Gennadiy N. Lepeshkin, Well, I have heard the expression, of course, the press harped on it a good deal.
Interviewer: What expression?
Lepeshkin: That it was a "biological Chernobyl," or "a second Chernobyl"
... or a "biological Chernobyl." Yes, the place was referred to that way, but that's due to the fact that there were many cases of disease and deaths of anim... peop... human beings, who died of anthrax, who had that diagnosis. That's why it was called that. It points to the fact that the human factor... that the violation of various technical procedures and other kinds of factors, such things can attract and lead to these kinds of serious consequences, which some compared to Chernobyl in terms of its scale. There, too, the human factor was central, in such events when experiments were done deliberately, protection devices were switched off and there was an uncontrolled thermonuclear reaction. Apparently some elements of that same tragedy were a part of what happened in Cherno... in Sverdlovsk.