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

by Adam Higginbotham

It was another hour before the chief of radiation safety arrived. Vorobyev stood by and listened to the man’s report in disbelief: his measurements revealed that radiation levels were indeed elevated, but they were a mere 13 microroentgen an hour. He claimed to already have performed a rough analysis and found that the radionuclides in the air were principally noble gases, which would quickly dissipate and therefore posed little threat to the population; there really wasn’t much to be concerned about. This assessment was apparently what Brukhanov had been hoping to hear. He stood and, looking around the room, declared darkly, “Some people here understand nothing and are stoking panic.” He left no doubt whom he was talking about. Yet Vorobyev knew that it was simply impossible to approach the station from any direction without passing through radiation fields tens of thousands of times higher than the radiation safety team reported. Every word he’d just heard must therefore be a lie—but his confidence in his own expertise and equipment had been shaken.