At 2:00 a.m., Scherbina telephoned his Party boss in Moscow, Vladimir Dolgikh—the Central Committee secretary responsible for heavy industry and energy—and requested permission to abandon the city. By the time the scientists finally crawled into their beds in the hotel, a few hours before daybreak, Scherbina had also reached a decision about the burning reactor: to smother it by bombarding it from the air, using Antoshkin’s helicopters. But the members of the government commission had still reached no conclusions about what combination of materials would work, or how, exactly, such an
...more
