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

by Adam Higginbotham

Over the next thirty years, the nuclear empire of the newly formulated Ministry of Medium Machine Building expanded with ferocious speed, in a gallop toward Armageddon that spared little time for safety. The price of progress was paid by unfortunate reactor technicians and irradiated submariners who one by one fell in their traces before receiving clandestine burials or being sent for examination in Moscow at Guskova’s department in Hospital Number Six. The accidents themselves remained secret, and, afterward, those patients who survived were forbidden from disclosing the true cause of the illnesses that would dog them for the rest of their lives. But Guskova and her colleagues gathered an awful bounty of clinical information about the impact of radioactivity on human beings. Alarmed by the refusal of Sredmash to acknowledge the dangers inherent in the breakneck development of the atomic power industry, in 1970 she completed a book that described the possible consequences of a serious accident at a civilian nuclear power plant. But when she presented the manuscript to the deputy health minister of the USSR, he threw it furiously across his office and forbade her from publishing it. The following year, she codified her clinical findings from her years of treatment in the book Radiation Sickness in Man, for which she was awarded the Lenin Prize.