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

by Adam Higginbotham

Just thirty-four years old, clever and ambitious, a dedicated Party man, Brukhanov had come to western Ukraine with orders to begin building what—if the Soviet central planners had their way—would become the greatest nuclear power station on earth.

The town of Chernobyl had been established in the twelfth century. For the next eight hundred years, it was home to peasants who fished in the rivers, grazed cows in the meadows, and foraged for mushrooms in the dense woods of northwestern Ukraine and southern Belarus. Swept repeatedly by pogrom, purge, famine, and war, by the second half of the twentieth century, Chernobyl was finally at peace. It had evolved into a quiet provincial center, with a handful of factories, a hospital, a library, a Palace of Culture; there was a small shipyard to service the tugs and barges that plied the Pripyat and the Dnieper, the two rivers that met nearby. Water permeated the surrounding countryside, an endlessly flat landscape of peat bogs, marshes, and sodden forests that formed part of the Dnieper River basin, a network of thirty-two thousand rivers and streams that covered almost half of Ukraine. Just fifteen kilometers downstream from the site chosen for the new power station, the rivers joined and flowed onward to the Kiev Sea, a massive hydroelectric reservoir providing fresh water to the two and a half million citizens of the republic’s capital, two hours’ drive away to the southeast.

But at the Ministry of Energy in Moscow, knowledge and experience were regarded as less important qualifications for top management than loyalty and an ability to get things done. Technical matters could be left to the experts.

By the time the young director began work in Chernobyl in 1970, the Socialist economic experiment was going into reverse. The USSR was buckling under the strain of decades of central planning, fatuous bureaucracy, massive military spending, and endemic corruption—the start of what would come to be called the Era of Stagnation. Shortages and bottlenecks, theft and embezzlement blighted almost every industry. Nuclear engineering was no exception. From the beginning, Brukhanov lacked construction equipment. Key mechanical parts and building materials often turned up late, or not at all, and those that did were often defective.

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.

The brain of the “command economy,” Gosplan managed the centralized distribution of resources throughout the USSR, from toothbrushes to tractors, reinforced concrete to platform boots. Yet the economists in Moscow had no reliable index of what was going on in the vast empire they notionally maintained; the false accounting was so endemic that at one point the KGB resorted to turning the cameras of its spy satellites onto Soviet Uzbekistan in an attempt to gather accurate information about the state’s own cotton harvest.

Eventually the supply problems of the centrally planned economy became so chronic that crops rotted in the fields, and Soviet fishermen watched catches putrefy in their nets, yet the shelves of the Union’s grocery stores remained bare.

When the building materials specified by the architects of the Chernobyl station had proved unavailable, Brukhanov was forced to improvise: the plans called for fireproof cables, but when none could be found, the builders simply did the best they could.

But the flame-retardant material specified for reroofing the structure—fifty meters wide and almost a kilometer long—was not even being manufactured in the USSR, so the Ministry granted him an exception, and the bitumen remained.

In 1984, the deadline for completing the fifth reactor was brought forward by a year. Labor and supply problems remained endemic: the concrete was defective; the men lacked power tools. A team of dedicated KGB agents and their network of informants at the plant reported a continuing series of alarming building faults.

The Era of Stagnation had fomented a moral decay in the Soviet workplace and a sullen indifference to individual responsibility, even in the nuclear industry. The USSR’s economic utopianism did not recognize the existence of unemployment, and overstaffing and absenteeism were chronic problems. As the director of the plant and its company town, Brukhanov was responsible for providing jobs for everyone in Pripyat. The inexorable construction work took care of twenty-five thousand of them, and he had already arranged for the establishment of the Jupiter electronics plant to provide work for more of the women in town. But that wasn’t enough. Each shift at the Chernobyl plant now brought hundreds of men and women to the plant by bus from Pripyat, and many of them then sat around with nothing to do.

Radiation is invisible and has neither taste nor smell. Although it’s yet to be proved that exposure to any level of radiation is entirely safe, it becomes manifestly dangerous when the particles and waves it gives off are powerful enough to transform or break apart the atoms that make up the tissues of living organisms. This high-energy radiance is ionizing radiation.

Severe exposure to all ionizing radiation results in acute radiation syndrome (ARS), in which the fabric of the human body is unpicked, rearranged, and destroyed at the most minute levels. Symptoms include nausea, vomiting, hemorrhaging, and hair loss, followed by a collapse of the immune system, exhaustion of bone marrow, disintegration of internal organs, and, finally, death.

The biological effect of radiation on the human body would eventually be measured in rem (roentgen equivalent man) and determined by a complicated combination of factors: the type of radiation; the duration of total exposure; how much of it penetrates the body, and where; and how susceptible those parts of the body are to radiation damage. The parts where cells divide rapidly—bone marrow, skin, and the gastrointestinal tract—are more at risk than other organs such as the heart, liver, and brain. Some radionuclides—such as radium and strontium—are more energetic emitters of radiation, and therefore more dangerous, than others, like cesium and potassium.

From the start, the Soviet nuclear project was governed by principles of ruthless expedience and paranoid secrecy. By 1950, the First Main Directorate would employ seven hundred thousand people, more than half of whom were forced laborers—including, at one point, fifty thousand prisoners of war—working in uranium mines. Yet even when their prison sentences were complete, the Directorate packed these men and women into freight cars and shipped them into exile in the Soviet Far North, to prevent them from telling anyone what they had witnessed. Many were never seen again.

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.

Even as it went into full-scale commercial operation, nobody knew how the RBMK would behave during a major accident.

This problem was especially pronounced during start-up and shutdown, when the reactor was operating at low power—and the systems designed to detect reactivity within the core proved unreliable. During these crucial periods, the engineers at their desks in the control room became almost totally blind to what was happening inside the active zone. Instead of reading their instruments, they were forced to estimate the levels of activity in the core, using “experience and intuition.” This made start-up and shutdown the most demanding and treacherous stages of RBMK operation.

So they designed the AZ-5 system to only gradually reduce the reactor’s power to zero. Rather than dedicated emergency motors, the system was driven by the same electric servos that moved the manual reactor control rods, used by the operators to manage reactor power during normal operation. Starting from their fully withdrawn position above the reactor, it would take between eighteen and twenty-one seconds for the AZ-5 rods to descend completely into the core; the designers hoped that the rods’ slow speed would be compensated for by their great number. But eighteen seconds is a long time in neutron physics—and an eternity in a nuclear reactor with a high positive void coefficient.

Adding to this disquieting list of major design defects, the construction of the reactors also suffered from the shoddy workmanship that plagued Soviet industry. The full start-up of Leningrad’s Reactor Number One was delayed for almost a year after fuel assemblies became stuck in their channels and had to be returned to Moscow for repeated testing. The valves and flow meters in other RBMKs, used to regulate the crucial supply of water to each of the more than 1,600 uranium-filled channels, proved so unreliable that the operators in the control room often had no idea to what extent the reactors were being cooled, or if they were being cooled at all. Accidents were inevitable.

Inside the hall, it was hard to breathe, and the humid, steam-saturated air carried the smell of ozone. But the operators gave little thought to radiation, and the panicked dosimetrists who dashed through the unit provided no useful information: the needles of all their monitoring equipment simply ran off the scale. The radiometers capable of taking higher readings remained locked in a safe and could not be released without orders from above. Razim Davletbayev told himself that the distinctive scent filling the turbine hall was caused by the short circuits arcing in the air; later, when he began to feel sick, although he understood that nausea was an early warning of radiation poisoning, he still preferred to put it down to the potassium iodide solution he’d drunk.

But Petrovsky had reached only the first level of the roofs—halfway up, at mark +30—when he saw Lieutenant Pravik and the men from the Pripyat brigade coming down toward him. Something terrible had clearly happened to them: staggering and incoherent, the half dozen men were pulling and dragging one another down the staircase, vomiting as they came. Petrovsky told one of his men to get them safely to the ground, while he continued upward with Ivan Shavrey—one of the two Belarusian brothers on the third watch. In his haste to reach the top and help the comrades they imagined still fighting the blazes at mark +71, Shavrey slipped on the steep staircase, and Petrovsky reached out to grab him.

The roof of the central hall had disappeared. Inside was a gaping black crater, where more than ten stories of walls and floors had been carved away as if scooped out from above by a monstrous spoon. The northern wall of the building had collapsed into a shambles of black rubble that tumbled out across the flat roofs of adjoining buildings and toward the station perimeter. Inside the ruins of the hall, he could see the tangled wreckage of the 120-tonne bridge crane, the refueling machine, the main circulation pumps, and the emergency core cooling tanks. The pilot tilted the helicopter to one side, so the plant photographer could shoot through the window. Prushinsky saw that the lid of the reactor—Elena, the two-thousand-tonne disc of concrete and steel designed to shield it from the outside world—was tilted upward to the sky. Beneath it, deep within the reactor vault, and despite the bright sunshine, he could make out the glowing lattice formed by the remaining fuel cells—and a single spot that burned a fierce yellow-red.

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.

At the same time, in Kiev, the Ukrainian Ministry of Transport began requisitioning buses from motor transport enterprises all over the city and the surrounding towns and suburbs, summoning their drivers to work late on Saturday night and preparing them to travel toward Pripyat under police escort. At 11:25 p.m. they received the Ukrainian Council of Ministers’ order to move. By 3:50 a.m., five hundred vehicles had already arrived at the city limits, with five hundred more reaching Chernobyl town less than a half hour later. Before dawn, a column of vehicles some twelve kilometers long had halted on the road toward Pripyat, while the drivers awaited further instructions and ate from a mobile canteen. The entire operation was conducted beneath a blanket of secrecy. By midmorning on Sunday, the bus stops of Kiev were crowded with frustrated passengers waiting in vain for scheduled services that would never show up.

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.

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.

As the multicolored convoy of buses wound its way through the narrow roads surrounding the city, few of the departing citizens knew where they were going. Nobody had told them anything. But they were confident they would soon return. Part of the convoy was well beyond the city limits when someone realized that the vehicles were carrying dangerous levels of radioactive dust on their wheels and had to double back to Pripyat for decontamination.

Now the streets echoed with new sounds: the barking of bewildered pet dogs, their fur so contaminated with poisonous dust that their owners had been forced to leave them behind; the whine of civil defense reconnaissance vehicles; and the relentless throb of helicopter engines, as the pilots and engineers of the Fifty-First Guards Helicopter Regiment returned again and again to fling bags of boron and sand into the mouth of the radioactive volcano.

The power station sat just a few meters above the water table of the Pripyat River, and if the melted fuel penetrated that far, the consequences would be catastrophic. A whole range of toxic radionuclides would poison the drinking water not only supplied to Kiev but also that of everyone in Ukraine who drew from the waters of the Dnieper River basin—some thirty million people in all—and, beyond that, flow into the Black Sea itself.

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.

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.

From inside the body, the damage inflicted by “hot” particles—the almost invisible fragments of nuclear fuel blown out of the reactor core—was exponentially greater than when kept outside: 1 microgram of plutonium could bombard the soft tissues of the esophagus or lungs with 1,000 rads of energetic alpha radiation, with lethal results.

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

The reality was that radionuclides could be neither broken down nor destroyed—only relocated, entombed, or interred, ideally in a place where the long process of radioactive decay might pose a less immediate threat to the environment.

On Saturday, May 10, Ryzhkov learned that a total of almost 9,500 people had already been hospitalized in connection with the accident, at least 4,000 of them in the previous forty-eight hours alone. More than half of that number were children, 26 of whom had been diagnosed with radiation sickness.

Back inside the zone, the dogs and cats left behind by the fleeing population had themselves become a health hazard—the Soviet Agriculture Ministry feared the spread of rabies and plague. More immediately, starving and desperate, with their hopelessly irradiated fur, the abandoned pets were now toxic to anyone they encountered.

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.

But in a place where the leaves on the trees and the earth beneath their feet had become sources of ionizing radiation, the work was Sisyphean. Even the most gentle summer breeze recirculated dust carrying alpha- and beta-emitting particles into the air. Every rain shower washed radiation from the clouds and flushed more long-lived nuclear isotopes into the ponds and streams. The arrival of autumn would send radioactive leaves skittering across the ground. The Pripyat marshes—the largest swamp in Europe—had become a massive sponge for strontium and cesium, and the vast stretches of agricultural land proved too large to be scraped clean even by squadrons of earth-moving machines. Only ten square kilometers of the zone would ever be truly decontaminated. A total cleanup would have required nearly six hundred million tonnes of topsoil to have been removed and buried as nuclear waste.

Pripyat and the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station now lay at the center of a vast depopulated area of 2,600 square kilometers, patrolled by soldiers from the Interior Ministry and accessible only to holders of a government-issued pass.

But the Politburo resolution also plainly recognized the true origins of the accident that destroyed Reactor Number Four. The catastrophe occurred “due to deficiencies in the construction of the RBMK reactor, which does not fully meet safety demands,” it stated. Furthermore, although Efim Slavsky was well aware of these shortcomings and received numerous warnings, he had done nothing to address the failings of the reactor design.

“I did not lie in Vienna,” Legasov said to his colleagues in a report he delivered two months later at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. “But I did not tell the whole truth.”

The Ministry of Medium Machine Building regarded its technical experts—architects, engineers, scientists, electricians, dosimetrists—as irreplaceable. They had to be protected from overexposure so that they could work in the zone for as long as possible. But the often middle-aged partizans were perceived as ignorant, unskilled, and expendable. They were thrown into the front line wherever necessary to perform manual tasks in high-radiation zones, one platoon after another. These men caught their maximum dose in a matter of hours—or minutes—before being sent home and replaced with more cannon fodder.

As the cleanup inside the thirty-kilometer zone ground on, morale among the tens of thousands of liquidators who had been shipped in to perform the dangerous and apparently inexorable task sank ever lower. Dust from highly contaminated areas continued to blow into those that had been cleaned, rendering weeks of work pointless; Kombinat appeared to have been making progress in Pripyat until the KGB learned that their specialists had been reporting readings from only the cleanest areas, and thus underestimating the true levels of radiation in the city by more than ten times. The secret policemen also noted that the liquidators’ food was bad, radiation safety was lacking, workers weren’t even being paid on time, and one radioactive waste dump was being flooded regularly with river water. The Kombinat leaders would eventually be reprimanded by the Party for tolerating nepotism, theft, and drunkenness.

In the meantime, looting from inside the zone had begun on an industrial scale, often initiated by the liquidators themselves and sometimes with the collusion of their commanders. One night, radiation reconnaissance officer Alexander Logachev watched in amazement as a renegade group of soldiers loaded one truck after another with gas stoves and building supplies taken from a heavily radioactive construction warehouse, in the shadow of the plant. “Guys, are you fucking crazy?” he asked, but they carried on regardless, and, by dawn, two massive Antonov 22 heavy lift transport aircraft were on their way to the Siberian military district filled with toxic contraband.

But privately, Legasov had been struck by what he had heard Prime Minister Ryzhkov tell Gorbachev and the rest of the Politburo more than a year earlier: that the explosion in Chernobyl had been inevitable, and that if it hadn’t happened there, it would have happened at another Soviet station sooner or later. It was only then that Legasov had finally recognized the true scope of the decay at the heart of the nuclear state: the culture of secrecy and complacency, the arrogance and negligence, and the shoddy standards of design and construction. He saw that both the RBMK reactor and its pressurized water counterpart, the VVER, were inherently dangerous. He began to investigate the problems in more detail and advocated at Sredmash for a new generation of reactor, cooled with molten salt. But his suggestions were met with fury and indignation: Efim Slavsky, at that time still head of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, told Legasov he was technically illiterate and should keep his nose out of matters that didn’t concern him.