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

by Adam Higginbotham

But Gennadi Shasharin, Mayorets’s deputy responsible for nuclear matters at the Ministry of Energy, refused to concede defeat. Following the second Interagency Council meeting, he drafted a letter to Gorbachev outlining the actual reasons for the accident and describing the attempts by Aleksandrov and Slavsky to bury the truth about the reactor design faults. Shasharin acknowledged the failures of the plant staff but argued that concentrating on these faults merely revealed the lack of organization and discipline at the plant: “they do not bring us closer to identification of the real causes of the disaster.” And the deputy minister explained that however hard they tried, they wouldn’t be able to hide the truth forever. The global scale of the disaster ensured that the international scientific community would demand to learn the technical details of the accident sequence. “Sooner or later,” Shasharin warned the general secretary, “they will become known to a broad circle of reactor specialists in our country and abroad.”