marilyn J. Young, 45–82. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997. This book was republished in 2018 by Routledge. Copyright Holder: Taylor and Francis Group LLC (Books) US, used by permission Description: This chapter discusses the status of civilian nuclear power in Ukraine and Russia after the break-up of the Soviet Union. In addition, it describes a unique approach to the question of how one defines “safety” in the context of complex technological systems, including nuclear power production.

INTRODUCTION: SAFETY AND FEAR; ECONOMICS AND ENVIRONMENTAL AWARENESS The purpose of this paper is to describe the general level of safety exhibited in the civilian nuclear power industry of Russia and Ukraine, to examine the various factors—both technological and institutional—that impinge upon safety improvements, and to provide an assessment of prospects for the future. In contradistinction to the oft-expressed opinion that operational safety in the nuclear industry is primarily dependent upon technical excellence of the equipment itself, together with the level of training achieved by operations and maintenance personnel, this paper shall argue that such factors are derivative. We believe, in fact, that public safety in any potentially dangerous technological industry derives from the organization of management and support services and, further, that the relative level of safety is societally determined: in other words, it is primarily dependent upon economic and political factors. Moreover, the linchpin that unites or impedes safety efforts at all levels—operational, managerial,

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and governmental—is the presence or absence of a strong safety culture instilled from above. On the most abstract level, indeed, the cardinal consideration may be the social contract existing between any government and the people it governs. Many argue that nuclear power is inherently unsafe, hence that it cannot be made safe, so the technology should be abandoned and all existing facilities throughout the world closed. Critics point to the accidents at the Three Mile Island nuclear station (near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in the United States) and at the Chernobyl nuclear station (located some one hundred kilometers north of Kiev [Kyiv], the capital of Ukraine) as ample proof of their position. As a form of argument, this is ideological in the extreme, relying more upon emotion and an appeal to fear of the unknown than upon reasoned judgment or the consideration of factual evidence. To demonstrate this point, we would cite the virulent campaign that was waged unsuccessfully in Austria to force termination of construction activities at power plant sites in Slovakia (particularly the Mochovce station) and the Czech Republic. Opponents of nuclear power generation have purchased television air time to run advertisements that juxtaposed still pictures of completely harmless concave cooling towers—which most people seem to think are the reactor units themselves—to stock footage of nuclear test explosions in the Pacific. Nevertheless, these arguments need to be taken seriously, if only because they are so persuasive. Two factors are of utmost importance. First of all there is fear of the atom—that odorless, colorless, invisible destroyer stalking the earth. This, of course, is the legacy of the A-bomb, so much in the news throughout much of 1995 because of the fiftieth anniversary of the devastation wrought to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For any analysis of “nuclear politics” to be complete, one must take this fear into consideration. In the Introduction to this volume, Marilyn Young discusses some of the factors impinging on the willingness of society to fully accept nuclear power plants in its midst. Secondly, one must consider the very notion of “safety”: how is this concept defined and what does it actually mean? We would argue that there exist competing definitions of “safety” and that the issue of nuclear power development worldwide ultimately will be decided as the result of public persuasion: whichever side projects its definition most effectively will win. (At the moment, to be sure, it is the naysayers who are ascendant.) We shall discuss this factor in greater detail to provide a background for the remainder of our analysis.

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The TMI accident occurred when personnel in the unit control room incorrectly diagnosed a dangerous situation; the accident was exacerbated because their emergency instructions were ill-suited to the task of restoring normal operating conditions given the actual situation that had developed. What might have been a scary, but manageable, scenario got completely out of hand, and the resulting accident nearly proved to be the realization of an engineering nightmare—a molten agglomeration of radioactive fuel and metallic structural elements that threatened to “eat” its way through the thick concrete stab underlying the damaged power unit. Other than an actual nuclear explosion, nothing more terrifying than the release of all that radioactivity into the environment could be imagined. As a matter of fact, however, virtually no radiation escaped the thick, negatively pressurized containment facility made of reinforced concrete.1 Obviously, the protective measures that had been designed into the power plant were sufficient to cope with a severe accident that went far beyond what anybody would consider acceptable. So, do the events at TMI demonstrate that nuclear power is safe or unsafe? That all depends. Is safety defined by the absence of accidents or by the capability of handling them when they occur? To a great extent, the answer to the latter question is determined in the political arena; purely technical issues may be, and often are, overshadowed by policy concerns, and policy concerns are driven largely by societal pressures. Many opponents of nuclear power production argue that no accidents are acceptable, regardless of the consequences that ensue. This ideology of “zero tolerance” requires assurances of absolute safety before a technology is deemed acceptable; TMI must, by definition, prove the technology unsafe. Indeed, many minor accidents that never had the capacity to create damage to people or the environment would prove exactly the same thing. But no technology, not even the most benign, is absolutely safe. Well over a decade ago Professor Charles Perrow of Yale University propounded the theoretical notion of a “normal accident”—the idea being, simply, that no technology is fail-safe, that not only are malfunctions to be expected, in reality they are unavoidable (a statistician would call them “anticipated events”). (360) For this reason, measures must be taken in the design and operation of technological systems to minimize the consequences of accidents when these (inevitably) occur. Society, in turn, will determine by consensus how many accidents are tolerable, how severe they may become before the public demands that the technology

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be abandoned. All of this is based on some sort of cost-benefit calculus that factors in both the potential good which is derived from the technology and the potential harm which may ensue from its application. An obvious example of the application of this theory (long before its actual formulation by Perrow) occurred in the United States in the early days of the consumer movement, when Ralph Nader published a treatise entitled Unsafe at Any Speed. (326) This was an indictment of a specific make of automobile. Nader’s premise was essentially that of an engineer: equipment breaks down, people make mistakes, and accidents happen— therefore, a vehicle must protect its occupants in the event that a specific range of accidents occurs (in the nuclear industry, these are called “design basis” accidents). Improvements in safety are defined by an engineer as those activities or mechanisms which (1) increase the probability of an adequate response in the event that a design basis accident occurs or (2) expand the envelope of design basis accidents that can be compensated for by the available equipment. As indicated by the title, Nader believed that the vehicle in question would not protect its occupants in any accident scenario whatsoever. Largely as a result of Nader’s activities, which were excoriated by industrialists at the time, Americans now drive safer and more efficient vehicles. Such changes result from a combination of technological innovation and quality control; but they cannot be brought into existence without public pressure, legislative action, governmental regulation, and/or enlightened industrial managers endowed with a realistic sense of what it takes to ensure the profitability of their businesses. It turns out that Americans, by and large, are actually very tolerant of technology’s underside, to the extent that this is almost a national characteristic. In some instances, the risk potential is negligible in comparison to the potential benefits. For example, adverse reactions to immunization, while not unheard of, occur so infrequently that most parents routinely vaccinate their children against a broad spectrum of devastating and not so devastating diseases. And, yes, some babies die in the process. By and large, however, unless it happens to your baby, most people understand that the risks inherent in the process of immunization are a small price for society to pay when compared with the death, disease, misery, and financial cost of failing to immunize the general population. Even when the risks are more palpable, most people take what they consider to be reasonable precautions and go about their business. The most obvious example, again, is the use of automobiles. Between forty

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and fifty thousand individuals are killed in the United States each year as the direct result of vehicular accidents, with hundreds of thousands more injured. The economic cost is staggering; the cost in pain and suffering among victims and their loved ones is incalculable. Yet, that does not keep people from driving. It does not even inspire many of them to buckle their seat belts, or to buy new tires when the old ones wear out, or to obey speed limits, or to stay sober. With respect to power production at civilian nuclear facilities, most developed societies have determined a level of technological safeguards that they consider adequate to protect the population from exposure to even minimal significant doses of radioactivity. With those safeguards in place, nuclear power has been allowed to function. Over time, these requirements have become increasingly stringent. Many plants that were designed and commissioned some two decades ago may be deemed uneconomic by their owners, since the facilities are reaching the end of their design life and the cost of retrofitting the latest safety enhancements is staggering. Some of these safety measures were not required when the old plants were designed and constructed; others simply did not exist at the time.2 Many countries, of course, have no nuclear program; and some, bowing to public pressure after the Chernobyl scare, have terminated existing programs. The United States, where these decisions are often made at the local level, has witnessed the following circumstances: the Seabrook plant on Long Island (New York) was built but never operated after citizens sued over the lack of emergency escape routes; and another in California was closed by public referendum after the utility had spent several years and much money turning a deficient facility into one of the best in America. In Wisconsin, one of the country’s lowest-cost producers of electricity—the Point Beach nuclear station—is under tremendous financial pressure due to an impending corporate merger, the reluctance of the state Public Utility Commission to grant a rate increase in the face of anti-nuclear sentiment, and certain administrative decisions taken by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that may directly affect operating efficiency of the station. Thus the economic decision to build and operate a nuclear facility depends to a great extent upon the political climate in the jurisdiction that will be affected. The political climate, in turn, depends upon public perception. For the US industry to have any chance at survival, there must be

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no more serious accidents anywhere in the world. But that alone may not be sufficient to ensure economic viability. Assiduous regulatory enforcement and the delays occasioned by citizen law suits are directly translated into increasing costs and decreasing profitability, even when the utility triumphs in court. The practical effect in the United States has been to eliminate all domestic projects for more than a decade, although American corporations are participating in projects overseas. While there are some signs that the US domestic situation is changing, and research into advanced reactor designs has continued unabated with significant government funding, the fact of the matter is that no utilities have chosen to take the financial risks inherent in bringing a new plant on stream. That said, it is still true that generating electricity through the use of nuclear power at existing facilities remains cost effective throughout most of the world even when the cost of decommissioning is taken into account. If full weight is accorded the environmental costs of fossil fuel generation, the economic advantages of the nuclear sector become even more pronounced. Trapped between the Scylla and Charybdis of fossil fuel pollution, on the one hand, and a deep antipathy in the populace for further nuclear development, on the other, the United States has turned its attention to energy conservation. The results have been nothing short of spectacular; but the lessons cannot profitably be transferred to Central and Eastern Europe because only a rich nation with a strong economy can afford the developmental costs that make energy conservation a significant mechanism for fine tuning energy sector developmental needs. Society, then, ultimately determines whether or not a specific technology will enjoy widespread application. In a market economy, the situation is fairly straightforward. Society defines the required level of perceived benefit, an acceptable level of risk, and the price it is willing to pay (none of these factors is immutable, of course). Industry, if it sees a sufficient market and can meet the requirements within the available pricing structure, applies the technology in its business activity. How the requirements are defined, however, is a political question. It may strike some people as ironic, but the nuclear power production industry in Russia and Ukraine faces exactly the same pressures as are encountered in the West, although the severity is different for each factor; as are the root causes of the difficulty. Political pressure against continued development of nuclear power in the former Soviet Union literally exploded onto the scene shortly after Chernobyl blew up. (483) It

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remained a strong factor through the 1990 parliamentary elections, at which time it was almost impossible for even Communists to win competitive election without a serious ecological plank in their political platform. (277) Also in 1990, a moratorium on the development of nuclear facilities was instituted in Ukraine, and several new units under construction were halted. In many instances, the units were as much as forty percent completed; some were even further along.3 Starting in 1991, political and economic woes brought nascent environmental concerns to a standstill. In Lithuania, public appreciation for the existence of the Ignalina RBMK plant sky-rocketed in the frigid month of February 1991 after Soviet President Gorbachev cut off oil shipments as part of the crackdown on nationalist separatism that also resulted in an attack by troops of the OMON on the radio-TV center in the republic’s capital. However, the best example of changing attitudes may be the Armenian situation, where the region’s only nuclear power plant had been shut down several months after the terrible earthquake hit in December 1988. Over the years, oil and gas pipelines leading into Armenia were destroyed as the civil war with Azerbaijan for control of NagornoKarabakh dragged on, and a blockade of the only rail line for delivering coal continued; Armenians had to make do with less and less electricity, and the supply of heat and lighting was eventually reduced to as little as two hours per day. Under the circumstances, opposition to nuclear power dissipated, and with significant foreign aid from Russia the power plant— which had deteriorated significantly during the shutdown—was brought back online in 1995 much more quickly than most Western observers felt was advisable. Nevertheless, in Ukraine and Belarus, the two Soviet republics most devastated by Chernobyl, significant public resistance to nuclear power remains. Indicative of this are repeated complaints by government officials that the population is suffering from “radiophobia”—by which they mean a psychological and psychosomatic malaise bordering on hypochondria in which anything that goes wrong with the health of the individual is immediately ascribed to the consequences of radiation exposure as a result of the accident. Which is not to say that their consequences have been mild,4 only that not every illness that has occurred over the past decade resulted from the radiation effects.5 Even in these countries, however, economic chaos has led to a softening of opposition to nuclear power. Overall generation of electricity

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has plummeted in the Ukraine due to the collapse of the economy; nevertheless, the country faces an energy shortage, and cheap nuclear power is playing an ever increasing role in its energy balance. Because Ukraine cannot afford the world prices for oil and gas being charged by its number one supplier (Russia), nuclear plants now produce nearly one half of all the electricity generated in the country. (258) As will be described below, energy politics, nationalist sentiments, and public safety issues have become inextricably intertwined. As far as fear of the atom is concerned, few places outside of Japan can compete with Ukraine. To a large extent, this fear was created throughout the Soviet Union by the government’s propaganda machine: for the duration of the Cold War, the word “nuclear” was inextricably associated with the words “weapons,” “war,” and “destruction.” Analogously, in the United States, the generation of the Fifties grew up with bomb shelters, air raid drills in schools, and the pervasive fear that “godless commies” were going to try to vaporize “God-fearing Americans” out of existence with “The Bomb.” Even after the Chernobyl accident, the Gorbachev government insisted on associating the “heroic” efforts of the party and the Soviet people to combat this disaster with powerful allusions to defeating the Nazis during World War II. The government defended its helplessness before the devastating radiation release from the explosion by insisting that the accident “proved” the necessity for avoiding nuclear war, the proportions of which would dwarf the consequences of a mere industrial accident.6 Economics is all about bottom line analysis. The bottom line in this story is that both Russia and Ukraine are exceedingly poor countries with economic, demographic, environmental, and medical statistics in the lowest decile of the world’s nations. (160) They are Third World economies struggling not to tumble into Fourth World status. Can they afford nuclear power, which is an extremely expensive technology to operate and maintain? Absolutely not. Can they afford to do without nuclear power? Again, absolutely not. Given the state of the environmental depredation in the two countries, even greater reliance on fossil fuels (assuming they could afford to purchase them) would doom the land to long term tragedies worse even than the current situation, which is bad enough.7 And the energy conservation strategy being pushed so insistently in Eastern Europe by the American government is unlikely to succeed in Russia or Ukraine, since consumer consumption is so low compared to Western countries, and there does not exist the technological infrastructure

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needed to manufacture high-efficiency motors, refrigeration units, and other industrial equipment.8

THE MECHANISMS FOR ENHANCING SAFETY What are the available means for enhancing safety, as that term is broadly defined above: those activities or mechanisms which (1) increase the probability of an adequate response in the event that a design basis accident occurs or (2) expand the envelope of design basis accidents that can be compensated for by the available equipment? Generally, these means fall into four categories: hardware; procedures; the organization of management and support services; and safety culture. Each category will be discussed in turn. None, of course, exists in a vacuum: for example, procedures, whether formal or informal, must of necessity take into account the available equipment.9 And, often, inadequacies in one area can be compensated for by modifying one’s approach to other activities. For example, the Soviet nuclear industry has always had to function in the face of a lack of written instructions for its operators (the reasons for this are complex, but include the following: unavailability of paper, duplicating machines, and computers resulting from a systemic compulsion for information control and secrecy; the fact that all things nuclear, including civilian power generation, were highly classified activities; and the low priority placed on any industrial activities other than actual production, resulting in a lack of resources for training). Thus it became expedient to insist that all plant operators, including equipment operators, hold college degrees in engineering. By contrast, American power plants, which devote a remarkably high percentage of their resources to training, routinely hire people right out of high school, technical school, or the military.

EQUIPMENT The Soviet Union had a history of building simple, durable equipment: machine guns, tanks, airplanes, even spacecraft were all of the “Volkswagen” variety—easy to build, easy to run, easy to repair. They had to be, because little expense was devoted to stockpiling tools and spare parts or, again, to training people in equipment operation. Soviet diesel engines are the envy of American specialists because they can generate more power

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at lower rpms than can Western diesels—as long as you can get them to run at all, which is a significant problem at nuclear plants. On the other hand, Soviet industry was—and remains—deficient in designing precision equipment, electronics, and other “high-tech” components. What they lacked mostly was a technological infrastructure. Throughout all branches of learning and all sectors of the Soviet economy, lots of money was spent on “science,” but almost none on “technology.” As a result, theoretical capabilities have always far outstripped practical applications.10 When senior engineers first began to visit the United States on technical exchanges, they would just shake their head ruefully as they pondered the simplicity, ingenuity, and widespread availability of products such as Post-it Notes, Pampers, and moist towelettes! Even today, budding Russian entrepreneurs complain about how difficult it is to turn a bright idea into a manufactured product. The most obvious result of this situation, ultimately, is the low standard of living available to the population. Everything sort of works, like plumbing and elevators, but just barely and not always.11 Everything is as primitive and simple as it can be, yet still function. Nothing is pretty, or easy, or convenient.12 American specialists generally agree that the design of basic equipment for Soviet pressurized water reactors (known as VVERs, in contradistinction to the Chernobyl-type graphite moderated channel reactor known as the RBMK) is pretty good. This includes the reactor unit itself— in essence a sophisticated way to boil water—as well as the piping, pumps, steam generators, turbines, and various other pieces of equipment. Some facets of the Soviet design are admirable: they have much more water storage capacity, which gives them more time to react to certain kinds of emergencies; the steel used has a lower cobalt content than does American steel, so the overall level of radiation on-site is lower; they seem to have sump screens that work especially effectively and that may play a role in the low ambient radiation levels; and, as noted, they make good diesels. Soviet plants have some equipment that American plants lack, and they lack some things commonly found in American plants, such as poweroperated relief valves on pressurizers. Other items have a completely different design (compare vertical US steam generators with horizontal Russian ones), but it is not clear which type is better; since each poses significant problems for operations and maintenance personnel. On the whole, both US and Soviet reactors are good at heating water, creating steam, and producing electricity.

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What the Soviet designed units do not have are sophisticated electronic instrumentation and controls, measuring equipment, or fire13 and emergency protection systems equal to those in the West. As a matter of fact, one of the best power plants in the world, the Finnish plant at Loviisa, combines a Soviet reactor with Western controls. The Czechs are now building an amalgam unit at Temelin, which will feature a Skoda-built Soviet reactor combined with Westinghouse I&C equipment. One sees a number of conscious trade-offs in the way Soviet units were designed. For example, the spent fuel pool in VVER units is located inside containment: this limits its maximum size, which causes complications in other areas, but provides a certain amount of additional protection. Russian engineers will declare, privately, that they have no faith in the integrity of the domestically manufactured steel pool liner and, were a leak to occur, at least all of the radioactive cooling water would be localized. Similarly, Soviet plants have three completely independent sets of emergency protection equipment, called “safety trains,” compared to two in US plants. The presence of the extra safety train offsets the lower reliability of the equipment, particularly of the safety system pumps and the power supply from the emergency diesel generators. Chernobyl-style reactors, of course, have no containment structure whatsoever. Rather, they are enclosed in what amounts to a glorified utility building. Like the US reactors at Hanford, Washington, Soviet RBMKs were designed with one purpose in mind—to produce weapons-grade plutonium (generating electricity was just secondary, an added bonus). A premium was placed on keeping the plant in operation, and refueling takes place while the reactor is running.14 PWR/VVER units, whose primary function is electricity generation, have to be shut down for a month or more in order for refueling to take place. There are other design features in the RBMK that make it extremely unstable in certain operating environments. With no containment to serve as the last barrier against disaster, circumstances were perfect for turning a bad accident into a national tragedy. A large number of modifications have been introduced to the original RBMK design since the Chernobyl accident, although not all functioning units in either Russia or Ukraine have instituted all the changes yet. However, even the upgraded units are inherently unstable (technically, they have a “positive reactivity coefficient” in all operating modes), although less so than before.

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Despite design changes and the progress that has been made recently, improving equipment reliability to any significant degree is an unresolvable problem for Russia and Ukraine, if to do this they have to rely on their own resources. The lack of market competition, inadequate technological infrastructure, government run manufacturing facilities, and a cumbersome approval process for new equipment make it nearly impossible that improved controls, measuring devices, or fire suppression systems will appear on the domestic market in this century. Nor is either country likely to develop a computer manufacturing industry anytime soon. Such items are available from foreign suppliers, but the power plants themselves are strapped for funds, and neither economy (particularly in Ukraine) is strong enough to allow large-scale purchases of imported equipment. Fortunately, a great deal of technical assistance has been provided, and continues to be made available, by G7 countries. Most of the equipment— valued in the tens of millions of dollars—has been donated in the form of humanitarian aid: as such, it should be exempt from import taxes, duties, and fees. However; the customs and tax administrations in both Russia and Ukraine are run as independent fiefdoms within the government, and even the existence of international accords such as the Gore-Chernomyrdin Agreement has not been sufficient to resolve the financial and bureaucratic “turf ” issues. As a result, much of the foreign aid has languished for months in customs warehouses, and only by paying the duty on equipment or invoking political pressure at the ministerial level and above has it been possible to get some shipments delivered to their destinations. Slowly but surely, such administrative problems do get resolved, and the process should work better in the future. But foreign governments have found themselves in the unlikely position of offering both equipment and hard currency—to pay for contract work as a means of providing funds with which additional equipment might be purchased—only to find out that it is extremely difficult to give either away.

PROCEDURES Prior to the Chernobyl accident, and for approximately three years thereafter, Soviet power plants had no written operating procedures and very few written training materials. Of course, training materials were superfluous, because they also had no formalized training.15 To this day they

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have no written maintenance or repair procedures. However, since 1989 a collaborative US–Soviet effort (and successor projects with the Russian Federation, Ukraine, and several Central European countries formerly in the Soviet sphere of influence) has disseminated information regarding American emergency operating procedures. This approach relies on a response to symptoms, regardless of the cause, rather than attempting to diagnose what has happened during a tense emergency situation on the basis of incomplete information.16 A vigorous exchange program consisting of quarterly discussions in Eastern or Central Europe and semiannual training sessions in the United States has led to the development of draft procedures for selected power units. After six years of development and a painfully slow regulatory approval process, on May 1, 1996, a full set of these procedures was finally implemented at one VVER unit in Novovoronezh, Russia. In order to implement the new procedures, operating crews had to be trained to work with them, which entailed creation of a training program, as well. The Eastern European operators who have participated in the program have gone through a remarkable psychological transformation. After an initial period during which American industry experts gave lectures on various aspects of operations and training, the operators set about writing their own procedures, with the Americans reviewing the drafts and providing commentary. For the Russians and Ukrainians, this was a new and far from pleasant experience: culturally they were not prepared to have foreigners criticize their efforts in an open forum. Soviet society had not developed the notion of constructive criticism, and the first few meetings included a lot of awkward silent moments.17 Gradually, however, as the procedure writers became accustomed to the methodology, as trusting relationships developed among the participants, and as the drafts became better over time, the give-and-take produced exactly the results that the Americans had hoped for: honest discussions laced with praise, criticism, and humor. More importantly, gradually and nearly imperceptibly there have occurred significant transformations in the way power plants are operated in that part of the world. In a recent discussion of a hypothetical accident scenario, one of the Americans asked whether or not the Ukrainians would shut down a damaged reactor coolant pump and continue operating the unit using the undamaged pumps. The surprising answer he received was, “We’re not allowed to do that anymore.”18

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MANAGEMENT AND SUPPORT SERVICES Soviet managers generally were not advocates of the Dale Carnegie approach, nor did they subscribe to the tenets of Total Quality Management. Take into account the top secret, quasi-military status of civilian nuclear power, and it is easy to understand why a less than enlightened management style prevailed. To a very great extent, it still does. By and large, major enterprises are still run by the same people who ran them in the days before democratization and the temporary banishment of the Communist Party. And a remote Soviet village dominated by one industry or one manufacturing facility resembles nothing so much as an American coal-mining company town. The plant manager was mayor, king, and deity. Literally he could make you or break you. Plus there was the KGB or Savak or whoever. Not a pretty picture. Managers were under tremendous pressure to meet production targets (“fulfilling the plan”)—little else mattered. Failure to do so meant that everyone in the enterprise lost bonuses, which amounted to as much as seventy-five percent of one’s base pay. One could be removed for cause, or for no reason at all. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that the management paradigm was authoritarian and top-down. When nothing matters except production, it is not surprising that few funds are expended on irrelevant luxuries such as training or environmental protection. Nor is safety a high priority when a run-the-plant-at-all-costs mentality prevails. Running a power plant meant keeping the plant running whenever possible. Particularly in the winter, when energy consumption throughout Europe increases sharply (it is easy to forget how far north Europe is situated). The ramifications can be seen everywhere in the system. One of the reasons the undamaged Chernobyl units were brought back on-line so quickly (Units 1 and 2 returned to service prior to the end of 1986 and before construction of the Unit 4 sarcophagus was completed; Unit 3 returned to service in 1987) can be seen in the need to cover an expected energy shortage—fossil fuel plants that should have been shut down during the summer months had been forced to keep running, since the accident had put four thousand megawatts of generating capacity out of commission. Soviet engineers knew that without their annual inspection and preventive maintenance, those fossil plants were unlikely to remain functional throughout the winter.19

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As the Ukrainian economic crisis intensified during 1992–1994, the disparity in effective salary between Russia and Ukraine grew exponentially. The Ukrainian currency, which had been at parity with the Russian ruble when the Soviet Union was officially dissolved, dropped in value sharply, with the exchange rate quickly reaching the twenty-to-one range.20 The breakup of the union also meant there were no longer any government constraints on residence or employment, and many of the most qualified plant personnel, largely Russian by birth and nationality, returned home to better paying jobs. Still, one cannot run a power plant without operators, and the Ukrainians found themselves hard pressed to put qualified people in the control rooms around the clock. A variety of incentives, including pay raises and tax concessions from the federal government, were instituted to stem the tide, but only the continued decline of the Russian economy—coupled with a dearth of further vacancies at Russian power plants—slowed down the loss of experienced personnel. The problem was especially critical at Zaporozhe nuclear station, since plans were underway to start up Unit 6 toward the end of 1995—in typical “old Soviet Union” fashion, the reactor went critical (achieved a self-sustaining chain reaction) just prior to the new year. The extra people required to staff this unit, in the face of a dwindling supply of experienced operators, has necessitated a decrease in the overall experience of control room personnel, and even less time is available to provide continuing training.21 A nuclear power plant, like any other complex organization, has many constituent elements not directly engaged in power production, but necessary nonetheless for work to continue. Among the most important support activities are maintenance, training, procurement, and planning. Each area is beset by a number of difficulties, the most critical of which are not susceptible to easy solution: these are lack of money to support their activities, and specifically a lack of modern equipment, including office automation, to increase the efficiency and work capacity of the unit. It is difficult to say which division is worst off. In a country where apartment dwellers routinely steal light bulbs out of hallways and car owners lock their windshield wipers in the glove compartment whenever they leave their cars, it should not be surprising that repair shops lack the necessary equipment, supplies, or spare parts. Still, it is surprising to see a fully operational blacksmith shop in a modern power plant, or to watch electricians rewinding cores for electric motors because replacements are not available.

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The planning department at an American nuclear facility has a staff numbering in the dozens. It coordinates all activities that require participation from more than one department or unit in the plant administration. For example, if routine servicing of a pump motor is to be performed, operations, maintenance, supply, and perhaps quality assurance people are called into play: operations isolates the pump and certifies that other equipment is in the proper configuration—for example, that valves are closed to keep water or steam from reaching the spot where the servicing is to occur—so that work may proceed safely; supply needs to get the proper materials ready for use and possible delivery to the work location; and the maintenance people will actually do the work. QA may have to inspect everything and run post-maintenance tests; then operators need to reconfigure the lines for normal plant conditions. Meticulous records are kept on everything: regulators and lawyers are everywhere. All of this is planned in advance, work is scheduled and logged, unit supervisors are informed so that they can schedule crews or plan their own activities. The maintenance supervisor must be certain that personnel sent to do the job have passed qualifying training on the activity. Everyone involved has a written procedure to follow, all of which are developed, maintained, and distributed electronically. Without massive logistical support (LANs, high-volume duplicating machines, computerized inventory records, etc.), even the simplest task can become chaotic. When a unit outage is planned, and the activities of hundreds of people over a span of thirty-five to eighty days need to be coordinated, the planning process begins months in advance. When major modifications are planned, engineering personnel need to perform a wide range of time-consuming activities. Without putting too fine a point on things, suffice it to say that this process is not duplicated at a Russian or Ukrainian plant. A specific example should highlight the differences. Both American and Soviet reactor units have chronic difficulties with steam generators. Replacing them is a major headache requiring that the affected unit be shut down (in the United States, this entails the loss of perhaps five hundred thousand dollars per day in revenue from the electricity not being generated), and having direct costs in the tens of millions of dollars. At an American station, the planning for this activity can take upward of three years. Coordination is essential, since the unit cannot operate while the modification is taking place, and every extra day the unit must be shut down costs so much

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money. Ideally, the actual process of replacing a unit’s old steam generators should take less than two months. By contrast, a leading Ukrainian specialist described the process at his plant, presumably with a great deal of hyperbole, as follows: the chief engineer calls a meeting on Tuesday and explains that next week we have to begin replacing the steam generators on a unit. Zaporozhe has replaced steam generators on at least three of the five units that have been in operation for a while. Never has the process taken less than a year to complete. This is not particularly a safety issue, but it helps explain a number of factors—economic, organizational, and cultural—that do have a direct bearing on the safe operation of a nuclear power plant. One specific factor needs to be mentioned here. When major equipment is replaced at a Western plant, the utility generally has a choice of suppliers, and it attempts to purchase the best replacement part at the best competitive price. In Eastern Europe, there is at most one supplier for a given piece of equipment (let us recall that blacksmith shop!), the item may or may not be in stock, the price will be whatever the manufacturer chooses to charge—Russia and Ukraine were, and to a great extent remain, state run industrial monopolies—and in all likelihood, even if it is possible to obtain the part, it is of exactly the same design as the one that went bad, so if the problem is generic to the item as designed you can be certain that you will have to replace this one, too.

SAFETY CULTURE The notion of a safety culture is difficult to define, but the results of its absence in a nuclear plant (or anywhere else, for that matter) are immediately obvious. Safety culture is an existential philosophy—establishing safe operation as the highest value to which all others are subordinated, including the generation of electricity and profits. If one tries to function so as to eliminate accidents, no matter how unlikely they are, then some accidents will not happen.22 The operative question is, “What if … ?” and the difficulty is that one can never prove which accidents did not happen, only that the general frequency is up or down. Safety culture is a habit—doing things in the same way every time so that, if something is done when your brain is in neutral, it is likely that it was done correctly. Good examples from everyday life include always

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putting on your seat belt as soon as you get into a car, always turning off the iron before walking away from the ironing board, always locking the front door behind you when you enter your home.23 Safety culture is an attitude of respect—caring about yourself, your coworkers, the environment, even the equipment you work with, and doing everything possible to safeguard them all. Marine drill sergeants instill the attitude that your rifle is your best friend and should be treated as such. Any supervisor can tell a lot about the people they work with just by observing how they handle their tools and their personal belongings. Ultimately, safety culture is also good business, since a safe, well operated enterprise is more likely to be a profitable one. Just ask any civil lawyer. At the extreme end of the spectrum, the nuclear industry in the West fully realizes public temperament is such that the next serious accident at a commercial facility will be the last—the political pressure to shut down the whole industry will be insurmountable. That fact, indeed, explains to a great extent the amount of attention, money, and effort being devoted by Western governments and by private industry to improving nuclear safety in Eastern and Central Europe. Safety is manifested in the way a facility is operated, but it stems from management. Management must devote the resources necessary to make safety a reality, either on its own merits (safe is better than dangerous) or for purely business reasons (safe is more profitable than dangerous). Unfortunately, safety is not necessarily more profitable. The best analogy may be environmental protection. Pollution safeguards are extremely expensive, and in many circumstances it is considerably cheaper for a manufacturer to pollute than not to. This is where government must step in. A strong set of laws, diligently enforced by a regulatory agency, and a system of punitive measures, imposed by the courts, to extract a sufficiently large penalty from polluters—large enough to make them pay attention and change their ways—has proven to be the only mechanism capable of enforcing socially acceptable behavior on enterprises without a social conscience. In theory, it is society at large that dictates what behaviors are acceptable, how the public interest is defined, and to what extent governmental action is the proper mechanism (as opposed, for instance, to market forces) for adjusting private behavior. These are the classic issues of representative democracy, but they are equally valid regardless of the form of government. One may go so far as to claim that they are the defining issues

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of any society. In the current American political situation, it is probably true that most citizens believe these issues are inadequately addressed: about as many believe there is too much government interference in the lives of individuals or the activities of business as believe exactly the opposite. All of these people, on both sides of these issues, should visit Russia! Levity aside, this discussion naturally leads to consideration of governmental politics on national and international levels, the regulatory environment in any jurisdiction, and the ways in which policy impinges on plant management, plant operation, and the availability of technology. In our opinion, national policy, industrial regulation, and plant management are inextricably entwined. It is only after a thorough analysis of the global factors involved that one can reach sound conclusions regarding the safety of nuclear power in Russia and Ukraine, prospects for improving safety, and the changes that must be instituted in society and at the plants themselves for meaningful improvement to occur.

GOVERNMENT, POLITICS, AND THE ECONOMY; REGULATION AND PERFORMANCE; SOCIETY AND SAFETY The areas of national policy that most affect the conduct of business in the nuclear industry today are economics and international relations. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, international relations expanded to include complex interactions among the successor states, particularly Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. Keep in mind, however, that perhaps the greatest change came several years earlier, when the veil of secrecy over all things nuclear was lowered. Indeed, were it not for the removal of security restrictions and the general relaxation of control over the flow of information within Soviet society in the late 1980s, prospects for increasing civilian nuclear power safety would be nil.24 In the realm of economics, the most significant policy decisions relate to the problem of government subsidies. Even before the breakup of the USSR and the implementation of economic reforms (the largely abortive shift to a “market economy”), authorities instituted a policy of “self-financing”—in effect, a requirement that all enterprises and most governmental agencies except the military and security establishments generate sufficient revenues to cover their own expenses. The practical effect on agencies has been to slash their appropriations from the federal budget, resulting in a scramble to exact fees from industrial sources for

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the services that had previously been provided at no identifiable cost.25 Industrial enterprises have been compelled to function on the revenues generated by the products they manufacture and sell, despite the fact that most remain government owned and operated. In olden days (i.e., pre-perestroika) the Soviet economic system operated within a framework of strict price controls on all domestically produced goods and services, particularly on raw materials and labor, and an elaborate system of internal fund transfers that allowed the government to maintain the fiction of economic viability. It was a deficit ridden system which diverted nearly two-fifths of the country’s GNP to support its military establishment and which was propped up by the international sale of natural resources for hard currency. In fact, the whole arrangement resembled nothing so much as a fragile house of cards based on interlocking subsidies. When the subsidies were curtailed, the structure collapsed. Had the new system been instituted consistently (read: in a draconian manner) the effect would have been devastating, but perhaps relatively short-lived—if one judges by events in Poland.26 The problem is that for political reasons the government could not really live with its own decision, since to do so would potentially engender greater unrest in an already shaky political situation. Further, the inability of Gorbachev and, after him, Yeltsin to control Central Bank policy crippled all attempts at economic reform. Rather than force the closing or restructuring of major industrial enterprises (with the attendant immediate increase in unemployment and decline in domestic production, but offering the hope of a steady medium-term rebound in capacity utilization and infrastructure development), the central bank continued to increase the money supply at will and to provide hopelessly inefficient major enterprises with massive unsecured loans intended to cover their current operating expenses. This simply exacerbated all stresses within the system without remedying any of the underlying causes. Too much money (in the form of wages for unproductive labor) chased too few goods, and consumer competition for relatively scarce supplies of imports allowed domestic producers to raise prices with no regard for quality improvement, but with artificially created impunity from the economic consequences of their actions. What has resulted is a nearly insurmountable problem of nonpayment outside the realm of the cash economy on the street. Enterprises everywhere—particularly large, government-operated manufacturers and raw materials producers—owe staggering amounts to their suppliers and

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employees.27 Thus a new system of inadvertent subsidies has been created, but the effects are not spread evenly throughout the economy, and the deficit is no longer being covered by raw material exports.28 As far as the energy industry is concerned, the situation has become fairly desperate. In Ukraine, which does not fabricate nuclear fuel and which also lacks easily accessible oil and gas reserves of its own, all of these products must be purchased from Russia at prices close to world levels. Passing along these costs to the consumer would bankrupt the economy immediately. Rather, the price the Ukrainian government (acting as the national cartel that purchases and distributes electricity) pays to itself (as the producer of that electricity) does not cover the cost of production. (258) Even in Russia, where the established price theoretically does cover production costs, the industry is mired in the nonpayment morass. Moreover, both governments have mandated that supplies of heat and electricity not be curtailed in the winter, despite the fact that neither individuals nor enterprises can pay their bills.29 Of course, to do otherwise in such a northern climate would doom millions to death—a policy no government that purports to care about its citizens could adopt. In effect, the energy industry generally and the nuclear sector most specifically,30 has shouldered the brunt of the problem. These economic woes reverberate throughout the nuclear industry: plant personnel work without pay, as do nonplant workers who live in the company towns, so individuals with marketable skills such as programming tend to leave the industry; moreover, management does not have the resources required to pay for necessary goods and services, much less to finance safety enhancements that must be purchased abroad and paid for in hard currency. Policy decisions obviously play an important role. Frequently, however, there is little coordination between national policy and its implementation on the ministry level, so it may seem as though there is no policy whatsoever. For example, the current policy of the Russian government with regard to civilian nuclear power is that everything should be done to further the sector’s development in the future. New plants are to be built, and construction that was stopped during the 1989–93 moratorium is to be resumed. On the other hand, existing power plants are often forced to shut down operating units in good condition because of insufficient industrial demand for the generating capacity. Not only does this practice put additional economic pressure on the nuclear plants, it also increases

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the number of unanticipated plant evolutions, which increases the possibility that problems may arise.31 Even where national policy is well defined, the policy itself may contribute to the persistence of safety problems. For example, the Soviet government did not feel comfortable having to ask for or rely on foreign assistance after the Chernobyl accident, despite its obvious and, to some limited extent admitted, inability to cope with the clean-up or with construction of the protective sarcophagus. In addition to any security issues that may have been involved, Soviet national pride interfered with initial attempts by foreign governments to provide aid. It was only through the intercession of Armand Hammer, the late private industrialist who had long-standing ties to the Soviet Union, that the government accepted the offer of any technical and medical assistance whatsoever.32 Even so, the official position of the government was that the Chernobyl cleanup effort represented a triumph of Soviet science and technology over the forces of nature and, moreover, that it demonstrated the organizational strength of the Communist Party in focusing the heroism and generosity of the people to resolve such a terrible problem. For all intents and purposes, it was claimed, the Soviet Union was left to struggle with Chernobyl on its own. (483) In addition, the help that was accepted was later ridiculed: since 1989 a number of commentators in the USSR and its successor states have reacted negatively to the unsuccessful efforts of Dr. Robert Gale to help the most critically ill patients.33 On the other hand, only a pronounced change in governmental policy, fostered by continued improvement of relations with the West, made it possible for the USSR to propose in 1988 that an international organization be created to assist in the distribution of information regarding operational experience and unforeseen events among civilian nuclear facilities worldwide.34 Only a genuine thaw of cold war hostility made it possible for the superpowers to embark upon the first bilateral efforts to increase safety at Soviet designed nuclear facilities in 1989.35 Those efforts, which focused initially on regulatory issues and the development of emergency operating procedures, continue even today. Naturally, a certain amount of suspicion, resentment, and wounded pride accompanied the acceptance of Western aid. Soviet bureaucrats and technical experts were put off by a variety of foreign attitudes and policies. These included: the belief that local staff were not capable of deciding what needed to be done; the insistence that most of the available funds

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be directed at foreign companies (working as contractors in conjunction with ministries or national laboratories) rather than at Soviet or successor state institutes; and—in the case of US Nunn-Lugar appropriations for disarmament, dismantlement, and nuclear materials accountancy—the legislative requirement that the Soviet and successor state governments make “good faith contributions” far exceeding their ability to pay or their institutional capacity to pry appropriations out of legislatures that were inimical to international cooperation and, during some periods, simply not functioning in any normal manner. Representatives of the United States Department of State and Department of Defense, ignoring the realities of politics and the lessons one might have learned from American appropriations disputes, took the position that Russian and other governmental officials need merely “snap their fingers” and the required appropriations would miraculously appear. Equal, if not greater, significance must be ascribed to attitudes and policies that dominated relations among the Soviet successor states themselves. We shall focus here on two specific issues, spent fuel storage and the fate of the Chernobyl plant. The Communist dominated Russian Duma elected in 1990, and ethnic Russians generally regardless of where they lived in the Soviet Union, were furious at political maneuvering by Ukraine and the Baltic republics that would ultimately result in the dissolution of the country. In January 1991, when Gorbachev was persuaded by hard liners to cut off oil supplies to Lithuania—and to allow violent intervention by special units of the police (OMON) and military (Spetsnaz) in order to disrupt government broadcasting there—local residents were spared from freezing only because the Chernobyl-type RBMK power plant at Ignalina continued to function. Deep seated anti-nuclear sentiment that had existed at least since the tragic accident nearly five years earlier evaporated instantaneously: it was replaced by an even more intense reaction against Russia and Russians.36 Shortly after the political reorganization of the Soviet Union, Moscow, for its part, passed highly restrictive and essentially vindictive legislation. Among the steps taken was a ban on the transportation of spent nuclear fuel across the new borders of the Russia Federation from countries of the “near abroad,” as the former Soviet republics were called. This action was directed specifically against Lithuania and Ukraine, although it also affected Kazakhstan to some extent. It hit particularly hard at Ukraine, which has five operating nuclear power plants. Aside

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from Chernobyl, most of the remaining units incorporate the 1000 MW VVER reactor design: this system has particularly limited capacity for storing spent fuel since the fuel pool is situated inside containment.37 The practical effect of this design decision is that spent fuel can be stored at the plant for only a relatively short period, as opposed to American units, which can retain on-site all of the fuel that will be expended during the full 40-year service life of the station. With no domestic capability for storing or reprocessing nuclear fuel off-site,38 and with regulations limiting the amount of on-site storage more severely than even the design constraints would dictate, Ukraine found itself in an untenable position: there was no way the country could become energy independent in the foreseeable future. Politically, of course, it was unacceptable to let Russia have such a stranglehold on the well-being of the nation. Accordingly, in early 1993, officials at the largest Ukrainian station39—Zaporozhe NPP—on their own initiative entered into negotiations with French and American consortia for the design and construction of a storage facility to be located adjacent to the plant. Ultimately, a contract was signed with the Americans, and operation was supposed to begin at the end of 1996. However, Ukraine’s financial woes have plagued this expensive project from its inception, so that it has moved along in fits and starts, although a substantial contribution from the United States government—provided as humanitarian aid— allowed work to proceed more smoothly. In addition, licensing delays have been numerous at every stage in the development process. In late summer 1996 approval was obtained for site preparation and pad construction, but as of New Year’s Day 1997, the nuclear regulatory agency of Ukraine had yet to authorize fabrication of the storage casks or loading of any spent fuel. This despite the fact that Zaporozhe, with its sixth unit started up, has been producing more than half of the nation’s electricity, and despite the fact that several of the units there are in violation of the requirement that enough free space be left in each spent fuel pool to allow for a complete unloading of the reactor core in the case of an emergency. As will be discussed below, the interplay here of Ukrainian economic policy, safety regulation, and national energy requirements is extremely complex. The continued operation of Chernobyl—and particularly Western diplomatic efforts to force closure of the facility—remains a delicate issue. Negotiations have been conducted virtually since the first days of Ukrainian independence. In the spring of 1994, a combined State

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Department/Department of Energy delegation from the United States visited Kiev to determine how much it would actually cost to shut down the station and to support long term maintenance and surveillance activities. As was widely reported subsequently in the press, Ukrainian officials set up three significant roadblocks. Two of the impediments were financial, the third touched more on national pride than on any other consideration. First of all, Ukraine insisted that closing Chernobyl would not be possible unless construction was completed on new units at Rovno, Khmelnitsky, and Zaporozhe—work that had been stalled by the moratorium declared back in Soviet days—because the country could not do without the three thousand megawatts of installed capacity at Chernobyl that was still being utilized. Immediately the cost went from under one billion US dollars to almost three billion. Secondly, Ukraine insisted that the West finance relocation of the twenty-eight thousand people whose lives would be disrupted if the station were shut down. Since Ukraine had no independent capability of providing jobs, housing, schools, or hospitals for these people, it included these costs in estimates of the total assistance package that would be required. Although difficult to assess in advance, these expenses surely pushed the total bill beyond the four billion dollar level. Nonetheless, representatives of the G7 countries have seemed willing to pay this price. On at least three occasions since early 1994 announcements have been made to the effect that an agreement had been reached between the president of Ukraine (there have been two in this time period) and foreign diplomats concerning the plant closing. Despite much ballyhooing in the West, however, none of these agreements has ever been ratified by the Ukrainian parliament, and it is not at all clear that Ukrainian government officials have ever bargained in good faith on this issue. Perhaps the greatest stumbling block to closing Chernobyl has nothing at all to do with finances. Rather, paramount here is national pride, both internally and with direct respect to Russia. Nationalist elements in the Ukrainian parliament, as well as many high ranking government officials individually, resent the tremendous pressure being applied to Ukraine in this regard. They believe that the West is unfairly treating the nation like a child who has misbehaved and who is being singled out for punishment as a means of delivering a lesson to its siblings. Of even greater saliency is the

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belief that Ukraine is being treated in a discriminatory manner because, of all the Soviet-designed RBMK units built in Eastern Europe,40 it was their misfortune that the one which blew up is located on Ukrainian soil. Anytime this issue is broached, whether formally at negotiating sessions or informally in private conversations, Ukrainians put forth the following argument: either RBMKs are dangerous or they are not; if they are dangerous, then all of them are dangerous, not just the ones at Chernobyl; if the remaining operational units at Chernobyl41 should be closed because the West judges them to be dangerous, then all such units, and particularly the ones located in the Russian Federation, should also be closed; if the West is not willing to put equal pressure on Russia to close down its many RBMK units, then why should Ukraine submit to such pressure?42 Ukrainian political considerations relate not only to diplomatic affairs. They also have important ramifications for domestic economic policy generally and for the energy sector specifically. Currently being played out is a titanic turf struggle between Goskomatom, the ministerial level agency that oversees operations at the nation’s civilian nuclear power stations, and the directors of the specific stations. Plant managers want control of their own operations. In particular; they want the freedom to threaten major electricity consumers in their service area with termination of service if bills are not paid. Currently, of course, both Russian and Ukrainian plants have to make do with no payment whatsoever for the electricity they produce, late and/or partial payment, and even payment in kind. For example, most of the staff at Balakovo nuclear station in eastern Russia drive shiny new cars because a nearby assembly plant has been paying its electricity bill in vehicles for the last couple of years. Last year, at Zaporozhe, the plant manager had to find an American company that was willing to take delivery of a large amount of refined aluminum (which the station had received in lieu of cash payment) and arrange for the delivery of needed equipment and supplies from the United States, just to realize some tangible benefit from the station’s electricity production. National policy, of course, is that no electricity consumer, and particularly no major industrial enterprise, face the threat that power might be cut off. This controversy lies at the heart of a different sort of power struggle currently at issue in Ukrainian courts. Late in 1995 Goskomatom tried to remove the director at Zaporozhe, Vladimir Bronnikov, who had the foresight to go on sick leave (making it illegal under Ukrainian law to remove him from his post). In turn, Bronnikov has sued to overturn

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the pending order that would effectively fire him. In a related maneuver, Goskomatom forced a rewrite of the Zaporozhe spent fuel storage facility contract, so that the actual customer was the governmental body, and not the power plant itself.43 This is not to say, however, that the power plants and Goskomatom cannot work together when it suits their common purpose. This is exactly what happened when Zaporozhe attempted to get regulatory approval for the start-up of Unit 6. Actually, this story goes back to 1989, when Zaporozhe sought to obtain regulatory approval from Moscow to start up Unit 5. Things had already changed considerably at Gosatomnadzor, the Soviet nuclear regulatory commission, since the dark days of Chernobyl. Armed with new powers and a national mandate, GAN had started to flex its regulatory muscle despite sorely inadequate staffing and funding. The deputy minister for nuclear operations, Nikolai Shteinberg, sent a commission headed by Aleksandr Gutsalov that was empowered to determine whether or not to grant permission for the new unit to begin commercial operation. Gutsalov determined that there were over seventy-five deficiencies, some major and some minor, that needed to be eliminated prior to start-up. Political pressure on Shteinberg to cave in was tremendous, because the Soviet government wanted the unit operational, but he stood his ground until a compromise of sorts was reached. Shteinberg forced the plant manager, the same Vladimir Bronnikov, to agree in writing that he would assume personal responsibility for ensuring that all the deficiencies would be addressed. In effect, Bronnikov had to plead guilty, in advance, to all criminal charges arising from any possible accident that might occur in the future, thus absolving the national government of responsibility.44 When Ukraine gained independence, Shteinberg was named head of its regulatory body—which, following the Soviet model, had ministerial status. Shteinberg brought with him many scientists, technical experts, and senior officials, including Georgy Kopchinsky, who became deputy minister (Gutsalov remained in Moscow and ultimately assumed Shteinberg’s old post). Shteinberg, an advocate of US-style regulatory activity, was disturbed by the fact that Zaporozhe Unit 6 was being completed without regard for new, stricter design standards that had come into force a few years after the start of construction. He gave the station until December 31, 1994, to bring the unit on line or be faced with meeting the revised standards. When the plant failed to meet that deadline, an unresolvable conflict was created.

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The Ukrainian government in 1995 proved to be just as anxious to start up the new power unit as the Soviet government had been six years earlier. The country was facing a serious energy shortfall, despite the economic downturn of recent years, and Kharkov, the nation’s second largest city, experienced power outages and planned cutoffs of heat and electricity during the 1994–1995 winter period. It is difficult to impute causality without insider knowledge of the situation, but shortly after the new year had begun a decision was made to downgrade the regulatory agency from an independent ministry to a division of the environmental protection ministry, which had the effect of undercutting Shteinberg’s ability to apply pressure to Goskomatom, the Ministry of Health, or other entities that now outranked his regulatory body in the administrative organization of the country’s executive branch. Subsequently, Goskomatom, acting this time on behalf of and with the full support of the power plant, convinced advisors of President Kuchma that the regulatory body had to change its policy with regard to Unit 6. This led to a confrontation, and Shteinberg was forced to choose between resigning or accepting a set of conditions that countermanded his previous authority. Shteinberg, internationally famous as the chief engineer who had restarted the undamaged Chernobyl units back in the fall of 1986, elected to step down from his government post and enter the private sector. Once again, Kopchinsky and others loyal to Shteinberg also resigned, leaving the regulatory agency even less able to exercise its authority and fulfill its responsibilities. In a recent conversation, Shteinberg was asked if Zaporozhe Unit 6 would have been allowed to go critical in August 1995 had he remained at the helm of the regulatory agency. “That’s a hard question,” he answered, “Probably, but under different conditions.”45 It is clear, despite vigorous enforcement activity within the regulatory agency itself, that the key issues guiding Ukrainian national policy in the nuclear arena have little to do with operational safety or environmental protection. The situation in Russia is more measured on all sides: enforcement is pursued steadily, but less vigorously than in Ukraine. Moderation reigns in the attitudes of all concerned parties. For instance, given the practical need to keep Chernobyl-type reactor units functioning despite the obvious inadequacies of the design, a decision was reached several years ago to install major safety enhancements. This is a slow and costly process that was begun in the early 1990s. For example, two of the four units at the Leningrad (St. Petersburg) nuclear

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station in Sosnovy Bor were substantially modernized by spring 1996, ten years after the Chernobyl accident. To provide a greater margin of safety during the continued operation of those RBMK units that have yet to be modernized, the Soviet government decided to limit their output to seventy percent of design capacity. This administrative decision—taken at the national level under urging by various international organizations— entails certain economic repercussions, but it dramatically increases the margin of operational safety at the units by increasing the time frames in which protective actions can be taken should another significant reactivity event occur in the future. Furthermore, political issues are not etched as sharply, either. Judging by the unpublished results of a survey conducted during the summer of 1993 in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second most populous city, there is little fear of danger from the power plant, which to located just sixty miles to the west—upwind; rather, here as elsewhere throughout Russia, people are much more concerned with their economic situation.46 When the Yeltsin government announced ambitious plans to develop civilian nuclear power during the next two decades, there was no discernible negative reaction among the population. Site preparation for new, advanced reactor units has actually begun at Kola, although the plant manager there does not anticipate completion of the project until around the year 2005. Overall, to be sure, Russia has greater natural resources than Ukraine and, despite obvious technological difficulties, it exports significant quantities of natural raw materials. Foreign investment in Russia continues to increase—in sharp contrast to the situation in Ukraine. Thus, the hard currency exigencies faced elsewhere in the CIS are less pronounced in Russia. In addition to, or perhaps as a result of, this situation, there seems to be much less conflict between the national nuclear operating agency in Russia, Rosenergoatom, and the regulatory body, Gosatomnadzor, than there is in Ukraine. This does not mean that disputes are nonexistent, merely that there seems to have been developed over time a greater level of mutual understanding between these bodies. A good case in point may be the way in which new, American-style emergency operating procedures are being approved for use at the power plants. As indicated, development of these procedures began in 1989 at Novovoronezh. Although it was obvious to everyone involved that nothing could be implemented at the plant without regulatory approval, and that it was unclear what kinds of demands would be made by the regulator, still there was great

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reluctance within the production organizations to provide information or ask for input. As a result when the whole package was ostensibly complete and the time had come to start training operators in the use of the new procedures, the process was stalled because the regulator believed, rightly, that it had to study the issues before allowing things to proceed. This caused a delay in implementation until January 1996, much to the dismay of the American side. By contrast, the regulator was brought into play at a much earlier time in the process with regard to developing EOP’s for other reactor types, a program that has been underway for nearly four years. Rosenergoatom, which became frustrated with the slow pace of regulatory approval, finally saw the wisdom in the American approach, and the agency changed its confrontational policy.47 Nevertheless, the Department of Energy, which had financed the development process for seven years, faced tremendous pressure from congressional staffers to produce some “scalps”—tangible proof that program funds were not expended in vain. When results did not materialize quickly enough, DOE diverted appropriations to other projects. One can judge the different attitudes of the regulatory agencies in Russia and Ukraine variously. The primary function of the regulator, of course, is to regulate. By definition this is an adversarial stance, and many would castigate a situation in which the operators and the regulators collaborate to any great extent.48 On the other hand, the regulator can insist on adherence to standards and procedures at a level that makes efficient operation of a facility virtually impossible. An example of such regulatory obstinacy can be seen in the United States at the present time. New technologies have been developed for detecting microscopic flaws in metals, and the existence of defective steam-generator tubes is of great concern since they can lead to radiation releases. The new methods are so advanced, however, that they allow detection of some defects too small to be measured accurately, much less fixed. Naturally, it is within the authority of the NRC to require that any defective tubes be repaired or “plugged,” which removes them from service and lowers the maximum energy output of the unit. This makes the unit less economical to run. Plug enough tubes and it no longer makes sense to keep the unit in operation. At least one American power plant is currently undergoing this intense scrutiny, and there is reason to believe that all others will soon face the same problem. Should the regulator be faulted for enforcing regulations to the fullest extent possible? Can the utilities be trusted, in the absence of dogmatic

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regulation, to make wise decisions balancing their own economic interests with the public interest? Ultimately, in the long term, this is a decision for society to make. In the short term, however, regulatory practice can cause effects to occur that may or may not accord with social values or wishes—assuming that a consensus on such issues exists and that these values can be specified in any meaningful sense.49 In the current US situation, for example, there is no question that the essentially antipathetical attitude of the Clinton administration to future development of civilian nuclear power creates an atmosphere in which rigid enforcement thrives. On the other side of the coin, most Americans would deplore the opposite extreme, where a laissez faire attitude toward regulation in the White House leads to abuses of the market place by “Big Business.” Of course, it is useful that the United States currently has a sizable surplus of installed electrical generating capacity in comparison to demand—partially the result of intensive efforts at energy efficiency and conservation throughout the economy. The choice of stringent enforcement is easier to make when there seem to be no compelling immediate drawbacks, such as the inability to adequately heat the nation’s homes during the winter. Just ask the Lithuanians or Armenians.

CIVILIAN NUCLEAR SAFETY IN RUSSIA AND UKRAINE In the summer of 1989, Bill Lee—president of Duke Power Company, one of the largest nuclear utilities in the United States, and guiding force behind the creation of the Institute for Nuclear Power Operations almost a decade earlier—was sitting in a medium-sized conference room at the Chernobyl nuclear station listening to a discussion of plans to completely redesign the RBMK reactor protective systems. The World Association of Nuclear Operators had just been formed at a meeting in Moscow, and foreign participants were on a tour of the damaged power plant. Of particular interest, of course, were the control rods. They should have shut down the chain reaction when jammed into the reactor core, but instead they led directly to the terrible disaster. An environment in which a chain reaction speeds up is said to be characterized by a “positive reactivity coefficient”; if conditions tend to slow down or stop a chain reaction, the system is said to have a negative coefficient. There are a variety of such coefficients that depend, for example, on temperature or pressure inside the reactor vessel. In some

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particularly abnormal situations, it is possible for steam bubbles—called “voids” because the space is devoid of fluid—to be formed in unanticipated areas of the core. In the Chernobyl accident, voids began to accumulate in the lower core region; the resultant positive void coefficient created a fantastic power spike, which in turn instantaneously produced pressures strong enough that they ripped open the reactor vessel and flipped the vessel head, weighing over one hundred tons, almost like the coin toss at the start of an American football game.50 Engineers at the Energy Technology Research and Design Institute in Moscow knew that this highly improbable scenario was theoretically possible, so they had provided operating instructions that should have made the occurrence of that scenario impossible. But just enough things went wrong in just the right sequence, and just the right safety systems were deactivated at just the wrong time.51 So the “impossible” happened, and Charles Perrow (359; 360) was proven correct: the statistically anticipated or “normal” accident had occurred. Not listening as the speaker’s words were being interpreted into English, Bill Lee said, “Ask him if the void coefficient will still be positive.” The answer, of course, was “yes.” “Then there’s nothing they can do to this reactor that will make it safe!” he exclaimed. Bill Lee made one other salient pronouncement that day: there is not a single reactor unit in the Soviet Union that could have been designed, built, licensed, or operated anywhere else in the world. Much has changed in the world since that summer in 1989. To a large extent, those changes can be traced back to the accident three years earlier at Chernobyl. What happened there was not even a nuclear explosion, just a simple mechanical failure—too much pressure in the fuel channels— but it transformed the world in ways no one could ever have imagined. And the Soviet Union is no more. Nevertheless, all of those other Soviet designed reactor units are still operating (except, ironically enough, for Chernobyl Unit 2 that was destroyed by fire). And what Bill Lee said back then is still true: only in the (post-) Soviet Union and the former satellite countries would these units still be in operation. But we must be cognizant that these are not the same reactor units from an engineering standpoint. Improvements have been made in all of them, even in the pressurized water reactors that have little in common with the RBMK.52 In addition, the governments running these plants

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know that at some level they will be held accountable if there is another terrible accident at a nuclear facility located on their territory. As a result, there now exists in all of these countries a functioning regulatory agency, not just a sham of an organization designed to convince the population that the government was looking out for their safety.53 Granted it is hamstrung by inadequate resources, insufficient funding, and the political and economic factors described in this study; still, it does regulate nuclear safety and it does look out for public safely in ways unheard of prior to Chernobyl. Most importantly, the people who work in these facilities—people who have known all along how to operate nuclear power plants in a safe, responsible manner—are less under the compulsion to keep the plants running at all costs. Not completely free of that impulse, but freer to a remarkable extent. Yes, fulfilling production goals means everybody makes more money, through bonuses, just as in the old days of five-year plans. But nuclear safety, radiation protection, and environmental safety are all serious endeavors in the post-Soviet nuclear industry, whereas earlier the concepts barely existed. Operating procedures are being developed that will make a difference in the way emergencies are handled. Are these power plants safe? By world standards, the answer must be “No.” And it is not likely they ever will be. But are they safer than hitherto? By any standard, the answer must be “Yes.” And as time goes on, particularly if stability and growth are established in the economies of these countries, the improvements in safety will continue.

NOTES 1. The total release amounted to less than 1 × 105 of the Chernobyl release. No one died, and it is difficult to believe that any one even suffered serious harm. Nevertheless, over five hundred million dollars in damages has been paid out as the result of civil suits brought against the operating company for putative harm caused by radiation in the aftermath of the accident. 2. In the case of the Diablo Canyon power plant on the central California coast, scientists discovered a new fault line about three miles offshore as the station was being built. Diablo Canyon had been designed to very stringent seismic standards anyway, because of the proximity of the San Andreas fault; nevertheless, additional protection was designed and installed at a cost of several hundred million dollars. 3. Various Soviet sources indicate that some power units (for example, Zaporozhe No. 6) were as much as eighty percent complete. In reality, most were not nearly so far along. For instance, upon visiting a plant site in the Crimea last summer, one American observer guessed that capital construction had not reached the forty percent level, and

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Part Two: Chernobyl, Eco-Nationalism, and Loss of Rhetorical Control virtually none of the heavy equipment had been installed. Rather, it was all standing unprotected at the construction rite, rusted and useless. Soviet data in this area usually were based upon the percentage of initial estimated cost that had been expended by the moratorium date, but these figures did not generally correspond to physical completion levels. 4. For details, see (298; 299: 78–114). 5. Data regarding public opinion with respect to civilian nuclear power have been discussed at meetings of the Soviet Nuclear Society and successor organizations in Russia and Ukraine since 1990. Much of the work, which was performed by an institute in Kharkov, Ukraine, was commissioned by power plant managers as part of an overall assessment of the political and ecological situation at their sites. 6. The same message was widely disseminated in the West. Many Americans remember the horrifying covers of the news magazines after information regarding the accident was released. Final Warning (174) evoked this same apocalyptic theme. The book served as the basis of a popular made-for-television movie. See also two sensationalist diatribes published in England: The Worst Accident in the World: Chernobyl and The Chernobyl Disaster. (195; 196) 7. See (158; 320; 361). 8. The American position is viewed sardonically and somewhat contemptuously by Ukrainian government officials because it advocates such measures as replacing domestic light bulbs in halls, corridors, and exit signs with high efficiency bulbs of Western manufacture. As if Ukraine has an abundance of lighted halls, corridors, and exit signs! As if the country could afford to purchase the bulbs in the first place or manage to distribute them throughout the country! As if people would not immediately appropriate them or destroy them, as currently occurs! As if this would make a dent in the real problem even if the other difficulties were surmountable! 9. When operators at Soviet designed plants started to develop Western style emergency procedures (see below), a curious situation developed. For a particular accident scenario, the procedure writers proposed a response strategy that seemed contorted to the American experts participating in the activity: “Won’t the RVLIS readout on reactor coolant level tell you what the situation is?,” they asked. The answer was simple: Soviet plants do not have a reactor level sensor. 10. For a discussion of this problem as it applies to astronomy, see (270). 11. Consider this cynical assessment of power plant systems by one American after his first exposure to a Soviet facility. “Eighty percent of the equipment works to eighty percent of spec approximately eighty percent of the time; that means it works right about half the time!” On a less facetious note, this situation greatly complicates the process whereby innovation is assimilated into the economy—whether that takes the form of new technologies or simply improving existing products. 12. One thing that is intuitively obvious to visiting Russians, but which dawns on Americans only after significant exposure to other cultures, is how expensive it is to make things pretty, easy, clean, or convenient. 13. Keep in mind that there have been repeated instances when fires have broken out at Soviet plants, but the local fire station could not be reached by telephone for several hours. Endemic problems relating to infrastructure and the economy impact all areas of life, not just nuclear power. We shall return to this problem below. 14. Online refueling and, concomitantly, off-loading of plutonium made it extremely difficult for the respective intelligence services to determine exactly how much nuclear

Ukraine, Russia, and the Question of Nuclear Safety material was being produced by the other side. Prudence dictated assuming the maximum possible amount, which undoubtedly led to intensified efforts by both superpowers to maximize their own production, just to “keep up with the Joneses”—or Ivanovs, as the case might be. 15. An unfunny joke went as follows: Soviet power plants have two operating rules. Rule No. 1 states, “Operators shall not allow any accidents to happen.” Rule No. 2 states, “In the event of an accident, reread Rule No. l.” This is not all that far from the truth. In any event, to this day control room operators in Eastern and Central Europe bear criminal responsibility for accidents that do occur. In one instance, a Czech shift supervisor told of an incident that happened several years ago: he was detained by the secret police, interrogated, and threatened with imprisonment because the unit he was working at tripped (shut down automatically due to some equipment malfunction) during a May Day celebration. The Soviet nuclear bureaucracy went to great lengths to convince Western governments that operator error was the sole cause of the Chernobyl disaster, including providing disinformation to the IAEA. They cleverly repeated some of the same justifications that were used by US industry officials after TMI, and they found a ready, willing, and believing audience in some circles. 16. The new methodology, termed “symptom-based,” was developed in response to the lessons learned from the TMI accident. 17. Changing the mind set of American operators after the TMI accident so that they accepted the completely new symptom-based approach to plant operations was an equally painful and slow process. 18. Congress and the bureaucrats in the Department of Energy who oversee the activities of the Lisbon Initiative, as this exchange program is called, have demonstrated continued impatience with the slow pace of tangible progress regarding emergency procedure development. Indeed, this facet of the program was essentially terminated after fiscal year 1996. Nevertheless, in our opinion, changing “the hearts and minds” of these operators fully justified the time, effort, and expense of the program. 19. The Soviet government vigorously denied this allegation when it was raised at the time, but a highly placed plant official confirmed its correctness in a 1989 conversation. 20. If one compares exchange rates for the two currencies against the US dollar, in January 1996 the Russian ruble was worth approximately forty times the value of the Ukrainian karbovanets; but this is slightly misleading, because starting in mid-summer 1995 the Russian government began to hold dollar trading in an artificially narrow range— ostensibly for stabilization of the domestic economy, but more probably as an attempt to influence the outcome of the December parliamentary elections and the Spring 1996 presidential election. In July 1995 the ruble was worth approximately thirty-two times as much as the now defunct karbovanets—a more reliable comparative figure. 21. At an American power plant, operating shifts train together every fifth, sixth, or seventh week; the plants maintain at least one complete extra shift to make the scheduling of training an actuality. At a typical power plant in Eastern Europe, control room operators are unlikely to get more than two weeks of training annually. 22. It is important to remember, however, that one can never completely forget about cost/ benefit ratios. At some level, some accidents are so unlikely, and the cost of protecting against them so great, that one decides to assume the risk. This, indeed, is the flip side of regulation. The calculus is very complicated because some of the variables, like public attitudes, are so indefinable, reminding one of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.

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Part Two: Chernobyl, Eco-Nationalism, and Loss of Rhetorical Control 23. Clever ideas such as irons that automatically shut themselves off and air bags in automobiles are examples of specific ways new or improved equipment can expand the envelope of design basis accidents—those events for which adequate protective measures are in place. They also show that to some extent ingenuity can overcome human factors of sloth, indifference, or carelessness, to say nothing of malice. But there are limits. The capacity of individuals to make fundamental blunders exceeds the resourcefulness and foresightedness of designers. Hence, nothing can be made completely foolproof. 24. It is now generally conceded that Soviet failure to share information within the industry itself regarding operating experience at nuclear plants was a prime contributor to the Chernobyl tragedy. 25. The Russian term for this policy is khozrasschet. A similar situation obtains in the United States with regard to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The NRC generates most of the funds it needs to function from fees that utilities pay for application reviews, operator licensing examinations, and other legislatively mandated services. 26. It is difficult to say for sure, however, since the Soviet economy, being orders of magnitude larger than the Polish economy, might not have responded in the same way. Be that as it may, Poland has witnessed steady economic growth recently after the three or four years of precipitous decline following the removal of the Communist Party from political control. 27. When employees finally do get paid, inflation may have eaten away thirty-five to fifty percent of their purchasing power. 28. Unfortunately, the government seems virtually powerless to halt the inflationary spiral. Moreover, the nonpayment issue is fraught with dire consequences, whatever action might be contemplated. Perhaps the only solution would be to eliminate by governmental fiat all indebtedness (except back payment of wages) among governmental agencies and among domestic enterprises. 29. In Armenia, the supply of heat and electricity to residents of Yerevan was reduced to two hours in every twenty-four because Azerbaijan had cut off the supply of oil and gas. Needless to say, this situation caused Armenians to change their attitude toward nuclear power, as a result of which the station that had been shut down after the 1988 earthquake is again up and running. Western experts believe that inadequate safety provisions and insufficient lead time before restart will cause serious operating problems in the future. 30. According to the director of the Kola nuclear power plant, such funds as are collected in Russia get distributed first to the nonnuclear sector of the industry. This occurs for the simple reason that the agency which receives the funds is housed in the Ministry of Energy—not the Ministry of Nuclear Power—and that agency makes sure that its own organizations are paid first. Private conversation with Yu. V. Kolomtsev, Polyarnye Zori, Russia, July 1995. 31. It takes a long time to bring a nuclear power unit on- or off-line. In the West therefore, nuclear installations are considered base load, and the economics of the situation dictate that they run continuously if there is no technical reason for shutting them down. Peak demand is met using hydroelectric, fossil, or pumped storage sources. In Eastern Europe, however, competing ministerial priorities may take precedence, as indicated above, and technical considerations can be subordinated to bureaucratic imperative. (Kolomtsev interview.) Nor is the West immune from this problem: it appears, for

Ukraine, Russia, and the Question of Nuclear Safety example, that an analogous situation at NASA had a direct bearing on decisions leading to the 1986 Challenger disaster. 32. It is noteworthy that by late 1988, when the Armenian earthquake caused catastrophic disaster in that Soviet republic, the domestic political situation had changed considerably. Mr. Gorbachev not only cut short a visit to the United States in order to oversee rescue efforts, he publicly appealed to organizations such as the International Red Cross for assistance. 33. This position, which makes a certain amount of sense in the context of Soviet government domestic propaganda, is encountered from unlikely sources, as well. For example, a 1993 book by a Ukrainian medical researcher considers Gale to be a dilettante who “came, perhaps, with the best of intentions, but was not a specialist in radiation medicine, just a practicing physician who treated blood diseases.” (246: 15–16). What is remarkable here is that the author is virulently anti-nuclear: he spares the Soviet government and its nuclear lobby none of his wrath, but he also has little use for the Soviet doctors in Moscow who treated the radiation victims or for Robert Gale either. 34. In the fall of 1988 the Ministry of Nuclear Power requested, and was granted, an invitation for Deputy Minister Vladimir Lapshin to attend a conference of nuclear utility CEOs held in Atlanta at the Institute for Nuclear Power Operations, an industry supported organization created after the accident at Three Mile Island. Minister Lapshin called upon the West to participate in a Moscow conference the following summer and to create the World Association of Nuclear Operators. 35. For a survey of the early stages in the development of international programs to enhance civilian nuclear power safety, see (118). 36. It is impossible to prove, of course, but it seems likely that this experience contributed to political decisions, once freedom was attained, that made passing a language test in the vernacular a prerequisite to obtaining citizenship. 37. Of all Soviet designed reactors, only the VVER-1000 features a negatively pressurized, reinforced concrete containment structure similar to those in Western designs. 38. Central storage facilities that served the whole Soviet Union were situated in Western Siberia, deep inside Russia and surrounded by nuclear missile defenses. After dissolution of the Union, all of these facilities were located outside the borders of the other former republics. 39. At the time, Zaporozhe had an installed capacity of five thousand megawatts. A sixth unit, which had never been completed because of the Soviet moratorium, had been preserved through the clever ruse of declaring it a training facility. This allowed station management to expend funds to maintain the construction site in reasonable materiel condition, thus preventing cannibalization of the unit for spare parts and enabling fairly rapid completion of equipment installation once the moratorium was lifted. Unit Six went critical in early August, 1995. 40. In addition to Lithuania’s Ignalina station, Russia continues to operate eleven RBMK reactor units at three different sites—Sosnovy Bor (St. Petersburg), Kursk (Novovoronezh), and Smolensk. In addition, there exists a very low power channel reactor serving the Siberian gold mines at Bilibino. See (340: 20–23). 41. Only Unit Three is currently in operation. A major fire—that had nothing whatsoever to do with the nuclear reactor itself—has put Unit Two out of commission for the past few years. On December 2, 1996, the Ukrainian State Nuclear Energy Committee ordered the restart of this unit by the fourth quarter of 1997. Although the Unit One reactor was removed from the grid at the end of November 1996, its reconstruction

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Part Two: Chernobyl, Eco-Nationalism, and Loss of Rhetorical Control was being discussed at the time of writing. See (143). The United States, the Germans, and the French have been poring over Chernobyl for years doing safety assessments, upgrade evaluations, and cost analyses. As Michael Congdon notes in his contribution to this volume (119), restarting the Chernobyl units is not economically feasible without life extension, because the West wants to give credits, not aid, and the high cost of upgrading the units cannot be amortized over the few remaining years of original service life. (Operable US units have been shut down because the cost of mandated upgrades, like steam generator replacement, could not be recouped in the time remaining on the operating license and because the political climate is such that the odds on getting life extension approval are very uncertain.) If the Ukrainians ever restart these units, then one can confidently predict that they will not shut them down in the year 2000 or anytime soon thereafter. 42. One senior regulatory official, who requests anonymity, has argued in just this manner at official meetings with foreign delegations, but also has expressed his personal opinion that Chernobyl should be shut down. (Private conversation, Kiev, Ukraine, July 1994) 43. The winner in this struggle proved to be the Zaporozhe plant manager. Just before New Year’s Day 1996 President Kuchma traveled to the plant site to hand out medals commemorating the startup of Unit Six. Bronnikov was awarded the highest civilian honor the nation can bestow, and M. P. Umanets, Chairman of Goskomatom, was “advised” that he should retire to care for his health (Umanets does, in fact, suffer from heart disease, but in the summer of 1995 he had returned to work from a long convalescence and could be seen toasting foreign representatives late into the night at a sanatorium outside of Kiev). Umanets is a former director of the post-accident Chernobyl nuclear power plant. 44. This was far from a trivial matter. Absolving national authorities, the government, and the Communist Party of any responsibility for inadequacies in the system was always a cornerstone of Soviet society. After the Chernobyl accident, for example, only the plant manager and his immediate subordinates were sent to jail, as the Ministry of Nuclear Power escaped all official censure. Soviet authorities did everything possible to convince its citizens and the world at large that the cause of the accident was “operator error” and dereliction of duty at the plant level. 45. One suspects that the conditions would have mirrored those of 1989. Private conversation with Nikolai Shteinberg, Kiev, Ukraine, January 1996. 46. The study was conducted by Marilyn J. Young and a team of researchers from Florida State University in conjunction with Aleksandr I. Yuriev, chair of the political psychology department at St. Petersburg State University. 47. The Ukrainian plant operators, it seems, have not reached the same level of understanding. At a meeting in July 1995 called to discuss regulatory concerns about the proposed dry storage project, V. Hryshchenko, a high ranking GAN official, stated in his opening remarks that Zaporozhe would be forced to compare the analytical computer codes and industry standards used by the American consortium during the design process (codes and standards that satisfied the requirements of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission) to current Ukrainian standards in order to have them certified for use domestically—a costly and time consuming process which could delay construction by months, if not years. Later in the meeting, Hryshchenko indicated that perhaps one way to resolve the issue was for plant management to submit a formal request in writing that the foreign standards be accepted on an ad hoc basis,

Ukraine, Russia, and the Question of Nuclear Safety applicable to this particular facility only. Without promising anything, he nevertheless indicated that his agency could respond to an official request of this type in much less time than it would take to complete the required studies. But the plant representative thought that the regulator was being unreasonable, and it was only after several weeks of intense negotiating by the American consortium that the plant acceded to everyone else’s position. Thus, when the regulator saw fit to be accommodating—having made its principled stand on the grounds of Ukrainian national sovereignty, but then recognizing the political and economic realities of the current situation—the operating organization chose to maintain an adversarial stance “on principle.” 48. It is for this reason that resident inspectors at American plants are reassigned every five years, so that no “buddy-buddy” relationships can develop. In the CIS, on the other hand, the policy is to recruit regulators for work at a specific plant from local operations staff—the theory being that they will know the plant design better and will, therefore, be more effective regulators. As always, there is an economic side to this problem. While the family of an American inspector is forced to undergo regular upheavals, at least they can buy a new house in their new locale. In Russia and Ukraine, housing is virtually impossible to obtain, and people can be recruited to ostensibly lower paid or lower prestige jobs by the promise of an apartment. Thus, since an organization such as a regulatory body does not control access to housing— the way a power plant used to, because it was the builder of all structures in the company town—it cannot entice people to work for them if that entails moving to another locale. 49. Moreover, what does one do as a national leader if one believes that the “nation” is wrong? Do you push for, for example, civil rights legislation despite your personal beliefs and the beliefs of your peers (as Lyndon Johnson did) because of a perceived greater good? Do you continue, for example, to prosecute a war (as Lyndon Johnson did) long after most of the country had come to believe that it was a mistake even to have begun it? Or do you send out an army of opinion pollsters before deciding what policies you will advocate as best for the nation. 50. The reactor vessel head is still leaning at a strange angle against the rubble that was the reactor. All of this mass of twisted steel and magmatic nuclear material is covered by the Sarcophagus that protects the environment from the devastating effects of the radiation trapped inside. 51. The best general description of what actually caused the Chernobyl accident can be found in the (417). 52. There are actually four different Soviet designed commercial reactor designs: the RBMK and three distinct VVER models—the first generation 440 MW (model 230), newer 440s (model 213—yes it makes no sense), and the 1000 MW units. Western experts believe that the older 440 MW VVER is actually a worse design than the RBMK. Kozloduy, a power plant in Bulgaria equipped with these old 440s, is generally considered to be the worst civilian nuclear installation in the world. 53. The obvious way in which the Soviet social contract was shredded by the cynical response of the government may have sounded the death knell to the tottering socialist state.

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Soviet Bureaucracy and Nuclear Safety O. M. Kovalevich,1 V. A. Sidorenko,2 and N. A. Shteinberg3 Translation by Michael Launer Provenance: Originally published in Forum for applied research and public policy 6, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 88–92. Copyright Holder: © The University of Tennessee Energy, Environment, and Resources Center and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, used by permission Description: This document is a translation of an article that appeared in Atomnaia energiia 68, no. 5 (May 1990): 333–337. A testament to glasnost under Gorbachev, it is a candid statement of the technical and bureaucratic difficulties faced by the Soviet Union in implementing its program to develop civilian nuclear power.

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uclear power plants generate about thirteen percent of the Soviet Union’s electricity. Two important factors make it necessary for the Soviet Union to develop nuclear power: the rising cost of other energy resources and the ecological problems that these other resources create. However, nuclear power can exist only if it is proven safe. The Soviet Union presently does not have a universally approved and widely used methodology to determine the level of safety at its nuclear power plants. It has not conducted comprehensive, exacting verification of safety-regulation compliance during all stages of a nuclear plant’s life cycle (site selection, design, construction, and operation); nor has it complied with International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safety recommendations. Instead, Soviet nuclear experts have conducted evaluations to verify compliance with the Soviet Union’s existing but inadequate safety rules and regulations. This effort has been supplemented by data concerning the reliability of nuclear power plant units (e.g., the number of unplanned shutdowns, trips, and personnel errors). Deficiencies first manifest themselves in start-up. In 1989, there were 118 emergency shutdowns of Soviet nuclear power units. Of these,

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responsibility fell on personnel in fifty-five cases, on equipment manufacturers in twenty-eight instances, and on design organizations in twenty-­ one. The remaining cases were ascribed to construction, equipment installation, and start-up problems. The number of stoppages at Soviet nuclear units remains high because of several problems: serious design deficiencies, the poor quality of construction, equipment installation and the equipment itself, the forced tempo of start-ups, and the lack of staff experience. When Soviet nuclear power units are built, they are certified for operation by governmental commissions. National energy plans force the tempo at which full power is achieved; this undermines the possibility of finding “shake-down” problems or of fully explaining and eliminating any trips. All of this leads to repeated trips later. Gosatomenergonadzor, the USSR State Committee for the Regulation of Industrial and Nuclear Power Safety, has insisted on the development of a new certification procedure for the operation of nuclear power plants. It calls for certification of commercial test operations (during which power is increased in stages), testing and a lengthy period of operation at full power, and subsequent power-unit certification for continuous operation. Personnel qualifications are a major component of nuclear safety. Staff ability to fulfill safety-related duties depends in part on nurturing a culture of safety among reactor operators, technicians, and administrators. The growth rate in the USSR nuclear power industry has not been matched by requisite measures to train specialists. Programs to develop technical support for training, including full-scope simulators, have been a disaster due to the negative attitude toward training displayed by industry leaders and design and construction supervisors. A leveling of living standards among Soviet workers, a relative decline in compensation for nuclear power workers, and constant media criticism have undermined the prestige of energy specialists in the eyes of the public. The reserve of personnel previously found in conventional power production and industrial nuclear facilities was exhausted in the early 1980s. Additional capacity required additional personnel, and the exportation of experienced nuclear specialists to other socialist countries created a situation in which people moving up the professional ladder lacked sufficient operational experience and emergency training. Operations documentation at Soviet nuclear power plants, including the content, format, preservation, and availability of information, leaves

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much to be desired. This situation did not escape the notice of the IAEA team during its recent inspection of Soviet nuclear power plants. The most promising means to decrease the number of violations caused by personnel include increasing the effectiveness of day-to-day work; developing consistent, nationwide qualification requirements, training programs, and methodologies; establishing mandatory tracks for professional development (particularly for operations personnel); and instituting individual responsibility for assigned work.

THE NUCLEAR CHALLENGE Despite the number of mishaps, the Soviet Union has gathered remarkably little information regarding the causes of personnel error. Not knowing the causes makes it impossible to develop sound programs to eliminate errors. Other nations have conducted studies to anticipate operator behavior in the event of an incident at a nuclear power plant. These models help predict operator errors; they also provide valuable information that helps improve the design of control panels and the requirements for operator training and licensing. According to industry-wide data provided by the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, mistaken instructions and confusing procedures cause forty-three percent of personnel errors; lack of knowledge or professional training contributes eighteen percent; and deliberately deviating from procedures or instructions, sixteen percent. But virtually no attention in the Soviet Union has been directed toward assessing personnel behavior during severe accidents. Since the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the rest of the world has shifted to response planning under severe accident conditions. Such procedures are based on evaluating the situation at the power plant and developing special monitoring and accident management capabilities. The Soviet Union, however, continues to ignore the need to prepare personnel to respond to severe accident conditions. On the one hand, it has not yet developed severe accident scenarios and, on the other, it is still “protecting” reactor operators and managers from having to deal with such traumatic conditions—even if it is just play acting. Thus, Soviet nuclear operators are unfamiliar with the concepts of “severe accident” and “severe accident management.” The administrative organization of Soviet nuclear plants must be reformed. Traditionally, it has followed a strict hierarchy that is inefficient,

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judging from the experience in the West, and—more importantly—an obstacle to safety assurance. Operations personnel must answer to two and sometimes three administrators—a response system sure to fail in an emergency. Specific safety-related issues fall under the purview of different managers. Independent safety-related tasks are performed by groups having no organizational connections to one another. Therefore, no one bears direct responsibility for the job as a whole. Insufficient supplies and outdated equipment to diagnose the condition of metals, weld joints, and electrical systems significantly complicate the task of maintaining plant safety. Above all, these shortcomings affect the scheduling and comprehensiveness of plant maintenance and servicing. The problem is even more compelling because Soviet designs do not address or provide the basis for guaranteeing plant safety. Thus, issues of safety are not fully met in the design, operation, or maintenance of Soviet units. The Soviet Union currently has several generations of nuclear power units that are substantially different from one another in their safety designs. The nation is now reaping the bitter fruits of its late conversion to modem safety requirements. It is being forced to consider taking some units out of operation long before they have expended their useful life. Soviet regulations have always lagged behind international standards, at least in terms of basic safety criteria. The designer, who was harnessed with the plant operator as an energy producer, never strived to improve safety standards. Electricity production, not operational safety, has been the primary design goal. A government agency capable of changing the situation did not exist previously, and even today the regulatory situation remains suspect. Gosatomenergonadzor does not have authority to take action but is forced to seek compromises. The Soviet Union also must shift from pro forma safety regulation to a system of regulation that is more evidentiary and that considers probabilistic risk assessment. Soviet experts must take advantage of mathematical modeling and comprehensive experimental computations that incorporate test results from small-scale equipment and systems models. They must ultimately alter the nuclear power plant design process, which has had little in common with the requirements and recommendations established by the international nuclear community.

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SAFEGUARDS What engineered safeguards and modifications have been implemented or are planned for the VVER-440 power units (440-MW pressurized water reactors) and the VVER-1000 power units (1000-MW pressurized water reactors) that have been built or are currently under construction? And what is the status of RBMK graphite units, similar in design to those at Chernobyl? Modernizing the old V-440 reactors to meet current safety standards is unrealistic. The expense equals or exceeds the cost of constructing new units. What might be realistic is partially retrofitting these units with safety systems capable of neutralizing “moderate” accidents. For a long time, Soviet experts have examined the theoretical aspects of upgrading diagnostic equipment and monitoring systems to overcome deficiencies in safety assurance, but they have not yet developed any realistic modifications. The quality of Soviet diagnostic equipment and its range of application is far behind world standards. The absence and questionable reliability of Soviet safety systems must be overcome by substantially more effective diagnostic measures (which are not presently available) or by more frequent personnel checks and maintenance shutdowns that could make nuclear units too expensive and inconvenient to operate. The Soviet Union must critically evaluate the merits of proposed plans to modernize VVER-440 units and must decide their fate. At the moment, their safety depends primarily on the quality of operations, which needs significant improvement. The Soviet Union is currently building and operating several VVER1000 nuclear power units. After the accident at Chernobyl, these plants were slated to become the foundation of nuclear power production in the Soviet Union. VVER-1000s are designed to be “nuclear power plants with enhanced safety characteristics,” despite the fact that they are being designed and brought online at different times. The extent to which the unit’s design meets the safety requirements depends on when the unit was blueprinted: the later the design, the safer the unit. Nevertheless, the USSR State Committee for the Regulation of Industrial and Nuclear Power Safety has not approved the safety of nuclear power plants equipped with VVER-1000 units. There are questions that cannot be answered without additional research and experimental design studies. These problems illustrate how expensive the development

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of nuclear power can be when experimental and theoretical studies are ignored and verification of engineering practice is not followed. Despite a 1982 accident at the Rovno plant, little attention has been paid to the problem of leaks from the primary loop to the steam loop that sometimes take place when a steam generator is damaged. Eight years later, the Soviet Union has not altered the design to ensure safe outcomes should this malfunction occur again. The Soviet Union has developed a practice of modifying plants while under construction or installation. For example, there were more than two thousand modifications in Unit 4 at the Zaporozhe Nuclear Power Plant after ground for the plant had been broken. One could deal with this problem if as-installed modifications were codified and incorporated into the design documentation for future units, but the industry continues to use the uncorrected blueprints of already constructed units when building subsequent ones. Problems recently have occurred in guaranteeing the reliability of emergency systems. This is another indication of the lack of a comprehensive approach to safety assurance. The absence of reliable mathematical models, limited testing of the systems designed to maintain safety, and poorly conceived quality assurance programs lead to deficiencies that show up only after power units have been built.

GRAPHITE REACTORS Construction of new RBMK graphite units has been suspended (including Units 5 and 6 at Chernobyl, Unit 6 at Kursk, and Unit 4 at Smolensk). Six first-generation units (the first two units at the Leningrad, Kursk, and Chernobyl nuclear power plants) are slated for modernization between 1992 and 1994. After the Chernobyl accident, efforts were made to neutralize the reactor design flaws and address the personnel errors that led to the accident. Modernization of these units will present the same difficulties as the modernization of plants equipped with model VVER-440 units. Guaranteeing the quality of equipment and parts and the quality of construction remains problematic. These shortcomings could bring to naught all positive changes in other areas. The USSR State Committee for the Regulation of Industrial and Nuclear Power Safety has banned certain equipment because of low quality and because its reliability cannot guarantee the required safety level.

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The picture presented here did not develop overnight. And the problems described here are characteristic of every stage in the life cycle of a nuclear station. Let us examine the situation along three broad avenues: What to do? How to do it? And how to ensure that it is done well? In the realm of “What to do?” (the requirements for effective systems, equipment, and administration to guarantee safety), there are no secrets for Soviet specialists to discover. They know what measures must be taken to improve safety. Difficulties arise when one discusses cost and overcoming public doubts. The problem of “How to do it” (conceptualizing, designing, manufacturing, and installing the required systems and equipment) is not as clearly defined but can be solved. The nation’s technological capabilities (i.e., research laboratories, if not at the point of application) will enable the Soviet Union to create the required materials, machines, equipment, and systems. There are, however, specific technologies where the level of Soviet development is low (for instance, in computer technology.) The basic problem is to ensure that tasks are performed well. In international practice, this process, called quality assurance, is of fundamental significance for guaranteeing safety. Quality assurance has not been given its due in the Soviet Union. It has been assumed that the system of responsibility and the relationship between industry and government would ensure quality. Attempts to develop a system of quality assurance analogous to that in foreign countries have run up against the faulty system of relationships that has evolved. Experience has shown that the old administrative system cannot ensure quality. Incorporating a new system of quality assurance in the nuclear power industry has become a necessity. As for how to ensure performance, the organizations and the people working for them cannot or do not want to do what is necessary. They cannot because the appropriate resources, labor force, and technological base are lacking, and they do not want to because they are not engaged in the results of their labor. In this respect, the current state of the nuclear industry reflects the general state of the Soviet economy. The cause is an overriding one. If one thinks about how to remove the domestic nuclear industry from this situation, the first thing one must do is shift all the active parties to new forms of interaction, new sources of financing, and new working conditions to encourage engagement and responsibility.

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The absence of effective laws is another reason why the country has not developed a well-structured, effective system for overseeing issues of nuclear safety. There is no governmental body responsible for regulating the full panorama of safety issues in the nuclear industry. The following agencies have been involved: the State Committee for the Utilization of Atomic Energy, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the State Committee for Hydrology and Meteorology. Not one of these agencies is predominantly a governmental regulatory body. The responsibilities of the operators have not been formulated legally; nor has there been a precise definition of the rights and duties of the ministries, agencies, organizations, or individuals that deal with nuclear energy. This multi-layered monitoring system creates inadequate concern and insufficient regulation; the system’s fragmentation does not allow objective safety analysis, which leads to an inaccurate accounting of the dangers. The bureaucratic nature of the monitoring process, in turn, conceals the dangers and creates the appearance of wellbeing. The absence of effective laws also has had a negative impact on safety rules and regulations. In the first place, the obligatory nature of these rules is stated only in technical documents; secondly, the system of regulation that has developed in the absence of law has “calcified” the system. In most developed countries, it is the regulatory body that develops and adopts technical standards documentation. The regulatory body has the right to consult with other organizations during the development of technical standards. However, final action regarding a draft document is taken by the regulatory body, which alone is responsible for setting safety standards. Thus, what is needed is the immediate enactment of a law regarding the utilization of atomic energy that will provide a legal basis for the safe development of nuclear power. Having this legal basis and shifting to a market-based economy will enable the Soviet Union to resolve many of the problems surrounding the safe development of nuclear power. And there is no doubt that it can be developed safely, just as there is no doubt that without it, the Soviet Union will be incapable of solving its energy, ecological, or economic problems.

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NOTES 1. Oleg Mikhailovich Kovalevich is deputy director of the Scientific and Technical Research Center within the USSR State Committee for the Regulation of Industrial and Nuclear Power Safety. 2. Viktor Alekseevich Sidorenko is deputy minister of the USSR Ministry of Atomic Energy and Industry. 3. Nikolai Aleksandrovich Shteinberg is director of operations in the USSR State Committee for the Regulation of Industrial and Nuclear Power Safety.

CHAPTER 24

Review of Two Books by David R. Marples Michael K. Launer & Marilyn J. Young Provenance: Originally published in Canadian-American Slavic Studies 26, nos. 1–4 (1992): 385–388 Copyright Holder: E. J. Brill, Koninklijke Brill, Brill Academic Publishers (Leiden, Netherlands), used by permission Description: A review of Chernobyl and Nuclear Power in the USSR (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986) and The Social Impact of the Chernobyl Disaster (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988)

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hen the Chernobyl accident occurred in April 1986, David Marples was completing work on a study of the nuclear power industry in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Marples, a research associate at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta, had focused particular attention on the scope of such development in the Ukraine, an area which occupies a critical position both geographically and demographically. By including an analysis of Soviet press coverage through late August 1986—when the Soviet government presented its explanation of the accident’s causes to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)— Marples provides in his first book both a historical context for the accident and a detailed description of the emergency measures taken to deal with its effects. His latest book The Social Impact of the Chernobyl Disaster discusses events through early 1988, probing many aspects of the postaccident situation—technological, sociological, economic, and political. Social Impact also contains a nontechnical explanation of the accident sequence written by Victor Snell, an expert on nuclear power. Throughout both works Marples bases his discussion on information gleaned directly from Soviet sources: he interviewed many of the scientific, bureaucratic, and media figures who were swept up in the episode. In addition, he has meticulously combed original television, radio,

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and print sources in Russian (the national news media), Ukrainian (the regional media), and several Eastern bloc languages. In these efforts he relied extensively on the personnel and resources of Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty—for whom he once worked, and to whom he still contributes occasional analyses. Social Impact describes in detail what Marples terms “the myth of Chernobyl”—the official Soviet view that Chernobyl “was first and foremost a victory, a story with an ending, and an ending that was triumphant.” (296) The facts, of course, are otherwise, although they “have rarely been dealt with thoroughly or even honestly by Soviet sources.” (276) Like other mythologies, this one, too, has some basis in fact—the truly heroic and self-sacrificing labors of the firemen who contained the blaze and died horrible deaths. But the myth was elaborated and promulgated by the authorities in order to cover up a much harsher reality. At Vienna Soviet candor drew rave reviews from technical experts and the Western press—supposedly a belated triumph of glasnost after the government’s shameless initial silence. In fact, at least two essential untruths were disseminated via the IAEA meetings, untruths accepted by many individuals in the West, who may have been influenced by the IAEA’s prestige. First, as documented in Social Impact, Soviet officials purposely understated the highest levels of contamination immediately after the accident by a factor of at least seventy. Secondly, the Soviet Union claimed that the root cause of the accident was human error, rather than faulty design of the station: operators, it was contended, had been lulled into complacency by a long history of trouble-free operation at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station (NPS). However, as Marples demonstrates in Chernobyl and Nuclear Power, nothing could be further from the truth: the RBMK reactor design used at Chernobyl and elsewhere in the Soviet Union is inherently unstable. Moreover, all Soviet NPS (including those equipped with the more stable VVER reactors) have been plagued by inferior design, shoddy construction materials and workmanship, poorly trained personnel, and a management cadre indifferent to either safety or ecological considerations. As is the case in many facets of the economy, these problems are shown to be endemic to the “utilities” on a national level. But the official Soviet explanation tracked perfectly with the accepted cause of the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island, and it has been greeted with little or no skepticism by Western political observers. Undoubtedly,

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the confusion was intentional; that it had the intended effect may be due, in part, to the inherent difficulty of assessing reality whenever two dissimilar cultures interact. Technical experts are not nearly as sanguine, however. In the West, studies of risk potential (called “probabilistic risk assessments” or PRAs) are so complex that they can be carried out only with the use of supercomputers. Soviet designers, on the other hand, must make do without PRAs: they do not have the technology themselves, and their government will not allow dissemination of the required technical data, nor will it spend the huge sums of hard currency needed to contract for such studies in the West. Indeed, strong indications have come to light recently that they do not even carry out studies of potential earthquake damage, even though many Soviet reactors have been sited in areas of high seismic activity. Westerners who are used to long delays in bringing reactors on-line because of social opposition to evacuation plans would not want to believe, as Marples documents from primary sources, that the Soviet Union could restart two of Chernobyl’s undamaged reactors before the destroyed unit had been permanently enclosed. Even today, ambient levels of radioactivity at the NPS are about eight to ten millirem per hour—approximately two thousand times greater than the natural background radiation. Clean-up workers and plant personnel who restarted the three undamaged units needlessly endured radiation exposure, in part because protective clothing and remote-controlled equipment were unavailable, in part because the authorities felt no compunction about subjecting these individuals to high levels of contamination over periods of time greatly exceeding even the most lax standards. Only grudgingly have Soviet officials admitted that Pripyat—once a town of forty-five thousand inhabitants—and some twenty-six nearby villages will never be resettled. However, the NPS— three kilometers away—continues to operate. In Marples’ opinion, the only important consideration was the perceived need to resume generating electricity as soon as possible because of an expected energy crisis that winter, an assertion vehemently denied by Soviet officials. Many citizens in the West incorrectly assume that US and Canadian standards are maintained everywhere else. They find it comforting to believe that Chernobyl was an unfortunate incident which, like TMI, shows how modern science and quality engineering can protect the Earth and its inhabitants from high-tech disaster. However, the fact of the matter is that Soviet nuclear power stations are neither designed nor built to

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withstand worst-case accidents of anywhere near the severity that can be accommodated safely by Western installations. For one thing, containment structures—those eery convex cylindrical towers—are either nonexistent or hopelessly inadequate to their task. Marples’ two books, if widely read, would do much to disintegrate the linkage between TMI and Chernobyl that is so forcefully and consistently presented by Soviet authorities. (Ironically, the anti-nuclear movement does the same thing. It, too, is wrong: TMI proved that a severe accident could be contained with minimal effect beyond the confines of a well-designed station—Time magazine’s cover notwithstanding, Chernobyl did not involve a partial meltdown of the reactor core, whereas TMI did.) Marples himself is not interested in Western reactions. Rather, he is concerned with piecing together the real story of Chernobyl, its aftermath, and the sociopolitical changes that have occurred as a result. Particularly heartening in his view is the development, beginning in 1987, of a vocal anti-establishment movement among members of the Ukrainian elite. In this case, the establishment is the Ministerstvo atomnoi energetiki, located in Moscow, and the elite includes both humanists and scientists. The ministry, which has insisted on unswerving adherence to existing plans for expanding the nuclear power industry, has been challenged as an example of bureaucracy remaining beyond the reach of perestroika—a clever tactic on the part of the opposition. Recent plant decommissionings and the cessation of construction at several NPS sites, including some stations nearing completion, provide evidence that public fear and resentment are beginning to effect economic policy formation in the Soviet Union. Thus, while observers are incorrect (in our view) when they interpret the Chernobyl accident as a failure of glasnost, it may be true that the tragedy spawned profound alterations in Soviet political culture. Marples has provided Western scholars a detailed, comprehensive, and exhaustively documented social history of one of mankind’s worst mistakes. On the negative side, his political judgment sometimes appears naive. For example, he states “one can surmise” that “a major reason” why construction of Chernobyl Units 5 and 6 was halted “was that there was simply nowhere to house either … the workers who would be needed to construct those reactors, or the operators who would be required to run them” (Social Impact, 237–238). However, Marples himself had demonstrated in his earlier book that primitive conditions were of little

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consequence in deterring Soviet planners, and no evidence of change is offered to support such a surmise. Chernobyl and Nuclear Power is occasionally sketchy where one might wish for greater detail; moreover, a previous reviewer has taken exception to some of the data on Soviet oil and gas production. In our view, the only significant failing of Social Impact is the absence of any accounting of clean-up costs, which ultimately will amount to hundreds of millions of dollars. But both books are essential reading. Their arguments and judgments are rendered fairly, if passionately. In virtually all instances, it is Soviet sources that provide the damning evidence, if only by conflicting with other official statements. Of course, as Jervis pointed out in Perception and Misperception in International Politics, (229) seldom is it true that all the evidence in a complex situation fits neatly without contradiction. (In partial defense of the Soviets, one must admit that ultimately the government provided significantly more factual information with respect to Chernobyl than it had for any previous postwar event; moreover—for whatever reasons—much has been written in the domestic press that is critical of official attempts at obfuscation and deception.) Given the significance of these studies, it is most unfortunate that St. Martin’s Press did not do a better job preparing the manuscripts for publication. Both texts occasionally suffer from nonnative word order. Many translated passages are marred by infelicitous choices from among dictionary synonyms. And the technical editing leaves much to be desired—not only have an inordinate number of typographical errors slipped by, but errors of fact or science render a few passages nonsensical. In addition, the reader would have been helped considerably had detailed maps of the affected area been provided.

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Review of Plutopia Michael K. Launer Provenance: Originally published in The Slavic and East European Journal 58, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 362–363. Copyright Holder: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL), used by permission Description: A review of Kate (Kathryn L.) Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)

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ull Disclosure Statement: The author of this review—one of the few Americans who has visited the Hanford Reservation near Richland, Washington, the closed city of Ozersk in Western Siberia, and the Chernobyl nuclear plant at Pripyat in Ukraine—has been a technical translator and conference interpreter for private sector companies and US government entities in the nuclear complex for more than twenty-five years. Kate Brown has written a monumental, remarkably rich, and wellresearched history about two cities whose founding and continued existence are inextricably bound up with the development of nuclear weapons. In the United States it is a story of military expedience in the struggle against Nazi Germany and a Cold War enemy, corporate indifference to the environment in the quest for greater profits, and local pride in one of America’s first planned communities despite obvious social inequality. In the Soviet Union it is the story of a Communist government that accepted environmental depredation, along with systemic indifference to human misery in the form of needless disease and death, as the inevitable price of progress and the consequence of efforts to build a “Socialist utopia.” As part of the research for this book Professor Brown interviewed dozens of individuals who worked at Hanford or the Mayak Production Association and/or who lived near these facilities. The most compelling

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portions of this narrative describe the personal histories of Soviet citizens who most directly suffered the consequences of the world’s first and longest-lasting nuclear disaster—contamination of the Techa River and its environs following the massive accidental release of radiation in 1957 from a waste dump in the village of Kyshtym. Kirkus Reviews (250) properly described this book as an “angry but fascinating account of negligence, incompetence and injustice … in the name of national security.” It is certainly that. The technical and scientific information presented in Plutopia would seem to be irrefutable; it is also maddening and depressing. Readers with no background in the subject matter will probably be amazed at the factual material presented throughout this book. Despite significant experience dealing with the Soviet Union and nuclear matters, I found much that was new and disturbing. Nevertheless, this study is not without serious flaws that bring into question the ultimate aim of the author, whose text is tendentious in the extreme. I will highlight three specific areas. Most noticeably, for a historian the author seems to have little regard for historical context—instead judging the situation by today’s standards. Part one of Plutopia seeks to portray the founding and development of Richland as a unique exercise in corporate excess, political pork barrel cronyism, and social injustice. But what the author bemoans, while regrettable, was the reality of the 1940s, ’50s, and beyond. Three entities were instrumental in the development of Hanford: the military brass (for whom the project was conceived); big business (in the form of DuPont, the prime contractor); and the cadre of scientists, engineers, and technical experts who were recruited to work there. For better or worse, this was an overwhelmingly successful, highly educated, middle-aged cohort of privileged, Establishment elite, white men accustomed to a certain level of comfort in their lives. Recruiting them to the isolated wasteland that was eastern Washington in those days was no mean feat. Keeping them and their families happy there was even more problematic. (A personal note: the first time we ever saw actual tumbleweed—in the late 1980s, in our mid-40s—was when we rode into Kennewick, WA from the Tri Cities airport.) Hence the emphasis by Hanford’s upper management on paying high salaries and providing single-family homes, quality schools, and excellent social services for this elite group. It is important to realize that, even today, one reason the national laboratories exist is that the skilled

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researchers who work there could never be compensated adequately within civil service pay scales. The author also notes that almost no Hispanics or African Americans were hired to build or work in the Hanford facilities (despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of such laborers in the western states were anxious to get a stable job in the post-Depression era) and that those who did find work there were treated as second-class citizens. Again, the author seems to take little cognizance of the fact that, while deplorable and unjust (even shortsighted), this was the social context in which construction of the facility occurred. Fewer elements of American society in those days were more conservative than the military and big business. Further, the author complains that the artificial division between the privileged employees living inside the nuclear zone and the remainder of Hanford’s work force was characterized not just by “how wealthy they were but how healthy” and that “risk … was calibrated along the lines of class and affluence”—as if this were not universally true in the United States then and now. While it is important to point out the backward social mores of a period in which an event such as the construction of the Hanford facilities occurred, it is the tone of this description that we object to. One might even characterize it as a “rant,” which has no place in an otherwise fine and important work of history. Secondly, although the parallels between Richland and Ozersk— between the weapons complex in the United States and USSR—are obvious, the author pushes this comparison much too far. For security and economic reasons, both countries chose remote, unfertile, sparsely populated sites for these facilities, but the American government used eminent domain to acquire the land and relocate the few hardscrabble farmers who lived there, whereas in the Soviet Union it was unthinkable to move people out of harm’s way. Also, despite the author’s assertions that Pripyat was “a rare modern city of urban conveniences” and Ozersk a “family-centered, consumer oriented” community, the truth is starkly different: Ozersk was and is a grimy company town, and Pripyat—even though abandoned in 1989 when first we visited Chernobyl—was just another small, rural Soviet city with cookie-cutter apartment houses and a tawdry naberezhnaia that, along with the countryside itself, served as the only source of fun and recreation for its residents. The author would have been well served by a greater appreciation for both American and Soviet deistvitelnost.

Review of Plutopia

Finally, the author falls into the common trap of equating weapons production and civilian nuclear power. Peppered throughout the text are sometimes snide and derisive innuendos to that effect—a comparison that is in fact unjustified. While cleanup at Hanford remains an intractable and extremely expensive endeavor, there exists a viable technical solution to the long term storage of low-level power plant radwaste—the deep geological repository at Yucca Mountain—that has been stalled by the sort of nuclear fear so rampant in this country, fear that is more paranoiac than rational. In fact, as a nearly carbon-neutral source of electricity, nuclear power plants (in the United States, at least) are much less harmful to the environment and to nearby residents than are coal-, oil-, or gas-fired facilities. Having said all that, we strongly recommend Plutopia to a broad audience, including university classes in engineering, political science, government, economics, and international affairs. This book could have been written more objectively, but there is no denying its power or its relevance to the modern world.

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Review of Plokhy, Chernobyl Michael K. Launer Provenance: Originally published in The Slavic and East European Journal 63, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 119–125. Copyright Holder: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages (AATSEEL), used by permission Description: Even thirty-five years later, Chernobyl continues to be an event that people find both fascinating and frightening. This chapter and the next provide critical analyses of recent books about the accident: the first is a review of Serhii Plokhy, Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe (New York: Basic Books, 2018).

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ew events in modern history have been discussed as thoroughly as Chernobyl: the name generates 12,500,000 hits on Google! Professor Serhii Plokhy—a distinguished scholar specializing in the history of Ukraine— now adds his voice in a fascinating, well-researched study regarding the devastating accident, but also covering the last two decades of Soviet rule. This is a curious choice of subject matter for someone who does not have a technical background in nuclear physics or engineering, someone whose research interests have encompassed the broad range of Ukrainian history and culture back to, and even beyond, the Kievan period. However, his emphasis is focused on the people most directly affected by the tragedy, and—not surprisingly for anyone familiar with his scholarship— he is primarily interested in the cultural and political relationships between Ukrainians and Russians, as embodied here in the Communist Party leadership in Moscow. Currently director of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard, Dr. Plokhy emigrated to Canada in the 1990s to assume a position in the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta. At the time of the accident, however, he was teaching in Dnipropetrovsk—about

Review of Plokhy, Chernobyl

three hundred miles southeast of Kiev, and nearly four hundred miles from Pripyat, the company town that supported the power plant. He first visited the accident site only recently—something drew him there as a tourist!—and he felt compelled to write this book. Accordingly, I believe this very personal study is an attempt by the author to achieve both catharsis and some sort of atonement for having departed his homeland to begin a new life in the West. The story begins in Moscow in January 1986, at the TwentySeventh Party Congress, where Mikhail Gorbachev announced that the Soviet Union would embark upon the accelerated development of civilian nuclear power production to provide the economic impetus for his new revitalization program consisting of perestroika, glasnost, and uskorenie. The congress also marked the pinnacle in the career of Viktor Briukhanov, Director of the V. I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant, who was among those representing the Communist Party of Ukraine at the congress. One of the six plant officials who would bear the brunt of legal responsibility for the accident, Briukhanov was ultimately sentenced to ten years in prison (following more than a year in KGB detention): as everyone in the Soviet apparatus knew, the buck always stops at the desk of an individual in order to shield the system from ultimate responsibility for any calamity. Chernobyl provides an extensive description of the accident itself and the courageous actions of the plant personnel, firefighters, and emergency workers (the “liquidators”), who committed what I would call “patriotic suicide” while trying to determine what, exactly, had happened and what, if anything, they could do about it. But Professor Plokhy is more concerned about the bureaucratic aftermath of the disaster: how the central authorities in Moscow and the regional authorities in Kiev (Kyiv) interacted; how—ultimately—the “Chernobyl disaster made the government recognize ecological concerns as a legitimate reason for Soviet citizens to create their own organizations, which broke the monopoly of the Communist Party on political activity.” (363: xv)1 As has been stated elsewhere To a great extent, debates over ecology served as a convenient and legitimate battleground for expressing center-periphery tensions that already existed in Soviet society, but which had no discursive outlet. (489: 451)

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Thus, Chernobyl opened up rhetorical and argumentative space for environmentalists and the Soviet public at large to question the motives and competence of those in power. Indeed, the final section of this study (363: 285–350) details how eco-activism soon turned to eco-nationalism: “Nuclear power plants were depicted as embodiments of Moscow’s eco-imperialism.” (305) Plokhy observes By the late summer of 1991, when Ukraine declared its independence from the crumbling Soviet Union …, few believed that Briukhanov, Fomin, and Diatlov [others who had been convicted and sent to prison] were the main culprits responsible for the disaster. (321)

As in Czechoslovakia, where the independence movement was spearheaded by a writer (Vaclav Havel), leaders of the anti-nuclear/proenvironment movement in Ukraine included Ivan Drach, Borys Oliynyk, Dmytro Pavlychko, Yuriy Shcherbak, and Volodymyr Yavorivsky. In 1988 Oliynyk called Soviet domination “an insult to national dignity.” (294) Ukrainian intellectuals found in Chernobyl a “new cause to add to their previous agenda of political freedom, human rights, and the development of the Ukrainian language and culture” It was the issue of Chernobyl that allowed the dissidents and the rebel intellectuals to break the common front of the communist authorities, pitting regional elites against their bosses in Moscow. (299)

Of course, it was the devastating health consequences and societal upheaval engendered by the accident that served as the wellspring for this dissent. In the 1960s, Ukraine’s Communist leaders jumped on the nuclear bandwagon as an emblem of modernity. Nuclear power, it was said, would be the key to modernization of life in the Ukrainian SSR. At the time, Soviet officials claimed that reactors were so safe one could be built on Red Square with no adverse consequences. Ironically, in the early days some of these same dissident writers had hailed the arrival of nuclear power in Ukraine (in censor-approved publications) as the means to remedy the poverty endemic to Ukrainian life and, particularly, the backwardness that encompassed its rural, agricultural areas. However, as the author points out in one of his starkest anti-Soviet/anti-Russian statements

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Writers were prepared to overlook the fact that modernity was coming to Ukraine in the garb of the Russian language and culture, undermining the cultural foundations of their imagined modern nation. (289)

Throughout the Soviet period, and beyond, all physicists and nuclear engineers were trained at Russian Federation academic institutions such as the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute (MEPhI), Tomsk Polytechnic University, and in Akademgorodok near Novosibirsk. Russian was the language of nuclear technology even during the first decade of Ukrainian independence: most of the safety regulations promulgated there had an authorization cover letter written in Ukrainian followed by pages and pages of technical information in Russian for the simple reason that equivalent technical terminology in Ukrainian did not exist. But the health effects of the nuclear accident changed these questions of national or ethnic identity. Professor Plokhy devotes considerable attention to the aftermath of Chernobyl as it impacted both the liquidators (600,000 of whom were dispatched from all over the Soviet Union) and the approximately one hundred thirty thousand Ukrainian citizens displaced by the radiation that spewed from the damaged reactor. Because of this emphasis it is worth considering the controversy that still rages over this issue. There have been several thousand longitudinal studies, funded by agencies in Western Europe or the United States and conducted by teams of domestic (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian) and foreign researchers, that have been published in the more than thirty years since the accident, but mostly beginning at the ten-year anniversary. Many of these studies have attempted to gauge the number of radiation-related deaths that will accumulate through the first forty years—the latency period for certain solid cancers—and beyond. For example, a significant number of children in the affected populations developed thyroid cancer well into their thirties and forties Twenty years after the accident, excess thyroid cancers are still occurring among persons exposed as children or adolescents, and, if external radiation can be used as a guide, we can expect an excess of radiation-associated thyroid cancers for several more decades. (385: 502)2

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In 2005 the World Health Organization estimated that the total number of Chernobyl victims would ultimately reach five thousand. Greenpeace International cited a figure of ninety thousand. Actually, the ultimate total is unknown and unknowable, because it depends on who is doing the counting and who qualifies as a “victim.” Epidemiological research concentrates on disease morbidity and mortality (who gets sick and who dies), which consists of a comparison between affected individuals and a baseline expectation absent an event such as Chernobyl. The fact of the matter is this: genetic mutations and diseases such as thyroid cancers, leukemia, female breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, and strokes occur spontaneously. Researchers therefore focus on excess relative risk (ERR), the number of additional occurrences directly attributable to the event under consideration. Given the absence of baseline data—due to the lack of a modern medical establishment in the Soviet Union as a whole and the obvious desire of Communist officials to conceal such information—many of these studies exclude a large number of potential subjects or struggle to validate their data. Societal understanding, for better or worse, is completely different. For example, using hypothetical numbers, if a certain cancer strikes five hundred victims in every one hundred thousand persons among the general population, but six hundred victims in a cohort under study, here is how those numbers will be understood from different vantage points •

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•

Researchers will say that the event caused one hundred deaths. However, which specific deaths can be attributed to the event are unknown except probabilistically when other factors such as dose loads are considered. Physicians in the field will treat all six hundred patients. How the cancer arose is essentially irrelevant for the physician. But identifying patients as Chernobyl victims will enable them or their surviving relatives to qualify for special government subsidies. Society—particularly uneducated members of society—will see six hundred victims of the event and will, regardless, want their child or mother or husband to be certified as such.

Additionally, lost in such discussions are a number of other factors. For example, according to Soviet statistics the number of murders and

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suicides increased dramatically in the first years after Chernobyl, whereas the number of poisonings and accidental deaths did not.3 Depression due to the strain of having one’s life totally turned upside down is welldocumented throughout the world; one need only look at the opioid crisis in the United States for confirmation. Should some fraction of the suicides among liquidators and people living in or displaced from contaminated areas (above the previously expected number) be considered victims of the accident? Society will believe that all of them should. If I had to hazard a guess at the final death toll I would choose a number in the tens of thousands—certainly more than the WHO estimate, but far below the inflated claims of organizations such as Greenpeace. That said, it is a pleasure to read Serhii Plokhy’s prose. His writing is the most elegant English from a nonnative speaker I can remember since Viktor Erhlich’s Russian Formalism, (146) which I read in graduate school nearly fifty years ago. As an example, let me quote from Professor Plokhy’s August 16, 2018, review of Anne Applebaum’s remarkable study, Red Famine, (48) in the New York Review of Books Anne Applebaum walks into the minefields of memory left by Stalin’s policies in Ukraine and multiple attempts to conceal, uncover, interpret, and reinterpret the Holodomor. (362)

Nevertheless, it is obvious he does not know technical English. This is hardly surprising, given his background, and the publisher did not provide the requisite editorial support. I found about thirty terms or expressions that should have been changed. Some are sort of funny: what should have come out as “Workers of the world, unite!” is rendered quite literally as “Proletarians of all countries, unite!” Legislators who choose not to vote on an issue are “abstentions,” not “attendees” (prisutstvuiut). There are a number of other literal translations from obvious Russian phrases: for instance, “first program” instead of “Channel One.” On a more serious level, energoblok (reactor unit or power unit) is not “block” or “energy block.” The aktivnaia zona reaktora (reactor core) is not the “active zone of the reactor.” The venttruba (ventilation stack or vent stack) is not an “exhaust pipe.” Finally, zapusk reaktora (reactor startup) is not the “launching of a reactor.” Also, Professor Plokhy consistently confuses nuclear “safety” and nuclear “security”—two quite different concepts.

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Several of the engineers at the power plant—whose job title was nachal’nik smeny energobloka (unit shift supervisor)—are variously identified as “shift leader,” “leader of the control room,” “head of (the) shift,” “chief of the night shift,” and “chief of the [Unit 4] shift.” For most readers, these terminology issues will go unrecognized. Much more important, however, are a considerable number of technical statements that are simply incorrect. For example, despite what is stated in the book • • • • • •

RBMK (Chernobyl-type) reactors have no reinforced concrete containment structures. (86) There are no water pumps inside the reactor core. (107) The accident resulted from a steam explosion, not a nuclear explosion. (143) It is not true that there were ten RBMK reactors in Warsaw Pact countries. (258) There were no RBMK reactors in Ukraine other than at Chernobyl. (304) Other than in Lithuania and at Chernobyl itself, it is not true that “old Soviet-era RBMK reactors have been decommissioned.” (348) In fact, four such units continue in operation near St. Petersburg, there are three at the Smolensk plant and four at the Kursk plant.

From twenty-five years as an interpreter specializing in nuclear technology issues, I have become friends with a number of technical and medical specialists, whom I consulted in preparation of this review. These individuals decried several of the more alarmist statements made in this book •

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Even if the other three reactors had been damaged by the explosion of Unit 4 (unlikely, but not impossible), it is not true that “hardly any living and breathing organisms would have remained on the planet.” (xii) Although the expert commission sent to Chernobyl was concerned about the status of the nuclear material remaining in the damaged reactor, it is not true that it could “lead to another explosion, wiping the plant, the nearby city, and the members of the commission off the face of the earth.” (128) It is unlikely that the stillbirth suffered by a pregnant woman who visited Kiev around the time of the accident was caused by

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the level of radiation in the city. She was too far along in her pregnancy for that to be the case. (187–88) It is estimated that approximately ten percent of the reactor core “had been blasted into the atmosphere.” However, it is not true that “the remaining 90 percent might be hurled thousands of kilometers from Chernobyl, making the first explosion an overture to a global disaster” (197–98) or that “Ukraine and Europe as a whole would become a desolate wasteland.” (198) It is not true that “we are still as far from taming nuclear reactions as we were in 1986.” (346) Nor is it true that “the chances of another Chernobyl disaster taking place are increasing.” (348)

Given the hundreds of works cited in the notes to this study, academics will regret the absence of a comprehensive bibliography. In addition, two works in particular should have merited mention. One is the 1991 report issued by the Soviet nuclear regulatory agency, Causes and Circumstances Surrounding the Accident at Unit 4 of the Chernobyl NPP 26 April 1986: Report of the USSR Gospromatomnadzor Commission. (182) Known as the “Shteinberg Commission Report” after its chairman, Nikolai Shteinberg, this report bluntly repudiated the nuclear ministry and the design bureau responsible for the RBMK reactors.4 The report’s final statement, prior to the “Conclusions” section of the report, reads as follows: “необходимо констатировать, что авария, подобная Чернобыльской, была неизбежной” (it must be stated that an accident similar to the one at Chernobyl was bound to happen). The second is a book by Shteinberg and Georgy Kopchinsky—a physicist and formerly a science advisor to the Politburo—that appeared at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the accident: Chernobyl: What Really Happened: A Warning. (256) Also very personal in nature, this book describes the immediate aftermath of the accident and the entire course of the recovery effort over the next several months. These caveats aside, Chernobyl is a remarkable study that continues Serhii Plokhy’s lifelong inquiry into Ukrainian history and into the center-periphery tensions that characterized Ukraine’s place and situation within the Soviet Empire. These tensions continue to this day. Because of his background, he has the knowledge needed to contextualize the accident and its aftermath both politically and culturally. It is highly recommended.

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NOTES 1. Unless otherwise specified, internal page references relate to the Plokhy book. See also (131; 145). 2. Dr. Elaine Ron, who died in 2010, worked in the Radiation Epidemiology Branch in the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. 3. Data from the Russian National Medical and Dosimetric Registry. See (323; 376). 4. Shteinberg was the reactor engineer in charge of restarting the undamaged units at Chernobyl in late 1986 and early 1987. Having spent nearly a year at the site, he joined the regulatory agency after receiving a radiation dose too great to allow his future presence at any power plant.

CHAPTER 27

Pseudo-Science and Potemkin-History Michael K. Launer Provenance: Previously unpublished Copyright Holder: Author Description: This extended review of Kate Brown’s Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019) critiques the historical methodology manifested in the book and the lack of scientific knowledge displayed by its author. A very brief review appeared in The Slavic and East European Journal 64, no. 4 (Winter 2020): 738.

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ull Disclosure Statement: From 1987 through 2012 the author of this review was a technical translator and conference interpreter for utility companies and US government entities in the nuclear complex. Specifically, in 1994 he served as the interpreter for representatives of the State Department and Department of Energy during the first set of negotiations with the Ukrainian government regarding the future decommissioning of Chernobyl’s undamaged reactor units. Kate Brown is a prolific scholar and an engaging writer. Her first two books A Biography of No Place (86) and Plutopia (87) earned multiple awards from the academic community. In her third book Dispatches from Dystopia (88) she refined her personal approach to writing history, which enables her to place events “in the moment”—not in the moment when they transpired, but rather in the moment when she is writing about them.1 This approach imbues her most recent study with a sense of urgency concerning the impending disaster she sees facing humanity in the nuclear age. Clearly, Professor Brown is not your average historian. In fact, she is defiantly not your average historian.2 Rather, she is part ethnographer, part cultural anthropologist, part memoirist, part intrepid explorer, part victim rights advocate, part inquisitive tourist,3 and part conspiracy buff. She

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is an aggressive investigator, pushy interviewer, compassionate listener, and a persistent, perceptive researcher. Brown is passionately involved on a personal level in the study of nearly current events—“being there in the narrative.”4 What she is not, unfortunately, is an epidemiologist, health physicist, or classical Sovietologist. What follows is an analysis of Manual for Survival (89), which has been mostly praised by scholars in the humanities and mostly pilloried by scholars in the sciences. In this review I will attempt to demonstrate that it is the historians who are mistaken—that, in fact, what Professor Brown has offered is an elegant example of conspiratist rhetoric5 in opposition to all things nuclear—not only nuclear weapons and nuclear power generation, but even nuclear medicine. How else is one to interpret the following statement made by Brown regarding an international conference (498) held in Kiev in May 1988 and sponsored by the International Atomic Energy Agency—one of the prime suspects in Brown’s conspiracy narrative? If Soviet scientists could prove that large-scale exposures to “low” doses of Chernobyl radiation harmed only a few dozen firemen, then they could show that even the worst nuclear accident in human history had no effect on human health. And if that were true, then the fallout from nuclear testing, the seeping radioactive waste from bomb factories, the civilian reactors that daily emitted radioactivity, the widespread use of radiation in medical treatments, and the exposed bodies of workers, patients, and innocent bystanders in secret medical tests could be forgotten. (89: 152–153; emphasis added)

This is not meant as exculpation for Soviet mendacity, which has been well known in academic and diplomatic circles for decades, and which Brown documents beyond any shadow of a doubt. But it does speak to a lack of objectivity one might reasonably have expected from an historian. What, indeed, is one to make of a situation in which this highly acclaimed historian, who has no actual scientific knowledge (a) relies on the field research of a scientist who has been censured by a national body in his home country for falsifying the results of his research;6 (b) makes three claims that violate certain laws of physics;7

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(c) relies on a compilation of studies that has been disparaged by internationally renowned experts writing in one of the world’s leading scientific journals;8 and, (d) references, often without clear attribution, sources who are well known in the nuclear complex for being rabidly antinuclear— but Brown conveniently fails to cite the incendiary titles of books and articles these individuals have written “Behind the Cover-Up: Assessing Conservatively the Full Chernobyl Death Toll.” (68) “Chernobyl: An Unbelievable Failure to Help.” (69) Poisoned Power: The Case Against Nuclear Power before and after Three Mile Island. (178) Mad Science: The Nuclear Power Experiment. (292) Population Control Through Nuclear Pollution. (421) The Crime of Chernobyl: The Nuclear Gulag. (423)

For all her copious research, Brown almost completely ignores the massive epidemiological literature that has accumulated as a direct result of the Chernobyl disaster. There have been—literally—thousands of research studies published on related topics. Nearly all of them are the work of international teams including researchers from the United States, the UK, Western Europe, the Baltics, Japan, plus Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. Interested readers might consult these reviews of multiple studies: Elizabeth Cardis et al. (thirty-one co-authors) (100); and E. J. Bromet, J. M. Havenaar, and L. T. Guey. (85) Brown’s difficulty in this regard is obvious: had she acknowledged the existence and the results described in the epidemiological literature, she would have had trouble reconciling this information with her reliance on Bertell, Yablokov et al., and Tchertkoff or to square it with her claim that the West has abandoned people living in the contaminated areas of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine to their cruel fate. The narrative in this book is based on the following premises 1. The nuclear age—particularly, aboveground testing of atomic and thermonuclear weapons conducted from the late 1940s through the early 1960s—has poisoned the earth; in this context,

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the 1986 Chernobyl disaster is merely an inflection point—what Brown terms an “acceleration”9—in the degradation of the biosphere. 2. There was—and continues to this day—a vast conspiracy among the nuclear states, international organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), commercial nuclear power interests, and academics to prevent the general public from learning about the devastating medical consequences of Chernobyl, including hundreds of thousands of fatalities that (supposedly) have been, and continue to be, caused by the radiation that spewed from reactor Unit 4 in April/May 1986. Rather—so the conspiracy goes— aside from an astounding number of children who contracted thyroid cancer and an unexpected number of cleanup workers (“liquidators”) who contracted leukemia, the conspiratists want the world to believe that the primary health effects suffered by the populace can be ascribed to psychological causes (what the Soviet government derisively termed “radiophobia”). 3. In order to continue this coverup, international entities have refused to conduct a long-term study of the effects of chronic exposure to low doses of ambient radiation similar to the Life Span Study of Japanese survivors of the atomic bomb explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which was begun in 1948 and continues to this day.10 The danger, of course, when writing in the moment is to view events from the reality of that moment—and not the reality in which the events being described actually occurred. Brown fell prey to that danger to a certain extent in her otherwise remarkable study Plutopia.11 But she succumbs to the danger in Manual for Survival. Consider, for instance, this comment about Soviet agriculture The sleepy farm communities of northern Ukraine and southern Belarus had not fully kept pace with the postwar trend, led by American farmers, in industrializing agriculture. (89: 112)

This romanticized vision of rural life might lead an uninformed reader to think that the USSR in 1986 was almost a normal Western country,

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when the reality was quite different. Brown, however, seems oblivious to the actual state of the Soviet economy in the years leading up to the dissolution of the Union and in the nearly thirty years thereafter in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. This despite the fact that she has proudly conducted interviews in dilapidated housing in Kyshtym, sat with Kazakh peasants in their yurts, and gathered berries on radiation contaminated land near Pripyat. In contrast, professionals in the Slavic field will not find surprising any of the following statements—culled from the writings of Murray Feshbach, the preeminent scholar who spent his career studying the nexus between the Soviet economy and demographic analysis • •

• •

• • • •

“inflation rate of 2,539 percent (officially) in 1992.” (156: 3) “Considering the shortage of … single-use syringes and needles, and the large number of injections given, the potential for a medical disaster is manifest. How do Soviet rural district hospitals perform such sterilization if about 80 percent do not have any hot water at all, 25 percent do not have sewage treatment, and 17 percent no piped water of any sort?” (157) “Some Soviet scientists assert that 75 percent of all illness is related to the use and consumption of polluted water.” (157) “contributing to the shortfall in medications and their supply is the qualitative issue of laboratory standards. No laboratories in Russia [met] good management practice and good laboratory practice even as late as 2000.” (159: 299) “700 major [petroleum product] accident spills … occur every year in Russia … these losses are the equivalent to about 25 Exxon Valdez spills per month!” (159: 301) “lead pollution levels in children (BLL—blood lead levels) above 5 mcg/dl may affect as many as 12% of all Russian children.” (159: 301) “In part, the inadequacies of rural medical facilities are a reflection of the perennial backwardness of the countryside.” (160: 5) “In the Ukraine, according to a September 1988 disclosure, the asphyxia, pneumonia, respiratory-disorder syndrome and very premature birth that ranked as the principal causes of death among newborns were ‘directly related to the inadequate skills’ of the medical personnel in attendance.” (160: 7)

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• • • •

“medical deprivation of the countryside and its acute shortage of so many modern amenities …” (160: 70) “overworked and underqualified doctors in underfinanced and badly equipped clinics and hospitals” (160: 183) “the all-but-universal horror of maternity ward conditions” (160: 209–210) “estimated Soviet GNP down by 4 to 5 percent in 1990 and 8 to 10 percent in the first half of 1991. …” (160: 258)

Brown’s naiveté—whether genuine or feigned for narrative effect—is stunning. Here are just a few examples • •

•

•

The Politburo “rarely dwelled on the contaminated territories or the people exposed in them. … To my surprise, that concern was left to others.” (89: 55) “The Ukrainian party leadership was under pressure. Waiting on orders from Moscow, they had delayed evacuating Pripyat. They had held the May Day parade because Moscow commanded it so. They stalled on giving out iodine pills because Ilyin told them to wait. All of that was bad advice.” (89: 62–63) Ukrainian health officials “stayed on message” until 1990, when they started to release information about medical impacts on the population and about the true scope of radiation contamination— “I tried to sort it out. Somebody, at some point, was lying. I tried to make sense of the contradictory evidence.” (89: 164) “I could not get access to the KGB case files.” (89: 234)

Particularly given the first-person nature of Brown’s narrative, it is legitimate to examine the manner in which stylistic choices within the text support the thrust of her conspiratist argument.12 Again, a few examples, chosen from many similar instances in this text • •

“Residents’ households became the spleen where radioactive isotopes moored.” (89: 109; emphasis added) “Mousseau and Møller are practicing the kind of science left to post-human landscapes, a science that is tedious and hazardous, as much as it is creative and invigorating.” (89: 131; emphasis added)

Pseudo-Science and Potemkin-History

• • • •

•

“Poorly welded fuel rods [in Chernobyl’s first reactor unit] popped inside the reactor like corn kernels in hot oil.” (89: 136; emphasis added) People living in contaminated areas “rarely had just one disease but had instead a complex of illness swarming their bodies like a murder of crows.” (89: 163; emphasis added) The WHO sent a “commission of well-dressed scientists … on an itinerary that included a number of suffering communities.” (89: 211; emphasis added) “[T]he UN’s Vienna International Center, a complex of glass, steel, and convenience” was an edifice in which “men and women in fashionable suits and impractical shoes glided on polished floors.” (89: 225; emphasis added). “Behind the international diplomats trailed the scent of cologne and good health.” (89: 22; emphasis added)

And what is perhaps the most outrageous sentence in the entire book Filmmakers walked right into the buzz saw of Westerners’ arguments about failed Soviet medicine and the alleged graft and incompetency of the socialist system. (89: 288; emphasis added)

When it suits her purpose, however, Brown conveniently contradicts her own hyperbole The [Chernobyl children’s charity] programs were plagued with corruption. (89: 296; emphasis added)

But the true test of any historical study is the manner in which the historian selects and utilizes existing sources. As noted earlier, Kate Brown is a remarkably persistent researcher: Manual for Survival contains, in its endnotes, (89: 319–320) a list of twentyseven archives around the world she utilized while preparing her manuscript and forty personal interviews she conducted, either in person or by telephone, with various figures relevant to her story. The number of government documents—previously unknown to academe or the general public—that she cites is truly outstanding. At one point in the book, in her own inimitable fashion, Brown addresses her readers directly: “Even

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if you are not one to look at footnotes, you might turn your attention to this one.” (89: 195) Check it out: footnote sixty-eight on pages 366–367 lists more than two dozen previously secret documents. Beyond that, however, it is important to discuss the public sources Brown relies on, the individuals whom she cites in a positive or derogatory manner, the extent to which discrepant information is ignored or distorted,13 and the readily available published reports that she studiously avoids. Brown has her heroes and her villains. Chief among her heroes is Keith Baverstock, a specialist in chemistry and molecular genetics who worked for the WHO during the 1980s and ’90s and who now serves as a senior researcher in Finland; her bête noir is Fred J. Mettler Jr., a physician, board certified in both radiology and nuclear medicine, and a member of the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP)—one of the other governmental entities that figures in this narrative. There is more about each of them below. Throughout this book Brown quotes or cites a large number of individuals, who—although usually not identified by more than their name— are actually well known in the “nuclear world” as fervent opponents of nuclear power and/or nuclear weapons. To mention just a few •

•

•

Joseph Mangano—Radiation and Public Health Project, “an independent group of scientists and health professionals dedicated to research and education of health hazards from nuclear reactors and weapons.” Further: “In Mad Science, Joseph Mangano strips away the near-smothering layers of distortions and outright lies that permeate the massive propaganda campaigns on behalf of nuclear energy.”14 John Gofman (deceased 2007)—formerly at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a physician and professor of Molecular and Cell Biology at Berkeley; founder of the now defunct Committee for Nuclear Responsibility, which was formed as a “political and educational organization to disseminate antinuclear views and information to the public”15—claimed in 1991 that a “health-Holocaust” was occurring at Chernobyl. Rosalie Bertell (deceased 2012)—a specialist in biometry and a founding member of the International Institute of Concern for Public Health, whose mission is described as “concern for

Pseudo-Science and Potemkin-History

human survival on an intact planet.”16 Dr. Bertell is the intellectual wellspring for Brown’s conspiracy theory and her belief that hundreds of thousands of people will ultimately die as a direct result of Chernobyl. As noted above, Brown’s beliefs about the diseases resulting from Chernobyl radiation are based on books written by Wladimir Tchertkoff and by Alexey V. Yablokov et al. Originally published in French, Tschertkoff ’s book espouses the conclusions promoted in the Yablokov compilation of studies. Tschertkoff ’s translator and sponsor, Susie Greaves, recently wrote that “[t]he nuclear industry in the West was perfectly aware of RBMK reactor technology and there is no evidence that the West ever warned that an accident was waiting to happen.” (183)17 On the contrary, the United States had virtually no knowledge about the RBMK until the Soviet government delivered its inaccurate and misleading report to the IAEA in advance of hastily scheduled meetings in Vienna in August 1986. Accordingly, in order to prepare for the Vienna meetings, the Department of Energy assembled a team consisting of a dozen technical translators, brought them to the DOE facility in Germantown, Maryland, and sequestered them over a long weekend as they compiled the first English language information regarding either the reactor design itself or the events that had occurred.18 Mikhail Balonov, who has written extensively on the medical consequences of the 1950 Techa River and 1957 Kyshtym events, states that Yablokov et al. •

•

• •

“[S]uggested a departure from analytical epidemiological [cohort or case-control] studies in favour of [studies based on group averages]. This erroneous approach resulted in the overestimation of the number of accident victims by more than 800,000 deaths during 1987–2004”; (56: 181)19 That they make “uncorroborated claims of mass mortality in emergency and recovery operation workers (‘liquidators’), of abnormalities in newborns, and a host of other supposed effects of radiation”; (56: 182) That the book “is full of doubtful claims of ‘new methodology’ research” and “contains numerous factual errors”; (56: 182) That “the denial of the analytical approach and the unconditional trust in the … geographic methodology with primitive

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•

statistical tests puts an end to the credibility of any conclusions” (56: 185); and, That “[t]he value of such a review is not just zero, but negative, as its lack of balance may only be obvious to specialists, while inexperienced readers may well be misled.” (56: 185–186)

Balonov’s ultimate conclusion is that “Yablokov’s estimation of population mortality due to Chernobyl fallout of about one million before 2004 … transports this book from science to the realm of science fiction. Clearly, if such a mass death of people had occurred as a consequence of Chernobyl, this would never have passed unnoticed.” (56: 185–186) Finally, Balonov states categorically that “[t]here are no reasonable grounds to suspect the modern community of experts of concealment of the facts.” (56: 188) As noted above, Brown almost completely ignores the massive epidemiological literature that has accumulated as a direct result of the Chernobyl disaster. But she does highlight two articles published in the journal Nature in a context that, according to her reading of the situation, clearly shows academics conspiring with their governments to attack contrarians. Specifically, Brown discusses these brief notices • •

Keith Baverstock, Bruno Egloff, Aldo Pinchera, Charles Rechti, and Dilwyn Williams. (63) Vasili S. Kazakov, Evgeni P. Demidchik, and Larisa N. Astakhova. (245)

Baverstock and Kazakov, who visited Minsk on a WHO mission, reported a dramatic increase in the incidence of childhood thyroid cancer starting in 1990, just four years after Chernobyl, and attributed this fact to the huge doses of iodine-131 that had been deposited over a wide swath of land in Belarus. This dramatic news was met with skepticism, in part because radioactive iodine had not previously been implicated in thyroid cancer and in part because Western radiation epidemiologists had no prior experience with what had been up to then a very rare phenomenon. In fact, these were not the first academic indications of an upsurge in thyroid cancer. In November 1991 an international team of Ukrainian and British researchers published an article in The Lancet, a highly respected British medical journal that has been published continuously since 1823

Pseudo-Science and Potemkin-History

•

Anatoly Prisyazhiuk, O. A. Pjatak, V. A. Buzanov, Gillian K. Reeves, and Valerie Beral. (370)

Nevertheless, the notices in Nature, a widely read international journal, spurred medical examinations that ultimately identified cancer in more than four thousand children—many of whom had been afflicted with an unusually aggressive type that was often characterized by a specific gene mutation (RET3). (Fortunately, thyroid cancer is very treatable: fewer than a dozen of these children had died from their disease through 2006—twenty years after the accident and about fifteen years since the outbreak began— although that cohort continues as adults to suffer from new cancers.) Indeed, against a worldwide baseline incidence of this cancer on the level of 0.5 per million children per year, the most thoroughly contaminated areas in Gomel oblast ultimately recorded a prevalence above one hundred thirty cases per million children per year.20 Thus, the Baverstock and Kazakov teams ultimately were vindicated. Accordingly, it might not be an exaggeration to state that the unanticipated outbreak of childhood thyroid cancer precipitated a paradigm shift—a fundamental change in the basic concepts and practices of radiation epidemiology—as belated acceptance of this reality compelled researchers to develop new methodologies of dose reconstruction in the face of inadequate records about the impacted individuals.21 Almost immediately following the publication of these two notices, however, Nature published three responses from world-renowned epidemiologists • • •

Valerie Beral and Gillian Reeves. (67) I. Shigematsu and J. W. Thiessen. (407) Elaine Ron, Jay Lubin, and Arthur B. Schneider. (386)

Beral, a radiation epidemiologist at Oxford University, has authored more than one hundred articles in The Lancet beginning in the 1970s. Reeves, her colleague at Oxford, is a professor of radiation biometry. Shigematsu has been a leading figure in the Life Span Study for many years. Thiessen was a medical doctor working in the US Department of Energy.22 Ron (deceased 2010), a senior investigator for the Radiation Epidemiology Branch at the National Cancer Institute, was one of the world’s foremost experts in radiation epidemiology and in the causes of thyroid cancer.23

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None of the comments challenged the accuracy of the numbers published by Baverstock and Kazakov. Rather, Beral and Reeves suggested that, because the reported numbers relied on histological examination of asymptomatic subjects, it was possible some of the cases may have been “occult” nodules “which are indolent clinically” and might “never progress to frank symptomatic disease.”(67: 680) Shigematsu and Thiessen stated that the data in the reports “are limited and preliminary,” and that “studies of these consequences must be carefully pursued and based on scientific methodologies.” The Japanese specialist offered the support of the Hiroshima-based Radiation Effects Research Foundation in conducting such studies. (407: 681) Ron and her colleagues argued that “carefully controlled epidemiological studies are needed to understand the true impact of the accident.” (386: 113) To this reviewer, Brown’s contention (89: 251–252) that these scholars were part of an international conspiracy stretches credulity beyond the breaking point. In particular, since Beral and Reeves were members of the international research team that first identified thyroid problems in children impacted by Chernobyl (370), their critique of the methods employed by the Kazakov and Baverstock teams should be considered dispositive. Brown, unfortunately, provides no indication that she is aware of these facts. Brown also uses innuendo and exaggeration as stylistic tools to support her main thesis. Some examples

James Asselstine The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) published a study saying Chernobyl could never happen in the United States. (111) Internally, however, one of the five NRC commissioners, James Asselstine, argued the same accident could indeed occur in the United States and that the NRC was not prepared for it.24 His concerns dismissed, Asselstine left the NRC that month. (89: 247)

Asselstine’s term as an NRC Commissioner came to an end a month after this report was released, so he was scheduled to leave in any event, and he returned to the private sector. There is no evidence adduced that his departure was somehow related to release of the report. Nevertheless, Brown allows the reader to infer that Asselstine resigned in protest, which is simply not the case.

Pseudo-Science and Potemkin-History

Gordon McLeod The accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on March 28, 1979, was a true meltdown of the reactor core— technologically a much worse event than the steam explosion that destroyed Chernobyl’s Unit 4. Citing Joseph Mangano (291), Brown writes When Pennsylvania State Health Commissioner Gordon McLeod announced nine months later that child mortality in a ten-mile radius around the plant had doubled, the governor did not order an investigation of the problem, but instead fired McLeod. (89: 60)

Brown sees this as just another indication of the nuclear establishment’s indifference to suffering among the population. But McLeod’s statement was completely irresponsible. In the first place, a grand total of fifteen (!) curies of iodine-131 was released beyond the grounds of the power plant—not enough to cause any harm to flora, fauna, or humans (62);25 and, as a matter of fact the accident caused no medical casualties. However, alarmed by national news coverage and the local media, many mothers of small children evacuated the area around the power plant needlessly. As a result, they suffered a version of PTSD that was still afflicting them ten years later. (135—See also 84; 85)

David Marples Marples, a history professor at the University of Alberta, Canada, has published extensively on topics related to Belarus, Ukraine, and nuclear power safety. He is no friend of nuclear power. Brown, while discussing the fact that in 1990 “Soviet doctors were well aware of a new trend in thyroid cancers among children” (89: 242), cites Belarus: From Soviet Rule to Nuclear Catastrophe (299) in footnote eleven on page 379. Brown writes: “Marples reports the first jump in thyroid cancers in Ukraine in 1986.” Here is what Marples actually wrote Among children prior to Chernobyl, there were seven cases of [thyroid cancer] in the republic. Between 1986 and 1989 a small increase in [thyroid cancer] was detected among children: two cases in 1986; four in 1987; and five in 1988. However, in 1990, 29 cases were suddenly detected. By 1991 the figure had jumped to 59. (299: 104)

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Apparently, one person’s “small increase” is another person’s “first jump” in thyroid cancers. Brown must not be aware of the five- to ten-year latency period of thyroid cancers, or she would have realized that any cancers that became clinically identifiable in 1986, 1987, 1988, and 1989 already existed before Chernobyl blew up.26 In informal logic the fallacy here is known as post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this)— just because Event B occurred after Event A does not necessarily mean that Event A caused Event B. Coincidences do happen in real life, if not in the mind of conspiratists. It is important to note that a team of scientists from the Research Center of Radiation Medicine or the Research Institute of Endocrinology and Metabolism, both within the Academy of Medical Sciences of Ukraine, studied four two-year intervals and one one-year interval (86–87, 88–89, 90–91, 92–93, and 94) and made the following rigorous statement: “[W]e have assumed that the consequences due to the Chernobyl accident had not manifested themselves during the first two time intervals.” (418: 742)

Fred Mettler Based on information from Olga Degtiareva, a Ukrainian endocrinologist, and Valentina Drozd, a medical doctor, (140; 141) Brown reports that in 1991 Mettler was shown slides of twenty thyroid biopsies, which he confirmed to be carcinogenic. (89: 260) She continues: “[a] year later Mettler published a major article about thyroid nodules among children in Chernobyl territories, but he did not mention the twenty thyroid cancers he had verified.” (89: 261) The article in question was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. (317) Given the fact that this study had fifteen coauthors (five of whom were Slavic), it seems a little misleading to write that “Metter published” a major article. But, then, he is one of the perpetrators of the grand conspiracy. In the text of their article, the Mettler team states that “[t]he purpose of our study was to assess the prevalence, size, type, and distribution of thyroid nodules in the population that had been continuously residing around Chernobyl from 1985 to 1990.” (317: 617) Among the research results was the following statement

Pseudo-Science and Potemkin-History

Overall, there was no apparent difference in the prevalence of nodules … between contaminated and control groups; this was also true when adults and children were considered separately. (317: 617)

Further, the research team implies that the generally bad health of people in rural areas will make cohort and case-control studies extremely difficult to conduct The large number of adults in unexposed populations with sonographically detected thyroid nodules will confound future detection of potentially radiation-induced nodules and carcinomas in the general population living around Chernobyl. (317: 618–619)27

Moreover, they explicitly include the following caveat: “[t]he fact that ultrasonography is not reliable in differentiating between benign and malignant nodules is well established. Consequently, we did not attempt to make such differentiations.” (317: 618) Accordingly, the study as designed had nothing at all to do with cancer per se, although Brown obviously thinks it should have. Interestingly, however, the research report does contain an oblique statement that might have satisfied a more objective observer Since the accident, some local scientists have reported that the prevalence of thyroid disease has increased in the populations potentially exposed to even very small amounts of radioactive iodine. (317: 617)

There is more one could say about Manual for Survival regarding issues such as the difficulty in conducting a long-term study of low dose impacts from radiation when the total population affected by Chernobyl is around five million people—for whom incomplete, incorrect, or simply no dose estimates are available. However, suffice it to say that as travelogues go, this book is pseudoscience and Potemkin-history. In closing, it may be appropriate to quote the first sentence in a review of Manual for Survival by the well-known historian Sheila Fitzpatrick that appeared recently in the Australian Book Review: “This is a very disturbing book.” (166) The present reviewer would agree wholeheartedly with Professor Fitzpatrick—but for completely different reasons.

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NOTES 1. “When I arrive someplace, the fact of my being there changes the place itself and the kinds of stories I can tell about it. … And in what voice do I write when I am part of the story?” (88: 3) Brown actually alludes to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle here: “Scientists have something called the ‘observer effect,’ which refers to the phenomenon of the observer, in the act of watching, altering the state of the object being studied.” (88: 12) 2. “I am confused by the notion that referring to oneself in scholarly writing is unprofessional or trivial or renders one’s work tautological—‘something we don’t do’” (88: 11). Further: “Academics recoil from the first-person narrative, in part, because to confess to being there is to call into doubt one’s objectivity and legitimacy.” (88: 11) 3. “Without intending to, I have become a professional disaster tourist.” (88: 1) 4. “The first-person voice, I hope, makes my judgments more palatable in that it does not pass them off as claims to universal truth or utterances from on high.” (88: 13) 5. “The neologism ‘conspiratist’ has been created in order to avoid the pejorative connotations of the phrase ‘conspiracy theorists’ and the awkwardness of repeatedly using ‘conspiracy proponents.’” (491: 89 passim) 6. The scientist in question is Anders P. Møller (see 32; 416). Jim Smith, who has made dozens of visits to the contaminated areas of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine, provided this assessment of Møller: he was “found guilty of manipulating data by the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty.” (416: 339) 7. Smith describes these gaffes in a section entitled “Breaking the Laws of Physics.” (416: 345) 8. The study in question is Yablokov et al., eds. (472) This work was reviewed quite negatively by Duncan Jackson. (222) Jackson argues that the book “reflects a conspiracy-theory approach which implies time and again that the International Atomic Energy Agency, the World Health Organisation and others ‘completely neglected’ or misinterpreted significant information sources when evaluating health effects” (222: 163) and that the editors “cite information in an uncritical fashion, such as an account of pigs literally ‘glowing’ as a consequence of contamination.” (222: 163) Another scientist, Mikhail I. Balonov at the IAEA, had this to say: “Yablokov’s estimation of population mortality due to Chernobyl fallout of about one million before 2004 … transports this book from science to the realm of science fiction.” (56: 185–186) See also Mona Dreicer: (139) Dreicer is deputy program director for Nonproliferation and Arms Control at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. 9. “I have argued that Chernobyl is not an accident but rather an acceleration on a time line of exposures that sped up in the second half of the twentieth century.” (89: 302–303) 10. Although Brown condemns the West for waiting five years to begin the Life Span Study, she is simply wrong. The LSS, so named, was initiated in 1948, but in fact the “U.S.-Japan Joint Commission” began studying the medical effects of bomb radiation in September 1945—less than two months after the war in the Pacific came to an end. See (406). 11. See (271). 12. See (491: 91). 13. See (491: 98). 14. https://www.orbooks.com/joseph-mangano/.

Pseudo-Science and Potemkin-History 15. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_for_Nuclear_Responsibility. 16. http://www.ccnr.org/bertell_bio.html. 17. Intellectually, Greaves is to epidemiology what Betsy DeVos is to public education. 18. Kathy Stackhouse. Personal communication. June 22, 2019. Ms. Stackhouse was a member of the team of translators who worked twelve- to-fourteen-hour days so that the US representatives sent to Vienna could have any information at their disposal prior to the meetings. 19. Brown, for her part, consistently asserts that Chernobyl claimed at least 135,000 lives in Ukraine alone. 20. See (140: 979). 21. See (260). 22. In a September 1986 The New York Times article, Thiessen is reported to have said that residents in the 30 km Exclusion Zone around the destroyed reactor “could have more than four times the normal number of thyroid cancers because of excess radiation from the April 26 accident.” Further, he said that Soviet figures on the amount of radiation released might be “significantly low.” The DOE analysis showed that figures regarding fallout were “several hundred times higher than those suggested by the Russians, who predicted only a 1 percent increase in thyroid cancer.” See (136: A28). 23. In 1985, while working as a postdoc in Israel, Ron authored a classic study of the carcinogenic effect of low doses of medical radiation used to treat patients suffering from tinea capitis (ringworm). See (327). 24. In personal communications, several individuals within the Department of Energy, its national laboratories, and the US nuclear industry have indicated that a Chernobyl-type accident cannot ever happen in this country, that the Soviet accident was unique due to the RBMK’s intrinsic design flaws and the lack of a reinforced concrete containment at Chernobyl. (272) 25. In comparison, using Brown’s own figures, (89: 246) nuclear bombs exploded at the Nevada Test Site released a total of 145 million curies of radioactive iodine, and at least fifty million curies of iodine were released at Chernobyl. 26. “After exposure, the minimum latency period before the appearance of thyroid cancers is 5 to 10 years.” See (217: 180). 27. Some thyroid nodules may be cancerous; the vast majority are not.

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CHAPTER 28

Confronting Climate Change: Assessing the Role of Nuclear Power Michael K. Launer & Marilyn J. Young Provenance: Previously unpublished Copyright Holder: Authors Description: This op-ed, written in late 2019, criticizes Scientific American for publishing two misleading Opinion articles regarding nuclear power, in general, and both Chernobyl and TMI, in particular. Scientific American declined to publish our commentary.

T

he climate crisis is not only a major existential challenge; it is also fraught with political implications. Central to both arenas is the question of civilian nuclear power: What role should it play going forward? US Democratic presidential challengers Klobuchar, Sanders, and Warren oppose continued development of nuclear energy, while Republicans lack clarity on this issue. Compounding any considered discussion of the options for reducing carbon emissions is the fact that the media have been less than helpful. Participants in a town hall meeting held at Columbia University (339) in New York City reached the conclusion that, rather than informing the public, the media have contributed only obfuscation. A recent example can be found in the July 2019 issue of Scientific American—an outlet one would expect to have informed contributors. However, articles by Mark Fischetti (161), a SciAm senior editor, and Wade Roush (389), a regular contributor to the magazine, while ostensibly positive about the prospects for nuclear power, contain a number of errors that compound prevalent misinformation. Mr. Fischetti states that nuclear power could “potentially” be one of the energy technologies used to control carbon in the atmosphere. We ask: How

Confronting Climate Change

can global carbon control be achieved without nuclear power being a component of the solution? Even the staunchest environmentalists (including Dr. Roush) are coming around to the idea that, absent nuclear power production, the other “renewables” will not be sufficient to resolve this issue. Furthermore, new fuel technologies and small modular reactors may ease the political dilemmas, but without large reactors (1000–1200MWe) there is no practical way to provide the massive amounts of electricity required today and tomorrow by megalopolises around the planet. Further, Mr. Fischetti and Dr. Roush imply equivalence between the 1978 accident at Three Mile Island and the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. This is unwarranted. On an engineering level, other than the presence of emergency core cooling systems and emergency diesel generators, there is almost nothing in common between a Western pressurized water reactor and a Soviet RBMK. More significantly, there is no comparison between the societal impacts the two events had in their respective countries. Technically speaking, Chernobyl was not even a nuclear accident; rather, it began as a steam explosion that caused massive damage to reactor internals, ruptured the reactor, destroyed the flimsy building that housed the entire unit, exposed red-hot graphite to the open air, and resulted in a mass of molten radioactive material lying on the concrete floor of the reactor building. TMI, on the other hand, truly was a meltdown of the reactor core. Mr. Fischetti states that Chernobyl “was caused by faulty reactor design and operation.” The phrase “faulty reactor design” hardly comes close to describing the dreadful RBMK-1000, and blaming the operators for the accident—which the Soviet government certainly wanted the world to believe—has long been discredited. Despite all the Soviet propaganda, in 1991 its own regulatory agency ultimately reached the following conclusion: “it must be stated that an accident similar to the one at Chernobyl was bound to happen.” (182)1 Whatever else is true about TMI and Chernobyl, operators at neither power plant had the breadth and depth of training required to cope with the situation that confronted them. This has been remedied in the West with the adoption of symptom-based emergency operating procedures and intensive simulator training for all control room crews—neither of which has been implemented in any meaningful manner at “Soviet designed” reactor units. In the United States, TMI prompted a significant re-evaluation of regulatory issues that, along with public pressure and persistent lawsuits,

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effectively stopped construction of new nuclear plants. The industry was just beginning to revive when Chernobyl blew up. As we have written (483)2—and in this Dr. Roush concurs (388)—the social upheaval resulting from the Chernobyl accident was a significant factor contributing to the ultimate dissolution of the Soviet Union. But there is one fact that few in the United States—and certainly none in the antinuclear lobby—recognize: no one was injured or impacted medically3 by TMI and the accident caused no damage offsite. TMI’s safety systems and the reinforced concrete containment structure enveloping the reactor unit isolated the surrounding communities and the environment from the potential consequences of the worst technological accident in history at a nuclear power plant anywhere in the world. Only fifteen (fifteen!) curies of 131Iodine (the element responsible for the development of thyroid cancer in children) were released beyond the physical borders of the TMI facility, along with 2.5 million curies of radioactive noble gases. (62)4 In contrast, estimates of the radiation release from Chernobyl range from fifty to two hundred million curies (including longlived 90strontium, 239plutonium and 137cesium), which fell mostly in what is now Belarus—not Ukraine—and were ultimately spread at some level throughout the northern hemisphere. In 1996 the International Atomic Energy Agency estimated that the amount of radiation released by Chernobyl exceeded that of the Hiroshima bomb by a factor of four hundred. (220) Given the widespread fear generated by these two accidents, it would be helpful if a publication as prestigious and influential as Scientific American were to provide objective and dispassionate information regarding what everyone recognizes to be a technology fraught with passion and misinformation.

NOTES 1. “необходимо констатировать, что авария, подобная Чернобыльской, была неизбежной.” 2. See also (404). 3. However, more than ten years after the TMI accident, some local residents continued to experience medically verifiable levels of psychological distress. See, for example, (135). 4. The average dose to people living within ten miles of the power plant was about equal to one chest X-ray and amounted to about three percent of the average annual background radiation received by US residents. Statistics from Wikipedia (463).

Afterword

T

he 1980s were a decade of phenomenal upheaval in the Soviet Union. Militarily, they were dominated by the War in Afghanistan (1979– 1988), which many believe was “the beginning of the end” for Communist Party domination. Culturally and politically, the 1980s began with the stultifying last days of Brezhnev’s Era of Stagnation and ended with Gorbachev’s ill-fated reforms—glasnost, perestroika, and uskorenie. In economic terms, the stable—but impoverished—situation that characterized the start of the decade was destroyed in virtual bankruptcy because of the Chernobyl disaster, culminating in unprecedented inflation. Diplomatically, a series of international controversies—not the least of which were destruction of the Korean Airliner, Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (the “Star Wars” program), and Chernobyl itself—led to Moscow’s loss of control over the Warsaw Pact nations and to the Fall of the Berlin Wall almost exactly ten years to the day from the start of the campaign in Afghanistan. In this collection of papers The Path from Disaster toward Russian “Democracy”—the first volume in our projected four-volume series The Rhetorical Rise and Demise of Russian “Democracy” in Russian Political Discourse—we have examined the significance of the KAL controversy and the Chernobyl nuclear accident as signposts (вехи) along the path from a virtual lack of any public discourse one could identify as characteristic of civil society to nearly complete loss of Communist Party control over the public rhetorical sphere. As rhetoricians and linguists, we are interested in the use and, often, the abuse of evidence in international relations—by governments, their leaders and representatives, by the press, academics, and the public. Our corpus is the language employed by various actors in furtherance of their political and societal goals. With reference to the Soviet Union, we have traced the development— from very fragile beginnings—of public discourse as that term is understood in the West. It is remarkable that, in the span of just one decade, the

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Communist Party went from almost total control of rhetoric in the public sphere to nearly total loss of that control. With respect to the United States, we have explored governmental distortions of fact for political gain, and we have examined conspiratorial distortions of fact and logic that seek to promote very specific goals—be that attacking the power wielded by the military industrial complex or opposing the development of nuclear power production. Along the way, we have detailed our understanding of situations and events in Russia and the United States as these relate to the topics we discuss. In so doing, we have set the stage for a discussion of the chaotic 1990s in Volume Two—A Flowering of “Democracy” during the Yeltsin Years— including the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the stumbling progress toward a semblance of democratic civil society in the Russian Federation. Volume Two should appear about a year from now. David Cratis Williams, Marilyn J. Young, and Michael K. Launer January 2021

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The Rhetorical Rise and Demise of “Democracy” in Russian Political Discourse 475 ———. “When the Shoe is on the Other Foot: Comparative Treatments of the KAL 007 and Iran Air Shootdowns.” In Studies of the Reagan Presidency and Public Discourse, edited by W. Barnett Pearce and Michael Weiler, 203–224. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1992. 476 ———. “Introduction: Non-Rational Assessment of Risk and the Development of Civilian Nuclear Power.” In Nuclear Energy and Security in the Former Soviet Union, edited by David R. Marples and Marilyn J. Young, 1–17. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997. 477 Young, Marilyn J., and Jim A. Kuypers, “Textual Reconstruction in the 1988 Iranian ‘Airbus’ Tragedy.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Speech Communication Association, Chicago, Illinois, November 1990. 478 Young, Marilyn J., and Michael K. Launer. “007—Conspiracy or Accident?” Review of Shootdown: Flight 007 and the American Connection, by R. W. Johnson. Commonweal, September 12, 1986, 472–473. 479 ———. “Flight 007.” Review of “The Target Is Destroyed,” by Seymour M. Hersh. Washington Book Review 2, no. 1 (January 1987): 9–11. 480 ———. Flights of Fancy, Flight of Doom: KAL 007 and Soviet–American Rhetoric. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988. 481 ———. “Conspiratist Rhetoric and KAL 007.” Chapter 9 in their Flights of Fancy, Flight of Doom: KAL 007 and Soviet-American Rhetoric. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988. 482 ———. “KAL and the Superpowers: An International Argument.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 74, no. 3 (August 1988): 271–295. 483 ———. “Redefining Glasnost′ in the Soviet Media: The Recontextualization of Chernobyl.” Journal of Communication 41, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 102–124. Reprinted in Mass Culture and Perestroika in the Soviet Union, edited by Marsha Siefert, 102–124. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. 484 ———. “A New Day for the Soviet Environment.” Review of Environmental Management in the Soviet Union, by P. R. Pryde; Soviet Environmental Policies and Practices: The Most Critical Investment, by Mildred Turnbull; and Environmental Policy in the USSR, by C. E. Ziegler. FORUM for applied research and public policy 7, no. 2 (Summer 1992): 134–135. 485 ———. Review of Chernobyl and Nuclear Power in the USSR and The Social Impact of the Chernobyl Disaster, by David R. Marples. Canadian-American Slavic Studies 26, nos. 1–4 (1992): 385–388. 486 ———. “Evaluative Criteria for Conspiracy Arguments: The Case of KAL 007.” In Warranting Assent: Case Studies in Argument Evaluation, edited by Edward Schiappa, 3–32. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995. 487 ———. Review of The Russian Press from Brezhnev to Yeltsin: Behind the Paper Curtain, by John Murray. The Russian Review 54, no. 3 (July 1995): 480. 488 ———. “The Final Days: Development of Argumentative Discourse in the Soviet Union.” In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the Study of Argumentation, June 16–19, 1998, edited by Franz H. van Eemeren et al., 903–908. Amsterdam: Sic Sat, 1999.

Bibliography 489 ———. “The Final Days: The Development of Argumentative Discourse in the Soviet Union.” Argumentation 16, no. 4 (November 2002): 443–458. 490 ———. “Carlos the Jackal Attacks RFE/RL!” Review of Cold War Broadcasting. Impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. A Collection of Studies and Documents, by A. Ross Johnson and R. Eugene Parta, eds. The Slavic and East European Journal 56, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 139–140. 491 Young, Marilyn J., Michael K. Launer, and Curtis Austin. “The Need for Evaluative Criteria: Conspiracy Argument Revisited.” Argumentation and Advocacy, 26, no. 3 (Winter 1990): 89–107. 492 Yuriev, Aleksandr I., and Young, Marilyn J. My i atomnaia energetika. Psikhologo-sotsiologicheskii opros naseleniia SPb (06.93) [Atomic energy and us: A socio-psychological survey of the population in St. Petersburg]. Unpublished survey conducted in June 1993. 493 Zakharov, V. “Chto kroetsia za ‘intsidentom’” [What’s hiding behind the incident]. Pravda, September 6, 1983, 4. 494 Zarefsky, David. “Conspiracy Arguments in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates.” Journal of the American Forensic Association 21, no. 2 (Fall 1984): 63–75. 495 Ziegler Charles E. Environmental Policy in the USSR. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987 (reprinted with a new introduction, 1990). 496 Zyla, Roman P. “Ukraine as a Nuclear Weapons Power.” In Nuclear Energy and Security in the Former Soviet Union, edited by David R. Marples and Marilyn J. Young, 121–137. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997. 497 Bunzel, J. Anti-politics in America: Reflections on the anti-political temper and its distortions of the democratic process. New York: Knopf, 1967. 498 Medical Aspects of the Chernobyl Accident, Kiev, May 11–13, 1988. Vienna: IAEA, 1989. 499 Goodnight, G. Thomas. “The Personal, Technical, and Public Spheres of Argument: A Speculative Inquiry into the Art of Public Deliberation.” The Journal of the American Forensic Association 18, no. 4 (Spring 1982): 214–227. 500 Toulmin, Stephen. The Uses of Argument. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 501 “Tucker Carlson vs. Trump.” The New York Times, November 20, 2020. https://www. nytimes.com/2020/11/20/us/politics/Tucker-Carlson-trump.html. 502 Young, Marilyn J., David Cratis Williams, and Scott M. Elliott. “Democratization and Cultures of Communication: The Mission of the International Center for the Advancement of Political Communication and Argumentation.” Paper presented at the Second Annual Russian-American Seminar on Democratic Institutions, St. Petersburg, Russia, August, 1993. 503 Young, Marilyn J. “When the Shoe is on the Other Foot: The Reagan Administration’s Treatment of the Shootdown of Iran Air 655 [or, ‘God is in the Adjectives, but the Devil is in the Detail’].” Paper presented at the University of Massachusetts National Symposium: “Public Discourse and the Reagan Presidency,” University of Massachusetts-Amherst, April 19–21,1989.

441

Index ABC, 10, 11, 15, 21, 57 Above-ground testing, 324 Absolute safety, 298, 329 Accident management, 368 Adamovich, Ales, 235, 251, 279, 280, 298 Adams, Jan S., 111 Ad hominem attacks, 38 Advanced reactor design, 332 African American Republican, xxxviii Agitprop, 109 Airbus crisis, 163 Air Navigation Commission (ANC), 68, 72, 97, 98, 107 Air-to-ground, 6, 11, 16, 17, 28, 62, 65, 67, 69, 96, 128 Alperovitz, Gar, 325 Alternative Home Service, 130 Alternative sources of energy, 316 American Nuclear Society, 256 Andropov, Yuri, 114, 152, 156, 171, 205, 207, 263, 292 Annealing, 238, 314 ANO, 77, 78 Anomalous situation, 26, 85 Antibiotic theory, 117, 119, 124 Anticipated event, 329 Anticipated transient, 358 Antinuclear movement, 279, 280, 297, 317 Antinuclear power movement, 266 Applebaum, Anne, 389

Argument analysis, 83 Argumentative discourse, 83 Argumentative ground, 286–302 Argumentative structure, 98, 287 Argument from ignorance, 93, 105 Argumentum ad verecundiam, xlviii, xxxiii Asahi newspaper, 19 Asselstine, James, 404 Associated Press, 4, 9–10 Associative/dissociative techniques, 101 Astakhova, Larisa N., 402 Atomic bomb, 325, 396 Atomic Energy Commission, 325 Audience-centered approaches, 84 Audience-centered perspective, 83 Audio tape, 41, 143 Austin, Curtis C., 83–108 Authoritarian form of government, 288 Background radiation, 315, 324, 377, 412 Baker, Jr., Howard H., 36, 125 Balonov, Mikhail I., 401, 402, 408 Balthrop, V. William, 52 Baseline incidence, 403 Bateson, Gregory, 165, 180 Baverstock, Keith, 400, 402–404 Benign nodules, 407 Beral, Valerie, 403, 404

444

The Rhetorical Rise and Demise of “Democracy” in Russian Political Discourse

Bernstein, 106 Bertell, Rosalie, 395, 400–401 Bethe, Hans, 99 Beyond design basis accident, 330, 335, 362 Biden, Joe, xxxv Bitzer, Lloyd, F., 24, 26, 53, 165, 166, 174, 180 Black box, 48, 61, 185, 186, 191 Black, Edwin, 34 Bohlen, Christine, 266 Bormann, Ernest G., 83 Borovik, Genrikh, 120, 121 Bovin, A., 30, 31 Branham, 166, 179 Briukhanov, Viktor, 385 Brochman, Philip. G., 240 Bromet, E. J., 395 Bronnikov, Vladimir, 258, 260, 352, 353 Brown, Kate, 380, 393–402, 404, 405, 408 Brutain, Georg, 254 Bunzel, J., 106 Burden of proof, 42, 56 Bureaucratic imperative, 110, 280, 362 Bureaucratic privilege, 218, 267, 282, 297, 298 Burgess, Parke G., 53 Burke, Kenneth, 92, 102, 107 Burns, John, 40 Burt, Richard, R., 13, 29, 30, 32, 56, 139, 189 Bush, George, xxxv, 141, 153, 154, 156, 158, 159, 164, 169, 174, 175, 182 Buzanov, V. A., 403 C-135, 149 Callan, L. Joseph, 240 Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs, 106 Cannon bursts, 44, 47, 48, 63, 67, 68, 69

Canonization, 112, 114, 211, 217, 230, 233 Carbon emissions, 410 Cardis, Elizabeth, 395 Case-control studies, 401, 407 Casey, William J., 123, 139, 186, 189, 194 Causal deductive claims, 85 Causes of death, 397 CBS, 8, 9, 11 Center-periphery tensions, 266, 296, 385, 391 Central Bank policy, 346 Central Intelligence Agency, 211 Chernobyl nuclear power plant, xlii, xliv, 212, 302, 364, 371, 411 Chronicle, 219, 222–224, 269, 274 CIA, 95 Circular reasoning, 95, 102 Civilian airliner, 14, 18, 28, 36, 37 38, 40, 47, 48, 53, 70, 93, 124, 126, 127, 128, 148, 151, 154, 182, 189, 268, 302 Civilian nuclear power, 135, 224, 226, 236, 243, 244, 245, 246, 248–260, 249, 251, 253, 265, 266, 276, 303, 308, 310, 311, 313, 317, 319, 327, 340, 345, 347, 352, 355, 357, 360, 363, 366, 383, 385, 410 Civilized behavior, 34, 35, 43, 52, 141, 158 Civil society, 132, 231, 235, 282, 283, 300, 413, 414 Clapper, James R., 5 Clarkson, Natalie, 56, 197 Clark, William P., 186, 190, 194 Classified information, 38, 95, 126 Climate change, 410 Clinton, Hillary, xxxii, xxxiv, 197 Close textual analysis, 84, 97, 209 Clubb, Oliver, 61

Index

Coercive communication, 104 Coercive rhetoric, 57, 416 Cognitive dissonance, 230, 248, 274 Cohen, Steven, 289 Coherence, 60, 61, 83, 103 Cohort studies, 388 Cold War, 154, 195–197, 317, 334, 380, xv Cold War Broadcasting, 195, 197 Commercial airliner, 15, 28, 32, 49, 56, 171 Commercial nuclear power generation, 323 Communicative nature of the rhetorical act, 102 Communist Party, 209, 211, 220, 221, 223, 244, 270, 273, 301, 302, 340, 348, 364, 385, 413, 414 Complex technological systems, 327 Compliance with safety regulations, 366 Composite narrative, 23, 136, 163 Computer technology, 372 Conspiracy argument, 56, 57, 83–108 theory, xli, 87, 94, 96, 401, 408 Conspiratist argument, 84–86, 95, 100, 101, 106, 398 discourse, 83 rhetoric, 84–87, 99–104, 106, 394 Consumer Reports, 117 Containment, 224, 234, 237, 246, 284, 307, 315, 319, 337, 350, 363, 378, 390, 409, 412 Contaminated areas, 225, 234, 275, 389, 395, 399, 403, 408 Content analysis, 136, 139, 160 Contextual reconstruction, 163, 164, 165, 173, 177, 178, 179, 180, 222, 268, 273, 276

Contravening evidence, 318 Control Data Corporation, 242 Control group, 407 Cooling pond, 237, 246, 284, 285 Cooling tower, 237, 284, 328 Corbett, Percy, 58, 70, 71 Corrosion and erosion, 238, 239 Cost-benefit calculus, 330 Cover-up, 95, 186, 188, 192, 235, 395 COVID, xlii Credibility by Association, 89 Creps, Earl G, III., 86, 90, 100, 103, 106 Crisis rhetoric, 132, 136, 137, 230 Criticality, 243 Crowe, William, 149, 150, 152, 153, 164, 170, 171 Cuban Missile Crisis, 24, 35, 50 Culmination, 112, 114, 164, 210, 211, 271, 291, 321 Czech Republic, 328 Dale Carnegie approach, 340 Dallin, Alexander, 61, 191, 193 Dawson, Jane I., 296 Decision-making, 127, 167, 186, 190, 219, 220, 269, 270 Decontamination, 135, 225, 275, 283 Deductive, causal claim, 86, 98, 103 Defective steam-generator tubes, 356 Defense Department, 151 Defense Intelligence Agency, 189 Degtiareva, Olga, 406 Demidchik, Evgeni P., 402 Democratization, 340 Demographic analysis, 397 Department of Defense, 309, 349 Department of Energy, 351, 356, 361, 393, 401 Design basis accident (DBA), 330, 335, 362

445

446

The Rhetorical Rise and Demise of “Democracy” in Russian Political Discourse

Design documentation, 371 Design review, 257 Deutsche Welle, 135 Diablo Canyon power plant, 359 Diesel generators, 240, 337, 411 Discrepant evidence, 86, 102 Discrepant information, 25, 95, 400 Disinformation, 47, 67, 82, 118, 184, 361 District heating, 251, 323 Diversion, 323 Dolgikh, Vladimir, 129 Domestic audience, 30, 34, 109, 110, 213 Donaldson, Sam, 13 Dose estimates, 407 Dose load, 388 Dose reconstruction, 403 Dosimetry, 237, 282 Double loop, 4, 41, 50, 90, 94 Drach, Ivan, 386 Dramatistic form, 85 Drop-off, 114, 210, 211 Drozd, Valentina, 406 Dudko, Sviatoslav, 243 Dukakis, Michael, xxxv Duke Engineering & Services, 307 Duke Power Company, 241, 357 Dulles, John Foster, xlii, xxxix Eagleburger, Lawrence S., 13, 138, 139, 189 Ecological debate, 265–285, 300 Ecological problems, 366 Eco-nationalist movement, 265 Edelman, Murray, 166, 167, 180 Egloff, Bruno, 402 Eisenhower, Dwight, 104, 312, 317, 325, 326 Electronic intelligence (ELINT), 122 Embrittlement, 238

Emelianov, I. Y., 212 Emergency instructions, 329 Emergency operating procedures (EOPs), 309, 339, 348, 355, 411 Emergency systems, 371 Emergency training, 367 Energy conservation, 332, 334 Energy crisis, 129, 135, 283, 316, 377 Energy Reorganization Act, 325 Engberg, Eric, 144 Engineered safety systems, 234 Environmental costs, 332 Environmental problems, 249, 327 Environmental protection, 246, 247, 251, 252, 303, 340, 344, 354 Epideictic function, 36 Epidemiological literature, 395, 402 Epidemiologist, 394, 402, 403 Epidemiology, 392, 403, 409 Erhlich, Viktor, 389 Estonian print media, 250 European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 204 European radio stations, 110 Evidence, xxxi–xlviii, 5, 12, 14, 53, 212, 318, 328, 378, 379 Evidentiary methodology, 101 Evidentiary relevance, 100 Evidentiary strength, 84 Evidentiary validity, 61 Evidentiary value, 59, 67 Evil Empire, 141, 143, 322 Evseev, V. S., 111, 290 Ewing, Harold, 69, 108, 186, 187 Excess relative risk, 388 Ex gratia compensation, 144, 153, 155, 156, 172, 181 Exhortation, 34, 49, 52, 53 Exhortative style, 48, 138

Index

Factual accuracy, 59, 100 Falwell, Reverend, 110 Fantasy theme, 83 Farrell, John C., 85 Faurer, Lincoln D., 19, 194 Fear of the atom, 328, 334 Feaver, Douglas, 19, 29, 55, 185 Federal Aviation Administration, 31 Feshbach, Murray, 397 Fidelity, 60, 61, 83, 85, 88, 100, 101, 103, 105 Fire suppression, 338 Fischetti, Mark, 410, 411 Fisher, Walter R., 60, 61, 83, 88, 99, 105 Fissionable material, 225, 226, 249, 275, 277, 323 Fitting response, 25, 50, 179 Fitzpatrick, Sheila, 407 Flight path, 41, 50, 73, 96, 107, 133, 134, 135 Florida Power & Light, 309 Foley, Thomas, 146, 147 Foreign audience, 118, 138, 147 Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 211, 214 Formal approaches, 84 Formal argumentation, 102 Formalist criteria, 85 Fossil fuel generation, 332 Frame of reference, 88, 89, 99, 176 Fukushima Nuclear Plant, xliii Fulfilling the plan, 340 Full-scope simulators, 367 GAEN, 237, 240, 243–245 Gagarin, Yuri, 322 Gal’berg, Valery, 243 Gale, Robert, 221, 271, 348 Gamma radiation, 237 Gerasimov, Gennady I., xlvi, 115

Getler, Michael, 12, 55 Gitman, M., 279 Glasnost, 109, 133, 208–233, 235, 267, 270, 281, 283, 295, 296, 325, 366, 376, 378, 385, 413 Glennan, T. Keith, 317 Glukhov, Andrei, 204 Gofman, John, 400 Golden, Frederic, 61 Goodnight, G. Thomas, 84, 85 Gorbachev, Mikhail Sergeevich, 116, 117, 139, 205–210, 215, 216, 218, 219, 221, 223, 229, 230, 252, 253, 261, 263–265, 266, 267, 269, 271, 280–282, 290, 293, 294, 297, 299, 333, 334, 346, 363, 385 Gore-Chernomyrdin Agreement, 338 Goshko, John M., 55 Goskomatom, 303, 352–354, 356 Gosplan, 218, 267 Gotoda, Masaharu, 13 Governmental discourse, 24 Governmental regulation, 330 Graves, Terry, 2 Great Purges, xli Greaves, Susie, 401 Grodzinsky, D., 251, 279 Ground-to-air, 5–22, 26 Gubarev, V., 217, 279 Guey, L. T., 395 Gulf war, 157 Gusinsky, Vladimir, 302 Gutsalov, Aleksandr, 353 Hale, Julian, 130 Halo effect, 89, 101 Hammer, Armand, 221, 271, 348 Havel, Vaclav, 386 Havenaar, J. M., 395 Haynes, Philip C., 126

447

448

The Rhetorical Rise and Demise of “Democracy” in Russian Political Discourse

Hersh, Seymour M., 55, 72, 107, 120–122, 134, 148, 160, 186–189, 190–193 Hinds, Lynn Boyd, 292 Hiroshima-based Radiation Effects Research Foundation, 404 Hitler, 39, 85, 102 Hoffman, David, 24, 55 Hofstadter Richard, 106 Hryshchenko, V., 364 Hughes, John, 13 Hugo Grant, 152, 157, 162 Human intelligence (HUMINT), 282, 302 Hydroelectric power, 324 Ideological argumentation, 25, 293 Immunization, 330 Implicative character, 101 Incompetence, 173, 207, 213, 218, 220, 235, 270, 280, 282, 298, 322, 381 Inertial navigation system (INS), 161 Infallibility, 45, 230, 234, 291 Inflation, 252, 255, 257, 304, 306, 324, 362, 397, 413 Info-Wars, xlvii, xxxiii Inman, Bobby, 57 Inoculation theory, 117, 118 Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, 313, 368 Intelligence capabilities, 6, 16, 24, 26, 30, 50, 189 Intelligence community, 188, 192, 196 Interception, 5, 16, 18, 20, 21, 30, 48, 55, 57, 59, 62, 63, 65, 68, 69, 70, 73, 81, 88, 97, 108, 135, 185 procedures, 57, 81, 97 Internal coherence of a text, 103 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), 129, 325, 366, 368, 375, 376, 394, 396, 408, 412

International broadcasting, 109, 110, 113, 130, 131, 133, 425, 429 International Center for the Advancement of Political Communication and Argumentation (ICAPCA), xxiii International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), 63, 65, 68, 72, 73, 75, 76, 78, 79, 81, 82, 96, 98, 107, 124, 156, 177 International Code Assessment Program, 242 International Hailing Frequency, 97, 98, 134 International law, 33, 35, 48, 124, 232 International organizations, 355, 396 International radios, 110, 130, 146 International waters, 37, 91, 108, 126, 170 Iodine-131, 402, 405 Iran Air Flight 655, 115, 137, 139, 145, 147, 155, 163, 164, 167, 168, 171, 176, 180, 232, 268 Iranian Airbus, 118 Iran-Iraq war, 167–169, 175, 177 Ishiyama, John, xxv Izvestiia, xliv Jackson, Duncan, 408 Jakobson, Helen, 197 Jameson, Sam, 15 Jamieson Kathleen, 106 Japan Broadcasting Corporation, 10–12 Japanese Defense Agency, 7, 19, 20, 29 Japanese Self-Defense Force, 193 Japan’s Air Self-Defense Force, 15 Jarriel, Tom, 10 JIJI NEWS AGENCY, 7 Johnson, A. Ross, 195

Index

Johnson, Lyndon, 365 Johnson, R. W., 61, 63, 64, 87, 183–185, 187 Jones, Alex, xxxii Joynt, Carey, 58, 70, 71 Justificatory rhetoric, 125, 137, 140, 157, 294 Kadell, Franz, 193 Kambulov, I. N., 135, 283 Kang, Sugwon, 61, 64, 67, 72, 74, 76, 78, 80, 81, 82 Kazakov, Vasili S., 402–404 Kennedy Assassination, 50 Kennedy, Senator, 110 Keppel, John, 82, 83 Kimmel, Karl, 123 Kirkpatrick, Jeane, 42, 47–48, 52, 64, 66, 80, 138, 186 Kirsanov, Piotr, 190, 191 Kissinger, Henry, 189 Kiudmaa, Roomet, 123 Klass, Philip J., 61, 72, 184, 186 Knizhnikov, V. A., 224–228, 275–277, 284 Kolomtsev, Yu. V., 362 Kombinat Production Organization, 218, 267 Kontsevoi, A., 285 Kopchinsky, Georgy, 353, 354, 391 Korean Air Lines, 61, 95, 145, 747 Korean Air Lines Flight 007, xv, xxxi, xli, xliv, xlv, 3, 5, 6, 7, 18, 23–57, 59, 62, 64, 67, 70, 72, 73, 78, 80, 86, 87, 89, 93, 94, 96, 98, 108, 137, 139, 159, 161, 170, 190–192, 232, 233, 262, 268, 281, 292 Kovalevich, Oleg Mikhailovich, 134, 366–374 Kramchenkov, Vladimir Mikhailovich, 303–310

Krutov, Alexander, 215–218, 232, 266, 268 Kuchma, 354, 364 Kurchatov, I. V., 241 Kurkin, B., 279, 280 Kuypers, Jim A., 160, 163–182 Lapshin, Vladimir, 363 Lashing out, 112, 114, 210, 211 Launer, Michael K., xv, xvi, xxxi, 5–135, 163–198, 200–202, 205–310, 327–412, 414 Lee, Bill, 357, 358 Legasov, Valery, 284 Leitmotifs, 88, 89, 98, 219 Lesser Facts, Greater Facts, 90–92, 101, 108 Leukemia, 388, 396 Leventhal, Todd, 121 Lichenstein, Charles, 33–36, 52, 67, 80, 138 Life cycle, 366, 372 Ligachev, Egor, 129, 263 Likhachev, Dmitri, 235 Link-Myles Corporation, 243 Liquidators, 260, 385, 387, 389, 396, 401 Lisbon Initiative, 309, 310 Lodeesen, Jon, 56, 197 Logical structure, 84 Low dose radiation, 394, 396, 407, 409 Low Power Operating License, 313 Lubin, Jay, 403 Maertens, Thomas, 72 Mainichi Daily News, 20 Malignant nodules, 407 Mangano, Joseph, 400, 405 Manning Robert A., 123 Mann, P. Q., 61 Marples, David R., 123, 234, 375–379, 405–406

449

450

The Rhetorical Rise and Demise of “Democracy” in Russian Political Discourse

Mask for ulterior motive, 104 Massacre 747, 193 Matuz, Rose, 111 McKerrow, Raymie, 160 McLeod, Gordon, 405 Medvedev, G. U., 217, 235, 266, 279 Medvedev, Zhores, 133 Meese III, Edwin, 190, 194 Meisel John, 112 Meltdown of the reactor core, 378, 405, 411 Mettler, Fred, 400, 406–407 Mickelson, Sig, 130 Mickiewicz, Ellen, 215, 232 Miklaszewski, Jim, 144 Military radar, 28, 31, 184 Miltenberger, James, 237, 240 Ministry of Atomic Energy, 218, 267, 280 Ministry of Atomic Energy and Industry (MAEP), 237 Ministry of Energy, 218, 267, 362 Ministry of Health, 218, 267, 373 Ministry of Internal Affairs, 373 Ministry of Nuclear Energy, 253 Ministry of Nuclear Power, 218, 227, 277, 363 Moller, Anders P., 408 Morbidity, 388 Mortality, 224, 284, 388, 401, 402, 405, 408 Moscow Engineering Physics Institute (MEPhI), 387 Moscow News, 110, 133 Moskvich, Yuri, xxv Mushroom clouds, 316, 322 Nader, Ralph, 106, 330 Narrative coherence, 83 Narrative fidelity, 85, 88, 100, 101, 103, 105

Narrative plausibility, 103 Narrative probability, 100, 101, 103 Narrative structure, 88, 91, 101 Narratives used rhetorically, 103 Narrativity, 83, 95, 100 Nathaniel Green, 205 National Commission on Radiation Safety, 225 National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP), 400 National Geographic, 118 National Security Agency, 27, 95, 187, 189 National security, xxxiv, 24, 27, 29, 49, 51, 95, 122, 187, 381 Natsume, Haruo, 14 Navasky, Victor, 83 Navigation lights, 42, 64, 75, 96, 115, 150 Navy P-3 aircraft, 22 Nazi war machine, 316 NBC, 8, 9, 11, 153 Negatively pressurized containment facility, 329 Negative reactivity coefficient, 357 Neumann, Franz, 85, 106 Newsweek, 15, 21, 122 New York Times, 4, 10, 12–14, 20, 24, 29, 30, 40, 55, 56, 87, 115, 127, 148, 161, 162, 409 Nikolaev, L., 218, 268 Nixon, Richard, 108 Nonproliferation, 408 Non-rational fear of nuclear power, 316 Non-specialists, xxxix, 235, 279, 280, 282, 297, 298 Normal accident, 315, 329, 358 Nossiter, Bernard D., 56 NSA, 19, 45, 71, 72, 189

Index

Nuclear contraband, 323 Nuclear fear, xlii, 311, 383 Nuclear fission, 316, 317 Nuclear medicine, 394, 400 Nuclear politics, 328 Nuclear power, 249, 251, 304, 321, 366, 386 Nuclear Power Station (NPS), 376 Nuclear Regulatory Agency, 303 Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), 237, 242, 243, 245, 314, 324, 325, 331, 362, 404 Nuclear safety, 237, 245, 282, 303, 308, 344, 357–359, 367, 373, 389 Nuclear security, 389 Nuclear waste, 307, 309, 321 Nuclear weapons, xlii, xxxii, 99, 115, 216, 229, 282, 294, 316, 317, 322–325, 380, 394, 400 Oberg, James, 61, 107 Official indifference to public welfare, 218, 267, 297 Official political culture, 112, 115 Official public knowledge, 26, 40, 53, 230 Ogarkov, Nikolai, 31, 41, 44, 46, 81, 107, 134, 149, 152, 161, 171, 191 Ogden, 52 Oil embargo, 316 Olbrechts-Tyteca, L., 91, 92, 100, 101, 103, 108, 181, 286, 288 Oliynik , Borys, 251, 279, 386 Omaha World-Herald, 10 Online refueling, 234, 237, 246, 360 Operational experience, 348, 367 Operational safety, 240, 327, 354, 355, 369 Operator error, 315, 361, 364, 368 Operator training, 234, 236, 242, 243, 257, 356, 368

Order to fire, 6, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18, 26, 74, 192, 193 Palmer, John, 8 Paradigm shift, 403 Paranoid style, 106 Parataxis, 101 Parke G., 53 Party Congress, 281 Pasedag, Walter, 319, 324 Pavlychko, Dmytro, 386 Pearce, W. Barnett, 166, 179 Pearson, David, 61, 64, 65, 76–79, 82–84, 87, 88, 90, 93, 96, 98, 100, 101, 104, 105, 108, 184 Pennsylvania Power & Light, 309 Perception of risk, 318 Perelman, Chaim, 91, 92, 100, 101, 103, 108, 181, 286, 288 Perestroika, xlvii, 208, 209, 218, 220, 263, 265, 268, 270, 281, 297, 378, 385 Perrow, Charles, 83, 315, 329, 358 Persian Gulf war, 152, 177 Personnel error, 366, 368, 371 qualifications, 367 training, 256 Persuasion/coercion axis, 59 Pilot error, 186 Pinchera, Aldo, 402 Pjatak, O. A., 403 Plokhy, Serhii, 384–387, 389, 391 Pluralist form of government, 287 Plutonium, 224, 284, 337, 360 Policy argument, xl, xlii, xxxix, 287, 299 Political culture, 112, 115, 208, 210, 211, 223, 227, 234, 263, 274, 280, 282, 297, 298, 378

451

452

The Rhetorical Rise and Demise of “Democracy” in Russian Political Discourse

discourse, xl, xli, 24, 84 dissent, 279 Ponomarev-Stepnoi, N. N., 254, 260, 280, 302 Positive reactivity coefficient, 337, 357 Poulakos, John, 84, 85 Power unit, 329, 339, 354, 359, 362, 366, 367, 369, 370, 371 Pravda, xliv, 161, 205, 206, 212, 262 Preknowledge, 25, 26, 30, 51 Presidential rhetoric, 136 Presidential Study Commission on ­International Broadcasting, 130 Price of Power, 192 Primary source materials, 196 Prisyazhiuk, Anatoly, 403 Probabilistic risk assessment, 242, 243, 369, 377 Proliferation, 92, 325, 408 Prometei, 241 Propaganda, 24, 32, 39, 41, 45, 56, 59, 82, 111, 118–120, 127, 135, 196, 206, 213–215, 290, 292, 293, 334, 363, 400, 411 Public knowledge, 23–26, 34, 40, 49, 51, 53, 54, 94, 104, 139, 156, 162, 172, 230, 231, 275 Public oratory, 111, 290 Public Service Electric & Gas, 309 Public Utility Commission, 331 Pumped storage, 362 Putin, Vladimir, xxix, xxvi, xxvii, xxviii, 300, 301 Qualitative progression, 90, 107 Quality control, 240, 330 Quality of operations, 370 Quasi-logical argument, 92, 100 Radar data, 50, 58, 94 Radiation contamination, 398

Radiation epidemiology, 392, 403 Radiation exposure, 224, 235, 284, 333, 377 Radiation-induced carcinoma, 407 Radiation-induced nodules, 407 Radiation protection, 233, 236, 284, 303, 359, 400 Radiation therapy, 326 Radioactive isotopes, 398 Radioactive waste disposal, 236 Radio Free Europe, 118, 132, 146, 195 Radio Liberty, 110, 118, 132, 146, 147, 161, 162, 195, 214, 292 Radiological effects, 228, 234, 278 Radiology, 400 Radio Moscow, 124, 129, 213 Radiophobia, 278, 297, 333, 396 Rather, Dan, 11 RC-135, 36–41, 50, 56, 57, 90, 91, 92, 94, 95, 107, 123, 125–128, 126, 128, 131, 149, 160, 185, 190, 191 Reactor coolant pump, 339 Reactor core, 350, 357, 378, 389, 390, 391, 405, 411 Reactor design, 234, 236, 243, 263, 332, 350, 365, 371, 376, 401, 411 Reactor failure, 321 Reactor pressure vessel, 238 Reactor startup, 389 Reactor unit, 230, 294, 311, 313, 336, 358, 389, 396, 399, 412 Reagan, Ronald, 23, 24, 27, 33, 34, 42, 52, 86, 106, 136–138, 143, 146, 151, 153, 171, 194, 413 Reagan’s Persian Gulf policy, 173 Real time monitoring, 16, 45 Reasoning from sign, 89, 95 Rechti, Charles, 402 Reconnaissance aircraft, 39–41, 50, 91, 92, 94, 96, 107, 108, 123, 127, 128, 131, 160, 184

Index

Reconnaissance plane, 36, 37, 39, 50, 56, 75, 90, 91, 94, 95, 125–127, 149, 187, 190 Recontextualization, xlv, 137, 163, 179, 229, 230, 268 Redefinition, 137, 174, 231, 283 Reeves, Gillian K., 403, 404 Reinforced concrete containment, 315, 363, 390, 409, 412 Renewables, 411 Reynolds, Jack, 8, 12, 193 Rhetorical act, 102, 105, 164, 165, 180 antecedents and constraints, 137 artifact, 106, 152, 159 coercion, 102, 105 criticism, 60, 70, 71, 136 exigency, 165, 179 icon, 39, 235, 282, 298 positions, 157 situation, 18, 23, 24, 25, 26, 49, 50, 51, 104, 139, 143, 159, 163–166, 174, 179, 180, 299 tactics, 109, 117 theory, xlviii, 24 world view, 99 Rhetoric of crisis situations, 137 Richardson, James, 238, 241 Rohmer, Richard, 20, 57, 82, 193 Ron, Elaine, 392, 403, 404 Roush, Wade, 410, 411, 412 Rowland, Robert C., 85 Russian Federation, xxi, xxviii, 247, 248, 254, 255, 306, 339, 352 Russian Presidential Addresses to the Federal Assembly (PAFAs), xxix Safety analysis, 257, 373 analysis design review, 257 assurance, 242, 369, 370, 371

culture, 328, 335, 343–345 recommendations, 366 regulations, 245, 387 standards, 207, 313, 369, 370, 373 systems, 226, 234, 276, 358, 370, 412 trains, 240, 337 Sakhalin Island, 6, 76, 84, 186 Sakharov, Andrei, 224 Sampson, Anthony, 16 Sarcophagus, 129, 201, 202, 217, 222, 232–234, 256, 267, 271, 273, 283, 284, 321, 323, 340, 348, 365 Satellite involvement, 56, 135 Sayle, Murray, 61, 76, 87, 184 Schneider, Arthur B., 403 Schultz, George, 192, 194 Science fantasy, 316 Scientific authority, 267, 297 Search and rescue satellite (SARSAT), 73, 81, 99 Second loop, 90, 107 Seismic analysis, 253 Self-sealing argument, 88 Self-sealing nature of conspiratist argument, 85 Self-sustaining chain reaction, 341 Severe accident, 242, 249, 324, 329, 368, 378 management, 368 Shafti, Hasan, 124 Shales, Tom, 19 Shcherbak, Yuri, 279, 323, 326, 386 Sherfey, Larry, 203 Sherron, Brian, 238 Shevchenko, Volodymyr, 218–220, 266, 268, 269, 271 Shigematsu, I., 403, 404 Shribman, David, 29

453

454

The Rhetorical Rise and Demise of “Democracy” in Russian Political Discourse

Shteinberg, N. A., 135, 239, 246, 256, 270, 283, 308, 354, 366–374, 391, 392 Shultz, George, 8, 20, 23, 24, 28–30, 32, 33, 49, 52, 54, 75, 138, 143, 160, 186, 189 Shute, Nevil, 319 Shvoev, Anatoly, 239 Sidorenko, Viktor Alekseevich, 366–374 Signals intelligence (SIGINT), 62 Sign reasoning, xxxiv, 88–90, 95 Sign-to inference framework, 89 Silence, 54, 112, 114, 195, 210, 211, 266, 290, 291, 376 Silent killer, 230, 311, 318, 319, 322 Simulators, 226, 242, 243, 256, 276, 367 Simulator training, 411 Six stages of a crisis response, 210 Slippery slope, 38 Smith, Carolyn, 11, 21 Smith, Donald, 160 Smith, Gerald, 241, 244 Snake venom theory, 117, 124–130 Social contract, 223, 274, 328, 365 Solar power, 316 Sonography, 407 Sources and methods, 5, 17, 22, 57, 104 Soviet Air Defense Force, 81, 84, 95, 134 Soviet Communism, 230 Soviet designed reactor units, 358, 411 Soviet information policy, 109, 132 Soviet international broadcasting, 109 Soviet media, 112 Soviet Ministry of Atomic Energy and Industry, 285 Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 31 Soviet Ministry of Nuclear Power, 259

Soviet Ministry of Nuclear Power and Industry, 258 Special technical means, 123 Spy mission, 75, 86, 91, 95, 114, 121, 140, 146, 162, 183, 184, 232, 268 Spy plane, 36, 39, 40, 56, 62, 75, 87, 120, 125–128, 134, 135, 325 State Committee for Hydrology and Meteorology, 373 State Committee for the Utilization of Atomic Energy, 373 Steam generator, 239, 246, 314, 336, 342, 343, 356, 364, 371 Storytelling structure, 101 Structural characteristics of a rhetorical text, 103 Stylistic choices, 86, 398 SU-15, 70, 78, 185 Sunday Times, 184 Superpower rhetoric, 24 Syllogistic progression, 85, 90 Symbiosis of poetics and argumentation, 105 Symptom-based operating procedures (EOPs), 257, 411 Tape transcript, 44, 45, 58, 61, 71 TASS, 3, 30 Taubman, Philip, 13, 56, 115 Tchertkoff, Wladimir, 395, 401 Technical competence, 322 Technical standards documentation, 373 Technological infrastructure, 310, 334, 336, 338 Technological innovation, 330 Technological safeguards, 331 Teller, Edward, 99 Template journalism, 109, 111–117 Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), 313 Text and context, 164, 166, 179, 181

Index

The Defense Agency, 14 The Guardian, 184 The Journal of the American Forensic Association, xxxix The KAL 007 Massacre, 193 The Nation, 77, 81, 87, 90, 92, 97 The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, xl Thermonuclear weapons, 395 The Sunday Times, 15 “The Voices”, 195 Thiessen, J. W., 403, 404 This Week with David Brinkley, 13 Thyroid cancer, 387, 388, 396, 402, 403, 405, 406, 409, 412 Thyroid nodules, 406, 407, 409 Tibar, Marko, 123 Time magazine, 15, 61, 125, 192, 378 Tracer bullets, 47, 73 Tracer rounds, 42, 44, 67, 134 Transcript, 19, 21, 44–47, 50, 58, 61, 62, 66–68, 71, 79, 81, 97, 160, 191 Transmutation, 320, 326 Transnational broadcasting, 53, 109 Transnational radio, 213, 215 Trump, Donald, xxxiii, xxxiv, xxxv, xxxvii, xxxviii Tu quoque arguments, 216 Turner, Stansfield, 57

United States Department of State, 349 Unit outage, 246, 342 Unofficial political culture, 280, 282, 297, 298 Unplanned shutdowns, 366 Uranium, 312, 324 US Central Intelligence Agency, xli US Environmental Protection Agency, 247 Use of sources, 184 Uskorenie, xlvii, 220, 270, 281, 385 US military and intelligence agencies, 97 US National Security Council, 122 US RC-135, 36–41 USS Nathaniel Green, 118, 119, 205, 213 USSR, xl, xlii, xliv, xlv, xlvi, 26, 30, 33, 35, 39, 42, 43, 45, 50–54, 65, 73, 78, 97, 107, 123, 129, 134, 138, 139, 141, 184, 187, 206, 213, 230, 231, 235–247, 252, 267, 279, 283, 287, 291, 292, 299, 322, 345, 348, 366, 367, 370 USSR State Committee for the Regulation of Industrial and Nuclear Power Safety, 366, 370, 371 USS Stark, 170, 181

Ukraine’s nuclear industry, 303–310 Ukrainian State Nuclear Energy ­Committee, 363 Ulterior motives, 103 Umanets, Mikhail, 226, 235, 256, 276, 364 Unarmed civilian aircraft, 87 Unarmed civilian airliner, 32, 33, 87 Unarmed civilian passenger plane, 33 United Nations Security Council, 13, 31, 44, 46, 153, 154, 169, 173

vanden Heuvel, Katrina, 83 Vedomstvennost, 267, 280 Velikhov, Evgeny, 229 Ventilation stack, 389 Version of the truth, 85 V. I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant, 311, 385 Voice of America, 26, 43, 120, 121, 146, 195, 213 Voznesensky, Andrei, 217 Vremia, 57, 120, 121, 127

455

456

The Rhetorical Rise and Demise of “Democracy” in Russian Political Discourse

Walker, Christopher, 125 Walters, Vernon, 153, 155–158, 177, 182 War in Afghanistan, 413 Warnick, Barbara, 84, 85, 101, 103 Washington International Energy Group, 312 Washington Post, 10, 12, 13, 20, 22, 29, 31, 55, 119, 128, 160, 161, 185, 205, 213, 232 Waste storage, 250 Weapons-grade material, 249, 323 Weapons-grade plutonium, 337 Weapons of mass destruction, 316, 317 Weapons-usable nuclear material, 303 Weart, Spencer, 319, 320 Weighted facts, 49, 53 Weisman, Steven, 14, 27, 55 Welch, Robert, 104 Western broadcasting and the Soviet media, 109 Western radio stations, 130 Western transnational broadcasting, 109 Wick, Charles, 67 Wicker, Tom, 87, 149 Wilensky, Harold, 194 Williams, David Cratis, xix, xvi, xvii, xviii, xxi, xxii, xxiii, 413 Williams, Dilwyn, 402 Wilson, George, 13, 20

Wind power, 257 Windt, Theodore Otto, 52, 292 Wolfson, Zêev, 243 Woodward, 106 World Association of Nuclear Operators (WANO), 309, 357, 363 World Health Organization, 388, 396, 399, 408 World News Tonight, 10 World War II, xlvii, xxxii, 39, 49, 219, 266, 270, 317, 334 Wright, James, 36, 39, 107, 125, 126, 160 Yablokov Aleksandr V., 395, 408 Yankee Rowe, 314 Yavorivsky, Volodymyr, 279, 386 Yazaki, Shinji, 20 Yeltsin, Boris, 263 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, 217 Young, Marilyn J., xix, xlvii, xv, xvi, xvii, xviii, xxi, xxii, xxiii, 5–198, 205–235, 248–302, 311–365, 375–379, 410–412, 414 Yunost, 217 Yuriev, Aleksandr I., xx, xxii, xxiv, 301, 364 Zarefsky, David, 56, 57, 84–86, 102 Zero tolerance, 329 Zori, Polyarnye, 362