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

by Adam Higginbotham

The quality of workmanship at all levels of Soviet manufacturing was so poor that building projects throughout the nation’s power industry were forced to incorporate an extra stage known as “preinstallation overhaul.” Upon delivery from the factory, each piece of new equipment—transformers, turbines, switching gear—was stripped down to the last nut and bolt, checked for faults, repaired, and then reassembled according to the original specifications, as it should have been in the first place. Only then could it be safely installed. Such wasteful duplication of labor added months of delays and millions of rubles in costs to any construction project.

Advancement in many political, economic, and scientific careers was granted only to those who repressed their personal opinions, avoided conflict, and displayed unquestioning obedience to those above them. By the midseventies, this blind conformism had smothered individual decision-making at all levels of the state and Party machine, infecting not just the bureaucracy but technical and economic disciplines, too. Lies and deception were endemic to the system, trafficked in both directions along the chain of management: those lower down passed up reports to their superiors packed with falsified statistics and inflated estimates, of unmet goals triumphantly reached, unfulfilled quotas heroically exceeded. To protect his own position, at every stage, each manager relayed the lies upward or compounded them.

At 8:16 a.m. on August 6, 1945, a fission weapon containing sixty-four kilograms of uranium detonated 580 meters above the Japanese city of Hiroshima, and Einstein’s equation proved mercilessly accurate. The bomb itself was extremely inefficient: just one kilogram of the uranium underwent fission, and only seven hundred milligrams of mass—the weight of a butterfly—was converted into energy. But it was enough to obliterate an entire city in a fraction of a second.

The granite used to build the US Capitol is so radioactive that the building would fail federal safety codes regulating nuclear power plants. All living tissue is radioactive to some degree: human beings, like bananas, emit radiation because both contain small amounts of the radioisotope potassium 40; muscle contains more potassium 40 than other tissue, so men are generally more radioactive than women. Brazil nuts, with a thousand times the average concentration of radium of any organic product, are the world’s most radioactive food.

More than eighty years later, Curie’s laboratory notes remain so radioactive that they are kept in a lead-lined box.

Of those who lived through the initial explosion in Nagasaki, thirty-five thousand died within twenty-four hours; those suffering from ARS lost their hair within one or two weeks, and then experienced bloody diarrhea before succumbing to infection and high fever. Another thirty-seven thousand died within three months. A similar number survived for longer but, after another three years, developed leukemia; by the end of the 1940s, the disease would be the first cancer linked to radiation.

Lockheed Aircraft built a water-cooled 10-megawatt nuclear reactor in a shielded underground shaft in the woods of North Georgia. At the touch of a button, the reactor could be raised from its shielding to ground level, exposing everything within a three-hundred-meter radius to a lethal dose of radiation. In June 1959 the Radiation Effects Reactor was brought up to full power and unsheathed for the first time, killing almost everything in the vicinity stone dead: bugs fell from the air, and small animals and the bacteria living in and upon them were exterminated, in a phenomenon the technicians called “instant taxidermy.” The effect on plants varied: oak trees turned brown, yet crabgrass remained strangely unaffected;

This negative void coefficient acts like a dead man’s handle on the reactor, a safety feature of the water-water designs common in the West.

This positive void coefficient remained a fatal defect at the heart of Atom Mirny-1 and overshadowed the operation of every Soviet water-graphite reactor that followed.

A fatal dose of radiation is estimated at around 500 rem—roentgen equivalent man—or the amount absorbed by the average human body when exposed to a field of 500 roentgen per hour for sixty minutes. In some places on the roof of Unit Three, lumps of uranium fuel and graphite were emitting gamma and neutron radiation at a rate of 3,000 roentgen an hour. In others, levels may have reached more than 8,000 roentgen an hour: there, a man would absorb a lethal dose in less than four minutes.

But it proved almost impossible to entirely remove the radiation from the helicopters, and when they returned each morning to begin a new mission, the airmen found the grass beneath their parked aircraft had turned yellow overnight.

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.”

once they had been admitted to the hospital, their transport proved beyond the limits of practical decontamination. The aircraft that delivered the first wave of patients was dismantled, and one bus was sent to the campus of the Kurchatov Institute, where it was driven into a pit and buried.

As befits a disease created unwittingly by mankind, acute radiation syndrome is a cruel, complex, and poorly understood affliction that tests modern medicine to its limits. The radiation exposure responsible for causing ARS may be over in a few seconds and unaccompanied by any initial reaction. But its destructive effects begin immediately, as the high-energy rays and particles of alpha, beta, and gamma radiation snap strands of DNA, and the exposed cells start to die. Nausea and vomiting set in, with a speed and intensity contingent on the dose, and the skin may redden. 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.

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.

His temperature rose; his intestines disintegrated and oozed from his body in bloody diarrhea.

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.

By the end of May, more than five thousand square kilometers of land—an area bigger than Delaware—had become dangerously contaminated.

Thickly dusted with beta-emitting radionuclides that exposed them to massive doses of radiation—in some places, up to 10,000 rads—almost forty square kilometers of woodland had been killed outright almost immediately. Within ten days, the dense stands of pine lining the main route between Pripyat and the station turned an unusual color, as their foliage changed gradually from deep green to coppery red. The soldiers and scientists who sped down this road had no need to peer from the observation ports of their armored personnel carriers to know they had entered the “Red Forest”; even shielded by armor plate and bulletproof glass, the needles of their radiometers began to swing wildly amid the extraordinary levels of contamination. The forest posed such a threat that it, too, would soon be mown down by combat engineers and buried in concrete-lined tombs.

The lecturers back in Moscow might tell you that radiation has no odor or taste, he explained, but they’ve never been to Chernobyl. Intense gamma fields of 100 roentgen an hour and above—on the threshold for inducing acute radiation syndrome—caused such extensive ionization of the air that it left a distinctive aroma, like that after a lightning storm; if you smell ozone, his colleague said, run.

In Area M, former combat photographer Igor Kostin was overcome by a mystical sensation, as if exploring another world. The radiation was so intense that afterward it became visible on film, seeping into Kostin’s cameras, rising through the sprockets, leaving ghostly traces at the foot of his pictures, like high-water marks after a flood.

The batiskaf—bathyscaphe—was a twenty-tonne lead cabin, with a single porthole of leaded glass thirty centimeters thick, which dangled on a five-meter cable from the hook of a Demag crane. With enough space inside to accommodate four men, the bathyscaphe, lifted a hundred meters in the air, could be “flown” by crane over Unit Four and allowed the engineers to descend into even the most radioactive areas of the site in relative safety.

Of the thirteen patients who had been treated with bone marrow transplants by Robert Gale and the Soviet specialists, all but one had died—so many that Guskova would eventually dismiss the technique as useless for managing ARS.

New burns continued to reveal themselves on his legs and arms even months after the explosion,

In the end, many of the former residents of Pripyat were found homes in the same sprawling complex of high-rise buildings in Troieshchyna, a remote and isolated suburb on the northeastern edge of the city. There, they were shunned by their new neighbors, who both resented the refugees and feared the invisible contagion of radioactivity. At school, other children were forbidden by their parents from sharing desks with pupils evacuated from Pripyat—and not without good reason. The radiation readings in the stairwells and hallways of the new apartment blocks in Troieshchyna were soon found to be hundreds of times higher than elsewhere in Kiev.

Winter wheat seeds taken from the Exclusion Zone in the days after the disaster and then germinated in uncontaminated soil had produced thousands of different mutant strains, and every new generation remained genetically unstable, even twenty-five years after the accident.