The civil defense radiation scouts had been taking hourly readings on the streets of the city since noon, and they found the figures alarming: on Lesi Ukrainki Street, less than three kilometers from the reactor, by midafternoon, they had recorded readings of 0.5 roentgen an hour; by nightfall, it was up to 1.8 roentgen. This reading was tens of thousands of times higher than normal background radiation, but the Soviet deputy minister of health insisted that it posed no immediate threat to the population. He pointed out indignantly that even after the still-undisclosed 1957 disaster in Mayak,
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