Truth may be the first casualty of war, but a nasty by-product of ideology are peace-time lapses in communication that often turn tragic.

By now the whole world knows what happened Saturday morning, April 26, 1986 at the power plant near Chernobyl, in the Soviet Ukraine. It's the site of the worst civilian nuclear disaster in history. When reactor no. 4 exploded, it released a massive cloud of radiation that ultimately spread throughout Eastern and Central Europe--traces even reached the United States. Crops and livestock in the area were rendered tainted and inedible and land surrounding the plant will be uninhabitable for centuries. The death toll-- whether from severe radiation exposure or its long-term effects--hovers at around 6,000 people.

One of the most curious things about this disaster is the Soviet government's initial response to it. They said nothing.

As the reactor burned that Saturday morning, inhabitants of nearby villages and their children unwittingly continued to farm, drink milk from their cows and go on about their lives. Night fell, radioactive dust settled on the ground, and still there were no newscasts, no warnings, no mention at all of any problem. Plant employees reporting for work the next morning were expected to carry out their duties as usual.

Later on Sunday, residents of Pripyat, Chernobyl's company town, were told to bring their identification papers and some money and board buses headed out of town. Seemingly no one else was told. No local TV or print news outfits visited the site of the accident. And from Moscow: silence.

When Scandinavian officials registered abnormal levels of radiation floating over on a strong wind from the Ukraine, they pressed Soviet government officials for an explanation. For six hours, according to a report published in Time magazine, Sweden insisted something was horribly wrong. The reactor kept burning, and the Soviets kept quiet.

It's that silence that interests FSU researchers Drs. Marilyn Young and Michael Launer. Young (Ph.D. Pittsburgh), of the School of Communication, and her husband Launer (Ph.D. Princeton), a specialist in Russian linguistics in the Department of Modern Languages, had been collaborating on research in Russian political communication for several years at the time of the Chernobyl accident. Working in concert with original Soviet documents, the two sought to shed light on what really happened in 1983, when the Soviets shot down the KAL Flight 007, an unarmed civilian airliner. Their behind- the-scenes research of both Soviet and U.S. political positions resulted in the most accurate, in-depth analyses of the disaster available anywhere in the world.

"We were on our way to Washington when we heard about the accident at Chernobyl," Launer says. "At that point, we knew what our next book was going to be about."

When they heard the initial reports, Young and Launer knew enough about Eastern bloc politics to know that Soviet silence was par for the course. While the rest of the world waited for some acknowledgment of the situation from Moscow, the two knew that the pre-glasnost Gorbachov government was simply in spin control mode, gathering details while giving out as little information as possible.

When a statement by Tass, the official Soviet news agency, was finally read on the national news at 9 p.m. Monday, April 28, it was so terse that many could be forgiven if they missed it entirely:

"An accident has taken place at the Chernobyl power station, and one of the reactors was damaged. Measures are being taken to eliminate the consequences of the accident. Those affected by it are being given assistance. A government commission has been set up."

That was it for Soviet admission of the accident at Chernobyl in the Soviet national newspapers, as well. Official state newspapers carried this same statement and some additional information, but coverage for the entire week following the accident was limited to less than 30 column inches. TV news stations did not show a still photograph of the accident site until May 1.

What they did focus on, Young and Launer found, were sometimes years- old accounts of similar-sounding nuclear accidents in the west. News stories--some of them up to 10 years old--decrying the West's "covering up" of "serious nuclear accidents" ran in various Soviet newspapers on April 29, May 3 and May 4. A subsequent Radio Liberty listener survey confirmed that more Soviet citizens first learned about the April 26 accident at Chernobyl from Western radio broadcasts than from any other source.

When the Soviets finally did discuss Chernobyl, it was to severely under- report both the amount of radiation released by the accident and the number of deaths it caused. In assessing blame for Chernobyl, Soviet officials listed "operator error" and continued their campaign to discredit Western nuclear power to deflect criticism of the outdated, largely unsafe conditions at most Russian plants. This attempt at escaping criticism from the situation at home is also par for the course in Soviet media, Young and Launer write. And it worked, for awhile.

"The Soviet representatives actually spread serious misinformation that was accepted by the rest of the world. What is interesting is the extent to which the Soviet Union managed to deflect criticism of its technology and its bureaucratic structure," Young says.

Young and Launer had seen this type of maneuvering before, in the Soviet's handling of the Korean Airline Flight 007, the subject of their 1988 book Flights of Fancy, Flight of Doom. On Sept. 1, 1983, this unarmed civilian airliner wandered into Soviet airspace and was shot down by a Russian air-to- air missile, killing all 269 people aboard, including 61 Americans and one U.S. Congressman. The plane was being tracked by Japanese and U.S. radar, and it simply disappeared from their screens. Young and Launer determined that no attempt was made to warn the offending pilot, despite the Soviet government's claim to the contrary.

The world waited for word from Moscow as to what had happened and were met with silence, as they would years later during the Chernobyl disaster. Soviet government officials did not confirm the attack until five days later. Those five days gave the U.S. government plenty of time to leap to conclusions and decry the Soviet Union in the American media as a nation of wanton, ruthless killers before they ever found out why the plane had been shot down. Then-president Ronald Reagan cut short his vacation to fly back to the White House, stopping as he boarded Air Force One to incite anti- Communist conservatives in Washington and vilify the Soviet Union through an American reporter.

"What can we think of a regime that so broadly trumpets its vision of peace and global disarmament and yet so callously and quickly commits a terrorist act to sacrifice the lives of innocent human beings?" Reagan asked. Soon after, Moscow emerged with a story: a spy story. To deflect criticism from the attack on the civilian airliner, Soviet officials claimed KAL Flight 007 had actually been a spy plane on a covert U.S. mission.

"Our analysis demonstrates that this was not the case. The Soviets simply made up what seemed to them a plausible story," Young said. "The way the Soviets were attacked by the Reagan administration made it nearly impossible for them to do anything other than fight back. So they concocted a spy story to make the shoot-down seem justified."

And so began a heated round of finger-pointing and threats between the U.S. and Soviet governments. From their analysis of classified Russian documents that have since been made public, Young and Launer concluded that the Soviets, who were not as well trained in aircraft recognition as the U.S. and some other countries, simply didn't know they were shooting down a civilian aircraft. Whether or not they ever checked is a different story. "U.S. Air Force Intelligence had made this point early on and been brushed aside by the CIA and Reagan administration, which really had a different agenda," Young said. "They wanted to capitalize on the fact that the ÔEvil Empire' had shot down a plane full of innocent people."

And the Western media, who had little choice but to accept the U.S. government line on what had happened to KAL Flight 007, swallowed it. "It is safe to say that, in this instance, the media were used," Young says. "Where could they turn for information that would counter the administration's position?"

Young and Launer's probe into Soviet/American political communication led them to a concise theory of the way a pre-glasnost Russia handled its communication following disasters such as the KAL 007 and Chernobyl. Their analysis translates what was formerly thought of as "Soviet silence" into a well-thought out official communications plan that helped the Russian government escape a lot of the blame for both disasters. Chernobyl, Young asserts, actually changed the way Russia handles such events, mainly because, as she points out, "It was the realization that their government did nothing to warn them of the danger for more than 65 hours; that officials did not even have a plan for an emergency evacuation of the worker's village; that robbed the official position of any credibility."

Young and Launer's analysis demonstrates that the Soviet government recognized this dilemma and launched a media campaign after the Chernobyl clean-up in an unprecedented effort to repair the social contract with Soviet society. The government supported the production of television documentaries, media commentaries, and public lectures designed to persuade Soviet citizens that the Communist Party had gone to heroic lengths to protect it from the aftermath of the accident.

In the final analysis, that plan didn't work. According to Launer, "The existence of a strong ecological movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s demonstrates that this campaign was a failure."

"By engaging the dissidents in the argument, the government legitimized their claims," Young adds. "It (the government) took the risk of losing the argument, which ultimately is what happened."

Why is all this important? Young and Launer's investigations into Soviet and U.S. handling of both KAL 007 and Chernobyl point out just how much information is manipulated before being given to the media, and just how little both American and Russian citizens were told about either event. The couple knows of no other American scholars of Russian communication working with original Soviet documents, making them the only ones in the West publishing this type of research. In Russia, communica- tion as a field has been literally dormant since the revolution of 1917, Launer writes, "for the simple reason that the communist system saw no need for the people to be informed about how communication works.

"The nature of the media and the constraints under which they operate prevent their providing the in-depth analysis necessary to understand how governments interact with each other and their own citizens," he says.

To that end, Young and Launer have become a formidable academic duo, and have recently established the FSU-based International Center for the Advancement of Political Communication and Argumentation to further international scholarly exchanges and collaboration--several Russian scholars including Alexei Salmin, a close advisor to Russian President Boris Yeltsin, have come to FSU to study and lecture under this program--as well as to attract funding to communication research projects.

Young has just completed an analysis of truth claims in the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill clash during the Thomas confirmation hearings, and the two have recently published a detailed analysis of the U.S. Navy's attack on an Iranian airliner in 1988 and a comparison of media treatment of that attack with KAL 007. A good part of the rest of 1995 will be taken up with a book the two are writing on Chernobyl, a retrospective they hope will be completed in time for the disaster's 10th anniversary next spring.

"Judging from the response our research has received, its future is quite bright," Young says, noting that a colleague judging a competitive forensics event had run across a participant using a the framework of Flights of Fancy to do a "Young/Launer analysis" of her topic.

"We think this sort of research will always be important because it is part of the process of holding governments accountable. More and more it is difficult to distinguish between the government's line and the reporter's. It is the scholar's role to examine both."