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 ## Document 6 of 16 128. A.P. Aleksandrov: I tried to take a conciliatory position, although, like Keldysh, I was on the side of Yangel (Korolev had already died), on the side of the civilians. I will not touch upon the essence, due to which the war flared up, it is nothing, it existed and passed, like all arrogant passions. Another thing is important--they did not use illicit methods in this group struggle. They preserved personal decency. Now it happens differently. 129. Now, it seems to me, in scientific collectives the moral climate is degenerating, the trust among colleagues and even between the teacher and his students has been lost... The lack of respect for a teacher is fraught with large moral losses. 130. OGONEK: They tell that there was such an incident in the life of your teacher, Abram Fedorovich Ioffe. A quite young researcher came to him and placed in front of the director several handwritten pages. The conclusions of yesterday's student, in essence, put an end to the theme, on which the famous academician had been working, and showed an error in his theory. Was there, Anatoliy Petrovich, actually such an incident, and how did the academician behave? 131. A.P. Aleksandrov: He sat down to check everything from the very start and understood that I was right, while he had made a mistake. But Abram Fedorovich at that time was awfully enthusiastic about this work of his on thin-layer insulation. He expected that it would create a revolution in aviation and machine building. It was hard for him to give up an entire direction. 132. I was not seeking any error in the work of Ioffe, of course. I wanted to apply it in practice, but nothing was turning out for me, for the life of me! Then I began to study everything myself and discovered the error. 133. Later I together with Academician Ioffe published an article on this error. But a part of the institute was already working on the theme. It was necessary to put an end to the entire direction on dielectrics and to reorganize the institute. 134. That was 60 years ago, it is awful how long ago it was... But I will also say today--I am indebted to Abram Fedorovich Ioffe for everything. 135. OGONEK: Did conflicts really not occur in your collective, did no one quarrel with each other and take offense? After all, could not such different people as future Academicians Semenov, Kapitsa, Alikhanov, Khariton, Artsimovich, and Kurchatov look at everything in the same way? For you yourself said--'bears in one den.'
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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.