Tom Sawyer and his side-kick Chuck try to earn tokens for a community rec center. | dHNfSGMzX001U0diZmM
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00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:02 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:05 I'm in Chernobyl's highly restricted exclusion zone
00:08 at the abandoned and crumbling Pripyat Hospital.
00:11 I'm hoping to find some lingering evidence
00:13 of a Soviet cover-up that might reveal
00:15 more than just the nuclear reactor's known design flaw.
00:19 Oh, my god.
00:21 Among these radioactive ruins, I found highly contaminated
00:24 boots and now clothes with the same intense levels.
00:27 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:31 Firefighter uniforms.
00:33 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:37 The readings are over 2,000 microceivers on this clothing.
00:41 So that's 8,000 times higher than standard background
00:45 radiation.
00:47 The first responders who ran in to fight the Chernobyl fire
00:49 likely had no idea the dangers they were facing,
00:52 and many died from radiation poisoning
00:54 within the first few weeks.
00:56 After the disaster, the Soviets chose not to alert
00:59 international authorities.
01:01 The radioactive cloud traveled as far as northern Europe,
01:04 and it wasn't until a power plant nearly 800 miles away
01:07 in Sweden detected dangerously elevated levels of radiation
01:10 that the USSR finally owned up to what happened.
01:14 The final death toll due to Chernobyl was incalculable.
01:18 The firefighters who must have worn these uniforms
01:20 were only the first.
01:22 This room is still extremely radioactive after 30 years.
01:26 OK, I think that's about as much time
01:27 as I want to spend in here.
01:30 So from what I read, the firefighters
01:33 were so radioactive that they brought them to the hospital,
01:36 and they tried to scrub off the radiation and couldn't.
01:39 And it's obvious that that's their clothing.
01:41 And so we know now that the amount of radiation released
01:44 is far higher than we thought.
01:46 So they're putting all this stuff down here.
01:48 They've covered up the doorway so nobody can get in here.
01:51 It's a cover up.
01:54 The question is, why?
01:58 It appears that the Soviets wanted
01:59 to conceal not only that they knew
02:01 about the faulty nuclear reactor,
02:03 but also the extent of the human toll
02:05 and of the radiation fallout.
02:08 Though I don't find any further clues as to what
02:10 caused the nuclear meltdown, the uniforms, still highly
02:13 radioactive, represent strong evidence
02:16 that everything about the Soviet response
02:18 to the Chernobyl explosion was an elaborate smoke screen.