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

by Adam Higginbotham

the heroic but doomed efforts of the plant operators to cool the shattered reactor core with water had resulted only in flooding the basement spaces of Units Three and Four with contaminated water and sending clouds of radioactive steam billowing into the atmosphere. In addition, there was the poisonous torrent of radioactive aerosols being carried into the air from the crater of Reactor Number Four—where the glowing lattice of fuel cells and the ominous spot of incandescence that Prushinsky had glimpsed suggested strongly that something was on fire. Somehow the blaze had to be put out and the reactor sealed.

Yet no one on the commission could suggest how the burning reactor might be smothered. Legasov looked around him in consternation: the politicians were ignorant of nuclear physics, and the scientists and technicians were too paralyzed by indecision to commit to a solution. Everyone knew that something must be done—but what?

The civil defense radiation scouts had been taking hourly readings on the streets of the city since noon, and they found the figures alarming: on Lesi Ukrainki Street, less than three kilometers from the reactor, by midafternoon, they had recorded readings of 0.5 roentgen an hour; by nightfall, it was up to 1.8 roentgen. This reading was tens of thousands of times higher than normal background radiation, but the Soviet deputy minister of health insisted that it posed no immediate threat to the population. He pointed out indignantly that even after the still-undisclosed 1957 disaster in Mayak, the population of the secret city had not been told to leave. “They never evacuated people there!” he said. “Why do it here?”

So far, the plume of vapor from the reactor had been drifting north-northwest—away from Pripyat and Kiev, toward Belarus; by noon on Saturday, chemical troops had registered external dosages of radiation along its path measuring a life-threatening 30 roentgen per hour, as far as fifty kilometers from the plant. But the wind could change at any moment, and there were already thunderstorms to the southeast. If even the smallest amount of rain fell on Pripyat, it would bring down radioactive fallout, with terrible consequences for the population. From Kiev, the Ukrainian prime minister had already unilaterally given orders to arrange transport—more than a thousand buses and trucks—for a possible evacuation of the city. Yet nothing would move without sanction from the top. And Scherbina wanted more information before making a decision. He resolved to wait until morning.

In the meantime, something had begun stirring inside the yawning vault of Unit Four. At around eight o’clock on Saturday evening, the plant’s deputy chief engineer for science noticed a ruby glow shimmering within the ruins. This was followed by a series of small explosions and brilliant white flashes that leapt from the wreckage of the central hall like geysers of light, illuminating the full height of the 150-meter vent stack.

sometime before midnight, a functionary interrupted a meeting to tell Scherbina that General Secretary Gorbachev would be calling him shortly for a situation report. The deputy minister ordered the room cleared. As Sklyarov rose to leave, Scherbina stopped him. “No, no. Sit down,” he said. “Listen to what I’m going to say. Then you’re going to tell your superiors exactly the same thing.” The VCh—the scrambled high-frequency line, from Moscow—rang, and Scherbina answered. “There’s been an accident,” the deputy minister told Gorbachev. “Panic is total. Neither the Party organs, the secretary of the oblast, nor the rayon committees are here at present. I’m going to demand that the minister of energy restart all units. We’re going to take all measures to liquidate the accident.” Scherbina was silent for a few moments as Gorbachev spoke. At last, Scherbina said, “Okay,” and replaced the receiver in its cradle. He turned to Sklyarov. “Did you hear all that?” He had; he was appalled. “You can’t restore the reactor, because there is no reactor,” he said. “It no longer exists.” “You’re a panicker.” “I’ve seen it with my own eyes.” A few minutes later, the special telephone rang again. This time it was Scherbitsky, the Ukrainian Communist Party chief. Scherbina repeated to Scherbitsky what he’d just told Gorbachev: a can-do shock-work action plan of fantasy and denial. Then he handed the phone to Sklyarov. “He wants to talk to you. Just say what I was saying.” “I don’t agree with wh...

Yuvchenko and his friends tried to estimate how much radiation they had received: they thought 20 rem, or perhaps 50. But one, a navy veteran once involved in an accident on a nuclear submarine, spoke from experience: “You don’t vomit at fifty,” he said.

Elsewhere, however, there were signs that not everything in the city was quite as it should be. The technician’s next-door neighbor, an electrical assembly man, spurned the beach that morning in favor of the roof of his apartment building, where he lay down on a rubber mat to sunbathe. He stayed up there for a while, and noticed that he began to tan right away. Almost immediately, his skin gave off a burning smell. At one point, he came down for a break, and his neighbor found him oddly excited and good humored, as if he’d been drinking. When no one else seemed interested in joining him up on the roof, the man returned there alone and continued to work on his accelerated tan.

She refused to believe anything was amiss. Only when he showed her the dark specks of graphite on the leaves of her strawberry plants did she agree to return home. Prianichnikov suspected the accident was a catastrophic failure of the reactor, but without a dosimeter, he found it hard to convince his neighbors of such a heretical idea. He couldn’t make them listen, and—as someone whose father and grandfather had both died at the hands of the Party—he knew that it could be dangerous to try too hard.

Large beads of liquid began to form on the canopy. At first, Volodin thought it was rain. But then he noticed that it wasn’t breaking over the glass like water: instead, it was strange, heavy, and viscous. It flowed slowly like jelly and then evaporated, leaving a salty-looking residue. And the sky remained clear. He bent over the control panel, and looked up: directly above him, the same whitish smoke was blowing overhead, thin in some places, dense in others. Almost like a cloud. “Captain, it’s maxed out!” the flight engineer shouted. “What’s maxed out?” “The DP-3. The needle’s stuck.” “Then switch to a higher range,” Volodin said, and turned to check the dial himself. But the radiometer was already calibrated to its most extreme setting. The needle was glued to the far end of the range, at 500 roentgen per hour. And Volodin knew that the device took its readings from a receiver in the back of his seat. It seemed impossible: the level of radiation inside the cockpit had risen beyond the worst expected in a nuclear war. Whatever it was, he had to get them away from the cloud immediately.

The family was just preparing for bed when they heard strange sounds coming from the direction of the station. From their sixth-floor balcony, they watched as yellow and green flames flared a hundred meters into the sky above the torn ruins of Reactor Number Four.

As the helicopter headed back to Pripyat, Legasov knew conclusively that he was dealing with not merely yet another regrettable failure of Soviet engineering but also a disaster on a global scale, one that would affect the world for generations to come. And now it was up to him to contain it.

At ten o’clock on Sunday morning, a full thirty-two hours after the catastrophe had begun, Boris Scherbina gathered the Soviet and local Party staff in the gorkom offices of the White House. At last, he gave the order to evacuate Pripyat. At 1:10 p.m., the radio-tochki in kitchens across the city finally broke their silence.

If he was aware of the rising level of contamination in the air all around them, Scherbina didn’t show it. The chairman seemed to regard the dangers of radiation with the haughty disdain of a cavalry officer striding across a battlefield bursting with cannon fire. And almost everyone else on the commission followed his lead: mentioning the radioactivity surrounding them seemed almost tactless. Among the ministers, an air of Soviet bravado prevailed.

Yet the traditional reflexes of secrecy and paranoia were deeply ingrained. The truth about incidents of any kind that might undermine Soviet prestige or provoke public panic had always been suppressed: even three decades after it had happened, the 1957 explosion in Mayak had still, officially, never taken place; when a Soviet air force pilot mistakenly shot down a Korean Air jumbo jet in 1983, killing all 269 people on board, the USSR initially denied any knowledge of the incident. And Gorbachev’s grip on power remained tenuous, vulnerable to the kind of reactionary revolt that had destroyed Khrushchev and his program of liberalization. He had to be careful.

Discussion turned once more to what to tell the world about what had happened. “The more honest we are, the better,” Gorbachev said, suggesting that they should at least provide specific information to the governments of the Soviet satellite states, to Washington, DC, and London. “You’re right,” said Anatoly Dobrynin, recently appointed to the Central Committee after twenty years as the Soviet ambassador to the United States. “After all, I’m sure the photos are already on Reagan’s desk.” They agreed to cable statements to their ambassadors in world capitals, including Havana, Warsaw, Bonn, and Rome. “Should we give information to our people?” asked Aliyev. “Perhaps,” Ligachev replied.

Later, when the wind changed direction again, threatening to carry the plume of radionuclides north toward Moscow, Soviet pilots flew repeated missions to seed the clouds with silver iodide, designed to precipitate moisture from the air. The capital was spared. But three hundred kilometers to the south, peasants watched as hundreds of square kilometers of fertile farmland in Belarus were lashed with black rain.

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.”

Valery Legasov and the team of scientists analyzing the latest data from Unit Four had made a horrifying and apparently inexplicable discovery. Instead of continuing to fall, the radioactive releases from the reactor had now suddenly begun to increase again, doubling from 3 million to 6 million curies overnight. The temperature of the burning core, too, was rising rapidly. By Thursday night, Legasov’s estimates suggested that it was already approaching 1,700 degrees centigrade. The academicians now feared that the uranium dioxide fuel and zirconium cladding remaining inside the vault of Reactor Number Four had become so hot that they had started to fuse into a mass of radioactive lava in what amounted to a total core meltdown. Worse still, the 4,600 tonnes of sand, lead, and dolomite that had been flung into the damaged building from two hundred meters in the air, combined with the impact of the initial explosions a week before, might have fatally compromised the foundations of the reactor. If the temperature of the molten fuel reached 2,800 degrees centigrade, they suspected it could begin burning through the reinforced concrete floor of the reactor vault. Pressed down from above, it could eat its way through the bottom of the vault, into the basement of the building, and deep into the earth below. This was the doomsday scenario of reactor accidents: the China Syndrome.

In the West, scientists had been simulating the worst-case scenarios of reactor meltdowns for fifteen years, in ongoing research that had only intensified after the disaster in Three Mile Island. But Soviet physicists had been so confident of the safety of their own reactors that they had never bothered indulging in the heretical theorizing of beyond design-basis accidents. And appealing directly to Western specialists for help at this stage seemed unthinkable. Despite the growing atmosphere of alarm among the physicists at the burning reactor, the government commission and the Politburo remained determined to conceal the news of a possible meltdown from the world beyond the thirty-kilometer zone.

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.

Soviet attempts to suppress further details of the accident were unraveling. In a classified report to Gorbachev on May 3, Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze warned that continued secrecy was counterproductive and had already bred distrust not only in Western Europe but also with friendly nations planning to embrace Soviet nuclear technology, including India and Cuba. Shevardnadze wrote that taking the traditional approach to the accident was also endangering Gorbachev’s dream of brokering a historic nuclear disarmament initiative with the United States. Western newspapers were asking how a nation that couldn’t tell the truth about a nuclear accident could be trusted to be honest about how many nuclear missiles it had.

technicians from the power station embarked on Legasov’s plan to extinguish the burning reactor with nitrogen gas. The idea was to use the plant’s existing pipe network—which before the accident had distributed the various gases used in plant maintenance—to help direct the nitrogen through the basement and into the ruins of the reactor hall. From the outset, the members of the plant staff executing this scheme recognized that it was pointless: the pipework in the area beneath the reactor was almost certainly damaged, and even if it reached the reactor hall, the nitrogen couldn’t hope to starve the fire of oxygen, because the building had no roof; instead of concentrating around the burning graphite and displacing air from the flames, the gas would just drift uselessly into the atmosphere. But orders were orders.

Guskova and her colleagues gathered an awful bounty of clinical information about the impact of radioactivity on human beings. Alarmed by the refusal of Sredmash to acknowledge the dangers inherent in the breakneck development of the atomic power industry, in 1970 she completed a book that described the possible consequences of a serious accident at a civilian nuclear power plant. But when she presented the manuscript to the deputy health minister of the USSR, he threw it furiously across his office and forbade her from publishing it. The following year, she codified her clinical findings from her years of treatment in the book Radiation Sickness in Man, for which she was awarded the Lenin Prize.

As befits a disease created unwittingly by mankind, acute radiation syndrome is a cruel, complex, and poorly understood affliction that tests modern medicine to its limits. The radiation exposure responsible for causing ARS may be over in a few seconds and unaccompanied by any initial reaction. But its destructive effects begin immediately, as the high-energy rays and particles of alpha, beta, and gamma radiation snap strands of DNA, and the exposed cells start to die. Nausea and vomiting set in, with a speed and intensity contingent on the dose, and the skin may redden. But the nausea eventually passes, the discoloration of all but the most severe burns fades within eighteen hours, and the patient enters a comfortable latency period. Depending on the severity of their exposure, this deceptive period of apparent well-being can last for days or even weeks, and only afterward will the further symptoms of ARS develop. The lower the dose, the longer the latency and the greater the likelihood of recovery—given the right treatment.

the openness was circumscribed.

The act of commission vs omission is still a lie.

The word “liquidation” was nothing more than a martial euphemism. The reality was that radionuclides could be neither broken down nor destroyed—only relocated, entombed, or interred, ideally in a place where the long process of radioactive decay might pose a less immediate threat to the environment. This was a task on a scale unprecedented in human history, and one for which no one in the USSR—or, indeed, anywhere else on earth—had ever bothered to prepare. Yet now it was also subject to the routinely absurd expectations of the Soviet administrative-command system. When General Pikalov, commander of the chemical warfare troops, gave his initial situation report on the thirty-kilometer zone to the visiting leaders of the Politburo Operations Group, he forecast that decontamination work would take up to seven years to complete. Upon hearing this, the hardline Politburo member Yegor Ligachev exploded in fury. He told Pikalov he could have seven months. “And if you haven’t done it by then, we’ll relieve you of your Party card!” “Esteemed Yegor Kuzmich,” the general replied, “if that is the situation, you needn’t wait seven months to take my Party card. You can have it now.”

the records of those with lower exposure and without severe symptoms were not to mention radioactivity at all. Instead, Moscow dictated that the hospital files of these patients were to state that they had been diagnosed with “vegetative-vascular dystonia.” This was a psychological complaint with physical manifestations—sweating, heart palpitations, nausea, and seizures—triggered by the nerves or “the environment,” unique to Soviet medicine but similar to the Western notion of neurasthenia. The memo decreed the same misleadingly vague diagnosis for liquidators who came for examination having received the maximum allowable dose of radiation for emergency workers.

Soviet contingency plans for a nuclear power plant accident had envisaged a single, brief radioactive release from a damaged reactor—not one that continued for so long and, even as decontamination work began, had still not ceased entirely.

Only ten square kilometers of the zone would ever be truly decontaminated. A total cleanup would have required nearly six hundred million tonnes of topsoil to have been removed and buried as nuclear waste.

the government commission in Pripyat also launched a technical and scientific inquiry, entrusted to Academician Valery Legasov—but overseen by Alexander Meshkov, the deputy head of the all-powerful Ministry of Medium Machine Building, which had designed the reactor in the first place. Meshkov concluded quickly that the cause of the accident had surely been operator error.

As they examined the data, the physicists discerned the broad sweep of events that led up to the accident: the reactor running at low power; the withdrawal of almost every one of the control rods from the core; muffled voices, a shout of “Press the button!”, and the activation of the AZ-5 emergency system. Finally, they saw the pen trace lines showing reactor power beginning a steep ascent until suddenly they rose vertically and ran off the top of the page.

Two years earlier, he had attended a meeting of the reactor design bureau, NIKIET, at which someone had suggested that—under certain circumstances—the descending control rods might displace water from the bottom of the core and cause a sudden spike in reactivity. At that time, the institute’s scientists had dismissed this concern as too improbable to worry about. Now, as Kalugin gazed in dismay at the fearsome geometry of the computer printouts from Reactor Number Four, it seemed all too possible.

Meanwhile, behind closed doors in Moscow, a bureaucratic battle had begun over the joint Report on the Causes of the Accident in Unit Four of the Chernobyl AES, the confidential version of events being prepared for the Politburo. In memos, meetings, and multiple interim documents, the barons of the Soviet nuclear industry—the scientists and the heads of the competing ministries that controlled it—competed to divert blame from themselves, ideally before the final report reached General Secretary Gorbachev.

Ah yes - the power of the pen - available to those willing to fight and write...

The conflict was hardly an even match: on one side was the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, the nuclear design bureau NIKIET, and the Kurchatov Institute, each headed by its respective octogenarian Titan of Socialist science, all veteran apparatchiks of the old guard: former revolutionary cavalryman Efim Slavsky; Nikolai Dollezhal, designer of the first-ever Soviet reactor; and Anatoly Aleksandrov, the massive, bald-headed Buddha of the Atom himself. These were the men who had created the RBMK, but had also ignored more than ten years of warnings about its shortcomings. On the other side was the Ministry of Energy, represented by the fifty-six-year-old nuclear neophyte Anatoly Mayorets. His ministry had built the plant, operated the reactor—and was responsible for the training and discipline of the staff who had blown it up.

Operators vs acquirers

Overseen by Meshkov, Slavsky’s deputy at the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, it unsurprisingly laid the blame for the accident on the operators: they had disabled key safety systems, flouted the regulations, and conducted the test without consulting with the reactor designers; Senior Reactor Control Operator Leonid Toptunov had pressed the AZ-5 button in a desperate and futile bid to stop the accident after it had begun, triggered as a result of his and his colleagues’ simple incompetence. Toptunov and Shift Foreman Alexander Akimov were unlikely to contest this version of events: both would be conveniently dead within ten days.

the specialists from the Ministry of Energy refused to put their signatures on the joint investigation report.

Ah that funny word, "joint" !!

Instead, they produced a separate appendix, based upon their own independent investigation. This opinion suggested that—whatever the operators’ mistakes—Reactor Number Four could never have exploded were it not for the profound defects in its design, including the positive void coefficient and the faulty control rods that made reactivity increase rather than decrease. Their detailed technical analysis raised the possibility that pressing the AZ-5 button, instead of safely shutting down the reactor, as it was supposed to do, may have caused the explosion.

The meetings went on for hours, yet Aleksandrov used all his considerable skill to squash talk of the reactor’s failings and returned again and again to general discussion of the operators’ mistakes. When that failed, Slavsky—“the Ayatollah”—simply shouted down those whose opinions he didn’t want to hear. The representative from the state nuclear regulator was never even permitted to report on his proposed design revisions, intended to improve the safety of the reactor.

But Gennadi Shasharin, Mayorets’s deputy responsible for nuclear matters at the Ministry of Energy, refused to concede defeat. Following the second Interagency Council meeting, he drafted a letter to Gorbachev outlining the actual reasons for the accident and describing the attempts by Aleksandrov and Slavsky to bury the truth about the reactor design faults. Shasharin acknowledged the failures of the plant staff but argued that concentrating on these faults merely revealed the lack of organization and discipline at the plant: “they do not bring us closer to identification of the real causes of the disaster.” And the deputy minister explained that however hard they tried, they wouldn’t be able to hide the truth forever. The global scale of the disaster ensured that the international scientific community would demand to learn the technical details of the accident sequence. “Sooner or later,” Shasharin warned the general secretary, “they will become known to a broad circle of reactor specialists in our country and abroad.”

When he reached the plant, Brukhanov went up to his office on the third floor of the administrative building. There, he found the windows covered with sheets of lead and another man sitting behind his desk. In the first of what would be many public humiliations for the beleaguered manager, no one had bothered to inform him that he was no longer in charge.

Much the same way a previous administration handled firings!

“What are we going to do with Brukhanov?” the new director asked his chief engineer. The two men decided to invent a position for him: deputy head of the Industrial-Technical Department, a sinecure in a back office where he could be kept busy while he awaited his fate. They both knew it was only a matter of time before he would be called to answer for his crimes.

aha, a similarity - put them in a position where they can cause limited harm - until charged or retired.

“The accident was the result of severe violations of the maintenance schedule by the operating staff and also of serious design flaws in the reactor,” the chairman began. “But these causes are not on the same scale. The commission believes that the thing that triggered the accident was mistakes by the operating personnel.” This was the preferred narrative of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building—and yet Scherbina went on to admit that the failings of the reactor were extensive and insoluble. The RBMK was not up to modern safety standards and even before the accident would never have been permitted to operate beyond the borders of the USSR. In fact, he said, the reactor was so potentially hazardous that his specialists recommended existing plans to build any more should be scrapped.

“For thirty years, you told us that everything was perfectly safe. You assumed we would look up to you as gods. That’s the reason why all this happened, why it ended in disaster. There was nobody controlling the ministries and scientific centers,” he said. “And for the moment, I can see no signs that you have drawn the necessary conclusions. In fact, it seems that you are attempting to cover everything up.”

At one point, Meshkov unwisely insisted that the reactor was still perfectly safe if the regulations were followed precisely. “You astonish me,” Gorbachev replied. Then Valery Legasov admitted that the scientists had failed the Soviet people. “It is our fault, of course,” he said. “We should have been keeping an eye on the reactor.” “The accident was inevitable. . . . If it hadn’t happened here and now, it would have happened somewhere else,” said Prime Minister Ryzhkov, who argued that the intoxicating power handed to Aleksandrov and Slavsky had proved their undoing. “We have been heading toward this for a long time.”

And yet, glasnost or not, the organs of the Soviet state were no more ready to disclose the truth about the myriad failures of Socialist technology than they had ever been. When a draft copy of the report eventually reached the Central Committee, the head of the Energy Department was horrified by what he read. He forwarded it to the KGB with a note attached: “This report contains information that blackens the name of Soviet science. . . . We think it expedient that its authors face punishment by the Party and the criminal court.”

“The defect of the system was that the designers did not foresee the awkward and silly actions by the operators.”

Classic acquirer vs operator battle

“I did not lie in Vienna,” Legasov said to his colleagues in a report he delivered two months later at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. “But I did not tell the whole truth.”

“commandments” on how to survive in the high-radiation zones of the ruined station, accumulated through months of practical experience. To avoid getting lost, he told Borovoi, never enter any room not illuminated by electric light and always carry both a flashlight and a box of matches in case it failed; he warned him to beware of water falling from above, which could carry heavy contamination into the nose, eyes, or mouth; and, most important of all—the First Commandment—be alert for the smell of ozone. The lecturers back in Moscow might tell you that radiation has no odor or taste, he explained, but they’ve never been to Chernobyl. Intense gamma fields of 100 roentgen an hour and above—on the threshold for inducing acute radiation syndrome—caused such extensive ionization of the air that it left a distinctive aroma, like that after a lightning storm; if you smell ozone, his colleague said, run.

He saw only his wife, a friend who had driven her in his car to collect him—and a soldier back from the Afghan quagmire, who recognized the engineer’s fur-collared camouflage. “Kandahar?” the soldier asked. “Chernobyl,” Bocharov said. The soldier put an arm around his shoulder. “Brother, you had a tougher job.”