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

by Adam Higginbotham

Eventually, rudimentary reconnaissance began with the help of a miniature plastic tank bought by one of the scientists for 12 rubles (the equivalent, then, of $5) from the toy store Detsky Mir—Children’s World—in Kiev. The toy was controlled by a battery-operated box on the end of a long cable and modified to carry a dosimeter, a thermometer, and a powerful flashlight. The scientists used it like a radiosensitive hunting dog which ran ten meters ahead of them and warned of imminent danger. Although fully aware of the perils surrounding them, the members of the Kurchatov task force were urged on by the gravity of their search for the missing fuel—necessary to guarantee that a new chain reaction could not begin—but also by scientific curiosity. Inside the Sarcophagus, they were explorers on the frontier of an alien world, where they found gamma radiation fields scaling heights no one had witnessed before and strange new materials forged at temperatures of more than 10,000 degrees centigrade in the crucible of a disintegrating nuclear reactor.