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

by Adam Higginbotham

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.