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

by Adam Higginbotham

at sometime before midnight, a functionary interrupted a meeting to tell Scherbina that General Secretary Gorbachev would be calling him shortly for a situation report. The deputy minister ordered the room cleared. As Sklyarov rose to leave, Scherbina stopped him. “No, no. Sit down,” he said. “Listen to what I’m going to say. Then you’re going to tell your superiors exactly the same thing.” The VCh—the scrambled high-frequency line, from Moscow—rang, and Scherbina answered. “There’s been an accident,” the deputy minister told Gorbachev. “Panic is total. Neither the Party organs, the secretary of the oblast, nor the rayon committees are here at present. I’m going to demand that the minister of energy restart all units. We’re going to take all measures to liquidate the accident.” Scherbina was silent for a few moments as Gorbachev spoke. At last, Scherbina said, “Okay,” and replaced the receiver in its cradle. He turned to Sklyarov. “Did you hear all that?” He had; he was appalled. “You can’t restore the reactor, because there is no reactor,” he said. “It no longer exists.” “You’re a panicker.” “I’ve seen it with my own eyes.” A few minutes later, the special telephone rang again. This time it was Scherbitsky, the Ukrainian Communist Party chief. Scherbina repeated to Scherbitsky what he’d just told Gorbachev: a can-do shock-work action plan of fantasy and denial. Then he handed the phone to Sklyarov. “He wants to talk to you. Just say what I was saying.” “I don’t agree with...

Alexander Esaulov

deputy chairman of the Pripyat city ispolkom—the equivalent of deputy mayor—Esaulov

By morning, ninety patients had been admitted. Among them were the men from Control Room Number Four: Senior Reactor Control Engineer Leonid Toptunov, Shift Foreman Alexander Akimov, and their dictatorial boss, Deputy Chief Engineer Anatoly Dyatlov.

Vladimir Shashenok, rescued from the wreckage of compartment 604 by his colleagues, had been one of the first to arrive. Burns and blisters covered his body, his rib cage was caved in, and his back appeared to be broken. And yet, as he was carried in, the nurse could see his lips moving; he was trying to speak. She leaned closer. “Get away from me—I’m from the reactor compartment,” he said. The nurses cut the shreds of filthy clothing from his skin and found him a bed in intensive care, but there was little they could do. By 6:00 a.m., Shashenok was dead.

Maria Protsenko

Protsenko was a small but formidable forty-year-old who wore her dark, curly hair cropped sensibly short, born in China to Sino-Russian parents, yet forged in the crucible of the USSR.

A graduate in architecture from the Institute of Roads and Transport in Ust-Kamenogorsk, Protsenko had been Pripyat’s chief architect for seven years, with her own office on the second floor of the city ispolkom. It was from there that she oversaw the execution of Pripyat’s new construction projects, with a profoundly un-Soviet eye for detail. Barred from Party membership by her Chinese birth, she brought an outsider’s zeal to her work. She roamed the streets with a ruler, checking on the quality of the concrete paneling in new apartment buildings. She chastised the construction workers for shoddy sidewalks: “Children will break their legs, and then how will you feel?” When persuasion wouldn’t work, she lashed them with invective. More than a few of the men were afraid of her.

“There has been an accident,” Malomuzh said, but offered no further information. “The conditions are being evaluated right now. When we know more details, we’ll let you know.” In the meantime, he explained, everything in Pripyat should carry on as usual. Children should stay at school; stores should remain open; the weddings planned that day should continue. Naturally, there were questions. Members of the Young Pioneers of School Number Three—1,500 children in all, part of the Communist equivalent of the Scouts—were due to assemble in the Palace of Culture that day. Could they proceed with the meeting? There was a children’s health run scheduled for the following day through the streets of the city. Should that go ahead, too? Malomuzh assured the school director that there was no need for a change of plans; everything should continue as normal. “And please do not panic,” he said. “Under no circumstances should you panic.”

Up on the second floor of the White House, a detachment of men found Maria Protsenko, who had maps of the city but no means to copy them. As photocopiers could be used to create samizdat materials, access to the few in the USSR was controlled tightly by the KGB. Protsenko sat down at her drawing board and began turning out schematics of the city as quickly as she could by hand.

From her desk in the White House, Maria Protsenko phoned home to tell her husband to vacuum and wash the floors of the apartment and make sure that when their fifteen-year-old daughter returned home from school she changed her clothes and showered. Yet when she called back two hours later, she found them both unflustered by her warnings. They were watching a movie together on TV, and her daughter hadn’t even bothered to wash: “When the movie finishes, I’ll go,” she said.

Even those who had seen the developing catastrophe firsthand found it hard to reconcile the destruction at the plant with the carefree atmosphere on the streets of Pripyat.

But at the plant, the nuclear engineers on the morning shift recognized all too clearly the danger the city was facing and tried to warn their families. Some managed to reach them by telephone and told them to stay indoors. Knowing that the KGB was monitoring the calls, one tried to use coded language to prepare his wife to escape the city. Another persuaded Director Brukhanov to let him go home for lunch and then packed his family into the car to take them to safety, only to be turned back at the end of Lenina Prospekt by an armed militsia officer manning a roadblock. The city had been sealed off. No one would be permitted to leave without official clearance.

Prianichnikov suspected the accident was a catastrophic failure of the reactor, but without a dosimeter, he found it hard to convince his neighbors of such a heretical idea. He couldn’t make them listen, and—as someone whose father and grandfather had both died at the hands of the Party—he knew that it could be dangerous to try too hard.

“Natasha,” Alexander said, “close all the windows. Throw away all the food that has been out. And wash everything in the apartment.” He couldn’t say much else. The KGB was there, interrogating everybody. But the couple agreed to meet the same way the following day. By now, other women had managed to smuggle vodka, cigarettes, and folk remedies to their husbands, some even passing them up through the hospital windows, tying bags to the end of a rope. Alexander said there were a few things he’d like Natalia to bring him: a towel, a toothbrush, toothpaste—and something to read. These requests were the normal things anyone might want to have in the hospital. It seemed the panic was over. Natalia felt quite sure that now, as soon as whatever had gone wrong at the plant was resolved, everything would be okay. She went home and did everything just as her husband had said.

Still more patients were arriving all the time, displaying the symptoms of radiation sickness. After some debate, the director of the hospital made the decision to distribute to everyone in Pripyat stable iodine—a prophylactic against iodine 131, the radioisotope that represents a particular threat to children. But there weren’t enough iodine pills in the dispensary, and it was imperative that the crisis remain secret. So Esaulov used his Party contacts in the neighboring districts of Chernobyl and Polesia to quietly appeal for help. By nightfall, a total of twenty-three thousand doses of potassium iodide had arrived, and preparations were under way to deliver them door-to-door to apartments across the city.

By nightfall on Saturday, the telephone lines and the hardwired radio speaker boxes in every apartment in Pripyat had fallen silent. The boxes—radio-tochki, or “radio points”—hung on the walls of homes throughout the Soviet Union, piping in propaganda just like gas and electricity, over three channels: all-Union, republic, and city. Broadcasts began every morning at six with the Soviet anthem and the cheerless greeting Govorit Moskva—“Moscow speaking.” Many people left the radio on constantly—at one time, switching it off was regarded with suspicion—a susurrating trickle of Party enlightenment in every kitchen. When the boxes were silenced and the phones went dead, even those in Pripyat who had spent the afternoon soaking up the sunshine began to realize something unusual was happening.

Alexander Korol had spent much of the morning sitting in Leonid Toptunov’s apartment, waiting for his old friend to come home and explain what had happened inside Unit Four. He’d heard that there had been a maximum design-basis accident at the plant. But he refused to believe it. Eventually Toptunov’s girlfriend, the nurse, arrived and explained that everybody from the midnight shift was in Hospital Number 126. Some of them were being flown to a special clinic in Moscow that evening.

It was past 9:00 p.m. when Korol found his way to the hospital, clutching a towel, toothpaste, and Toptunov’s toothbrush. When he got there, two red Ikarus buses were drawn up at the front steps. One was being loaded with injured firemen and his friends from the night shift on Unit Four. They were all still wearing their hospital pajamas, and many appeared perfectly healthy. Korol climbed aboard and found Toptunov: Leonid looked just as he always did. But his friend could see that the seats and walls of the bus had been covered with sheets of plastic, and when Toptunov spoke, he seemed bewildered and disoriented. Korol asked him what had happened. “I don’t know,” the young operator said. “The rods came halfway, and then stopped.” Korol asked no more questions. He knew that few other people in Pripyat would have any idea that the men were being taken from the city, or where they were going. He began moving through the bus with a pen and paper, scribbling down the names and addresses of his friends’ relatives—so at least he could tell them that their loved ones were being transported to Moscow. As he did so, two more men were brought aboard the bus, on stretchers. One of them looked up. “Hi, Korol!” he said brightly. But Korol had no idea who the stricken specialist was. His face had turned a bright red and was so swollen that he was completely unrecognizable. And when Korol saw the man on the second stretcher, his body seared by 30 percent burns, he realized that, whatever ...

In their big corner apartment at the end of Lenina Prospekt, Valentina Brukhanov had waited in vain all day for news of her husband, whom she had last seen leaving silently before dawn. It was long after midnight when the station director returned home, bringing a permit that would allow their pregnant daughter and son-in-law to take the family car, slip through the militsia cordon, and escape the city. He stopped for only a few minutes. He said he had to get back to the plant. “You know the captain is always the last one off the ship. From now on,” he told Valentina, “you’ll be responsible for the family.”

In the small hours of Sunday morning, General Ivanov’s plane lifted off from the tarmac at Borispol Airport, carrying twenty-six men suffering the initial symptoms of acute radiation syndrome. They included Leonid Toptunov; his shift foreman, Alexander Akimov; Deputy Chief Engineer Dyatlov; Alexander Yuvchenko; and the firefighters who had fought the blazes on the roof of the reactor hall. Most had no idea where they were being taken, or why. They worried about the fate of their families—and about what had happened at the plant. The flight to Moscow took less than two hours. Those who were still conscious vomited all the way.

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 operation might be accomplished.

Ivanov gave him the radiation report. Far from falling, as the Ministry of Health officials had hoped, the level of contamination on the streets of Pripyat was increasing. There was no question in the minds of the civil defense chief and his regional deputy: the population of the city was in danger not only from the radionuclides continuing to drift from the reactor but also from the fallout already accumulated on the ground. They must be evacuated. The officers’ view was backed up by a separate report from the director of Hospital Number 126. Only Pikalov, the imposing, beetle-browed commander of the chemical troops, a decorated veteran of the Great Patriotic War, suggested that there was still no hurry to get the people of Pripyat to safety. Scherbina told them that he had made up his mind: the evacuation should begin that afternoon. But he still held back from giving the order. First, he wanted to see Reactor Number Four for himself.

As the helicopter headed back to Pripyat, Legasov knew conclusively that he was dealing with not merely yet another regrettable failure of Soviet engineering but also a disaster on a global scale, one that would affect the world for generations to come. And now it was up to him to contain it.

At ten o’clock on Sunday morning, a full thirty-two hours after the catastrophe had begun, Boris Scherbina gathered the Soviet and local Party staff in the gorkom offices of the White House. At last, he gave the order to evacuate Pripyat. At 1:10 p.m., the radio-tochki in kitchens across the city finally broke their silence. In a strident, confident voice, a young woman read aloud the announcement drafted that morning by a gaggle of senior officials and approved by Scherbina:

The emergency proclamation was worded carefully: it didn’t tell the citizens how long they would endure their enforced absence, but deliberately led them to believe it would be a short time. They were told to pack only their important documents and enough clothing and food for two or three days. They should close their windows and turn off their gas and electricity. Municipal workers would remain behind to maintain city utilities and infrastructure. The empty homes would be guarded by police patrols. Some, fearing what would happen in their absence, packed only their most valuable possessions—party dresses, jewelry, flatware. Others packed winter clothes and prepared for the worst.

But it wasn’t long before she discovered why Alexander had vanished so suddenly. Soon afterward, Sasha Korol—working through the list of addresses he had scribbled down on the bus the previous evening—arrived at her door and explained what he had witnessed of the medical airlift to Moscow. Unbidden, he also brought Natalia money—100 rubles, almost a month’s salary—and a carton of milk for the baby. Setting down the milk on the seat of Alexander’s bicycle in the hallway, she went into the bedroom to pack. She filled a small suitcase—clothes for the boy, a couple of dresses, some shoes—and went downstairs to wait.

In the meeting room across the hall from her office, Protsenko joined a group of twenty members of the city administration to make the arrangements. The architect laid out the maps and counted every apartment building in the city, while the chiefs of the internal passport department and the district zheks added up the number of families in each complex, and how many children and elderly each family included. Together with the city’s head of civil defense, Protsenko then calculated the number of buses that would be needed to collect them all from each of the city’s six microdistricts. In all, there were some 51,300 men, women, and children in Pripyat, of whom more than 4,000 were station operators and construction workers expected to remain behind to take care of essential services in the city and work at the power plant itself. To get all the families out safely would require more than a thousand buses—plus two river vessels and three diesel trains, which would be directed to Yanov railway station and used to ship out the single men who filled the city’s dormitory complexes.

If he was aware of the rising level of contamination in the air all around them, Scherbina didn’t show it. The chairman seemed to regard the dangers of radiation with the haughty disdain of a cavalry officer striding across a battlefield bursting with cannon fire. And almost everyone else on the commission followed his lead: mentioning the radioactivity surrounding them seemed almost tactless. Among the ministers, an air of Soviet bravado prevailed.

There were 1,225 buses in all, painted in a kaleidoscope of colors, representing more than a dozen different Soviet transport enterprises: some red, some yellow, some green, and some blue; some half red, half white; others with a stripe—plus 250 trucks and other vehicles in support, including ambulances from the civil defense, repair trucks, and fuel tankers. At 2:00 p.m., a full day and a half after the pall of radionuclides had first begun drifting into the atmosphere, the motley caravan of vehicles waiting at the Pripyat city limits at last began to move. Maria Protsenko was waiting for them on the railway bridge at the entrance to the city.

As the first bus approached, the police major waved it to a halt, and Protsenko climbed aboard. She showed the driver the map and gave him his instructions: the buses were to proceed in groups of five; she told him which microdistrict they should go to, how to get there, the building they should stop at, and the route they should take out of the city. Then she climbed down, the policeman waved forward another group of buses, and Protsenko showed the next driver her map. Gradually, five by five, hour by hour, she watched as each of the one thousand vehicles drew away down the scenic incline of Lenina Prospekt and, with a sharp turn and a tart belch of low-octane gasoline fumes, disappeared into the city. Outside the 540 separate entrances of its 160 apartment buildings, the citizens of Pripyat mounted the steps of their buses, and the doors banged shut behind them.

The helicopter was equipped with no bombsights or targeting mechanisms that could help them here. To drop the sandbags into the reactor vault, the flight engineer had to aim as best he could by eye, estimate a trajectory, and shove them through the door one at a time. As he leaned out over the reactor, he was enveloped in clouds of toxic gas and blasted by waves of gamma and neutron radiation. He had no protection apart from his flight suit. The intense heat rising from below made it impossible for Nesterov to hover: if the helicopter lost forward momentum, it would be caught in the column of superheated air, its rotor blades would encounter a calamitous drop in torque, and the machine would fall abruptly out of the sky.

At 5:00 p.m., Maria Protsenko folded her map, flagged down one last bus, and, climbing aboard, rode it down Lenina Prospekt, a lone passenger entering a deserted city. She directed the driver from one side of Pripyat to the other, stopping in each district to check on the results of her work. At six thirty, Protsenko returned to the ispolkom to tell the mayor that her task was complete. “Vladimir Pavlovich, that’s it. Everybody has been evacuated,” she said.

It wasn’t until later that night that she began to feel sick: her throat was raw, and she developed a blinding headache; her feet and ankles burned and itched. She made no conscious connection to radiation, partly because she knew nothing about the effects of the radioactive alpha and beta particles in the dust that had blown around her bare legs during her hours on the railway bridge, but also because she preferred not to think about it. When the diarrhea began, Protsenko told herself she had eaten some bad cucumbers; the headaches and the sore throat—well, she had gone without sleep for two days. She soothed the itching by lifting her legs into the bathroom sink and running her feet under cold water. But it soon returned.

Lifted skyward on a pillar of fierce heat from the shattered core, convoyed by obliging winds, the invisible cloud of radiation had traveled thousands of kilometers since its escape from the carcass of Unit Four. Unleashed in the violence of the explosion, it had soared aloft into the still night air, until it reached an altitude of around 1,500 meters, where it was snatched by powerful wind currents blowing from the south and southeast, pulled away at speeds of between fifty and a hundred kilometers an hour, and flew northwest across the USSR toward the Baltic Sea. The cloud carried gaseous xenon 133, microscopic fragments of irradiated graphite, and particles composed of pure radioactive isotopes, including iodine 131 and cesium 137—which generated such heat that they warmed the air around them and took flight like hundreds of thousands of tiny hot air balloons. At its heart, it pulsed with some 20 million curies of radioactivity. By the time Soviet scientists finally began regular airborne monitoring near the accident site on Sunday, April 27—a full day after the accident occurred—the invisible monster had slipped away, leaving them ignorant of its size and intensity. Their measurements revealed only its tail. Within twenty-four hours, it had reached Scandinavia.

By 1:00 p.m., using meteorological calculations developed to help monitor the Partial Test Ban Treaty on nuclear weapon trials, the Swedish National Defense Research Institute had also modeled prevailing weather patterns across the Baltic. These established beyond doubt that the radioactive contamination hadn’t originated in Forsmark at all. It had come from somewhere outside Sweden. And the wind was blowing from the southeast.

Yet by Monday morning, even Aliyev knew only the vaguest details about a nuclear accident in Ukraine. Not one word about Chernobyl had appeared in the Soviet press or been reported on radio or television. Authorities in Kiev, without prompting from Moscow, had already acted to suppress awareness of the situation by scientists. On Saturday, after instruments at the Kiev Institute of Botany registered a sharp increase in radiation, KGB officers arrived and sealed the devices “to avoid panic and the spreading of provocative rumors.” Even so, by the time General Secretary Gorbachev assembled the emergency meeting to discuss what had happened, Aliyev realized that radiation would soon be detected far beyond the borders of the USSR.

and uncomfortable. Everyone was nervous. Gorbachev asked simply, “What happened?” Vladimir Dolgikh, the Central Committee secretary in charge of the Soviet energy sector, began by explaining what he knew from his telephone conversations with Scherbina and the experts in Pripyat. He described an explosion, the destruction of the reactor, and the evacuation of the city. The air force was using helicopters to bury the ruined unit in sand, clay, and lead. A cloud of radiation was moving south and west and had already been detected in Lithuania. Information was still scant and conflicting: the armed forces said one thing, scientists another. Now they needed to decide what—or whether—to tell the Soviet people about the accident.

“Come off it!” replied Aliyev. “We can’t conceal this!” Others at the table argued that they didn’t have enough information yet to tell the public and feared causing panic. If they released any news at all, it had to be strictly circumscribed. “The statement should be formulated in a way that avoids causing excessive alarm and panic,” said Andrei Gromyko, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. And by the time they took a vote, Ligachev had apparently prevailed: the Politburo resolved to take the traditional approach. The assembled Party elders drafted an unrevealing twenty-three-word statement to be issued by the state news agency, TASS—and designed to combat what the Central Committee’s official spokesman called “bourgeois falsification . . . propaganda and inventions.” Whatever Gorbachev’s intentions, it seemed that the old ways were best after all.

By 2:00 p.m. in Stockholm, Swedish state authorities were in unanimous agreement: the country had been contaminated as the result of a major nuclear accident abroad. Just over an hour later, the country’s Foreign Ministry approached the governments of East Germany, Poland, and the USSR to ask if such an incident had taken place on their territory. Soon afterward, the Swedes sent an identical communiqué to their representatives at the International Atomic Energy Agency. By that time, both Finnish and Danish governments had confirmed that they, too, had detected radioactive contamination inside their borders.

Yet the Soviet authorities assured the Swedes that they had no information about any kind of nuclear accident within the USSR.

Finally, at 8:00 p.m. on Monday, April 28, almost three days after the toxic cloud first rolled into the night sky above Unit Four, Radio Moscow broadcast the TASS statement agreed upon in Gorbachev’s office. “An accident has taken place at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant,” the announcer read. “One of the atomic reactors has been damaged. Measures are being taken to eliminate the consequences of the accident. Aid is being given to those affected. A government commission has been set up.” In its brevity and frugality with the truth, the bulletin was typical of Soviet news reports, a continuation of the way the state had covered conventional industrial accidents for decades.

The following morning, Tuesday, April 29, the press in Moscow remained entirely silent about the accident. In Ukraine, the daily papers in Kiev reported the news, but their editors did their best to keep it quiet: Pravda Ukrainy printed a short report at the bottom of page three, beneath an article recounting the story of two pensioners struggling to have telephones installed in their homes. Robitnycha Hazeta—the Ukrainian workers’ daily—took care to bury its Chernobyl story below the Soviet soccer league tables and coverage of a chess tournament.

On Tuesday evening, Vremya broadcast a new statement issued in the name of the Soviet Council of Ministers. This conceded that two people had been killed as a result of an explosion at the Chernobyl plant, that a section of the reactor building had been destroyed, and that Pripyat had been evacuated. There was no mention of a radioactive release. This time the report was relegated to sixth place, behind the latest encouraging news about the mighty Soviet economy.

Meanwhile, the radioactive cloud had continued north and spread west to envelop all of Scandinavia—before the weather stagnated and the contamination drifted south over Poland, forming a wedge that moved down into Germany. Heavy rain then deposited a dense band of radiation that reached all the way from Czechoslovakia into southeastern France. The West German and Swedish governments lodged furious complaints with Moscow over its failure to promptly notify them of the accident and requested more information about what had happened, but to no avail. Instead, Soviet embassy officials contacted scientists in both Bonn and Stockholm seeking advice on nuclear firefighting, especially tips on how to extinguish burning graphite. The widening rumors, experts’ public speculation about a reactor meltdown, and now—more terrifying still—the possibility of a radioactive fire that could not be put out spread panic throughout Europe.

By the morning of Tuesday, April 29, the work of Antoshkin’s crews seemed to be having an effect: radioactivity escaping from the reactor began to fall, and the temperature dropped from more than 1,000 degrees to 500 degrees centigrade. But radiation levels in the deserted streets of Pripyat had now become so dangerous that the government commission was forced to withdraw to a new headquarters nineteen kilometers away in Chernobyl town. The territory immediately surrounding the plant—an area roughly one and a half kilometers in diameter, which officials soon began calling the osobaya zona, or Special Zone—was highly contaminated with both debris and nuclear fallout. Scientists, specialists, and those operators who had stayed behind to tend to the needs of the remaining three reactors at the station now approached it only in armored personnel carriers.

By the time the light failed on Tuesday night, Antoshkin’s helicopter crews had dropped another 190 tonnes of sand and clay inside the walls of Unit Four. But the fire blazed on, and radionuclides continued to pour from the wreckage of the reactor. A scientific report revealed to the Party in Kiev that levels of background radiation in the Ukrainian cities of Rovno and Zhitomir, more than a hundred kilometers to the west and southwest of the plant, respectively, had already increased almost twentyfold. The regional civil defense leaders had made preparations for evacuating the settlements within a ten-kilometer radius of the plant—ten thousand people in all—and pleaded with Scherbina to give permission for the operation to proceed. But, to their consternation, he refused.

On Wednesday, April 30—the eve of the annual May Day celebrations, which would fill the streets of towns and cities throughout the USSR with parades and rallies—the wind blowing over the Chernobyl plant shifted once more. This time it turned almost due south, carrying energetic alpha and beta contamination directly toward Kiev, along with dangerously high levels of gamma radiation, in the form of iodine 131—the radioisotope that concentrates dangerously in the thyroid gland, particularly in children. At exactly one o’clock that afternoon, radiation levels on the streets of the city began to rise abruptly. By nightfall, recorded radioactivity on Nauki Prospekt, near the heart of Kiev on the eastern bank of the Dnieper, had reached as high as 2.2 milliroentgen per hour (or 22 microsieverts per hour)—hundreds of times higher than normal. The progress of the radioactive cloud had been tracked by the weather-monitoring equipment of the USSR State Committee for Hydrometeorology, which that day sent classified reports of its findings to Prime Minister Ryzhkov in Moscow, but also to the leaders of the Ukrainian Communist Party in Kiev, including First Secretary Scherbitsky. Inside the Ukrainian Ministry of Health, the republic’s senior doctors, normally orderly and restrained, started to panic. They discussed the need to take precautions against radioactive aerosols and to broadcast a warning to the population. But they took no action.

He tried to convince Scherbitsky to cancel the big May Day parade they had scheduled to pass through the center of the city the following morning. But the first secretary told him that the orders had come down from Moscow. Not only would the parade take place, but they were all expected to attend and to bring their families with them—to demonstrate that there was no reason for anyone in Kiev to panic.

Prime Minister Ryzhkov examined the maps carefully. Some locations seemed safe for now, others were clearly not, and in some villages, the fallout was patchy and varied from street to street. Clearly something had to be done, but it was hard to know exactly what. Everyone in the room was awaiting his decision. “We will evacuate the population from the thirty-kilometer zone,” Ryzhkov said at last. “From all of it?” someone asked. “From all of it,” the prime minister replied and circled the area on the map for emphasis. “And start immediately.”