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

by Adam Higginbotham

Logachev looked down at the digital readout and felt his scalp prickle with terror: 2,080 roentgen an hour. An impossible number. Logachev struggled to remain calm and remember the textbook; to conquer his fear. But his training failed him, and the lieutenant heard himself screaming in panic at the driver, petrified that the vehicle would stall. “Why are you going this way, you son of a bitch? Are you out of your fucking mind?” he yelled. “If this thing dies, we’ll all be corpses in fifteen minutes!”

By the time the young director began work in Chernobyl in 1970, the Socialist economic experiment was going into reverse. The USSR was buckling under the strain of decades of central planning, fatuous bureaucracy, massive military spending, and endemic corruption—the start of what would come to be called the Era of Stagnation. Shortages and bottlenecks, theft and embezzlement blighted almost every industry.

What has changed?!

The quality of workmanship at all levels of Soviet manufacturing was so poor that building projects throughout the nation’s power industry were forced to incorporate an extra stage known as “preinstallation overhaul.” Upon delivery from the factory, each piece of new equipment—transformers, turbines, switching gear—was stripped down to the last nut and bolt, checked for faults, repaired, and then reassembled according to the original specifications, as it should have been in the first place. Only then could it be safely installed. Such wasteful duplication of labor added months of delays and millions of rubles in costs to any construction project.

The humiliation of enduring an expletive-spattered dressing-down delivered at screaming pitch was a ritual repeated daily in offices everywhere. It engendered a top-down culture of toadying yes-men who learned to anticipate the whims of their superiors and agree with whatever they said, while threatening their own underlings. When the boss put his own proposals to the vote, he could reasonably expect them to be carried unanimously every time, a triumph of brute force over reason.

Advancement in many political, economic, and scientific careers was granted only to those who repressed their personal opinions, avoided conflict, and displayed unquestioning obedience to those above them.

Lies and deception were endemic to the system, trafficked in both directions along the chain of management: those lower down passed up reports to their superiors packed with falsified statistics and inflated estimates, of unmet goals triumphantly reached, unfulfilled quotas heroically exceeded. To protect his own position, at every stage, each manager relayed the lies upward or compounded them.

Gosplan—in Moscow. The brain of the “command economy,” Gosplan managed the centralized distribution of resources throughout the USSR, from toothbrushes to tractors, reinforced concrete to platform boots.

Yet the economists in Moscow had no reliable index of what was going on in the vast empire they notionally maintained; the false accounting was so endemic that at one point the KGB resorted to turning the cameras of its spy satellites onto Soviet Uzbekistan in an attempt to gather accurate information about the state’s own cotton harvest.

Eventually the supply problems of the centrally planned economy became so chronic that crops rotted in the fields, and Soviet fishermen watched catches putrefy in their nets, yet the shelves of the Union’s grocery stores remained bare.

Gorbachev had assumed power in March 1985, ending the long succession of zombie apparatchiks whose declining health, drunkenness, and senility had been concealed from the public by squadrons of increasingly desperate minders.

He had met his targets and fulfilled the plan and won himself and his men orders of merit and pay bonuses for beating deadlines and exceeding labor quotas. But, like all successful Soviet managers, to do so, Brukhanov had learned how to be expedient and bend limited resources to meet an endless list of unrealistic goals. He had to cut corners, cook the books, and fudge regulations. When the building materials specified by the architects of the Chernobyl station had proved unavailable, Brukhanov was forced to improvise: the plans called for fireproof cables, but when none could be found, the builders simply did the best they could.

Brobdingnagian

The Era of Stagnation had fomented a moral decay in the Soviet workplace and a sullen indifference to individual responsibility, even in the nuclear industry. The USSR’s economic utopianism did not recognize the existence of unemployment, and overstaffing and absenteeism were chronic problems. As the director of the plant and its company town, Brukhanov was responsible for providing jobs for everyone in Pripyat.

Those who actually had important work to do were known—with a bureaucratic frankness that hinted at satire—as the Group of Effective Control. Yet the dead weight of unwanted manpower tugged even at those with urgent responsibilities and infected the plant with inefficiency and a dangerous sense of inertia.

At 8:16 a.m. on August 6, 1945, a fission weapon containing sixty-four kilograms of uranium detonated 580 meters above the Japanese city of Hiroshima, and Einstein’s equation proved mercilessly accurate. The bomb itself was extremely inefficient: just one kilogram of the uranium underwent fission, and only seven hundred milligrams of mass—the weight of a butterfly—was converted into energy. But it was enough to obliterate an entire city in a fraction of a second. Some seventy-eight thousand people died instantly, or immediately afterward—vaporized, crushed, or incinerated in the firestorm that followed the blast wave.

But by the end of the year, another twenty-five thousand men, women, and children would also sicken and die from their exposure to the radiation liberated by the world’s first atom bomb attack.

Radiation is produced by the disintegration of unstable atoms. The atoms of different elements vary by weight, determined by the number of protons and neutrons in each nucleus. Each element has a unique number of protons, which never changes, determining its “atomic number” and its position in the periodic table: hydrogen never has more than one proton; oxygen always has eight; gold has seventy-nine. But atoms of the same element may have varying numbers of neutrons, resulting in different isotopes, r...

Adding to or removing neutrons from the nucleus of a stable atom results in an unstable isotope. But any unstable isotope will try to regain its equilibrium, throwing off parts of its nucleus in a quest for stability—producing either another isotope or sometimes a different element altogether. For example, plutonium 239 sheds two protons and two neutrons from its nucleus to become uranium 235. This dynamic process of nuclear decay ...

Radiation is all around us. It emanates from the sun and cosmic rays, bathing cities at high altitude in greater levels of background radiation than those at sea level. Underground deposits of thorium and uranium emit radiation, but so does masonry: stone, brick, and adobe all contain radioisotopes. The granite used to build the US Capitol is so ra...

All living tissue is radioactive to some degree: human beings, like bananas, emit radiation because both contain small amounts of the radioisotope potassium 40; muscle contains more potassium 40 than other tissue, so men are generally more radioactive than women. Brazil nuts, with a thousand times the average con...

Radiation is invisible and has neither taste nor smell. Although it’s yet to be proved that exposure to any level of radiation is entirely safe, it becomes manifestly dangerous when the particles and waves it gives off are powerful enough to transform or break apart the atoms that make up the...

Ionizing radiation takes three principal forms: alpha particles, beta particles, and gamma rays. Alpha particles are relatively large, heavy, and slow moving and cannot penetrate the skin; even a sheet of paper could block their path. But if they do manage to find their way inside the body by other means—if swallowed or inhaled—alpha particles can cause massive chromosomal damage and death. Radon 222, which gathers as a gas in unventilated basements, releases alpha particles into the lungs, where it causes cancer. Polonium 210, a powerful alpha emitter, is one of the car...

Beta particles are smaller and faster moving than alpha particles and can penetrate more deeply into living tissue, causing visible burns on the skin and lasting genetic damage. A piece of paper won’t provide protection from beta particles, but aluminum foil—or separation by sufficient distance—will. Beyond a range of ten feet, beta particles can cause little damage, but they prove dangerous if ingested in any way. Mistaken by the body for essential elements, beta-emitting radioisotopes can become fatally concentrated in specific organs: strontium 90, a member of the same chemical family as calci...

Gamma rays—high-frequency electromagnetic waves traveling at the speed of light—are the most energetic of all. They can traverse large distances, penetrate anything short of thick pieces of concrete or lead, and destroy electronics. Gamma rays pass straight through a human being without s...

In 1903 Marie and Pierre Curie had won the Nobel Prize for the discovery of polonium and radium—an alpha-particle emitter, roughly a million times more radioactive than uranium—which they extracted from metric tonnes of viscous, tarry ore in their Paris laboratory. Pierre was killed in a road accident, but Marie continued exploring the properties of radioactive compounds until she died in 1934, probably due to radiation-induced bone marrow failure. More than eighty years later, Curie’s laboratory notes remain so radioactive that they are kept in a lead-lined box.

USSR tested its first thermonuclear device—a hydrogen bomb, a thousand times more destructive than the atom bomb—and both emerging superpowers became theoretically capable of wiping out humanity entirely. Even Kurchatov was shaken by the power of the new weapon he had created, which had turned the surface of the earth to glass for five kilometers around ground zero.

Unlike a nuclear weapon, in which a vast number of uranium atoms fission in a fraction of a second, releasing all their energy in an annihilating flash of heat and light, in a reactor the process must be regulated and delicately sustained for weeks, months, or even years. This requires three components: a moderator, control rods, and a coolant.

Should each fission fail to create as many neutrons as the one before, the reactor becomes subcritical, the chain reaction slows and eventually ceases, and the reactor shuts down. But if each generation produces more than one fission, the chain reaction could begin to grow too quickly toward a potentially uncontrollable supercriticality and a sudden and massive release of energy similar to that in a nuclear weapon. To maintain a steady state between these two extremes is a delicate task.

By inserting electromechanical rods containing neutron-absorbing elements—such as boron or cadmium, which act like atomic sponges, soaking up and trapping delayed neutrons, preventing them from triggering further fission—the growth of the chain reaction can be controlled incrementally. With the rods inserted all the way into the reactor, the core remains in a subcritical state; as they are withdrawn, fission increases slowly until the reactor becomes critical—and can then be maintained in that state and adjusted as necessary. Withdrawing the control rods farther, or in greater numbers, increases reactivity and thus the amount of heat and power generated, while inserting them farther has the opposite effect. But controlling the reactor using only this fraction of less than 1 percent of all neutrons in every fission makes the control process acutely sensitive: if the rods are withdrawn too quickly, too far, in too large a number—or any of the myriad safety systems fail—the reactor may be overwhelmed by the fission of prompt neutrons and become “prompt supercritical.” The result is a reactor runaway, a catastrophic scenario accidentally triggering a similar process to the one designed into the heart of an atomic bomb, creating an uncontrollable surge of power that increases until the reactor core either melts down—or explodes.

Yet the sheer size of the Union, and its poor infrastructure, favored nuclear power. The scientists pointed out that the Siberian deposits were thousands of miles from where they were most needed: in the western part of the Soviet Union, where the majority of its population and industry lay. Moving either raw materials or electricity over these distances was costly and inefficient.

the nuclear plants’ closest competition—hydroelectric stations—required flooding huge areas of valuable farmland. Nuclear stations, while expensive to build, had little environmental impact; they were largely independent of natural resources; they could be located close to the sources of demand in major cities; and, if constructed on a large enough scale, they could produce vast amounts of electricity.

A year after Calder Hall opened, in October 1957, technicians at the neighboring Windscale breeder reactor faced an almost impossible deadline to produce the tritium needed to detonate a British hydrogen bomb. Hopelessly understaffed, and working with an incompletely understood technology, they operated in emergency conditions and cut corners on safety. On October 9 the two thousand tons of graphite in Windscale Pile Number One caught fire. It burned for two days, releasing radiation across the United Kingdom and Europe and contaminating local dairy farms with high levels of iodine 131. As a last resort, the plant manager ordered water poured onto the pile, not knowing whether it would douse the blaze or cause an explosion that would render large parts of Great Britain uninhabitable. A board of inquiry completed a full report soon afterward, but, on the eve of publication, the British prime minister ordered all but two or three existing copies recalled and had the metal type prepared to print it broken up. He then released his own bowdlerized version to the public, edited to place the blame for the fire on the plant operators. The British government would not fully acknowledge the scale of the accident for another thirty years.

Rumors of what had happened in Mayak reached the West, but Chelyabinsk-40 was among the most fiercely guarded military locations in the USSR. The Soviet government refused to acknowledge its very existence, let alone that anything might have happened there. The CIA resorted to sending high-altitude U-2 spy planes to photograph the area. It was on the second of these missions, in May 1960, that Francis Gary Powers’s aircraft was shot down by a Soviet SA-2 surface-to-air missile, in what became one of the defining events of the Cold War.

unit’s five-level rapid power reduction system, known in Russian as AZ-5. Pushing this button would drive a special bank of twenty-four neutron-absorbing boron carbide control rods—as well as every one of the remaining 187 manual or automatic control rods that remained withdrawn at the time—simultaneously into the core, quenching the chain reaction throughout the reactor. Yet the AZ-5 mechanism was not designed to bring about an abrupt emergency stop. Dollezhal and the technicians of NIKIET believed that suddenly cutting off the electricity generated by the reactor would be disruptive to the operation of the Soviet grid. And they thought that such an immediate shutdown would be necessary only in the extremely unlikely event of a total loss of external power to the plant. So they designed the AZ-5 system to only gradually reduce the reactor’s power to zero. Rather than dedicated emergency motors, the system was driven by the same electric servos that moved the manual reactor control rods, used by the operators to manage reactor power during normal operation. Starting from their fully withdrawn position above the reactor, it would take between eighteen and twenty-one seconds for the AZ-5 rods to descend completely into the core; the designers hoped that the rods’ slow speed would be compensated for by their great number. But eighteen seconds is a long time in neutron physics—and an eternity in a nuclear reactor with a high positive void coefficient.

On the night of November 30, 1975, just over a year after it had first reached full operating capacity, Unit One of the Leningrad nuclear power plant was being brought back online after scheduled maintenance when it began to run out of control. The AZ-5 emergency protection system was tripped, but before the chain reaction could be stopped, a partial meltdown occurred, destroying or damaging thirty-two fuel assemblies and releasing radiation into the atmosphere over the Gulf of Finland. It was the first major accident involving an RBMK reactor, and the Ministry of Medium Machine Building set up a commission to investigate what had gone wrong. Afterward, the official line was that a manufacturing defect had led to the destruction of a single fuel channel. But the commission knew otherwise: the accident was the result of the design faults inherent in the reactor and caused by an uncontrollable increase in the steam void coefficient. Sredmash suppressed the commission’s findings and covered up the accident. The operators of other RBMK plants were never informed of its true causes. Nevertheless, the commission made several important recommendations, to be applied to all RBMK-1000 reactors: develop new safety regulations to protect them in the event of coolant loss; analyze what would happen in the event of a sharp rise in steam in the core; and devise a faster-acting emergency protection system. Despite their apparent urgency, the reactor designers failed to act on a single on...

At their first planned maintenance shutdown, the Chernobyl operators found that the serpentine plumbing of the reactor was riddled with faults: the water-steam coolant pipes were corroded, the zirconium-steel joints on the fuel channels had come loose, and the designers had failed to build any safety system to protect the reactor against a failure of its feed-water supply—eventually, the Chernobyl engineers had to design and fabricate their own. Meanwhile, in Moscow, the reactor designers continued to discover further troubling flaws in their creation. In 1980 NIKIET completed a confidential study that listed nine major design failings and thermohydraulic instabilities which undermined the safety of the RBMK reactor. The report made it clear that accidents were not merely possible under rare and improbable conditions but also likely in the course of everyday operation. Yet they took no action to redesign the reactor or even to warn plant personnel of its potential hazards.

by crushing dissent and conjuring an air of infallibility, Dyatlov—like the Soviet state itself—expected his underlings to carry out his commands with robotic acquiescence, regardless of their better judgment.

It was another hour before the chief of radiation safety arrived. Vorobyev stood by and listened to the man’s report in disbelief: his measurements revealed that radiation levels were indeed elevated, but they were a mere 13 microroentgen an hour. He claimed to already have performed a rough analysis and found that the radionuclides in the air were principally noble gases, which would quickly dissipate and therefore posed little threat to the population; there really wasn’t much to be concerned about. This assessment was apparently what Brukhanov had been hoping to hear. He stood and, looking around the room, declared darkly, “Some people here understand nothing and are stoking panic.” He left no doubt whom he was talking about. Yet Vorobyev knew that it was simply impossible to approach the station from any direction without passing through radiation fields tens of thousands of times higher than the radiation safety team reported. Every word he’d just heard must therefore be a lie—but his confidence in his own expertise and equipment had been shaken.

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.

Ignoring instructions from above, the shift foreman of Unit Three had ordered the emergency shutdown of his reactor and isolated its control room from the station’s ventilation system. At the other end of the plant, Units One and Two remained online, and the operators stood at their posts. But all the alarms were blaring in unison, and the armored doors in the corridors were battened down.

Yet as Toptunov and Akimov entered the plant infirmary, the water they had worked so hard to release gushed uselessly from shattered pipes around the smashed reactor. It spilled through Unit Four from one level to the next, running down corridors and staircases, slowly emptying the shared reserves needed to cool Unit Three, flooding the basement and the cable tunnels that linked them both, and threatening further destruction. Many more hours would pass, and other men would sacrifice themselves to the delusion that Reactor Number Four survived intact, before Director Brukhanov and the men in the bunker acknowledged their terrible mistake.

Unit Four had been taken off-line for routine maintenance, and some kind of electrical tests were being carried out; exactly what, he couldn’t say. During those tests, an accident had occurred.

Legasov was witty and opinionated, and his privileged background gave him the confidence to speak his mind in a world of cowed apparatchiks.

When Legasov professed to be mystified by his colleague’s apparent hostility, his wife had a simple remedy: “Tell him less about your successes.”

As they were driven the 140 kilometers to Pripyat by bus, under police escort, their mood was grim—they knew that two men were now dead. But they remained mystified by what might have happened. Perhaps the roof of the reactor hall had collapsed, or some machinery had caught fire. Yet they still believed that the reactor had been shut down safely and was being cooled with water; there would be no more casualties.

went to lunch in the restaurant downstairs. Afterward, he ambled out onto the sunny hotel terrace and saw Director Brukhanov crossing the plaza toward him. “What’s the problem with the unit?” Prushinsky asked. Although the shell-shocked director would later continue to give his superiors contradictory information—and for several more hours tell others that Reactor Number Four remained intact—at this moment, Brukhanov acknowledged the truth. “There is no unit anymore,” he said. Prushinsky was dumbfounded. He knew this man was no nuclear expert. But what he was suggesting was simply inconceivable. “Have a look for yourself,” Brukhanov said in despair. “The separators are visible from the street.”

Shortly before 5:00 p.m., Senior Lieutenant Alexander Logachev of the Kiev region civil defense unit ran into the White House with the results of his ground radiation survey of the plant. His armored personnel carrier had come down Lenina Prospekt at one hundred kilometers per hour—so fast that the seven-tonne vehicle became airborne as it crested the railway bridge, and then drove right up the steps and across the pedestrian plaza to the main entrance. The map the breathless Logachev presented to Malomuzh showed the radiation reading just beside the plant cafeteria, scribbled hastily in pencil: 2,080 roentgen an hour. “You mean milliroentgen, son,” the Party chief said. “Roentgen,” Logachev said. Logachev’s commander studied the map. He finished one cigarette and then lit another. “We need to evacuate the city,” he said.

Sklyarov, the Ukrainian energy minister, had encountered Scherbina often over the years, during the Moscow boss’s tours of inspection at the many power plants under construction in the republic. At sixty-six, Scherbina was intelligent, energetic, and hardworking, tough and self-assured—but also emotional and impulsive and always determined to demonstrate that he knew better than anyone else, even the specialists. Small and wiry, what he lacked in stature he made up for with imperious attitude. Some regarded him with respect and admiration. The energy minister had found him all but impossible to work with. Scherbina introduced himself quietly to each of the gathered experts, until he came to Sklyarov, who, by now, had already driven out to the plant and seen the destruction of the reactor for himself. “So, are you shitting your pants?” Scherbina asked.

“We have to evacuate the local population,” Prushinsky said. “Why are you being so alarmist?” Scherbina asked.

Like the station’s own physicists, Legasov’s first concern was the possibility of a new chain reaction in the remains of Reactor Number Four. The plant operators had already tried to drench the nuclear fuel by pouring bags of boric acid powder—which contained neutron-absorbing boron—into the water tanks of the cooling system. But the chemical solution had disappeared into the maze of broken piping tangled in the reactor hall. They couldn’t be certain where it had gone, and now supplies were running low. Ukrainian energy minister Sklyarov ordered another ten tonnes of the powder to be sent from Rovno nuclear power station, more than three hundred kilometers away to the west. But the Rovno station director was reluctant to part with it—what if he had an emergency? And when it was finally dispatched by truck, the vehicle broke down. It would not arrive in Chernobyl until the following day.