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

by Adam Higginbotham

But it soon became clear that neither the design of the reactor nor the long trail of accidents and institutional cover-ups that preceded the disaster would be considered by the court. Although none of the accused was tortured to confess or brought to the stand to denounce counterrevolutionary activity, no one doubted the outcome of the proceedings: it effectively became one of the final show trials in the history of the Soviet Union.

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.

The three Chernobyl reactors—along with the twelve other RBMK-1000 units operating elsewhere in the USSR—had all been subjected to the extensive technical refit proposed in the secret Politburo resolution the previous July.

In what amounted to a tacit admission of the designers’ culpability in the accident, each RBMK was now fueled with more highly enriched uranium; modified with scores of extra control rods, which reduced the positive void coefficient; and featured a faster and more effective emergency shutdown system. The authorities revised instruction programs for reactor operators and made money available to build computer simulators to prepare them for accident scenarios. Yet little had really changed: more than a year after the disaster, the Politburo received a report showing that Soviet atomic power stations continued to be bedeviled by bad construction, poor staff discipline—and hundreds of minor accidents.

The health minister said that they had not discovered a single case of injury in the general population due to radiation. “One must say definitely,” he told the assembled delegates, “that we can today be certain there are no effects of the Chernobyl accident on human health.” But the citizens of the Soviet Union no longer trusted their scientists.

Slowly at first, but then with gathering momentum, the Soviet public began to discover how deeply it had been misled—not only about the accident and its consequences but also about the ideology and identity upon which their society was founded. The accident and the government’s inability to protect the population from its consequences finally shattered the illusion that the USSR was a global superpower armed with technology that led the world. And, as the state’s attempts to conceal the truth of what had happened came to light, even the most faithful citizens of the Soviet Union faced the realization that their leaders were corrupt and that the Communist dream was a sham.

Early in December 1991, in a national referendum called by the parliament in Kiev four months earlier, the Ukrainian people voted to declare independence from the USSR, and Mikhail Gorbachev lost the battle to hold together the union of the twelve remaining Soviet republics.

Every one of the investigators behind the report now agreed that the fatal power surge that destroyed the reactor had begun with the entry of the rods into its core. “Thus the Chernobyl accident comes within the standard pattern of most severe accidents in the world. It begins with an accumulation of small breaches of the regulations. . . . These produce a set of undesirable properties and occurrences that, when taken separately, do not seem to be particularly dangerous, but finally an initiating event occurs that, in this particular case, was the subjective actions of the personnel that allowed the potentially destructive and dangerous qualities of the reactor to be released.” Steinberg recognized that the origins of the accident lay with those who had designed the reactor and the secret, incestuous bureaucracy that had allowed it to go into operation. But he concluded that it was no longer constructive to allocate blame—whether with “those who hang a rifle on the wall, aware that it is loaded, or those who inadvertently pull the trigger.”

IAEA experts revealed at last the true magnitude of the technical cover-up surrounding the causes of the disaster: the long history of previous RBMK accidents, the dangerous design of the reactor, its instability, and the way its operators had been misled about its behavior. In dense scientific detail, it described the inherent problems of the positive void coefficient and the fatal consequences of the control rod “tip” effect.