RADIOACTIVE UKRAINE
Chernobyl’s 19-mile ‘exclusion zone’ sees uptick in tourism
The button that could have started a nuclear holocaust is gray — not red. I learned this after climbing into a nuclear rocket command silo, 12 floors below ground, and sitting in the same green chair at the same yellow metal console at which former Soviet officers once presided. Here, they practiced entering secret codes into their gray keyboards, pushing the launch button and turning a key — all within seven seconds — to fire up to 10 ballistic missiles. The officers never knew what day their practice codes might become real, nor did they know their targets.
This base in Pervomaysk, Ukraine — about a four-hour drive from Kiev — once had 86 intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of destroying cities in Europe and the United States. Though the nuclear warheads have been removed, the command silo with much of its equipment, giant trucks that carried the rockets to the base and an empty silo were preserved so that people could see what had been secretly going on at nuclear missile bases in the former Soviet Union. The museum’s collection includes the R-12/SS-4 Sandal missile similar to those involved in the Cuban missile crisis and the RS-20A/ SS-18 Satan, the versions of which had several hundred times the destructive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
“This is what the tourists come to see,” said Igor Bodnarchuk, a tour guide for Solo East Travel, a Kiev company that specializes in tours of Soviet ruins. “What else do we have to offer?”
Tourists go to Paris to marvel at the majesty of the Eiffel Tower, to Rome to stroll the cobbled streets of the Vatican, to Moscow to behold the magnificent domes of Red Square. And while Ukraine has its own plethora of domed cathedrals, including monasteries with underground caves, thousands of tourists are trekking to this country for a uniquely Soviet experience. Here, they stand outside an exploded nuclear reactor at Chernobyl and rifle through the remains of a nearby abandoned city — Geiger counter in hand. In Chernobyl’s shadow, they marvel at the giant “Moscow Eye,” an anti-ballistic-missile detector that rises 50 stories high and looks like a giant roller coaster.
Every day, a handful of travel companies ferry mostly foreigners to Chernobyl’s 19-mile “exclusion zone.” In 2016, Solo East Travel hauled 7,500 people there, up from only one trip in 2000.
“It used to be sort of extreme travel,” said Sergei Ivanchuk of Solo East Travel. “You were very brave to go to Chernobyl in 2000. Now, not so much.”
Ivanchuk insists that people who go to Chernobyl are not morbid. “They are intelligent people who want to learn something new, and are often interested in nuclear power,” he said.
Likewise, people who venture to the missile base at Pervomaysk are interested in the Cold War. “It’s a place to remember — like the Holocaust — about a dangerous time in history and what it means to have nuclear weapons,” he said.
Earlier this year, Russia deployed a new cruise missile, apparently violating its 1987 arms-control treaty with the United States, making the Soviet ruins in Ukraine seem all the more relevant.
Visitors can stand across the street from the damaged reactor at Chernobyl, which recently was covered by a huge, $2.3 billion shield. But the highlight of the tour is, by far, the crumbling city of Pripyat. Though tour operators are warned to stay out of Pripyat’s buildings, tourists routinely stomp through the city, including the hospital where dying first responders were taken.
Tourists stick their Geiger counters against tatters of clothing in the hospital lobby and watch their machines shoot up to shockingly high levels — 85 microsieverts per hour. The normal range is 0.09 to 0.30 microsieverts per hour, according to the tour company. Most guides carry their own Geiger counters; many tourists come with their own.
Tour operators claim that a visit to Chernobyl is no more dangerous now than a flight from Ukraine to North America. This calculation includes spending 10 minutes in front of the burned-out reactor and no more than two hours in Pripyat.
Solo East Travel has a video that shows how it came up with such math. Those calculations, however, don’t factor in hovering over a firefighter’s highly radioactive clothing that has been dug up from deep in the hospital. Nor do they specifically include driving through the Red Forest near the Chernobyl reactor — where the radiation burned up all the trees, which were then bulldozed and buried. Our Geiger counters went crazy as we drove through the new-growth forest, registering 26 sieverts per hour.
Our guide tried to calm fears about our exposure to radiation by assuring us that any high levels on our body would be detected by the machines we had to pass through on the way out of Chernobyl’s exclusion zone. Those machines — old Soviet steel contraptions that look like retro airport metal detectors — hardly inspire confidence.
To amplify tourists’ shock, guides have embellished some of the Pripyat remains: Amid hundreds of crumbling gas masks spread over the floor of an elementary school, a baby doll has been placed on a chair — wearing a gas mask. A hospital nursery has been outfitted with plastic dolls, placed in cribs with blankets, to make the scene appear even more macabre. Outside a village school building, old toys are scattered about. One-eyed teddy bears and dolls with missing limbs sit on bed springs at a village orphanage. Tables are set with plates and pots.
The most eerie scenes include an abandoned amusement park with its empty, lonely looking Ferris wheel and bumper cars filled with leaves; a swimming pool with cracked tiles, its deep end filled with trash and an old shopping cart; school hallways cluttered with books; school desks laid out with science experiments; posters of Lenin and other Soviet leaders adorning classroom walls; and a broken baby carriage abandoned in a decaying community center.
Visitors are exhausted by the time their tour bus leaves Pripyat and turns down a one-lane road through a thick forest. Hiding there is the Moscow Eye, also known as the “Russian Woodpecker,” an enormous metal structure silhouetted against the sky like a vertical Stonehenge.
Using over-the-horizon radar, the Moscow Eye was the receiver for a powerful radio broadcast sent from elsewhere in Ukraine. Some said that the signal’s short, repetitive tapping noise sounded like a bird, thus the woodpecker moniker. Others say it sounded more like a machine gun. From 1976, until it went off the air in 1989, the unexplained radio signal interfered with many broadcasts. Listeners speculated that it was a method of Soviet mind control. Only in the past three years have tourists discovered its sublime metal architecture rising from the forest floor near Chernobyl, an anachronistic remnant from a not-so-distant era.