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April 10 - April 13, 2023
By 9:00 a.m., hundreds of members of the militsia had been mobilized on the streets of Pripyat, and all roads into the town had been cut off by police roadblocks. But as the city’s leaders—including Protsenko, Deputy Mayor Esaulov, the Pripyat civil defense chief, and the directors of schools and enterprises—gathered for an emergency meeting at the White House, elsewhere in Pripyat the day began exactly as it would on any warm Saturday morning.
At 10:15 a.m., a solitary armored car—the lead radiation reconnaissance scout vehicle of the 427th Red Banner Mechanized Regiment of the Civil Defense Forces of the USSR—swung slowly left off the Kiev road toward Pripyat.
By sunrise on Sunday, the general was in command of a disaster-response aviation task force of eighty helicopters, awaiting orders at four different airfields around the plant, with still more being redirected toward Chernobyl from airfields across the Soviet Union.
Legasov estimated that the reactor had contained 2,500 tonnes of graphite blocks, which had caught fire and already reached a temperature of more than 1,000 degrees centigrade.
Even accounting for the material that had been thrown from the core by the explosion, if his calculations were correct and what remained burned unchecked, the blaze could roar on for more than two months—releasing a column of radionuclides into the air that would spread contamination across the USSR and circle the globe for years to come.
Ordinary firefighting techniques were useless. The graphite and nuclear fuel were burning at such high temperatures that neither water nor foam could possibly quench them: so hot that water would not only evaporate instantly into steam, further distributing radioactive aerosols in a cloud of toxic vapor, but also could separate into its constituent elements, oxygen and hydrogen, creating the possibility of a further explosion. And besides, the colossal fields of gamma radiation surrounding the reactor made it impossible to approach by land or water for prolonged periods.
Far from falling, as the Ministry of Health officials had hoped, the level of contamination on the streets of Pripyat was increasing. There was no question in the minds of the civil defense chief and his regional deputy: the population of the city was in danger not only from the radionuclides continuing to drift from the reactor but also from the fallout already accumulated on the ground. They must be evacuated.
To even the most recalcitrant Soviet eye, it was clear that Unit Four of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant would never again generate a single watt of electricity. In the crisp light of the new day, it was obvious that the reactor had been completely destroyed. The roof and upper walls of the reactor hall had gone, and inside Legasov recognized the upper lid of the reactor, thrown aside by what must have been an enormous explosion and resting at a steep angle on top of the vault. He could see graphite blocks and large pieces of the fuel assemblies scattered across the roof of the machine hall
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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 Hou...
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In all, there were some 51,300 men, women, and children in Pripyat, of whom more than 4,000 were station operators and construction workers expected to remain behind to take care of essential services in the city and work at the power plant itself.
By midmorning on Sunday, the bus stops of Kiev were crowded with frustrated passengers waiting in vain for scheduled services that would never show up.
Lifted skyward on a pillar of fierce heat from the shattered core, convoyed by obliging winds, the invisible cloud of radiation had traveled thousands of kilometers since its escape from the carcass of Unit Four.
Unleashed in the violence of the explosion, it had soared aloft into the still night air, until it reached an altitude of around 1,500 meters, where it was snatched by powerful wind currents blowing from the south and southeast, pulled away at speeds of between fifty and a hundred kilometers an hour, and flew northwest across the USSR toward the Baltic Sea.
Late that night, the plume encountered rain clouds over Sweden, and the moisture in them began to scavenge and concentrate the contaminants it contained. When the rain finally fell from the clouds, around the city of Gävle, two hours’ drive north of Stockholm, it had become heavily radioactive.
As the deputy prime minister of the USSR, Aliyev was one of the most powerful men in the Soviet Union. Once the head of the Azerbaijani KGB, and one of only twelve voting members of the Politburo, he held joint responsibility for making the most profound decisions affecting the course of the empire.
Not one word about Chernobyl had appeared in the Soviet press or been reported on radio or television.
For Gorbachev, this was a sudden and unexpected test of the new openness and transparent government he had promised the Party conference just a month earlier; since then, glasnost had been nothing more than a slogan.
And by the time they took a vote, Ligachev had apparently prevailed: the Politburo resolved to take the traditional approach.
Radionuclides continued to boil from the smoldering remains of Reactor Number Four, as the helicopter pilots of the Seventeenth Airborne Army attempted to cover the reactor and bring the graphite fire raging beneath them under control. Yet the Soviet authorities assured the Swedes that they had no information about any kind of nuclear accident within the USSR.
Chebrikov, the KGB chief, disagreed: his sources saw no indication that the radiation situation was improving. In fact, they were facing disaster. Further evacuations in the area were already under way, there were almost two hundred victims of the accident hospitalized in Moscow, and Vladimir Scherbitsky, the Ukrainian premier, had reported outbreaks of panic in his republic.
Everyone present agreed that they must seal up the reactor completely as quickly as possible. To take control of the situation, they moved to set up a special seven-person operations group, headed by Prime Minister Ryzhkov and including Dolgikh, Chebrikov, the minister of the interior, and the minister of defense. The group, granted emergency powers to command all Party and ministerial authorities throughout the Union, would coordinate the disaster response from Moscow, placing all the resources of the centralized state at the disposal of the government commission in Chernobyl.
Meanwhile, the radioactive cloud had continued north and spread west to envelop all of Scandinavia—before the weather stagnated and the contamination drifted south over Poland, forming a wedge that moved down into Germany. Heavy rain then deposited a dense band of radiation that reached all the way from Czechoslovakia into southeastern France.
Using just three helicopters, they had managed to dump ten tonnes of boron and eighty tonnes of sand into Unit Four by nightfall.
the flight engineers continued to heft the bags into Unit Four by hand and remained almost entirely unprotected from the gamma rays rising from the ruined building.
It was also clear that attempts to conceal the truth of what had happened from the international community seemed only to have made matters worse. Western diplomats and reporters were deluging Moscow with protests and questions about the nature and proportions of the accident.
Amounting to a gargantuan dirty bomb formed of more than five thousand tonnes of intensely radioactive graphite and five hundred tonnes of nuclear fuel, such an explosion could exterminate whatever remained alive inside the Special Zone—and hurl enough fallout into the atmosphere to render a large swath of Europe uninhabitable for a hundred years.
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.
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.
In his headquarters in Chernobyl town, Silayev adopted a typically Soviet approach to the crisis: rather than choose a single course of action to halt the possible meltdown, he gave orders for dynamic action and patriotic sacrifice on all fronts at once.
Since then, Soviet dissembling about the accident had metastasized into a global diplomatic and environmental crisis.
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.
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.
That day, radioactive rain fell on Japan before being carried eastward by the jet stream—out across the Pacific at an altitude of 9,000 meters and a speed of 160 kilometers an hour—toward the coasts of Alaska and California.
“Where they are now is unknown.” The civil defense and the Ministry of Health had failed utterly in their responsibilities. There had been no clarity or plan. People leaving the evacuation zone had not even received blood tests for radiation exposure.
So far, more than 1,800 people, including 445 children, had been hospitalized; more were expected.
The scientists had presented him with two possible prognoses for the molten fuel currently scorching its way toward the basement of Unit Four. The first was that the heat of radioactive decay could gradually dissipate on its own; according to their calculations, that might take months. The second scenario, presented by Academician Legasov and old man Aleksandrov, was much darker. In addition to Velikhov’s fear that, reaching 2,800 degrees, the collision of the molten fuel with the water of the suppression pool could result in a blast of steam that would destroy the remains of Unit Four and
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When they arrived on the scene, they found it eerily silent, deserted except for the skeleton staff of operators tending to Units One, Two, and Three.
Finally, on Tuesday, May 6—ten days after the crisis began—the Ukrainian health minister appeared on local radio and TV to warn Kievans to take precautions against radiation: to remain indoors, close their windows, and protect themselves against drafts.
By Wednesday, crowds of frantic Kievans were fighting for tickets out of the city, struggling to flee in numbers not seen since the German blitzkrieg swept east in 1941.
In Moscow, the Western fact-finding team from the International Atomic Energy Agency—the director general, former Swedish diplomat Hans Blix, and the American Morris Rosen, director of nuclear safety—had been granted permission to see the plant in person and become the first officials from outside the Soviet Union to visit the scene. They were due to fly to Kiev on Thursday, May 8.
As he ran, one of the engineers couldn’t help himself, and looked back. He glimpsed a giant cone of something black and crumbling, mixed with fragments of concrete—material that had spilled into the passageway from the shattered building above. His tongue tingled with the metallic taste of liquid radiolysis.
The valves themselves were intact and labeled clearly: numbers 4GT-21 and 4GT-22 opened easily. A few moments later, Ananenko recognized the sound of the water gurgling from the suppression pools above their heads. By dawn on May 8, the imminent threat of a second catastrophic explosion from beneath the reactor had been averted. Soon afterward, an official in civilian clothes sought out Moose Zborovsky at his post in the bunker and handed him an envelope sent from the government commission. Inside he found 1,000 rubles in cash.
The scientists no longer saw themselves as cloistered academics working in the esoterica of pure physics, but as the only men standing between the ignorant fools in Chernobyl and a global disaster.
The head of the Clinical Department of Hospital Number Six was sixty-two-year-old Dr. Angelina Guskova. She had begun her career in radiation medicine more than three decades before, at the genesis of the Soviet nuclear weapons program.
Over the next thirty years, the nuclear empire of the newly formulated Ministry of Medium Machine Building expanded with ferocious speed, in a gallop toward Armageddon that spared little time for safety.
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.
By 1986, Guskova had spent more than ten years presiding over the largest radioactive injury clinic in the USSR. She had treated more than a thousand victims of severe radiation exposure and knew perhaps more than any other physician in the world about nuclear accidents.
The spirit of patriotic mass mobilization was boosted by the first detailed coverage of the accident appearing in the Soviet press, as the propaganda experts in the Kremlin finally found an angle on the catastrophe. Izvestia and Pravda published awestruck blow-by-blow accounts of the courageous sacrifice of the firefighters who helped battle the initial blaze, alongside portraits of the miners and subway workers busy tunneling beneath the ruins.
No formal plans, either civilian or military, had ever been devised to clean up after a nuclear disaster on such a scale.
