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

by Adam Higginbotham

As the cleanup inside the thirty-kilometer zone ground on, morale among the tens of thousands of liquidators who had been shipped in to perform the dangerous and apparently inexorable task sank ever lower. Dust from highly contaminated areas continued to blow into those that had been cleaned, rendering weeks of work pointless; Kombinat appeared to have been making progress in Pripyat until the KGB learned that their specialists had been reporting readings from only the cleanest areas, and thus underestimating the true levels of radiation in the city by more than ten times. The secret policemen also noted that the liquidators’ food was bad, radiation safety was lacking, workers weren’t even being paid on time, and one radioactive waste dump was being flooded regularly with river water. The Kombinat leaders would eventually be reprimanded by the Party for tolerating nepotism, theft, and drunkenness. In the meantime, looting from inside the zone had begun on an industrial scale, often initiated by the liquidators themselves and sometimes with the collusion of their commanders.