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

by Adam Higginbotham

Taking the DP-5, Vorobyev went out into the night for a third time to verify his results. Tendrils of amber light were spreading across the sky as he drove toward Pripyat. There, he found a police roadblock, a crowd of people waiting in the open for a bus to Kiev, and hot spots of fallout on the asphalt: levels of gamma radiation rose by thousands of times in the space of a few meters. By the time he returned to the plant from the city, Vorobyev’s car and clothes were both so contaminated that the DP-5 could no longer take accurate readings. He clattered down the concrete steps of the bunker on the verge of hysteria, a wild look in his eyes. “There’s no mistake,” he told Brukhanov. “We must take action as the plan demands.” But the director cut him off. “Get out,” he said and pushed him away. “Your instrument is broken. Get out of here!” In desperation, Vorobyev picked up the phone to notify the Ukrainian and Belarusian civil defense authorities. But the operator told him he had been forbidden from making long-distance calls. Eventually he managed to get a connection to Kiev on his direct line, which in their haste Brukhanov and his assistants had failed to have cut off. But when Vorobyev delivered his report, the civil defense duty officer who answered refused to believe that he was serious.