"Ronald Reagan intimate opinion on the Strategic Defense Initiative was, and still is hard to guess.
Supporters says from day one he grasped quite well the limits of technology; he knew the missile shield just would never work. In this case, supporters add, Reagan was playing bluff; the SDI was just a thorn in the side of the Soviets, for the following reasons. If they tried to build a Star Wars, they would spent billion of rubbles and end bankrupt, all this for an unworkable boondoggle. And if they did not build a counterpart, then it marked a milestone in the Cold War potlatch: for the first time since 1947, the American military has a weapon system without equivalent on the other side of the iron curtain. It was an assault on Soviet pride.
Critics, however, says Reagan was just naive while its military advisors were not. The Strategic Defense Initiative would be just another massive military program siphonning out ten thousand of billion dollars. Reagan, they says, has an indealistic vision of its space shield. The overaching goal of the system - to make nuclear war impossible without the dangerous poker of Mutual Assured Destruction - only helds if the shield was a hundred percent efficient. Indeed, a single atomic warhead going through the shield had the potential to kill ten million of Americans; and would this happen, then an escalation would be unavoidable, meaning the end of the world.
A rumour impossible to verify told the story of presidential candidate Reagan visiting Cheyenne Mountain in 1979. There are radar operators watching for possible incoming waves of soviet nuclear missiles. The legend had Reagan asking the operators "what do you do once missiles are coming ?" and the puzzled operators to answer "hum, well, there's nothing we can do." This would have convinced Reagan that Mutual Assured Destruction - born of the dreadful Cuban missile crisis - was a folly.
Another way of making a nuclear war impossible was badly needed. Something different had to be done; and the result was the Strategic Defense Initiative. Pitched to a frightened Reagan returning from Cheyenne Mountain, the SDI would be a shield in space that would make ballistic missiles obsoletes... just like anti-aircraft missiles had made high-flying, fast bombers obsoletes two decades earlier.
That story sounds to good to be true. Whatever; now were two visions to prevent a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The first was the old Mutual Assured Destruction - MAD - and it was based on mutual fear; the second was SDI, and it used technology to try and make a nuclear exchange impossible.
A nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the United States obviously meant the end of civilization. That everybody knew it; yet for twenty years the world destiny was at the mercy of a simple mistake. On September 26 1983, only Stanislas Petrov nerves avoided a disaster; the operator of a soviet radar station, he was led to believe American missiles were coming. Yet he stayed quiet and that was fortunate, since it proved to be a false alarm !
That was the world fate hanged to a silly mistake was never acceptable. Film-makers denounced the idea again and again. In Sidney Lumet Fail Safe 1964 masterpiece, an American bomber pilot can't be called-back of its mission to nuke Moscow, even by the president himself. The mission was triggered by a false alarm, but past a certain point the pilot have orders to never turn back even if called by the President, because the call might be a trick from the Soviets to make them abort their missions. And to Moscow they go, and the mission is accomplished. With Moscow destroyed, a devastated President is forced proposing the Soviets to bust New York as a revenge to keep the balance and not trigger World War Three... Stanley Kubrick Doctor Strangelove finale used a dark-humoured variant of Fail Safe plot.
At the dawn of the year 1986 noone could guess that beside MAD and SDI another path was to be taken soon, a path that would make a nuclear war definitively impossible... at much less risk than fear, and at much less expense than Star Wars.
It was no wonder that Gorbachev, lacking professional understanding of the issue, could not bring himself to dismiss Reagan' Strategic Defense Initiative as a long-term threat. At the same time, unlike the previous leadership, he also regarded "Star Wars" as an additional rationale for the nuclear disarmament.
In March 1986, Gorbachev suggested at the Politburo: "Maybe we should just stop being afraid of the Strategic Defense Initiative ! Of course, we cannot be indifferent to this dangerous program. But the people of the US military-industrial complex are betting precisely on the fact that the USSR is afraid of the SDI--in the moral, economic, political, and military sense. That is why they are putting pressure on us--to exhaust us. And we decided to say: yes, we are against the SDI, because we are in favor of abolishing nuclear weapons. But for us this is a problem not of fear, but of responsibility, because the consequences would be unpredictable. Perhaps Margaret Thatcher is right when she categorically rejects the idea of a nuclear-free world as a dangerous romantic utopia." he added.
While the SDI kept Gorbachev on the fence between Thatcher nuclear orthodoxy and his abolitionist instincts, the Chernobyl nuclear reactor explosion ultimately forced his hand.
For the first time, the Soviet leadership allowed the media to pursue serious public debates about nuclear dangers. The result was a surge of antinuclear sentiments in the Soviet Union. Gorbachev also immediately sensed that Chernobyl would increase antinuclear momentum in the West.
In political terms, Gorbachev used Chernobyl to undercut the very basis of the nuclear orthodoxy: the heroic and romantic image of Soviet nuclear power."
***
"As the S-NB rolled, Priest could see through the base of the ripped-open tank, all the way through to the NERVA reactor itself. And in there, he saw a point of light, white-hot. That’s the goddamn core. The reactor’s blown itself apart, and exposed the core. There was no sign of the biological shield, which must have been blown away. Perhaps that was what they had seen, in red-hot fragments, fountaining past the Command Module’s windows.
As he stared into the wreckage he thought he could actually feel heat on his face: heat radiating from the core itself, as if it were a tiny, captive sun.
He glanced at the radiation dosimeter number on his DSKY. Thirty thousand roentgens an hour were spewing out of the core, and through the spacecraft, in an invisible hail of gamma and neutron radiation.
Thirty thousand. It was a hard number to believe. The safe limit, according to the mission rules, was one-thousandth of a roentgen per day.
“I guess we’re kind of privileged,” Priest said. “Nobody in the history of mankind has ever gotten up so close to an exposed nuclear reaction before. The victims of the Jap bombings were killed by heat and the shock wave rather than by radiation…”
May 5, 1986
Ukraine
The Mi-8 was flying over the cratered reactor. Marshall Serguey Akhromeyev and Soviet Premier Nikolai Ryzhkov were hard-boiled individuals; they had survived Stalin purges and the Great Patriotic War that had killed 30 million people. Even then however Ryzhkov could said that Akhromeyev was disturbed. They could see some kind of smoke plume coming out of the ruined powerplant – ten thousands of roentgens slipping through the atmosphere every second. Akhromeyev was haunted by worker Alexander Yuvchenko's badly burned face, the tears flowing down over the blisters as he told his story.
"It was an apocalyptic sight: flames shot into the sky; sparks showered from the severed 6,000-volt cables hanging from the smashed circulation pumps; burst water and nitrogen tanks dangled in the air above the red-hot wreckage of the reactor hall. The air ignited the hot graphite and started a graphite fire. After the larger explosion a number of employees at the power station went outside to get a clearer view of the extent of the damage. We stopped outside and looked up towards the reactor hall and saw a LASER-like beam of light bluish light, caused by the ionization of air, that appeared to flood up into infinity. I was momentarily transfixed by the eerie glow."
Cherenkov radiation. Akhromeyev shivered. Nobody in the history of mankind has ever gotten up so close to an exposed nuclear reaction before.
Down on the ground he could see small silhouettes swarming around the ruined powerplant – hundreds of soldiers building the infamous sarcophagus.
Akhromeyev face was grim as he told Ryzhkov about the latest developments in the disaster.
"All fires have been extinguished or contained within 6 hours of the two explosions. Yet we anticipated a second, more dangerous problem. Unit 4's reactor core is still melting down. Under the reactor is a huge pool of water — coolant for the power plant. The continuous nuclear reaction, traveling in a smoldering flow of molten radioactive metal, is approaching the water. If that happened it may trigger a second steam explosion that would do unimaginable damage and destroyed the entire power station, including the three other reactors, spewing even more radiation into the atmosphere.”
Ryzhkov face turned white.
“In order to prevent the steam explosion, workers need to drain the pool underneath the reactor. But the basement has been flooded, and the valves are underwater.”
Ryzkhov swore, then said “I spoke to scientist Velikhov. He told me radiation releases have begun rising again, and he fears that the reactor core base might collapse, bringing the molten nuclear fuel into explosive contact with a reservoir of water beneath.”
Akhromeyev nodded. “To deal with that menace we have send men into the basement in wetsuits." Akhromeyev reminded these men horror stories.
"We had radioactive water up to our knees, and in a corridor stuffed with myriad pipes and valves, it was like finding a needle in a haystack. But we found them, opened the valves and heard a rush of water out of the tank. Mission accomplished."
As he watched the liquidators desperate work from above, Marshall Akromeyev was reminded of the dark days of the siege of Leningrad. Aged 19, he had spent two years outside in the cold, hardly nourrished. At the end of the ordeal he weighed only 90 pounds. All of sudden it dawned on the Marshall what a disaster it would be to have even limited nuclear warfare in a Europe studded with atomic reactors - radioactivity from the ruined reactors adding to nuclear bomb devastation in a deadly hail of gamma rays and radiations.
Akhromeyev leaned toward Ryzhkov and told him through the helicopter noisy engines ''You must understand that from this moment on, nuclear danger for our people has ceased to be abstraction. It has become a palpable reality."
...
Far above their heads, in space, assets were moved into position to asses damage to the nuclear powerplant. A KH-11 got the first pictures on April 29. The problem was that KH-11 pictures, the satellite itself and even his parent agency – the NRO - very own existence, were masked to the public.
Landsat was civilian, but its resolution was lower. Back in 1963, NASA and the NRO had got an agreement limiting civilian resolution to 30 m. The French were not bound by the agreement and their SPOT-1 satellite, fresh in orbit, got 10 m resolution pictures.
By early May however NASA and the NRO were actively discussing a derogation to the 1963 agreement, if only because the Chernobyl accident looked so bad. Central to the discussion was space station Liberty, and what level of detail could be obtained from the astronaut naked eye and hand held cameras.
After heated discussions, a joint operation was decided. In the month of May a KH-10B
Grey would be launched and snap pictures of Chernobyl at different resolutions. Space station Liberty would act as a cover up, performing his own, public remote sensing campaign – its orbit did not carried it over Chernobyl before June. Pictures from the two missions would be released to the public together, with the notable exception of the KH-10B sharpest pictures that would remain in NRO hands.
