In Europe

secrecy and repression, no longer worked in a modern world with its accompanying means of communication. The credibility of the party leadership sank to the point at which it could sink no further.
    In the early hours of 26 April, 1986, two explosions took place in one of the four reactors at the giant nuclear complex. It was an accident of the kind scientists and environmental activists had been warning about for years, particularly because of its effects: a monstrous emission of iodine-131 and caesium-137. Huge radioactive clouds drifted across half of Europe: first in the direction of Sweden and Finland, then across Poland, Czechoslovakia, Germany and Austria, by way of Switzerland, northern Italy and France, all the way to Great Britain and Norway. Some residue also reached the Netherlands, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Turkey and Rumania. Twenty countries were contaminated. Years afterwards, British sheep were still failing inspection on the grounds of being a threat to public health.
    Around 200 people died during and immediately after the explosions, but in the years that followed thousands more died from radioactive contamination and resulting illnesses. According to the most conservative estimates, the disaster claimed a few thousand lives; other reports speak of many times that number.
    These days Chernobyl is inhabited again. It is an inconspicuous town, only an hour from Kiev, full of people whose job it is to make sure that no one else comes to town: forest rangers, security people, soldiers,firemen, maintenance personnel, office workers, cafeteria help. Cars drive in and out of town, laundry flaps cheerfully on the line, three babies have been born here recently. At least 10,000 people work at Chernobyl these days – more or less at their own risk, only time will tell. But then, with two weeks on and two weeks off, an early-retirement plan and double overtime, what Ukrainian could resist?
    Thanks to Irina's efforts, I am today the guest of Nikolai Dmytruk, assistant director of the Chernobyl InterInform agency of the ministry of emergency affairs. He shows me his collection of maps, full of faded ink spots, red, yellow and green. The official ‘zone’, as the most hazardous area is called, is shown on the map by means of concentric circles tightening in around the exploded plant, several kilometres apart, each one indicating greater danger, each one accompanied by increasingly strict security controls, as though the good Lord himself had gone to the drafting table during the explosion with compass and ruler. The truly radioactive areas look much more jagged on the map, big red smears, blown along by the wind. Some sections of the zone were upwind during the disaster itself, and are now quite safe. But on the other hand, in the densely populated town of Narodichi, in real terms outside the zone, the radioactivity is just as strong as in Chernobyl itself.
    Some 100,000 people have since moved from the most heavily contaminated areas, but around 200,000 remain. Ukraine simply lacks the funds to evacuate them. Meanwhile, strange things continue to happen. Osteoporosis, cancer of the larynx and immune diseases, the statistics tell it all. Almost all of the young people here have health problems. In the same way Belgian or Dutch physicians deliver the diagnosis ‘stress’ when they don't know what else to say, the doctors in Kiev say ‘radiation’ and go on about their business.
    Dmytruk has me put on a kind of prison suit, then we climb into an old Volkswagen van and drive to the reactor. ‘Everyone expects to see something unusual here,’ he says. ‘Ruined forests, rabbits with six legs, death and destruction. But that's exactly it: you don't feel anything, you don't see anything, you don't smell anything, not a single human sense sounds the alarm.’ The scene of the disaster itself, popularly referred to as ‘the sarcophagus’, looks like a huge concrete coffin built around the ruins of the reactor. The Geiger counter reads 1.05 microroentgens. ‘Notbad,’ Dmytruk says. ‘When the wind is blowing hard we sometimes get up to 1.5. Then you can hear the sarcophagus creaking and groaning in the distance.’
    Fifteen minutes further along lies the Pompeu of the twentieth century.
    In the 1980s, Pripyat – specially built for the workers at the power plant – was a modern town of about 50,000 inhabitants, mostly young families. It was, by Soviet standards, a model town: lots of greenery, good