Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster

by Adam Higginbotham

But it was clear that the cleanup operation would need yet more manpower. The Politburo now recognized that if the Union’s young draftees—already plagued by alcoholism and drug abuse—continued to be sent into the high-radiation zone, the health of an entire generation of Soviet youth could be ruined, rendering the country incapable of defending itself in the event of an attack from the West. On May 29 the Politburo and the Council of Ministers of the USSR issued a decree unprecedented in peacetime: calling up hundreds of thousands more military reservists—men aged twenty-four to fifty—for a mobilization of up to six months. They were told they were required for special military exercises; many discovered the truth only when they were already in uniform. By the beginning of July, more than forty thousand of these troops were encamped around the perimeter of the Exclusion Zone, sleeping in rows of tents and driven toward the Special Zone each morning in convoys of open trucks.