To one of the two specialists, Alexander Kalugin, who had dedicated his career to the RBMK project, it all seemed chillingly familiar. 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
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