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

by Adam Higginbotham

At the very start, one member of the Kurchatov group in Chernobyl—the RBMK reactor specialist Konstantin Fedulenko—tried to tell Legasov that the whole helicopter operation might be misguided. He had seen for himself that each of the cargo drops into the shattered building was hurling heavy radioactive particles into the atmosphere. And, given the small size of the target—partially concealed by the tilted concrete lid of Elena—and the speed of the pilots’ approach, there seemed little chance that any of the sand or lead was making it into the eye of the reactor vault itself. But Legasov disagreed. He told Fedulenko that it was too late to change course. “The decision has been made,” he said. The two scientists argued for a few minutes, until Fedulenko eventually admitted the full extent of his fears: that all their efforts to quench the graphite fire were a total waste of time. He said they should just let the radioactive blaze burn itself out. Legasov didn’t want to listen. He insisted that they had to take immediate action—whether it was effective or not. “People won’t understand if we do nothing,” Legasov said. “We have to be seen to be doing something.”