Environmental Diplomacy in the Cold War: The Disposal of Radioactive Waste at Sea during the 1960s

Abstract

claims to the contrary throughout the cold war, Russia admitted in 1993 that, for decades, the Soviet Union routinely had dumped radioactive waste into the sea. Although Westerners had long suspected as much, the extent of the dumping provided appalling evidence of the abuses possible without public participation in or international accountability for environmental policies. In addition to discharges and packaged wastes, the Soviet Union sank as many as eighteen nuclear reactors, some still containing fuel, into areas where dumping was prohibited by international law.1 The Soviet Union not only had denied that it dumped radioactive waste into the sea, but also had repeatedly condemned Western countries for doing so, or as its propagandists preferred to say, 'for poisoning the common wells of humanity'. The question of waste disposal led to heated exchanges at international meetings: the Soviet delegate to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Vassily Emelyanov, walked out of one in 1961, while vowing never again to speak to the director-general, Sigvard Eklund, whom he called a puppet of Western industrialists. At the time, Britain's Atomic Energy Authority (AEA), which dismissed such melodramas as cold war dogma, attributed them to the Soviet Union's strategy of trying to exploit weaknesses in the West's nuclear programmes; an example of a scientific and environmental issue becoming another