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

by Adam Higginbotham

General Tarakanov had divided the rooftops according to their height and level of contamination. He named each area after a woman in his life: Area K (Katya), where the gamma fields reached 1,000 roentgen; Area N (Natasha), up to 2,000 roentgen; and, finally, Area M (for Masha, the general’s older sister).

perhaps by the heat of the explosion, but otherwise intact. Around them, levels of radiation reached as much as 10,000 roentgen an hour: enough for a fatal dose in less than three minutes.

The head of the Kurchatov Institute pointed out the inconvenient physics of Slavsky’s approach: the continuing decay heat of the nuclear fuel remaining inside the reactor building made sealing it up impractical, if not impossible.

But the often middle-aged partizans were perceived as ignorant, unskilled, and expendable. They were thrown into the front line wherever necessary to perform manual tasks in high-radiation zones, one platoon after another. These men caught their maximum dose in a matter of hours—or minutes—before being sent home and replaced with more cannon fodder.

By the middle of the summer, a stupendous one thousand cubic meters of concrete—twelve thousand tonnes—was being churned out every twenty-four hours by the Sredmash plants.

Capable of lifting almost twenty times the load of an ordinary crane, they were used to install huge prefabricated steel forms, which were backfilled with still more concrete, entombing the escarpment of highly radioactive debris that had tumbled from the northern side of the reactor building. This became the “Cascade Wall,” which rose in a series of terraces—four colossal steps, each fifty meters long and twelve meters high—like the temple of a vengeful prehistoric god.

If brought too close, the engines of the concrete pumps guttered and died, and the dials of the dosimetrists’ equipment went haywire, like compass needles in a magnetic field. It was a phenomenon the experts could never satisfactorily explain.

There, in compartment 217/2 on mark +6, it encountered a gamma field so hot that the instrument reached its maximum reading and then—its mechanism overwhelmed—burned out. Whatever lay inside was stupendously radioactive and represented a possible clue to the location of the hundreds of tonnes of lost fuel. Yet anyone entering the blackness of corridor 217/2 to find out what it was risked absorbing a lethal dose of gamma radiation in minutes, or seconds.

The lecturers back in Moscow might tell you that radiation has no odor or taste, he explained, but they’ve never been to Chernobyl. Intense gamma fields of 100 roentgen an hour and above—on the threshold for inducing acute radiation syndrome—caused such extensive ionization of the air that it left a distinctive aroma, like that after a lightning storm; if you smell ozone, his colleague said, run.

The radiation was so intense that afterward it became visible on film, seeping into Kostin’s cameras, rising through the sprockets, leaving ghostly traces at the foot of his pictures, like high-water marks after a flood.

But there was heavy radiation everywhere, and, in certain rooms, they could feel it popping against their eyeballs, like an invisible spray; in others, they found that Sredmash had installed speakers relaying a constant, low-frequency roar—an aural warning not to linger.

After that, work moved quickly: with the poisonous maw of the reactor finally covered, the Sredmash teams installed a ventilation system to stabilize the atmosphere inside the Sarcophagus and connected a network of radiation- and temperature-monitoring devices to a freshly decontaminated room nearby filled with computer equipment. There was still no sign of the missing 180 tonnes of uranium from the reactor core, and Academician Legasov and the other scientists remained concerned about the possibility of a new chain reaction. So inside the new structure the Sredmash engineers also installed a sprinkler system, supervised by the Kurchatov Institute, designed to spray the ruins with neutron-absorbing boron carbide solution and coat everything with a film to suppress any new criticality as soon as it started. Finally, the roof and windows of the Unit Four machine hall were layered with steel plates, and the western end of the reactor hall was shored up with a row of ten massive steel buttresses, each forty-five meters high.

It was an extraordinary achievement, a technical triumph in the face of horrifying conditions, and a new pinnacle of Soviet gigantomania: the engineers boasted that the structure contained 440,000 cubic meters of concrete, 600,000 cubic meters of gravel, and 7,700 tonnes of metal. The costs had risen to more than 1 million rubles—or $1.5 million—a day.

The document formally commissioning the Sarcophagus received its final signature on November 30, 1986, just seven months and four days after the first explosions tore through Reactor Number Four.

In September, Dr. Angelina Guskova announced that a total of thirty-one men and women were now dead as a direct result of the explosion and fire in Unit Four of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. This number would henceforth be regarded as the official death toll of the accident. Anything higher was treated as evidence of bourgeois Western propaganda.

The body of pump operator Valery Khodemchuk, killed immediately by the blast or by falling debris, remained buried beneath the wreckage of the reactor hall; his colleague Vladimir Shashenok, who had died as a result of physical trauma and thermal burns a few hours later in the Pripyat hospital, had been laid to rest in the graveyard of a small village near the power station. Since then, twenty-nine more victims—operators, firemen, and security staff—had succumbed to the effects of acute radiation syndrome in the radiology wards of Kiev and the specialized clinic in Moscow. Of the thirteen patients who had been treated with bone marrow transplants by Robert Gale and the Soviet specialists, all but one had died—so many that Guskova would eventually dismiss the technique as useless for managing ARS.

But the Politburo task force in Moscow also requisitioned an additional 13,000 newly completed apartments in Kiev and other cities across Ukraine—snatching them from under the noses of families who had spent years on waiting lists—and handed the keys to evacuees from Pripyat.

Unit Three remained so contaminated that the plant’s chief engineer and specialists from the Kurchatov Institute all advised that it would be too expensive—and cost too many operators their health—to recommission it. But their objections were overruled, and the third Chernobyl reactor was scheduled for reconnection to the grid in the second quarter of 1987.

The commission even issued orders to resume the construction work on Reactors Five and Six, which—although it was close to completion—had been stopped dead on the night of the accident.

The few awards granted to plant workers were processed in total secrecy.

The trial of Viktor Brukhanov and the other five men who stood accused of causing the disaster at the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station began on July 7, 1987.

Collectively, the six men stood accused of negligence in conducting a dangerous and unsanctioned experiment on Reactor Number Four of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station, resulting in the total destruction of the unit, the release of radioactive fallout, the evacuation of 116,000 individuals from two separate cities and dozens of villages, and the hospitalization of more than two hundred victims of radiation sickness, of whom at least thirty were already dead.

The court also heard that the Chernobyl plant had suffered a long history of accidents that had not been addressed or even reported and that what had been regarded as one of the best and most advanced nuclear installations in the USSR had, in fact, operated constantly on the edge of catastrophe as a result of its lax and incompetent management. There was no mention of any faults in the design of the RBMK-1000 reactor.

On Tuesday, July 29, another fiercely hot day, Judge Brize delivered his verdict. All six men were found guilty: Yuri Laushkin was given two years in prison; Alexander Kovalenko, three; and Boris Rogozhkin, five. All three were taken into custody in the courtroom. Brukhanov, Fomin, and Dyatlov each received the maximum sentence: ten years’ confinement in a penal colony. Every one of them remained stoic except Fomin, who wept in the dock. Valentina Brukhanov fainted. Afterward, one of the investigators told her, “Now you can terminate your marriage at any time.”

As the end of 1987 approached, the new atomgrad for the Chernobyl workers and their families in Slavutych was almost ready to begin receiving its first residents, due to arrive from both the workers’ shift camp on the Dnieper and from apartments where they had been living in Kiev.

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.

It was only then that Legasov had finally recognized the true scope of the decay at the heart of the nuclear state: the culture of secrecy and complacency, the arrogance and negligence, and the shoddy standards of design and construction. He saw that both the RBMK reactor and its pressurized water counterpart, the VVER, were inherently dangerous.

It was this profound failure of the Soviet social experiment, and not merely a handful of reckless reactor operators, that Legasov believed was to blame for the catastrophe that had bloomed from Reactor Number Four.

For the final rulers of the USSR, the most destructive forces unleashed by the explosion of Reactor Number Four were not radiological but political and economic.

After the accident, frustrated and angry, he confronted the need for truly drastic change and plunged deeply into perestroika in a desperate bid to rescue the Socialist experiment before it was too late.

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.

‘Glasnost wins after all’ is the way we might begin this story,” the correspondent said, standing in front of multicolored maps showing that the most heavily radioactive hot spots lay as far as three hundred kilometers from the station, across the border in Belarus, in the districts of Gomel and Mogilev, where witnesses had watched black rain fall in April and May 1986.

The land was so poisoned that the Belarusian government estimated another hundred thousand people would have to be evacuated, and planned to request the equivalent of $16 billion in further aid from Moscow.

But environmental issues were already becoming a focal point for nascent independence movements in Latvia and Estonia and would soon provide a platform for Zelenyi Svit, the Green World opposition party in Ukraine.

In October 1989 the newspaper Sovietskaya Rossiya reported that hundreds of tonnes of pork and beef contaminated with radioactive cesium had been secretly mixed into sausages and sold to unsuspecting shoppers throughout the Soviet Union in the years since 1986.

The Soviet economy, after decades of spending on the Cold War arms race, was now staggering under the burden of the botched market reforms of Gorbachev’s perestroika, the high price of withdrawing and demobilizing troops from Afghanistan, and the collapse in the international oil market. And the financial cost of Chernobyl—the irradiation and destruction of equipment, the evacuations, the medical care, and the loss of factories, farmland, and millions of kilowatts of electricity—continued to rise.

The price for the construction and operation of the Sarcophagus alone was 4 billion rubles, or almost $5.5 billion. One estimate put the eventual bill for all aspects of the disaster at more than $128 billion—equivalent to the total Soviet defense budget for 1989.

In July 1989 Gorbachev gave a speech signaling to the people of the Soviet satellite countries of Eastern Europe—East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and the rest—that he would not intervene if they chose to unseat their leaders or even break with the brotherhood of Socialism altogether. Four months later, the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet empire began to unravel.

Within the borders of the USSR, ethnic division and opposition to Moscow rule gathered pace amid chronic shortages and an imploding economy.

In Lithuania, six thousand people encircled the Ignalina nuclear power plant, where the two new RBMK-1500 reactors had become a target of nationalist anger, triggering the start of protests that soon led the th...

In Minsk, a reported eighty thousand people marched on the headquarters of the Belarusian government, demanding to be relocated from contaminated territory. “Our leaders have been lying to us for three years,” one participant told a Soviet reporter. ...

In Ukraine, the Soviet Ministry of Energy’s continuing construction of new nuclear power stations had become a focal point of regional opposition to Moscow.

When Kiev called for an end to work on the controversial plant in Crimea, building went on regardless—until the local authorities sanctioned strikes and cut off funding for the project at the state bank.

On March 1, 1990, the Supreme Soviet of Ukraine passed a series of sweeping environmental protections for the republic, among them an agreement to close down all three of the remaining ...

On August 2, republican legislators placed a moratorium on the construction of any new nuclear plants in Ukraine. In Moscow, the Ministry of Energy was forced to consider who would control the Soviet Union’s network of nuclear plants if its Union...

In the Exclusion Zone, hundreds of thousands of tonnes of debris from the reactor, radioactive soil, vegetation, furniture, cars, and equipment had now been interred in roughly eight hundred waste disposal sites, known as mogilniki, or “burial grounds”—concrete-lined trenches, p...

But the warren of nuclear dumps had been hurriedly excavated and poorly maintained. Nobody had bothered to keep track of what had been buried where, and by the beginning of 1990...

The continued mobilizations created a public outcry, and, at last, the Soviet military authorities decided to stop sending troops to the zone. In December 1990 the liquidation effectively came to a halt.

By the end, it was almost impossible to calculate the total number of liquidators who served in the forbidden zone—in part because the figures were falsified by the Soviet government. By the beginning of 1991, as many as six hundred thousand men and women from across the Soviet Union had taken part in cleanup work in the radioactive netherworld surrounding the site of Reactor Number Four and would be officially recognized as Chernobyl liquidators.

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.