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

by Adam Higginbotham

The first reports of the radiation detected over Sweden had reached Reagan aboard the presidential plane as he was leaving Hawaii on Monday, and his planned day off in Bali on Wednesday had been interrupted by a briefing on what US intelligence knew so far about events at the Chernobyl plant. Since then, Soviet dissembling about the accident had metastasized into a global diplomatic and environmental crisis. From high-resolution spy satellite photographs taken over Ukraine, in which they could make out details as small as individual fire hoses laid in the direction of the reactor cooling canals around the plant, CIA analysts knew that the scale of the catastrophe was far greater than Moscow acknowledged. And officials at the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission had begun to suspect that at least one of the other reactors at Chernobyl was now threatened by the ongoing crisis at Unit Four. Yet Moscow had rebuffed Reagan’s public offer of medical and technical assistance, and American nuclear experts could only speculate about what was really happening at the crippled plant.