Whitehall gave the ‘appearance of disarray’ after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, Margaret Thatcher complained.
She was on an official visit to Japan when radioactive fallout from an explosion at the Soviet nuclear reactor began arriving in the UK as officials were leaving for the May bank holiday weekend.
With the prime minister away there was chaos. Phone lines were overwhelmed, advice to calm the public caused panic and there was no contingency plan.
Whitehall gave the ‘appearance of disarray’ after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, Margaret Thatcher complained
In one moment of pure ‘farce’, environment minister William Waldegrave mistakenly gave out the telephone number for the Department of the Environment (DoE) drivers’ pool instead of Whitehall’s technical information centre during a radio interview.
A scathing post-mortem by the No 10 policy unit concluded that it was only after the bank holiday was over that the government finally gained control.
In his report to the prime minister, John Wybrew, of the policy unit, wrote: ‘Over the bank holiday weekend, when the fall-out first occurred, you, (foreign secretary) Geoffrey Howe and (No 10 press secretary) Bernard Ingham were away in Tokyo. Whitehall lacked a firm lead.
‘Anxious telephone callers inundated Maff (the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries) and seriously hampered communications. Not until after the weekend did DoE and environment ministers firmly take charge of the government’s response.
‘Before that, the ill-co-ordinated nature of the information and advice aroused rather than calmed public anxiety.’
A sign warns of radiation contamination near former apartment buildings Pripyat, the town closest to the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in Ukraine
Environment secretary Kenneth Baker sought to assure the public the risks were ‘insignificant’, only for John Dunster, the head of the National Radiological Protection Board, to say the death toll in the UK would run to ‘tens of people’.
‘Both conclusions derived from the the same assumption and analysis. Mr Dunster was quantifying what he regarded as an insignificant risk,’ Mr Wybrew noted.
‘The next day he had to explain that tens of deaths would arise from cancer over the next 30 to 40 years, during which time millions would die from cancer wholly unconnected with the Chernobyl incident.’