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

by Adam Higginbotham

your balls in lead.” Even as the bombardment continued, Academician Legasov and the other scientists sent down from the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy and the Ministry of Medium Machine Building in Moscow still had little idea what was going on inside the burning reactor. The pilots were now targeting a red glow they could see inside Unit Four, but no one could be certain exactly what was causing it.

At the very start, one member of the Kurchatov group in Chernobyl—the RBMK reactor specialist Konstantin Fedulenko—tried to tell Legasov that the whole helicopter operation might be misguided. He had seen for himself that each of the cargo drops into the shattered building was hurling heavy radioactive particles into the atmosphere. And, given the small size of the target—partially concealed by the tilted concrete lid of Elena—and the speed of the pilots’ approach, there seemed little chance that any of the sand or lead was making it into the eye of the reactor vault itself.

He said they should just let the radioactive blaze burn itself out. Legasov didn’t want to listen. He insisted that they had to take immediate action—whether it was effective or not. “People won’t understand if we do nothing,” Legasov said. “We have to be seen to be doing something.”

The hot weather and the rotor wash created an almost constant tornado of radioactive dust reaching thirty meters into the air. The soldiers wore no protective clothing—not even petal respirators. The dust filled their eyes and mouths and caked beneath their clothes. At night, they slept fitfully in their irradiated uniforms, in tents beside the Pripyat. At dawn, they rose to start again.

But by the next evening, Valery Legasov and the team of scientists analyzing the latest data from Unit Four had made a horrifying and apparently inexplicable discovery. Instead of continuing to fall, the radioactive releases from the reactor had now suddenly begun to increase again, doubling from 3 million to 6 million curies overnight. The temperature of the burning core, too, was rising rapidly. By Thursday night, Legasov’s estimates suggested that it was already approaching 1,700 degrees centigrade.

In the West, scientists had been simulating the worst-case scenarios of reactor meltdowns for fifteen years, in ongoing research that had only intensified after the disaster in Three Mile Island. But Soviet physicists had been so confident of the safety of their own reactors that they had never bothered indulging in the heretical theorizing of beyond design-basis accidents. And appealing directly to Western specialists for help at this stage seemed unthinkable. Despite the growing atmosphere of alarm among the physicists at the burning reactor, the government commission and the Politburo remained determined to conceal the news of a possible meltdown from the world beyond the thirty-kilometer zone.

Western newspapers were asking how a nation that couldn’t tell the truth about a nuclear accident could be trusted to be honest about how many nuclear missiles it had.

He contrasted the openness of “free nations” with the “secrecy and stubborn refusal” of the Soviet government to inform the international community of the risks they shared from the disaster. “A nuclear accident that results in contaminating a number of countries with radioactive material is not simply an internal matter,” Reagan said in his folksy rasp. “The Soviets owe the world an explanation.”

But the results of the initial operation had been chaotic: “Five or six thousand people are simply lost,” Ryzhkov said. “Where they are now is unknown.”

So far, more than 1,800 people, including 445 children, had been hospitalized; more were expected. High levels of radioactivity now covered the western Soviet Union, from Crimea in the south to Leningrad in the north, exceeding the natural background levels by five or ten times in most places.

The specialists and management from the plant who had remained behind to man the station were still nominally led by Director Viktor Brukhanov and his chief engineer, the once-bombastic Nikolai Fomin. The two men continued to sit by their phones in the dimly lit bunker beneath the plant, awaiting instructions from the government commission. But they were wrung out by exhaustion, radiation exposure, and shock. Fomin had remained in the bunker for five days, curling up to sleep beside the humming equipment in the ventilation room. Since the final evacuation of Pripyat, Brukhanov and the other operators had been sent to live in a Pioneer camp thirty kilometers from the plant site, named Skazochny, or “Fairy Tale.”

Finally, on Tuesday, May 6—ten days after the crisis began—the Ukrainian health minister appeared on local radio and TV to warn Kievans to take precautions against radiation: to remain indoors, close their windows, and protect themselves against drafts. By then, word had gone around that senior Party members had quietly sent their children and grandchildren to the safety of Pioneer camps and sanatoria in the south.

That evening, crowds gathered at the railway station as thousands of people attempted to escape the city. Men and women spent the night sleeping on the concourse to keep their places in line for tickets. The Soviet internal passport system prevented most citizens from leaving their areas of registration without good reason, so many workers hurriedly applied for vacations; some who were refused simply quit their jobs in desperation. Fleets of orange street-cleaning trucks soon appeared, to start what would become an incessant effort to wash hot fallout from the city streets. By then, crowds had begun to form outside the city’s banks, some of which were forced to close just a few hours after opening; others limited withdrawals to 100 rubles per person. By afternoon, many banks had run out of money. When the pharmacies sold out of stable iodine pills, people resorted to drinking tincture of iodine, intended for use as an external antiseptic, burning their throats. Lines outside liquor stores quadrupled in length as people sought protection from radioactivity with red wine and vodka, forcing the Ukrainian deputy minister of health to announce, “There is no truth to the rumor that alcohol is useful against radiation.”

The academicians’ relief at the emptying of the suppression pools was brief. While the efforts of the soldiers and engineers headed off the possibility of a devastating steam explosion, the threat to the water table remained, and the scientists’ fear of the China Syndrome only intensified. Some estimates now suggested that if it melted through the foundations of Unit Four, an incandescent mass of fuel might sink as far as three kilometers into the earth before stopping.

And by the end of the week, the Politburo had granted permission for the most desperate measures yet: Soviet diplomats were reported to have approached the German Atom Forum, West Germany’s leading nuclear industry group, requesting foreign help.

Still, Velikhov could afford—at last—some optimism. While the desperate work had continued to battle the meltdown beneath the reactor, the levels of radionuclides escaping into the air above it had suddenly started to fall—as steeply and inexplicably as they had begun rising five days before. As Reactor Number Four came into view, Rosen and Blix could see a light trail of smoke drifting from the ruins, but the level of radioactive release, while still significant, was approaching zero—and the graphite fire was apparently all but extinguished. The temperature on the surface of the reactor had plunged, from 2,000 degrees centigrade to just 300 degrees. Although the Soviet scientists were at a loss to comprehend exactly why, it seemed that—thirteen days after it had begun—the emergency might be over at last. Even so, Rosen didn’t want to take any chances. When the helicopter was still eight hundred meters out, Velikhov asked if he’d like to get closer. “No,” the American said. “I can see perfectly from here.”

At a press conference in Moscow the following day, Rosen told reporters that the graphite fire was out and that measurements taken during their helicopter flight revealed that “there is relatively little radioactivity now.” He felt confident there was no longer any risk of a meltdown. “The situation appears to be stabilizing,” he said. “I

Back in Moscow, the theoretical physicists continued to insist that the molten corium still moving somewhere deep inside Reactor Number Four remained a terrible threat. But there was fierce disagreement about their findings. The atomic specialists from the Kurchatov Institute and Sredmash dismissed them as the opinions of academic interlopers who lacked any practical experience in nuclear reactors. They argued that it was almost certain that the corium would stop melting through the basement levels of Unit Four long before it breached the deepest foundations of the building. And the theoreticians agreed that this scenario was indeed the most likely—but it was by no means guaranteed. They calculated that the chances of a ball of radioactive lava searing through all four of the 1.8-meter-thick reinforced concrete floors beneath the reactor and reaching the water table of the fourth-longest river in Europe were as high as one in ten.

Told they would need to prepare for only three days away from home, the uprooted families soon ran out of food, money, and clean clothes, and then discovered that even what they had thought was clean was not.

Thirty kilometers away, Natalia Yuvchenko and her two-year-old son, Kirill, were among the 1,200 refugees who had been billeted among the clay-and-thatch homes of Lugoviki, a rural settlement on the River Uzh without a single telephone. The last time she had seen her husband, Alexander, he had been waving to her from inside his hospital ward in Pripyat and telling her to go home and close the windows. Since then, she had received no information about where he had been taken or what condition he might be in. With two other families from her building in Pripyat, Yuvchenko and her son were taken in by an elderly peasant couple who gave up the bedroom of their small house for the newcomers. Yuvchenko and the others with young children shared the bed; everyone else slept on the floor. On Monday, the old man took the children fishing, but Kirill was still sick, and the house was damp. By Tuesday, there was no longer enough food to feed three families, and Yuvchenko was almost out of money. She appealed to her former neighbor: “Sergei, let’s get out of here,” she said, and together they gathered enough cash for bus tickets to Kiev. When they arrived, she took Kirill to the airport and boarded a flight for Moldova, where her parents and Alexander’s parents still lived directly across the street from one another. From there, Yuvchenko set out, once more, to find out what had happened to her husband.

The first patients from the plant had landed in Moscow soon after dawn on Sunday, April 27. They had been met at Vnukovo Airport by doctors clad in PVC aprons and protective suits, and buses with seats sheathed in polyethylene. The specialists of Hospital Number Six—a six-hundred-bed facility reserved for treatment of the nuclear workers of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building and home to two floors dedicated to radiation medicine—had cleared the entire department in preparation for their arrival.

By evening on Sunday, a total of 207 men and women, mostly plant operators and firemen—but also security guards who had remained at their posts beside the burning unit, construction workers who had waited at a bus stop beneath the plume of fallout, and the anglers from beside the inlet channel—had been admitted to the wards of the hospital. One hundred fifteen of them were initially diagnosed with acute radiation syndrome. Ten had received such massive doses of radiation that the doctors immediately regarded their survival as impossible.

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.

But the nausea eventually passes, the discoloration of all but the most severe burns fades within eighteen hours, and the patient enters a comfortable latency period. Depending on the severity of their exposure, this deceptive period of apparent well-being can last for days or even weeks, and only afterward will the further symptoms of ARS develop. The lower the dose, the longer the latency and the greater the likelihood of recovery—given the right treatment.

Yet by the time they reached Moscow, a full day after the accident began, only the most gravely affected of the 207 patients exhibited any outward signs of sickness.

But Guskova’s decades of work in radiation pathology had helped her pioneer a method of biological dosimetry, gauging exposure based on interviews and tests. These included the time taken for the initial onset of vomiting and a count of white blood cells, or leukocytes. Manufactured in the bone marrow, these cells are the foundation of the body’s immune system and among the most reliable biological markers of the effects of ARS. By measuring the patient’s leukocyte count and the rate at which it was falling, the doctors could provide a corresponding estimate of the dose each had received.

But it was the blood test that remained the crucial bellwether of who would survive and who—almost certainly—would not. When Natalia Yuvchenko went to ask the doctors about Alexander’s condition, they said she would simply have to wait. “Within the first three weeks, we’ll know,” they told her. “Just be prepared for the worst.”

The worst-affected patients in Hospital Number Six were attacked from both without and within. As their white blood cell counts collapsed, infection crawled across the skin of the young operators and firemen: Thick black blisters of herpes simplex encrusted their lips and the inside of their mouths. Candida rendered their gums red and lacy, and the skin peeled back, leaving them the color of raw meat. Painful ulcers developed on their arms, legs, and torsos, where they had been burned by beta particles. Unlike thermal burns caused by heat alone, which heal slowly over time, radiation burns grow gradually worse—so their external beta burns expanded outward in waves from wherever radioactive material had touched them and ate into the tissue below. The men’s body hair and eyebrows fell out, and their skin darkened—first red, then purple, before finally it became a papery brown-black and curled away in sheets.

the evening of Friday, May 9—Victory Day, marking the Soviet triumph over the Nazis in the Second World War—the patients watched from the windows of the hospital as another fireworks display lit the sky.

The deaths began the next day. The first was a firefighter from the Chernobyl power plant brigade, Sergeant Vladimir Tishura, who had climbed to the roof with Pravik minutes after the explosion. On May 11 Pravik and Kibenok—the commander of the Pripyat brigade—both succumbed to their injuries. Grotesque rumors would later reach Pravik’s men back in Ukraine: that he had been exposed to such intense radiation that the color of his eyes had changed from brown to blue, and doctors found blisters on his heart. That same day, Alexander Akimov became the first of the plant operators to slip away: he died with his eyes open, his skin black.

Dr. Guskova now forbade further communication among the patients, confining them to their rooms. Outside the windows, the trees were in full bloom; the weather was perfect. Beyond the fence on Marshal Novikov Street, Moscow went about its business as usual. Those men and women who survived lay alone in their beds, attached to IVs or blood exchange machines for hour after hour, often with only the nurses for company. News of further losses among their friends and colleagues came in whispers from relatives and the disquieting sound of loaded gurneys rolling down the long corridors of the hospital.

By the end of the third week in May, the death toll from the accident had reached twenty, and Alexander Yuvchenko grew frightened. His white blood cell counts plunged to zero, and his remaining hair fell out. When will it be my turn? he wondered. Alone in their rooms, the most seriously injured survivors began to fear the darkness, and the lights in some wards were kept on almost constantly.

On Wednesday, May 14, 1986, more than two and a half weeks after the explosion inside Unit Four, Mikhail Gorbachev finally appeared on TV to address the accident in public for the first time.

kilometer zone since the beginning of the month. Young men in Kiev, Minsk, and Tallinn had been summoned from their workplaces—or roused by a knock on the door in the middle of the night—and taken to be issued uniforms, sworn under oath, and told they should consider themselves to be at war. They learned their final destination only once they arrived in the zone. Now Marshal Sokolov, who had sent the Soviet armed forces across the border into Afghanistan in 1979, had come to lead his men on one more heroic military campaign to protect the motherland, which would become formally known as “the Liquidation of the Consequences of the Chernobyl Accident.”

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.

At the same time, the civil defense reservists of Special Battalion 731 began work on removing the topsoil around the reactor by hand. Even as other troops moved through the high-radiation zone by armored personnel carrier, these men started work in the open wearing regular army uniforms, protected only by cotton petal respirators. They excavated the soil near the reactor walls with ordinary shovels and placed it in metal containers for transport and burial in the partially finished radioactive waste storage vaults under construction for the Fifth and Sixth Units. Their shifts lasted as little as fifteen minutes, but the weather was hot and the radiation relentless. Their throats itched, they felt dizzy, and there was never enough water to drink. Some men suffered nosebleeds, while others began vomiting. Called to help clear chunks of reactor graphite lying on the ground near Unit Three, a detachment of chemical warfare troops arrived in a truck and began to pick them up using their hands.

The Politburo now recognized that if the Union’s young draftees—already plagued by alcoholism and drug abuse—continued to be sent into the high-radiation zone, the health of an entire generation of Soviet youth could be ruined, rendering the country incapable of defending itself in the event of an attack from the West. On May 29 the Politburo and the Council of Ministers of the USSR issued a decree unprecedented in peacetime: calling up hundreds of thousands more military reservists—men aged twenty-four to fifty—for a mobilization of up to six months. They were told they were required for special military exercises; many discovered the truth only when they were already in uniform. By the beginning of July, more than forty thousand of these troops were encamped around the perimeter of the Exclusion Zone, sleeping in rows of tents and driven toward the Special Zone each morning in convoys of open trucks.

Daily radiation surveys conducted across the length and breadth of the zone and beyond—by helicopter, plane, by armored vehicle, and on foot by troops clad in rubber suits and respirators—revealed that the contamination had spread far across Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia.

When General Pikalov, commander of the chemical warfare troops, gave his initial situation report on the thirty-kilometer zone to the visiting leaders of the Politburo Operations Group, he forecast that decontamination work would take up to seven years to complete. Upon hearing this, the hardline Politburo member Yegor Ligachev exploded in fury. He told Pikalov he could have seven months. “And if you haven’t done it by then, we’ll relieve you of your Party card!” “Esteemed Yegor Kuzmich,” the general replied, “if that is the situation, you needn’t wait seven months to take my Party card. You can have it now.”

Now that the graphite fire was finally going out, and the specter of the China Syndrome had receded, it was imperative to prevent further radioactive releases into the atmosphere around the plant—and also to restart Chernobyl’s three remaining reactors as soon as possible. The electricity they generated may not have been crucial to the Soviet economy, but restoring them to operation would once more demonstrate the might of the Socialist state and reassure the people of its commitment to nuclear energy. And they could be safely brought back online only once the ruins of Unit Four had been sealed.

Gorbachev told Slavsky he wanted the reactor sealed up by the end of the year. Deaths were almost inevitable. The octogenarian nuclear minister turned to his men. “Lads, you’ll have to take the risk,” he said.

In public, the Soviet government continued to assure its people that the catastrophe was under control and that the radiation already released posed no long-term threat. But in its secret sessions within the Kremlin, the Politburo Operations Group heard that the direct effect of the disaster on the population of the USSR was already reaching alarming heights.

The Kremlin’s chief scientists on radiation medicine and meteorology—Leonid Ilyin and Yuri Izrael—refused to provide a definitive answer about the long-term effect of the spreading contamination. Summoned from Chernobyl to an urgent meeting with the Ukrainian government task force, the experts said that the reactor had been covered and radioactive emissions steeply reduced; soon they would cease altogether. They insisted that current radiation levels didn’t warrant an evacuation and recommended merely that the republic take further steps to keep the population informed of the ongoing measures to manage the crisis. But the Ukrainian leaders suspected that—whatever their true beliefs—Ilyin and Izrael also didn’t want to take responsibility for endorsing an evacuation. So, in a special late-night session of the Ukrainian Politburo, Vladimir Scherbitsky ordered the two scientists to draw up a written and signed statement of their opinion. He then locked the document in his office safe and disregarded their advice.

That night, Scherbitsky unilaterally ordered that every child in Kiev from preschool to seventh grade, and all those who had already been relocated from around Chernobyl and Pripyat, be evacuated from the city to safe areas in the East for at least two months.

The evacuation began five days later, sweeping up 363,000 children, as well as tens of thousands of nursing and expectant mothers, in an exodus of a half million people—the equivalent of a fifth of Kiev’s total population. It was a logistical task that dwarfed the initial effort to evacuate the thirty-kilometer zone and, from the outset, was overshadowed by the specter of panic. Thirty-three special trains ran on a shuttle schedule, departing every two hours from Kiev station; gaggles of grade school students clustered on the platforms, numbered paper labels pinned to their shirts, in case they got lost, and extra planes were provided for those who could not make the journey by rail. When the torrent of women and children overwhelmed the Pioneer camps and sanatoria of Ukraine, Soviet holidaymakers in resorts across the Caucasus were informed that their vacations were canceled, and evacuees found temporary homes from Odessa to Azerbaijan. Three days later, Kiev had become a city without children. No one could say when they might return.

But for all this apparent care for its citizenry, the dark undertow of Soviet history was already tugging at the first victims of the accident. Just the day before, the Ukrainian health minister had received a telegram from his superior in Moscow. The message provided instructions on how to record diagnoses on patients exposed to radiation as a result of the accident. While those with severe radiation sickness and burns were to be described accordingly—“acute radiation sickness from cumulative radiation exposure”—the records of those with lower exposure and without severe symptoms were not to mention radioactivity at all. Instead, Moscow dictated that the hospital files of these patients were to state that they had been diagnosed with “vegetative-vascular dystonia.” This was a psychological complaint with physical manifestations—sweating, heart palpitations, nausea, and seizures—triggered by the nerves or “the environment,” unique to Soviet medicine but similar to the Western notion of neurasthenia. The memo decreed the same misleadingly vague diagnosis for liquidators who came for examination having received the maximum allowable dose of radiation for emergency workers.

By the beginning of June, the thirty-kilometer zone had become a radioactive battlefield encircled by a besieging army. The detritus of combat—abandoned vehicles, wrecked equipment, zigzagging trenches, and massive earthworks—lay everywhere around the plant. But even as dosimetrists in protective suits roamed the open landscape and military helicopters crisscrossed the sky overhead, the banished citizens of Pripyat began trying to return to their homes. Looting was already a problem, and each person had something they needed urgently to retrieve from the city.

But as the summer days began to shorten, and Protsenko continued to conduct the work of the city ispolkom from exile in Chernobyl, her responsibilities focused more and more on the developing bureaucracy of the nuclear no-man’s-land; she learned to sense which of the specialists visiting her office had come directly from the Special Zone around the reactor—by the scent of ozone rising from their clothes. At the same time, she received official instructions to help arrange for the evacuated citizens to visit their apartments and collect their furniture and personal belongings. A twelve-person committee met to agree on what could be removed and how it might be done. They made plans to summon 150 furniture trucks from all over the oblast, to deploy a team of 50 dosimetrists to take radiation measurements in people’s apartments and at checkpoints, to find buses to transport the visitors across the zone, and to requisition a half million polyethylene bags to contain their effects. After two weeks of planning, the operation was ready to begin when someone pointed out that completing it was impossible: the citizens of Pripyat remained homeless and therefore had nowhere to put any of the belongings they would remove from the abandoned city. Eventually, Protsenko befriended a group of physicists from the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences who had come to monitor levels of radiation in the zone, and it was they who finally told her the truth. General Pikalov’s chemical troops would go on...

To one of the two specialists, Alexander Kalugin, who had dedicated his career to the RBMK project, it all seemed chillingly familiar. Two years earlier, he had attended a meeting of the reactor design bureau, NIKIET, at which someone had suggested that—under certain circumstances—the descending control rods might displace water from the bottom of the core and cause a sudden spike in reactivity. At that time, the institute’s scientists had dismissed this concern as too improbable to worry about. Now, as Kalugin gazed in dismay at the fearsome geometry of the computer printouts from Reactor Number Four, it seemed all too possible.

On the afternoon of Monday, April 28, a telegram arrived at the Politburo in Moscow: CAUSE OF ACCIDENT UNRULY AND UNCONTROLLABLE POWER SURGE IN THE REACTOR. Yet the question of how this power surge had been triggered remained unresolved. The search for appropriate scapegoats began immediately.