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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## UNCLASSIFIED Document 6 of 16 136. A.P. Aleksandrov: At that time we were not yet "'bears.'" We were very young. And we revered the authority of our teacher. But we looked at the world, of course, in different ways. And very likely we both quarreled and took offense... Only I do not remember. But how cheerfully, how enthusiastically we worked--I remember. How we helped each other out, if someone's instrument got out of order, how we left our own jobs and started to repair it. We shared everything with each other. Well, when seminars were under way and we were of a different opinion on a scientific problem, in the heat of the debate we did not choose expressions. One of us, I remember, even shouted at Ioffe himself: "'You have forgotten Ohm's law!'" 137. And here is what is interesting: At the institutes, which people from the Leningrad Physical Technical Institute later headed, there were also no conflicts and, in my opinion, there are none to this day. Take if only the institutes of Semenov (now the director there is Academician Goldanskiy) and Kapitsa. Petr Leonidovich was particularly stern: If two people came to grips and he did not make out who was right and who was at fault, he fired both. 138. OGONEK: Did your work on the atomic problem begin at Ioffe's Institute? 139. A.P. Aleksandrov: I did not begin immediately to concern myself with atomic physics. At first they attached little importance in general to this problem. 140. A strange thing happened. I remember that I and P.P. Kobeko, later a corresponding member, developed a method of obtaining cold-resistant rubber and introduced it at a plant. This direction was regarded at the institute very nearly as the main one; when the authorities came, they led them directly to us to boast. But they did not show the authorities the nuclear physicists-- Alikhanov and Kurchatov--and their work. The authorities believed that they were concerning themselves with nonsense. Ioffe from the very start understood the importance of nuclear research and attached great importance to it. 141. Later everything changed, when they discovered the fission of uranium and got whiff of the bomb... But atomic weapons were our basic work only for Beria and Stalin. All of us regarded it as forced and temporary work. Kurchatov often said: ''God forbids that this be used against people! Only a peaceful atom.'" 142. OGONEK: The "'peaceful atom'" proved to be unreliable. Now the opponents of nuclear power plants and their supporters are demanding the passage of a law on atomic power engineering. What, in your opinion, should it be like?
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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.