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

by Adam Higginbotham

Zeus was so enraged by the theft of the gods’ most powerful secret that he chained Prometheus to a rock, where a giant eagle descended to peck out his liver every day for eternity. Nor did mortal man escape retribution for accepting Prometheus’s gift. To him, Zeus sent Pandora, the first woman, bearing a box that, once opened, unleashed evils that could never again be contained.

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.

Yet the designers saw no need to prepare for such a calamity, which they regarded as outside the realm of reasonable probability. Nonetheless, they granted the scenario its own designation: the beyond design-basis accident.

the quickest way to find out how the new reactors would work in industrial electricity generation would be to put them directly into mass production.

But eighteen seconds is a long time in neutron physics—and an eternity in a nuclear reactor with a high positive void coefficient.

Director Brukhanov had granted approval to skip the test, to meet his end-of-year deadline.

The temperature inside the reactor rose to 4,650 degrees centigrade—not quite as hot as the surface of the sun.

I’m so young, and it’s all over.

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.

Revealing to the world the true roots of the disaster—the design of the reactor itself; the systematic, long-term failures and the culture of secrecy and denial of the Soviet nuclear program; and the arrogance of the senior scientists overseeing its implementation—was unthinkable.

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.

Valentina Brukhanov waited on a park bench in Kiev beside an old man who had fought in the Great Patriotic War. When talk turned to the Chernobyl proceedings, the veteran explained that some people thought that the defendants should be sent to prison, but in his opinion that wouldn’t be just. He said they should all be shot.

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.