The Kremlin’s dirty nuclear secret

The explosion at Mayak was the real nuclear disaster of 50 years ago, says robert matthews

Around this time, 50 years ago, scientists were desperately trying to cope with a blunder that had triggered a nuclear catastrophe. No, it was not the Windscale accident of October 1957 in which a fire broke out in a reactor in Cumbria. This was a far more serious accident that unfolded at the same time and led to many deaths - and yet one which few outside the nuclear industry know about.

That is because it took place at a top-secret nuclear plant deep in Soviet Russia during the height of the Cold War. The first hints of the disaster emerged in the mid-1970s, when a Soviet dissident named Zhores Medvedev claimed that a major accident had occurred at the Mayak ('beacon') facility in the Urals.

Not until the late 1980s and the era of glasnost did the full picture emerge. Hastily built in the late 1940s as part of the Soviet Union's race to acquire its own atomic