Word: fallout
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Soon after the Chernobyl meltdown, Soviet officials ordered the permanent evacuation of villages within 30 km (19 miles) of the power plant, but heavy nuclear fallout covered a much broader area. In some parts of Narodichi, a Ukrainian agricultural district whose boundaries lie some 60 km (37 miles) from the reactor, levels of radioactivity are still nine times as high as the acceptable limits, according to the local Communist Party chief. Vladimir Lysovsky, a doctor at Narodichi District Central Hospital, contends that in the past 18 months, there has been a dramatic rise in cases of thyroid disease, anemia...
...wily veterans, Co-Captains Scott Gilly and Fred Schernecker, were quite suspicious. Gilly hit two three-pointers early in the second half, but was silent the rest of the way. Schernecker poured in four three-pointers, including a four-point play, but he sent the crowd to the fallout shelters with his unmistakable misses...
...have inadvertently - assisted the Soviets by pushing for an early test blast. The 1952 explosion peppered the atmosphere with a telltale assortment of radioactive debris, including new atomic elements that could have been created only by a compressed fusion reaction. When Hirsch and Mathews asked Bethe if that fallout could have tipped off the Soviets, Bethe instantly said yes. Says Hirsch: "It was as though he had been waiting 35 years for someone to ask him that question...
...Hirsch and Mathews account has received mixed reviews from the surviving members of the Los Alamos team. Carson Mark, who took over for Bethe in 1947, concedes that the U.S. monitored the Soviets' weapons research by examining the fallout from their blasts, but he doubts that the U.S.S.R. could have worked in the other direction, deducing the secret of Mike's construction by studying its debris. Teller and others believe that the late Andrei Sakharov, who built the Soviet H-bomb, was clever enough to have invented the device from scratch, without the help of Fuchs or anyone else...
...late 1950s, Sakharov grew deeply concerned about the dangers of atomic fallout. Several times he attempted to use his prestige to halt Soviet nuclear testing. Recalling Sakharov's personal appeals against the atmospheric explosions, Nikita Khrushchev described the nuclear physicist in his memoirs as a "crystal of morality." When his behind-the-scenes lobbying turned to open criticism of the regime, Sakharov was fired from the nuclear program. "The atomic issue was a natural path into political issues," he explained...