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

by Adam Higginbotham

Yet many of the expert witnesses called to the stand were drawn from the very state agencies—including NIKIET and the Kurchatov Institute—responsible for the original design of the RBMK-1000. Unsurprisingly, the physicists absolved themselves of blame, arguing that the quirks of their reactor became dangerous only in the hands of incompetent operators. The court stifled any dissent from this view. When one nuclear specialist began to explain that Toptunov, Akimov, and Dyatlov could not have known about the positive void coefficient that helped precipitate the explosion of the reactor, the prosecutor dismissed him abruptly from the stand. Dyatlov submitted twenty-four written questions to be put to the expert witnesses about the specifications of the reactor and whether it conformed to the regulations of the USSR’s State Committee for Nuclear Safety. But the judge simply ruled them out of order, without further explanation.