Their reassurances would have been more convincing but for the fact that as they spoke a tanker passed outside, spraying the pavement and spattering the window of the room they were talking in with water.
Mr Lavrukhin looked up as the tanker swung by and burst out laughing. The moment broke the ice, and Mr Lavrukhin and his party threw away their well rehearsed scripts and relaxed. Mr Lavrukhin talked about his family and how they had all been caught up in the panic to evacuate the city.
He said he received a call in the early hours of the morning informing him there was an emergency at Chernobyl. He wasn’t given too many details at that point; just that there had been a large explosion.
As soon as he put the receiver down, it rang again. It was his boss who told him to report to the town hall at once. Before he could get out of bed, the phone rang again. It was the Ministry of the Interior in Moscow demanding information.
He ran to his car with just an overcoat over his pyjamas. At the town hall everyone was milling about, unsure of what to do. His boss was already there and was on the phone to people in Chernobyl. The chief of police and the fire officer ran in and were instructed to make all haste to Pripyat.
The blood drained from their faces when informed the nuclear power station had blown up.
Mr Lavrukhin said everything after that was just a blur. His job was to prepare for the possible evacuation of the whole city; an enormous task which kept him preoccupied night and day for three days.
Everything depended on the wind. If the winds swung toward Kiev, then everyone, three million people, would have to be evacuated; a virtually impossible undertaking but one which, nevertheless, had to be prepared for.
This would mean somehow telling the populace something of the emergency on their doorstep without causing widespread panic. On the second day, the winds did indeed swing toward Kiev and the first phase of the evacuation began.
All the schoolchildren, roughly about 200,000, were bussed out of the city and dispatched with all speed south to pioneer camps.
Lavrukhin’s own family, his wife and two daughters of school age, were evacuated in this first wave as they lived north of the city and therefore closest to Chernobyl. Mr Lavrukhin was overwhelmed by the responsibility: Not only did he have to deal with the possibility of the mass evacuation of the city… he also had to deal with the huge influx of people from Chernobyl and the surrounding area.
The following day McGinley was taken on a short trip outside the city limits to see the efforts being made to bring back normality.
Heading north out of Kiev there was evidence of the vast evacuation that had taken place. Municipal buildings and community centres were crowded with evacuees: so many that in some areas makeshift shelters had been hastily constructed on the pavements.
Leaving the city limits, things became even more chaotic. Fields surrounding the Ukranian capital had been turned into large encampments, with wooden and canvas structures supplying the bulk of living space. Many tents had been set up by the side of the road, and further tented camps had sprung up in wooded clearings.
Large convoys of trucks, tractors, buses, battered old cars and even a few horse-drawn carts were all parked up on the sides of the road. Groups of mainly young men stood around in surly groups. Check points, were positioned at intervals on the side of the road heading away from the disaster zone.
These were manned by up to a dozen people, each brandishing radiation monitors or jet-sprays hooked to their backs. Everyone passing through was swept and either passed ‘clean’ or directed to join the ragged queues at hastily erected tented clinics.
All that was left behind was a vast wasteland abandoned by its inhabitants as they fled the invisible enemy that spread like a dark stain from the stricken Chernobyl reactor.
BETRAYAL
McGinley’s eyewitness accounts of events in the Soviet Union made banner headlines. But the publicity generated by the Chernobyl incident was a mixed blessing.
Abroad, the veteran’s stock had never been higher. It encouraged ex-servicemen from across the globe to come forward with hair-raising accounts of their own experiences.
A group of former Soviet generals revealed that thousands of troops had been deliberately irradiated after an atomic bomb, twice the size of Hiroshima, was dropped near the provincial city of Orenburg in 1954.
Hundreds were said to have died in the immediate aftermath and the pilot and co-pilot of the TU-34 that dropped the bomb both died of leukaemia.
A startling report alleged that an experimental town in Kazakhstan had been “nuked” to test a new nuclear bunker system doubling as a subway. According to information passed to western scientists the bunkers survived the blast, but hundreds of luckless “volunteers” who had been herded inside the maze of tunnels died horribly after the fireball sucked all the oxygen from the air in the tunnels.
Elsewhere a huge explosion in 1957 at a nuclear bomb factory in the Ural Mountains caused the evacuation of an entire region. Hundreds of survivors were said to have been carted off to a town near the city of Penza where military doctors used them in radiation experiments.
French ex-servicemen also contacted their British “brothers in nuclear arms” to talk of their experiences in the Algerian desert and Polynesia in the Pacific. France exploded more than 200 nuclear devices and hundreds of soldiers were now complaining of ill health.
But like Britain and the Soviets, the secrecy surrounding the test programme and the difficulty of scientifically proving a link between radiation and illnesses that often emerged decades later prevented them from gaining compensation.
In Britain, the death of William Penney in 1991 marked a watershed. Any hope the veterans had of compensation seemed to die with him. There was a different mood in the country as Britain entered the 1990s.
It was a time of unprecedented economic growth and prosperity. People were obsessed by celebrity and the celebrity lifestyle. The nation embarked on a gigantic spending spree and considerations about the environment and other issues were brushed under the carpet.
Society appeared indifferent to the horrors of the past, and the nuclear bogyman didn’t seem so scary any more.
The British Nuclear Test Veterans’ Association, its membership inexorably dwindling by the death (natural or otherwise), began to fall into disarray. Lack of progress in the campaign led to rows, in-fighting and arguments about what direction the organisation should take.
Ken McGinley’s position as chairman for the first time was being challenged. Sheila Gray, his long-time secretary said: “People used to think he was God, and his word was law. They were not so sure any more.”
In a bid to revive flagging morale, McGinley launched an action in the European Court claiming his human rights had been violated by the British government.
Appearing before nine European judges in 1997 he argued the case that the government had concealed vital documents; he claimed the lives of veterans had been ruined by being forced to witness nuclear tests at Christmas Island and that the government had used them as guinea pigs.
It all had a tired, familiar ring to it and with no new evidence to go on, no smoking gun, the court action failed. It was another bitter blow and it left the campaign with nowhere obvious to go.
Many veterans abandoned the fight. Others vowed to carry on, but there were few options left open. Ken McGinley strove to keep the issue in the public consciousness.
He wrote to the famously-abrasive actor Sean Connery asking him to consider performing a voice-over for a proposed documentary on Christmas Island. The actor said he was prepared to consider it, and McGinley managed to get an Australian soap actor to agree to play the starring role. But the project failed through lack of interest.