Happy Birthday, Chernobyl!

The famous meltdown occurred 39 years ago this week.

I made a trip to a little country called Ukraine. Maybe you’ve heard of it.

It’s the largest country in Europe, rich in farmland, flat as a blini, with no mountains or canyons to protect it. This makes it an absolutely perfect place to invade, and people have been doing just that for centuries: most recently the Russians, but before them the Poles, Austro-Hungary, the Turks, the Russians again… Once, Ukraine even invaded itself. In Kiev, there’s a Russian tank mounted on a pedestal as a World War II memorial. In 2014, Pro-Russian separatists drove the tank off the pedestal and used it to take over a local arts center. At least some of the blame goes to Ukraine for leaving the keys in the tank.

And there’s that other Ukrainian oopsie, Chernobyl.

In 1986, a meltdown at this nuclear power plant killed thirty and forced hundreds of thousands to flee. Now it’s a tourist attraction, albeit one that exposes you to plutonium, cesium, strontium and, yes, americium (USA! USA!). It sounds dangerous, but tour operators do issue some protective gear: little paper booties. These are not to safeguard you – you already paid admission – but to protect the linoleum floors of the reactor. The one sop to safety is that every guest is given a badge to detect radiation. At the end of the tour, you turn in the badge; three weeks later you’ll get a call if you’ve received a lethal dose of radiation and have three weeks to live. I’m not making any of this up including this part: they now have nighttime tours of Haunted Chernobyl, in case nuclear apocalypse wasn’t scary enough. Oh, they also host bridal showers.

My wife, who loves dangerous, stupid adventures (such as marrying me) could not wait to visit Chernobyl. And so, back in 2011, she booked us a romantic two-week trip to Ukraine. (By the way, it’s just Ukraine, not “The Ukraine”. It’s like U2’s Bono, not U2’s “The Edge”.) Our trip began in southern Ukraine, in the picturesque seaside town of Odessa. Like most Eastern European beaches, there’s no sand – just a waterfront stretch of gravel. And no one actually goes in the water – they lay in beach chairs all day, without sunscreen, burning and blistering audibly. Walking by, it sounded like bacon frying.

This is where I first noticed something unique about Ukraine, something you never read in the papers: everyone in the country has big boobs. Maybe it’s genetics, maybe it’s diet, maybe it’s a side-effect of Chernobyl. Regardless of the cause (who cares, eh lads?), everyone in this country is busty: young women, old women, and many of the men. This is the country I dreamed of when I was sixteen (and sixty!). It was the Sovereign Republic of Cleavage. It was the nation of Boobistan. It was Knockerslovakia.

The Odessa Steps, where, in 1905, absolutely nothing happened.

Odessa boasts a world-class opera house, where, for just three dollars, I attended the greatest performance of “Aida” I ever slept through. But the city’s main attraction is the Odessa Steps, an elegant flight of stairs leading from the city to the harbor. It was here Sergei Eisenstein filmed the Odessa Steps Massacre sequence, for his 1925 silent classic “The Battleship Potemkin”. This brutally beautiful montage was ripped off by Brian DePalma for the best scene in “The Untouchables”, and has been parodied in dozens of comedies, most of them by Woody Allen. On a more somber note, it was on this very spot in 1905, that nothing happened. Eisenstein made up the whole massacre. Pure Bolshoi! Fake newsreel!

From Odessa, we drove through two hundred miles of solid nothing to reach Pobuzke, home to the Museum of Strategic Rocket Forces. It’s situated in the middle of a giant wheat field, littered with disarmed nuclear missiles the size of school buses. (At least I think they’re disarmed – they did leave the keys in that tank.) Hidden in the center of the field is an elevator that takes you one hundred feet down into a missile silo.

There’s a nuclear missile silo 200 feet below me.

The doors open on what looks like Adam West’s Batcave: a large underground command center filled with blinking consoles, rotary phones and 1960’s-era computers. Every morning for years, a Russian soldier strapped himself into a chair and waited for the phone call that gave him the order to push the button to launch the missile that would incinerate New York City. Decades later, that same Russian soldier was still down here, working as a tour guide. I’m not sure anyone told him the Cold War was over.

This man controlled the button that would have launched nukes at New York City…

He even let me push the button!

The next morning we headed another two hundred miles north to Kiev. This is a worldly and welcoming city – I was accosted in the town square by a man in a ratty Bart Simpson costume. And they really do eat Chicken Kiev in Kiev – it’s a breaded chicken cutlet stuffed with an entire stick of butter. If Elvis had known about this dish, he’d have died even younger.

I was starting to love Ukraine – its beauty, its boobs, its Bart – when my travel agent called with bad news: Chernobyl would be closed for the month. It wasn’t a safety issue – there was a property dispute with a farmer whose fields you had to cross to get to the power plant’s wreckage. Plutonium did not rattle the tour operators half as much as an angry farmer with a pitchfork.

I had to break the news to my wife, the words no husband should ever have to say: “Honey, I can’t take you to Chernobyl.”

What followed was the second-biggest meltdown in Ukrainian history.

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