68 pages • 2 hours read
Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster
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Chapters 13-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13: “Inside Hospital Six”
Here, Higginbotham steps away from the scientists’ and soldiers’ efforts to check in on the evacuated residents of Pripyat. By the Tuesday following the explosion, residents like Natalia Yuvchenko—told by authorities they will only be gone for two or three days—are running out of money and clean clothes. Desperate to locate her husband, Natalia gathers her young son Kirill and sets out for Moldova where her parents live. Through her parents’ political connections, Natalia learns that Yuvchenko is at the closely-guarded Hospital Six in Moscow. Those same connections allow Natalia to enter the hospital while so many other patients’ loved ones remain kept out by armed guards.
Of the 207 men and women admitted to the hospital after the explosion, 115 receive acute radiation syndrome diagnoses, and 10 will most likely die. When Natalia finally finds Yuvchenko, he looks normal and healthy aside from a shaved head; the doctors shave the patients heads so that their hair falling out doesn’t alarm them. While those exposed to acute radiation often exhibit symptoms like vomiting in the immediate aftermath of the exposure, the disease enters a latency period that can last for days or even weeks. This is why Yuvchenko looks and feels okay at the moment, as do Toptunov, Akimov, and Lieutenant Pravik, all of whom are receiving treatment in Hospital Six.
But within a few days, all four patients begin to suffer dramatic slides. On May 6, a grotesquely swollen Akimov passes much of his intestine through his anus then falls into a coma, dying five days later and becoming the first plant operator to die at the hospital. That same day, Lieutenant Pravik dies. Yuvchenko’s burns are slower to reveal themselves, but when they do they blacken and peel the skin away on his arm and shoulder, the radiation eating into his tissue nearly to the bone.
On May 13, Yuvchenko’s superior and roommate in intensive care, Perevozchenko, dies. By the last week in May, a total of 20 patients are dead, including Toptunov who suffocates in the night by radiation suffocating his lungs. Terrified, Yuvchenko hangs on through extraordinary pain that morphine can’t help.
Chapter 14 Summary: “The Liquidators”
Back at Chernobyl, the core temperature stabilizes around 600 degrees centigrade. Fearing another unexpected temperature spike, the Soviet government assigns 400 coalminers from Moscow and Donbas to begin excavating the area below the core where they will build a heat exchanger to cool the core should it melt down through the concrete barrier. Given an “all but impossible” (245) deadline of one month to excavate the chamber and build the exchanger, the miners work 24 hours-a-day in three-hour shifts to complete the task.
Once the miners excavate the chamber, engineers with the Ministry of Medium Machine Building (Sredmash) arrive to construct the heat exchanger out of prefabricated components built in Moscow. The already hot temperatures inside the chamber reach a sweltering 60 degrees centigrade—around 140 degrees Fahrenheit—as the workers’ welding tools fill the chamber with toxic gas. They must pull countless men out of the tunnel who pass out as a combined result of the heat, gas, and sheer exertion. On June 24, only a little over a week past the deadline, the heat exchanger is complete. But by that point, the core temperature declines even further, all but eliminating the possibility of the meltdown the scientists fear. The heat exchanger “was never even turned on” (246).
Next, the Soviet government embarks on the ambitious task of “liquidating” the contamination zone, which spreads out in a leopard-spot pattern reaching as far as 300 kilometers from the plant. Fearing that “the health of an entire generation of Soviet youth could be ruined” (246), the military calls up hundreds of thousands of reservists between the ages of 24 and 50 to carry out the liquidation effort, 40,000 of whom camp in the 30-kilometer Exclusion Zone itself. Their tasks include razing whole villages to the ground, burying contaminated soil, and building hundreds of new dams and drainage wells to redirect contaminated water so it remains in the zone. The most grisly task by far involves the mass extermination of an estimated 20,000 irradiated pets and farm animals left behind by those who evacuated the area.
Despite the extraordinary efforts and sacrifices of the liquidators, Higginbotham writes that “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. And, even with the seemingly unlimited manpower at the disposal of the Soviet Union, this was regarded as simply impossible” (257).
Chapter 15 Summary: “The Investigation”
Running parallel to a criminal investigation conducted by the Kiev Prosecutor’s Office is a technical inquiry into Chernobyl led by Legasov. Throughout the inquiry, Legasov answers to Sredmash deputy head Alexander Meshkov, who strongly signals his belief that the explosion is the result of operator error. But to the RBMK reactor experts flown in from the Kurchatov Institute, the logbooks and tape recordings from the Unit Four Control Room suggest a different story, one that highlights inherent flaws in the RBMK design. One of the experts even recalls a bureau meeting at NIKIET during which a specialist raises concerns about the AZ-5 mechanism causing a spike in reactivity—concerns that others promptly dismissed at the time as improbable.
Meanwhile, public statements from the Politburo regarding the causes of the accident remain vague. Future Russian president Boris Yeltsin attributes the explosion to “the subjective realm, in human error” (266). As the world and the Soviet people await more concrete answers, the government promises to deliver a full report to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as soon as it completes its inquiry. The government chooses Legasov to collate the findings and deliver the official report to the IAEA. But Legasov returns to Moscow from Chernobyl “a changed man” (266), ideologically shaken by the knowledge of “how overwhelmed they had been by the accident, how unprepared they were to protect the Soviet people from its consequences” (266). Legasov’s health is equally shattered, as Hospital Six doctors reveal “the toxic fingerprint of the reactor deep within Legasov’s body” (266). But despite poor health and shaken convictions, Legasov throws all his energy into compiling the report from hundreds of documents and scientific findings.
After a long and tortuous bureaucratic battle, Legasov and Scherbina present their findings to Gorbachev and the rest of the Politburo. While they lay most of the blame on the plant’s operating personnel, they also detail the extensive design flaws of the RBMK reactor, which “even before the accident would never have been permitted to operate beyond the borders of the USSR” (271). Gorbachev is furious, upbraiding Aleksandrov and Sredmash minister Efim Slavsky in particular: “For thirty years, you told us that everything was perfectly safe. You assumed we would look up to you as gods” (271). Despite Gorbachev’s ire, Aleksandrov and Slavsky avoid overt censure so that the Politburo can maintain its public narrative that operator error—not design flaws—are to blame for the Chernobyl accident. They place the lion’s share of the blame at the feet of Brukhanov and Fomin. The Party kicks both men out, arresting and charging them both with breach of safety.
Despite his private misgivings, Legasov travels to the IAEA’s headquarters in Vienna on August 25 and delivers a masterful performance, speaking for five uninterrupted hours and successfully convincing the agency that the plant’s operators are the ones responsible for the explosion and not the designers who built the reactors nor the bureaucrats who allowed them to remain in service. Two months later, Legasov admits to the Soviet Academy of Sciences, “I did not lie in Vienna. But I did not tell the whole truth” (277).
Chapters 13-15 Analysis
While the idea of doomed heroism reappears throughout the book, nowhere are the costs of this bravery more disturbingly rendered than in Chapter 13, in which Higginbotham checks in on the patients at Hospital Six. For their courageous yet futile efforts to flood the ruined reactor—during which they waded around in highly irradiated water for two hours—Toptunov and Akimov both die horrific deaths. Toptunov suffocates to death in the night after his radiation-ravaged lungs fail. Akimov’s fate is even more grisly. After suffering acute pneumonia and a total metabolic collapse, “his intestines disintegrated and oozed from his body in bloody diarrhea” (235). Both of these men’s fates might have been different had Brukhanov ordered the plant evacuated earlier, or if Dyatlov had believed Tregob when he told him the core is already gone.
While other heroic efforts don’t end in swift, gruesome death, many of them are no less ineffective at containing the consequences of the blaze. The hundreds of coalminers and engineers who work to build the heat-exchanger—hastily approved in another effort to keep up appearances—toil in 140 degree Fahrenheit heat while choking on the toxic gas emitted by their welding tools. By the time they finish the heat-exchanger, the temperature of the core seems to have dropped on its own. The exchanger “was never even turned on” (246). The efforts of the tens of thousands of reservists who participate in the liquidation effort are also of only marginal benefit because the liquidators needed far more effort and manpower to make a dent in the large-scale nuclear disaster.
That so much of the work done to contain Chernobyl is of marginal benefit—the helicopter drops, the heat-exchanger, the liquidation efforts—is a result of the Soviet bureaucracy’s emphasis on moving quickly rather than smartly for the sake of appearances. Indeed, to have moved more thoughtfully or methodically would have only shown the Soviet people and the rest of the world that the explosion caught the USSR completely off-guard, signaling its lack of preparedness for not only a nuclear accident but also a nuclear war. For example, when a commander tells Politburo Ideology chief Yegor Ligachev that decontamination efforts would take seven years—frankly an understatement—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!” (249).
This threat of losing one’s Party card and thus the privileges it affords members is a serious one. In the Soviet Union, only one in 15 citizens are official members of the Communist Party. These individuals enjoy access to restricted stores and foreign journals, better medical care, and the ability to travel outside the USSR. While the Stalinist days of threatening dissenters with labor camps or death are largely a thing of the past, the prospect of ejection from the Party is a compelling tool for keeping the Soviet elite in line. This threat—tacit but clearly understood—likely informs Legasov’s decision to follow the Politburo’s instructions to suppress the revelations about the RBMK’s catastrophic design flaws and to lay the vast majority of the blame on individuals like Brukhanov, Dyatlov, and Fomin. Evidence suggests Legasov knows his testimony is, at best, incomplete. He even admits during the Politburo meeting, “It is our fault, of course. We should have been keeping an eye on the reactor” (271)
As for the Politburo’s decision to publicly absolve the USSR’s nuclear designers and the rest of the atomic elite from guilt in the Chernobyl affair, it is clear that the Soviet Union has more important priorities than Gorbachev’s high-minded principles of glasnost:
In a society where the cult of science had supplanted religion, the nuclear chiefs were among its most sanctified icons—pillars of the Soviet state. To permit them to be pulled down would undermine the integrity of the entire system on which the USSR was built. They could not be found guilty (276).
In addition to outlining the Politburo’s motivations for covering up the role of the Soviet Union’s nuclear designers in causing the Chernobyl accident, this once again reveals conditions unique to Soviet society and culture that play a significant role in precipitating the disaster. While the Communist Party worked hard to suppress religion over the second half of the 20th century, it created a different kind of worship centered on the state and in particular its scientists. But the very elements of religion that Communism claimed to forsake—specifically, a denial of reality—make their way into the Soviet Union’s cult of science, with dangerous results. Even Gorbachev himself refers to the nuclear scientists as gods, albeit false ones: “For thirty years, you told us that everything was perfectly safe. You assumed we would look up to you as gods. That’s the reason why all this happened, why it ended in disaster” (271).
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