Documents / FOIA release
This Central Intelligence Agency JPRS report, dated 1 August 1990, translates an OGONEK interview by Vanda Beletskaya with Academician Anatoliy Petrovich Aleksandrov, former president of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Aleksandrov blames the Chernobyl accident on an ill-considered experiment prepared by Donenergo that violated operating instructions. He also describes earlier nuclear plant defects, Legasov's suicide, and his dealings with Beria and Kapitsa. He argues for continued atomic power engineering and a law on nuclear power.
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# Concatenated JPRS Reports, 1990 80. But Beria vetoed the idea of developing atomic plants for ships as far back as 1945 (at the same Institute of Kapitsa we had begun to design such a reactor). Only the atomic bomb interested him. It is a pity that it was that way. For we began to design nuclear-powered vessels earlier than the Americans began to design the Nautilus. 81. Beria is the past. But then the perpetuation of the memory of Academician Kapitsa, while students, who knew him, his widow, and his children are still alive, is a present, vital matter. 82. OGONEK: Who settles the questions of perpetuating the memory of scientists, if not the Academy of Sciences? 83. A.P. Aleksandrov: What do you mean who? The Politburo, the KGB. It was always that way before. Perhaps, now something will change, I do not know... 84. I always tried to change what it is still possible to correct, and to accept what it is not in your power to change. 85. Now, in my opinion, it is possible to change the situation with blue blood,' which in my days as president of the Academy I was unable to do. 86. OGONEK: Our journal wrote about this. But they brought a suit against OGONEK. 87. A.P. Aleksandrov: Well, well. Provided the KGB or the procuracy was implicated in the case, be you whoever you like, you will not get anything. 88. The case with 'blue blood' is of the following sort. Two organs--the Academy of Sciences and the State Committee for Science and Technology, where Guriy Ivanovich Marchuk was at that time--supervised the work on the development of blood substitutes. They began to carry out the theme under the supervision of Academician Yuriy Ovchinnikov. Professor Feliks Beloyartsev directly conducted the research in Pushchino, at the Institute of Biophysics under Corresponding Member Genrikh Ivanitskiy. 89. I supervised this work a little, they made the fluorocarbons at one of our plants. Of course, medical personnel, civilian and military, also participated. 90. They completed the experiments on animals, clinical tests were begun. The military gave permission for the use of the new blood substitute in Afghanistan. There this saved many people. Things went
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FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 22 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.