America Beyond 2001 | Ethics for the Twenty-First Century

Several years ago, I was—as far as I can tell—the first Western journalist to visit the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. I was taken there on a tour in the company of several engineers called in after the April 1986 explosion to clean it up. I learned that, on the night of the accident, two electrical engineers were “playing around” with reactor #4 in what the Soviets later described as an unauthorized experiment. The two engineers wanted to see how long a turbine would freewheel if they took the power off it. That meant shutting down reactor #4.

To do so, they had to...

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