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

by Adam Higginbotham

No formal plans, either civilian or military, had ever been devised to clean up after a nuclear disaster on such a scale. Even by the middle of May, there still weren’t enough plant specialists available to supervise an improvised operation, and there was disagreement over setting the maximum dose of radiation that workers could receive safely. Naval doctors, whose expertise had been earned the hard way, through decades of accidents in the close quarters of nuclear submarines, insisted on the Ministry of Defense standard of 25 rem. But both the Soviet Health Ministry and the head of the chemical troops, General Vladimir Pikalov, wanted twice that: 50 rem, the level prescribed for his soldiers in the event of war. 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.