Of the five men who had gathered temperature and radiation readings from the bowels of the reactor in the most terrifying days of May 1986, he told me that four were already dead. “So twenty percent survived,” he said with a dark smile. “If you include me.” The liquidators who lived on did so with the fear that they’d returned from the battlefield with fatal wounds no one could ever see. “We know that the invisible enemy is eating away inside us like a worm,” said General Nikolai Antoshkin, whose helicopter crews fought to extinguish the nuclear inferno. “For us, the war continues, and, little
...more
