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

Especially toward the end of the book, Higginbotham raises the question: To what extent did the Chernobyl explosion help cause the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union? Higginbotham draws a clear connection between the political fallout of the Chernobyl disaster and the acceleration of polices like glasnost and Gorbachev’s perestroika economic reforms which, historians agree, were major factors in the fall of the Soviet Union. “The cloud of radiation that spread out across Europe, making the catastrophe impossible to conceal, had forced the touted openness of Gorbachev’s glasnost on even the most reluctant conservatives in the Politburo. And the general secretary’s own realization that even the nuclear bureaucracy buckled to secrecy, incompetence, and stagnation convinced him that the entire state was rotten. After the accident, frustrated and angry, he confronted the need for truly drastic change and plunged deeply into perestroika in a desperate bid to rescue the Socialist experiment before it was too late” (327).

Certainly Chernobyl is not the only factor involved in the Soviet Union’s eventual demise. Among the biggest is the USSR’s war in Afghanistan which effectively bankrupts the country. But Higginbotham makes a compelling case that the political and social effects of Chernobyl signify something larger than mere disillusion with the Soviet Union’s nuclear ambitions to include disillusion with the entire system and the ideologies that underpin it.

This disillusion appears when the government cordons off town of Pripyat and cuts phone lines. But what’s most alarming to the town’s citizens—more so than the wreckage off in the distance blackening the sky, more so than the reports of patients admitted to the hospital vomiting and incoherent and covered in burns—is the sudden silence from their household radios. This signals that the Chernobyl disaster was one of the earliest and most dramatic instances of the Soviet people beginning to mistrust their government and to question whether the extent to which the Communist Party’s dedication to its own ideology is sincere. As the steady stream of Party propaganda goes silent across households in Pripyat, this foreshadows the impact the Chernobyl disaster will have on the broader Soviet population.

Perhaps the strongest evidence of this thesis, however, comes 15 years after the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union and Gorbachev’s removal from office, when the former General Secretary acknowledges that Chernobyl affected the USSR’s fall more than his failed economic reforms. 

The theme of heroism in service of a doomed cause re-emerges throughout the book, as brave men and women sacrifice their health and often their lives in the pursuit of halting a disaster that’s become out of control. For example, as General Antoshkin’s helicopter pilots fly dangerously close to the gaping maw of the ruined reactor while absorbing severe doses of radiation, many of the scientists on the ground question the likelihood that much the material dropped from the sky hits its mark. When one scientist advises Legasov to discontinue the drops, which are potentially ruining the health of the helicopter pilots in vain, Legasov disagrees—not with the premise that the drops are hopeless, but with the notion that their efficacy matters at all. He says, “People won’t understand if we do nothing. We have to be seen to be doing something” (190). This kind of thinking will infect much of the recovery and cleanup efforts surrounding Chernobyl. In the absence of any real emergency contingency plans, the Soviet Union must make up for this by giving off the appearance of acting swiftly and decisively, of being in control. But this emphasis on appearance over reality results in an enormous amount of wasted suffering on the part of individuals involved in relief efforts. Later, these acts of heroism—in vain or not—act as powerful propaganda tools when the USSR begins to shape the story of the relief efforts as a triumph of bravery.

Nowhere are the costs of this doomed 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 deaths stemmed from Brukhanov’s stubbornness and Dyatlov’s dismissal of 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 effective 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. “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).

The findings of the 1988 scientific expedition into the bowels of the Chernobyl Sarcophagus tell a deeply deflating story about the heroic efforts of the Chernobyl relief workers. For example, of the 16,000 tons of material dropped by Antoshkin’s helicopter pilots at great risk to their own health, only a tiny amount reaches its target. Most piled up uselessly in the corners of the reactor building. Perhaps even more disheartening is the fact that Zborovsky’s courageous mission to release the water suppression tanks fails, and furthermore may have actually done more harm than good had it succeeded. That’s because it’s the standing water left in the tanks that, rather than causing a steam explosion, finally cools the molten uranium fuel and halts its downward flow toward the groundwater. When taking stock of all of the heroic deeds involved with the Chernobyl disaster—the firefighters and plant workers who stay behind to fight the blaze, the helicopter pilots dropping material from above, the attempt to release the water suppression tanks—most have little to no effect on the fate of the core, which essentially burns itself out. Knowing this gives even the undoubtedly heroic elements of the Chernobyl story a muted quality.

At various points in the book, Higginbotham exposes the stark differences between the Soviet nuclear industry and that of its counterparts in the United States and Western Europe. Aside from the West’s mandate to use safer—though less efficient—PWR reactors rather than the dangerously unstable RBMK reactors, the most dramatic divide can found in the United States’s relative transparency in the wake of the Three Mile Island partial meltdown and the Soviet Union’s obsessive dedication to secrecy around multiple nuclear accidents, most of which result in far more damage than the Three Mile Island incident. That incident is largely the result of human error, as plant operators take various actions in violation of U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules. The fact that the United States even has a dedicated federal governing body overseeing the activity in its nuclear plants is itself a significant divergence from the Soviet Union, where around a half-dozen agencies enforce rules with little consistency or efficiency.

The lack of preparation for a calamity like Chernobyl also offers another counterpoint to the United States’s approach to emergency planning. The Soviet Union’s poor performance in this area is a result of both its dangerous over-confidence in its nuclear program but also its refusal to invest heavily in less sexy technologies like computers which are indispensable tools for modeling disaster simulations. “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” (194).