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

by Adam Higginbotham

In public, the Soviet government continued to assure its people that the catastrophe was under control and that the radiation already released posed no long-term threat. But in its secret sessions within the Kremlin, the Politburo Operations Group heard that the direct effect of the disaster on the population of the USSR was already reaching alarming heights. On Saturday, May 10, Ryzhkov learned that a total of almost 9,500 people had already been hospitalized in connection with the accident, at least 4,000 of them in the previous forty-eight hours alone. More than half of that number were children, 26 of whom had been diagnosed with radiation sickness. The levels of contamination in four of Russia’s western regions had begun a rise that had yet to be explained, and the Soviet Hydrometeorology Department had decided to fly weather control missions over Kiev, using aircraft to release more cloud-seeding materials into the atmosphere in the hope of preventing radioactive rain from falling on the city.