In the late 1970s amateur radio operators began hearing raucous bursts of electronic chatter flooding the airwaves and interfering with normal operations. Cutting across the high-frequency bands, the staccato signals resembled a rapidly chopping helicopter blade or the steady fire of a machine gun. Some thought the sound was more like a woodpecker, and that was the name that stuck.
The Russian Woodpecker, as the transmitter came to be called, was pinpointed by triangulation to an area in the Soviet Union near the border between Ukraine and Belarus. Thought by some to be a radio jamming station or, by the paranoid, a Soviet mind control device, the Woodpecker was soon unmasked as an over-the-horizon radar built to provide early warning of a United States nuclear attack.
On a recent trip to Ukraine, which is now fighting Russia along a new Eastern Front, I stood at the base of the gargantuan steel structure, straining to reduce it to words. Almost 500 feet high and three times as wide, the Woodpecker was lined top to bottom with cylindrical, cage-like antennas. Nearby on an eroding block wall, a mural of a Soviet soldier, red star on his cap, stared vacantly at the encroaching forest. With the Cold War long over, nature was taking back what had passed as an outpost of civilization.
For all the fears of an onslaught from the West, it was a different kind of nuclear event that helped bring an end to the Soviet empire. A few miles from the Russian Woodpecker was the next stop on my tour: Chernobyl, where a combination of design flaws and operator error led to a meltdown in 1986.
By the time the fallout had settled, one more prop had been knocked from the scaffolding of Soviet power. Five years later, the unwieldy monolith collapsed.The Woodpecker, now silent, is a reminder of a time when errors no more predictable than those at Chernobyl might have led to a nuclear world war.
Though the number of Russian and American warheads has been negotiated downward, the threat is still here. It doesn’t take very many to ruin the world. The doctrine called MAD, for mutually assured destruction, kept two superpowers at bay. Now nine countries have the weapons — not just the United States and Russia but also China, France, Britain, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea.
No one is building backyard fallout shelters or conducting Civil Defense drills as they did during the Cold War. More people seem worried about the next Fukushima than the very real possibility of a nuclear attack. In a talk last month, Gareth Evans, an Australian diplomat, politician and spokesman for disarmament, described this surreal disconnect: “That the world has managed to survive nearly 70 years without a nuclear holocaust — deliberately or accidentally initiated — is not a matter of the inherent stability of nuclear deterrence, or the wisdom of statesmen and the systems they oversee, but rather sheer, dumb luck.”
When I signed up for a visit to the Zone of Exclusion, the evacuated wilderness around Chernobyl, I hadn’t heard of the Woodpecker. Walking through the dark ruins of the installation’s control center, past wrecked electronic consoles and tangles of dead cable, I remembered the Cuban missile crisis and the day my mother announced, uncharacteristically, that we were going to church. Everyone, she said, would be praying for peace. That night, I lay sleepless imagining an intercontinental ballistic missile coming through the roof.
And now, half a century later, on assignment for National Geographic, I was traveling with an interpreter from Moscow who had experienced similar childhood fears. Near the base of the Woodpecker, she reached down and picked up a shiny metal object — a lapel pin, probably dropped by another visitor, displaying the universal symbol for radioactivity.
She placed it in my hand, and I added it to my collection of nuclear memorabilia. The first of these came to me when my father, a doctor for the Veterans Administration, brought home some bubbly green rocks a patient had given him. They had been collected at Trinity Site in southern New Mexico, where the United States exploded its first nuclear bomb.
One of the mildly radioactive pieces sits in a wooden box in my bedroom, wrapped in a handwritten letter explaining that it is called Trinitite, “unique in the mineral world.” I have opened the lid at night and confirmed that it does not glow. Nor does it register on the bright yellow Civil Defense Geiger counter I found later on eBay — the kind you were supposed to use as you poked your head outside the fallout shelter to see if there was anything to emerge to.
The oldest of my souvenirs is a small piece of jet black graphite, embedded in acrylic, from the first nuclear reactor, built at the University of Chicago in 1942 by a team led by Enrico Fermi. Somehow, these objects make the abstractions of nuclear fission and nuclear politics feel more real.
On a Sunday morning during my weekend at Chernobyl, we visited an old Orthodox church, named for the prophet Elijah. We walked quietly inside to see the Savior of Chernobyl, an eerie religious icon with a postapocalyptic theme.
Chernobyl, in some translations, means wormwood — the name of the star in the Book of Revelation that falls from the sky, poisoning the waters. And there it was, in the painting, hurtling toward an earthly hell peopled by ghostly figures in robes and a group of liquidators wearing gas masks and white-coated medical personnel. These were the people who risked their lives, knowingly or not, to contain the horror.
In the center of the bleakness is an infamous tree used by Nazis as a gallows during World War II. It too was killed by radiation.
The imagery stayed with me, and back at home, I found a small reproduction of the icon for sale on the Internet — another addition to the collection. As I look at it, I wonder whether someday there will be others like it, commemorating the saviors and survivors of the next nuclear catastrophe — deliberate or accidental, and of a vastly more devastating scale.