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 119. A.P. Aleksandrov: Something worries me. For example, the establishment of the Russian Academy of Sciences. This is no good. The union Academy of Sciences, which before the revolution was the Imperial Academy of Sciences, existed more than 250 years. And it was not bad, it was a quite worthy institute. 120. It upsets me that many scientists have gone up in the world, without having grounds and scientific works for this. 121. OGONEK: Who specifically. 122. A.P. Aleksandrov: Well, for example, Academician Zhuchenko. His positions are quite strange, and the scientific contribution, which he advertises, does not exist. In general with biology it was most difficult of all for Keldysh, he came into a most distressing inheritance: The students of Lysenko and its associates were in power. But they do not want to surrender their positions even now. 123. I worries me that parascientific directions: extrasensory perception, unidentified flying objects, and the like, have begun to flourish. It is not the business of the Academy to encourage such a thing. Although this is a trivial thing as compared with the decrease of the pace of development of the basic sciences, in which with every year we are losing our positions. 124. Relations between people are also becoming more and more complex, all kinds of confronting groups are emerging. 125. True, complex relations always existed among scientists. Like those of bears in one den. Prominent scientists did not get on with each other. At least when I was president, I had a hard time, I always tried to see to it that science did not suffer. The examples of this went beyond the walls of institutes long ago, for example, the falling out of Academicians Basov and Prokhorov. Both are Nobel Prize laureates and brilliant scientists, but together they felt restricted. Here the solution was simple--they established for Prokhorov a separate institute, and this completely justified itself, science did not suffer and even profited. 126. Back under Keldysh, I remember, they dragged me into being involved in the commission for rocketry. Well, there was simply a civil war among the missilemen! Korolev and Yangel were on one side, Chelomey was on the other. The civilians were for Korolev and Yangel, the military was for Chelomey. 127. OGONEK: And what position did you take?
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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.