Pripyat, near Chernobyl, after the disaster

For those who have seen it, Pripyat is a place of silence, devoid of life. The only movement that suggests human habitation is the flutter of laundry on clotheslines. But the laundry has been there, day and night, since April 27. On that day, most of the town’s 40,000 citizens hastily collected a few belongings and piled into buses that evacuated them from the vicinity of the shattered Chernobyl nuclear reactor only half a mile away. They did not know then, and do not know now, whether they will return home in months or years. Or ever. On this and the following pages, TIME publishes the first photographs to appear in the U.S. of the ruined nuclear plant, the cleanup operation and the surrounding countryside. One of the few Americans who have seen Pripyat is Dr. Robert Gale, a bone- marrow specialist who helped Soviet doctors cope with the Chernobyl disaster, which so far has cost 26 lives. ”It’s a very dramatic thing to see a partially destroyed nuclear power plant,” Gale told reporters after taking a helicopter tour of the scene. ”The damage itself doesn’t appear to be that great. A short distance away is a city of high rises that today is completely deserted. If you’re looking down on it from a helicopter, it’s not at all apparent why this is so. But one knows there is a silent enemy lurking there.” The enemy, of course, is radiation. There have been reports that some people, including looters, did not realize the danger. A Soviet newspaper disclosed that police sentries and, later, burglar alarms were used to protect Pripyat’s abandoned dwellings. Beyond that, Soviet militia units and troops man watchtowers and checkpoints along a 60-mile perimeter. Despite the elaborate surveillance, two elderly women reportedly managed to hide in their Pripyat homes for more than a month after the accident. Eventually they were found and hospitalized. Their present condition is unknown. All told, about 100,000 people from the Chernobyl vicinity will have to be monitored for the rest of their lives for signs of cancer. Among the most seriously injured were 300 plant workers and firemen, 24 of whom have already died. According to the Soviet press, there were others who took astonishing risks in the battle to control the seething reactor, including helicopter crews that dumped sand, lead and boron on the exposed reactor core in order to stop the massive leakage of radiation. For the long term, Moscow’s plan is to enclose the unit in a concrete tomb equipped with a cooling system to dissipate heat generated by more than 150 tons of active nuclear fuel still in the reactor. In the city of Kiev, 80 miles to the south, Soviet authorities are taking precautions against the spread of radiation into the water supply. Emergency wells are reportedly being dug to be used in the event that reservoirs fed by rivers become contaminated. Officials insist that radiation in Dnieper River water has not exceeded the ”permissible level,” but they have urged citizens not to play soccer or volleyball on river beaches ”because dust is kicked up.”

Ever since the disaster, rumors have swirled throughout the country: that Chernobyl survivors could spread radiation like a contagious disease; that victims have been placed in lead coffins and buried in unusually deep graves; that vodka and red wine are effective antidotes to radiation. During a visit to Budapest, Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev told Hungarian factory workers, ”Chernobyl has warned us once again: man has set in operation a really fantastic force that must be strictly controlled.” It was a telling message that surely reverberated last week through the lifeless silence of Pripyat.