NUCLEAR ACCIDENT RESPONSE - a look back

BY SQUADRON LEADER JUSTIN SALMON RAF

Th is was part of the UK’s Nuclear Accident Response Organisation (NARO) and we were supposed to be first responder in the case of an air accident involving nuclear weapons at airfields in Suffolk. The idea was that we would go in, ascertain the situation, establish cordons and prepare for the arrival of the wider NARO setup.

Th is was during my first tour as an Engineer officer in the RAF, and I volunteered for the SNT as a secondary or additional duty – something in addition to your day job. Thus we would do occasional training and exercises, but otherwise would be on call, in my case while I was Officer Commanding the Communications and Information Systems

Engineering Flight.

My role in the SNT was to command the two-person Special Safety Team (SST). Kitted up in our charcoal-lined NBC suits, wellington boots (in place of the normal NBC boots) and S10 respirators, we consisted of a young SAC who carried the radiation detector, and me who was essentially there for moral support. In our training, I remember our RAF Regiment instructors saying – perhaps joking – that the youngest, most inexperienced airman was the most expendable and hence did this most dangerous job: entering the irradiated crash area to measure the radiation and locate the nuclear weapon (or parts thereof) among the wreckage. But it would be unfair to send anyone in alone, so to boost the airman’s courage and not make him feel alone, a young officer was assigned to be at their side – we would take courage from each other, the theory went. And that’s how Flying Officer Salmon became the SST Commander. It seems so antiquated to be describing that now, the idea of the expendable SAC, and surely there must have been a less risky way of locating the weapon. That definitely seems to be a legacy of the Cold War, when casualties on exercises and operations were more generally acceptable, and I remember similar logic being explained during NBC training at the time, when we were told that the most junior SAC – theoretically the least useful person – should be the one to do the chemical sniff test to check for any residual presence of chemical weapons.

Th ankfully we never had to do it for real, and so my experience was limited to a couple of exercises. We would crash out to the accident site in our rickety LDV minibus, land rovers, and the 4-tonne lorry carrying the Base Support Team’s equipment. I always felt we had a slightly amateurish look in our ageing vehicles (I swear the minibus broke down one time…) compared to the other first responders that would also converge on the crash, like the police, fire fighters and ambulances. I presume things have moved on in the past 16 years!

But watching Chernobyl – particularly the young conscripts doing cleanup – made me shiver slightly at the thought that we might once have been in a vaguely similar position. In theory we were much better equipped and trained, but after seeing the mini-series, I’m not sure I would have wanted to test that. Massive kudos to them for doing it.

Jewish Chernobyl

Since seeing the series, I’ve also been reading a book about Chernobyl (“Chernobyl” by Serhii Plokhy) and it caught my interest that prior to 1917, Chernobyl was known as a Jewish town, with Jews making up some 60% of the population and with strong Hasidic connections. Rabbi

Menachem Nochum Twersky, a disciple of the Baal Shem Tov, made his home there in the 18th century. Pogroms during the Russian civil war reduced Chernobyl’s Jewish population to about 1700, or around 20% of the population, and a couple of decades later, the German invasion essentially brought an end to Jewish Chernobyl, with a mass execution on the outskirts of Chernobyl on 7 November 1941, although a few hundred Jews did return after the war. Separately, many Jews were later present during and after the nuclear disaster, including the turbine engineer Igor Kirschenbaum who was on duty the night of the accident.