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

by Adam Higginbotham

Three weeks went by before they finally agreed to the lower limit, by which time many men had been dangerously overexposed. Even then, the 25 rem maximum proved difficult to monitor and was often deliberately disregarded by unit commanders.

The civilian nuclear industry specialists arriving from other atomic plants across the USSR to help in the cleanup were horrified by the lack of preparation around them. They found too few trained dosimetrists to effectively monitor their radiation exposure.

Such tasks exposed the liquidators to their maximum allowed annual doses of radiation—often in a matter of seconds.

But long before the project was completed on June 24, temperature readings from Prianichnikov’s sensors had declined yet further, and fear of the China Syndrome abated at last. The heat exchanger, with its intricate network of stainless steel tubing, ten kilometers of control cabling, its two hundred thermocouples and temperature sensors layered in concrete and sandwiched beneath a layer of graphite blocks—the result of weeks of frenzied work by hundreds of miners, soldiers, construction workers, electricians, and engineers—was never even turned on.

Whether rising from the roadsides in the slipstream of endless columns of speeding trucks and concrete mixers or whirling in the downdraft of the heavy transport helicopters, the dust carried radiation throughout the zone. Lifted into the sky by the breeze, microscopic radioactive particles a few microns across traveled with insidious ease, settling nearby or brought down as heavy fallout a hundred kilometers away by rain.

The threat to the population from the radiation was twofold: external, from the fine irradiated dust and debris on the ground around them; and internal, from radioisotopes poisoning the food chain through the soil, crops, and farm animals.

By the end of May, more than five thousand square kilometers of land—an area bigger than Delaware—had become dangerously contaminated.

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.”

But General Secretary Gorbachev was determined to smother the fiasco as quickly as possible. The USSR had been the first in the world to construct a nuclear power station, he told the Politburo. Now it must be the first to build a coffin for one.

The following afternoon, in an interview broadcast on Soviet Central Television, the head of the government commission, Ivan Silayev, outlined plans for the reactor’s final resting place: a tomb in which the ruins of Unit Four would be interred forever. It would be “a huge container,” he explained, “which will enable us to secure the burial of everything that remains . . . of this entire accident.” The resulting structure would be monumental, built on a scale to last a hundred years or more, and, before the cameras, Silayev gave it a name resonant with history and ritual: sarkofag. Sarcophagus.

On Saturday, May 10, Ryzhkov learned that a total of almost 9,500 people had already been hospitalized in connection with the accident, at least 4,000 of them in the previous forty-eight hours alone. More than half of that number were children, 26 of whom had been diagnosed with radiation sickness.

While those with severe radiation sickness and burns were to be described accordingly—“acute radiation sickness from cumulative radiation exposure”—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.

long as it was cheap and available in enormous quantities. As the summer wore on, everything from PVA glue to barda—a pulp made from beetroot and waste products from timber processing—was shipped into the rail yards on the perimeter of the zone and sprayed from beneath the helicopters in thick, dark showers.

Thickly dusted with beta-emitting radionuclides that exposed them to massive doses of radiation—in some places, up to 10,000 rads—almost forty square kilometers of woodland had been killed outright almost immediately.

they had entered the “Red Forest”; even shielded by armor plate and bulletproof glass, the needles of their radiometers began to swing wildly amid the extraordinary levels of contamination. The forest posed such a threat that it, too, would soon be mown down by combat engineers and buried in concrete-lined tombs.

become sources of ionizing radiation, the work was Sisyphean. Even the most gentle summer breeze recirculated dust carrying alpha- and beta-emitting particles into the air. Every rain shower washed radiation from the clouds and flushed more long-lived nuclear isotopes into the ponds and streams. The arrival of autumn would send radioactive leaves skittering across the ground. The Pripyat marshes—the largest swamp in Europe—had become a massive sponge for strontium and cesium, and the vast stretches of agricultural land proved too large to be scraped clean even by squadrons of earth-moving machines.

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.

within seventy-two hours, their task was complete: Protsenko’s beloved atomgrad was enclosed behind a twenty-strand fence 2 meters high and 9.6 kilometers in circumference, patrolled by armed guards. Soon afterward, a centralized electronic alarm system, devised by the Special Technical Division of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, was installed inside the perimeter to keep intruders out of the city.

By June 24, they had completed a 195-kilometer alarmed fence around the entire Exclusion Zone. Pripyat and the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station now lay at the center of a vast depopulated area of 2,600 square kilometers, patrolled by soldiers from the Interior Ministry and accessible only to holders of a government-issued pass.

The government commission calculated that cleaning the city to make it habitable once more would require a dedicated force of 160,000 men. The price of such an operation would be unimaginable. “Forget it,” the physicists told her. “You will never return to Pripyat.”

The investigation into the causes of the accident in Unit Four of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant that began in the early hours of April 26 developed along two parallel paths. The first, the criminal inquiry, escalated in scope and importance over the course of the day, as the impact of the disaster slowly became apparent.

He ordered the creation of a special investigative group within the Second Department of the prosecutor’s office of the Soviet Union, the division dedicated to crimes committed within the state’s closed military and nuclear installations. The entire investigation was henceforth classified as top secret.

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.

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 Number Four, it seemed all too possible.

On the afternoon of Monday, April 28, a telegram arrived at the Politburo in Moscow: CAUSE OF ACCIDENT UNRULY AND UNCONTROLLABLE POWER SURGE IN THE REACTOR. Yet the question of how this power surge had been triggered remained unresolved. The search for appropriate scapegoats began immediately.

Meanwhile, the investigators from the prosecutor’s office and the KGB continued to walk the wards of Hospital Number Six, interrogating the engineers and operators of the plant even as they began to lapse into comas and die.

When Sergei Yankovsky came to interrogate the director about his role in the accident, he found him in the infirmary. “Damn it,” Brukhanov told him, “I trusted Fomin. I thought it was an electrical test. I didn’t think it would turn out like this.”

In his absence, the minister made arrangements to have Brukhanov permanently removed from his position as director of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

“The accident was caused by a combination of highly improbable technical factors,” Andranik Petrosyants, the chairman of the Soviet State Committee for the Utilization of Atomic Energy, wrote in a statement published by the Los Angeles Times.

An examination at Hospital Number Six revealed the toxic fingerprint of the reactor deep within Legasov’s body: doctors found fission products, including iodine 131, cesium 134 and 137, tellurium 132, and ruthenium 103, in his hair, airways, and lungs. His health shattered, he suffered from headaches, nausea, digestive problems, and chronic insomnia. Nevertheless, Legasov threw himself into collating material for the report, which was compiled from the work of dozens of specialists and hundreds of documents.

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.

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.

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 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.

By the end of the summer, the investigation of the reactor designers would be broken off into a separate criminal case, while that of the plant operators gained momentum.

“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.”

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.

Gorbachev was furious. His anger and frustration had been building for weeks as the catastrophe bloomed. He had struggled to find accurate information about what was happening, and his personal reputation in the West—as a reformer, a man one could do business with—had been tarnished by the fumbled attempts at a cover-up. He now accused Slavsky and Aleksandrov of presiding over a secret state and deliberately concealing from him the truth about why the accident had happened in the first place. “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.”

The representatives of the Ministry of Energy admitted they had known that there were problems with the reactor, but Aleksandrov and Slavsky had nevertheless insisted on constantly expanding the nuclear power program.

At one point, Meshkov unwisely insisted that the reactor was still perfectly safe if the regulations were followed precisely. “You astonish me,” Gorbachev replied.

“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.

In it, the Party leaders faulted Brukhanov and the chief engineer, Fomin, for tolerating rule breaking and “criminal negligence” inside the plant and for failing to safely prepare for the test during which the accident took place. They criticized the Ministry of Energy for its slipshod management, neglect of staff training, and for becoming complacent about the number of equipment accidents inside the nuclear plants under its jurisdiction. Finally, they attacked the state nuclear regulatory authority for its lack of effective oversight. But the Politburo resolution also plainly recognized the true origins of the accident that destroyed Reactor Number Four.

The catastrophe occurred “due to deficiencies in the construction of the RBMK reactor, which does not fully meet safety demands,” it stated. Furthermore, although Efim Slavsky was well aware of these shortcomings and received numerous warnings, he had done nothing to address the failings of the reactor design.

The resolution instructed the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Defense to equip and retrain troops and firefighters to deal with radiological emergencies and decontamination work.

Finally—in an implicit acknowledgment of all that was wrong with the reactor itself—the Party leaders decreed that all existing RBMK plants should be modified to bring them into line with existing safety standards. Plans to build further RBMK reactors were terminated immediately.

Yet those at the top of the nuclear industry, who had supervised the project from the start, escaped overt censure almost entirely. Slavsky—who, by now, was overseeing the construction of the Sarcophagus, intended to entomb the failed reactor forever—and Aleksandrov were merely reminded of their commitment to ensuring the safety of the peaceful atom. Nikolai Dollezhal’s name wasn’t mentioned at all.

The following day, officers of the Sixth Directorate of the KGB circulated a list of subjects relating to the Chernobyl accident regarded as classified to varying degrees. Covering two sheets of typescript, the document listed twenty-six numbered items. At the top, marked Sekretno—“Secret”—was item one: “Information revealing the real reasons for the accident in Unit Four.”

There was no mention of any design faults in the reactor.

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.”