Thomas Wellock
NRC Historian
Despite
not seeing eye-to-eye on many matters, the U.S. and the Soviet Union,
nevertheless, continued to exchange information about nuclear reactor
safety even during the Cold War. Then the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in
1979 and the information exchanges stopped. It wasn’t until the 1985
Reagan-Gobachev summit that discussions were restarted.
![U.S.-Soviet Signing Ceremony]()
U.S.-Soviet Signing Ceremony
After
productive meetings with U.S. nuclear safety experts shortly after the
Chernobyl nuclear accident in April 1986, Soviet expert Anfronik
Petrosyants noted: “We hope we have broken the ice of mistrust.”
It appeared something good for reactor safety and Cold War relations might come from the disaster.
A
year and a half later the initial talks bore fruit. On the second
anniversary of Chernobyl, NRC Chairman Lando Zech met with his Soviet
regulatory counterpart for a signing ceremony at the U.S. State
Department establishing a joint coordinating committee of U.S. and
Soviet experts to share information on nuclear safety issues. It was an
important moment for the world. As Hans Blix, the head of the
International Atomic Energy Agency, observed: “a radiation cloud doesn't
know international boundaries.”
But
it was an uneasy relationship. Both sides entered negotiations with
trepidation born of a long Cold War. In March 1987, an NRC safety team
led by Commissioner Frederick Bernthal toured Soviet facilities,
including two undamaged reactors at Chernobyl. The delegation reported
that Soviet experts were not eager to discuss the possibility of formal
cooperation with the U.S. on safety matters. They only agreed to further
talks.
At
home, some U.S. officials suspected the negotiations were a trap. Carol
Kessler, an NRC and State Department staffer, recalled strong
opposition to the NRC initiative from military representatives. An
officer, she recalled, “stood up on a chair in [an] inter-agency meeting
and explained to us how were all ruining the lives of our grandchildren
[by negotiating with the Soviets]. It was the most amazing meeting I
have ever seen.”
Nevertheless,
negotiations gained momentum with support from President Ronald Reagan
and General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. In December 1987, the two
leaders jointly called for a bilateral agreement on reactor safety. The
memorandum was signed just four months later. It created 10 working
groups to work on safety regulation, operations, research, and radiation
protection. Similar agreements quickly followed with other Soviet-bloc
nations.
The
Soviet memorandum marked a key shift for the NRC in international
affairs that outlived the fall of communism. Surrounded by reactors that
did not meet Western safety standards and bereft of regulatory agencies
like the NRC, former communist countries desperately needed assistance.
The bilateral agreements allowed the agency to become an ambassador
among them advocating that they establish Western safety standards and
regulations.
In a future post, I will detail the 20-year international effort to Westernize the communist nuclear regulatory system.
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