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 of Sciences, he was already over 70 years old. But after expiration of the term scientists reelected him to this high post. Recognition in the country, recognition abroad. An honorary member of the academies of many countries of the world... 6. And suddenly ''the president of the Academy of Sciences of the era of stagnation...,''' ''the author of the Chernobyl catastrophe...' 7. Our conversation also began with the accident. 8. OGONEK: Anatoliy Petrovich, much has already been written about the causes of the Chernobyl catastrophe, but I would like to find out your point of view. 9. A.P. Aleksandrov: You pose the question tactfully, but actually you probably want to hear whether I consider myself responsible for the the accident. You need not apologize, it is nothing... That I have not heard in recent times... Here is what I will say to you: Chernobyl is a tragedy of my life as well. I feel this every second. When the catastrophe occurred and I found out what a complicated thing they had begun to do there, I nearly went to kingdom come. I was in very bad condition. That is why I decided to leave the post of president of the Academy of Sciences and even turned in this regard to Gorbachev. Colleagues stopped me, but I believed that I must do that. My duty, I believed, was to put all my energy into the improvement of the reactor. 10. To be answerable for the development of atomic power engineering and specifically for the Chernobyl catastrophe are different things. Judge for yourself. Although, incidentally, I am convinced that everything related by me will cause a new stream of abuses on my old bald head. But I would be acting against my conscience if I were to agree with the opinion that now one must not develop atomic power engineering and all nuclear power plants should be shut. Mankind's rejection of the development of atomic power engineering would be disastrous for mankind. Such a decision is no less ignorant, no less monstrous than the experiment at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, which directly led to the accident. ## 11. OGONEK: Did you know about it? 12. A.P. Aleksandrov: That is the tragedy of it, that I did not know. Not I, not anyone at all at our institute. And the designer of the reactor which is at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, Academician Dollezhal, also knew nothing about this. When I later read a description of the experiment, I was simply horrified. I will not go into the technical details, I will merely say that the
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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.