Pripyat was a small place: few of the buildings reached higher than ten stories, and one could cross the whole city in twenty minutes. Everyone knew everyone else, and there was little trade for the militsia—the policemen of the Ministry of Internal Affairs—or the city’s resident KGB chief, who had an office on the fifth floor of the ispolkom. Trouble was confined mostly to petty vandalism and public drunkenness. Each spring, the river gave up another grim harvest, as the thaw revealed the bodies of drunks who had blundered through the ice and drowned in midwinter.
A Western eye may have been drawn to Pripyat’s limitations: the yellowing grass bristling between concrete paving slabs or the bleak uniformity of the multistory buildings. But to men and women born in the sour hinterlands of the USSR’s factory cities, raised on the parched steppes of Kazakhstan, or among the penal colonies of Siberia, the new atomgrad was a true workers’ paradise. In home movies and snapshots, the citizens of Pripyat captured one another not as drab victims of the Socialist experiment but as carefree young people: kayaking, sailing, dancing, or posing in new outfits; their children playing on a great steel elephant or a brightly painted toy truck; cheerful optimists in the city of the future.
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By the end of December 1985, Viktor and Valentina Brukhanov could look back on a year of triumphs and milestones at home and at work. In August they saw their daughter married and Lilia and her new husband resume their studies at the medical institute in Kiev; soon after, Lilia became pregnant with their first child. In December, the couple celebrated Viktor’s fiftieth birthday and their own silver wedding anniversary, with parties in their big corner apartment overlooking Pripyat’s main square.
At the same time, Viktor was honored with an invitation to Moscow to join the delegation attending the impending 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, an important stamp of political approval from above. The Congress promised, too, to be a significant event for the USSR as a whole. It would be the first over which the new general secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, would preside as leader of the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev had assumed power in March 1985, ending the long succession of zombie apparatchiks whose declining health, drunkenness, and senility had been concealed from the public by squadrons of increasingly desperate minders. At fifty-four, Gorbachev seemed young and dynamic and found an enthusiastic audience in the West. With political opinions formed during the 1960s, he was also the first general secretary to exploit the power of television. Speaking unselfconsciously in his southern accent, plunging into crowds on apparently spontaneous walkabouts finely orchestrated by the KGB, Gorbachev appeared constantly on the nation’s flagship TV news show, Vremya, watched every night by nearly two hundred million people. He announced plans for economic reorganization—perestroika—and, at the climax of the Party congress in March 1986, talked of the need for glasnost, or open government. A dedicated Socialist, Gorbachev believed that the USSR had lost its way but could be led to the utopia of True Communism by returning to the founding principles of Lenin. It would be a long road. The economy was staggering under the financial burden of the Cold War. Soviet troops were mired in Afghanistan, and in 1983 US president Ronald Reagan had extended the battle into space with the Strategic Defense Initiative, the “Star Wars” program. Annihilation in a nuclear strike seemed as close as ever. And at home, the monolithic old ways—the strangling bureaucracy and corruption of the Era of Stagnation—lingered on.
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In the sixteen years that he’d spent building four nuclear reactors and an entire city on an isolated stretch of marshland, Viktor Brukhanov had received a long education in the realities of the system. Hammered on the anvil of the Party, made pliant by the privileges of rank, the well-informed and opinionated young specialist had been transformed into an obedient tool of the nomenklatura. He had met his targets and fulfilled the plan and won himself and his men orders of merit and pay bonuses for beating deadlines and exceeding labor quotas. But, like all successful Soviet managers, to do so, Brukhanov had learned how to be expedient and bend limited resources to meet an endless list of unrealistic goals. He had to cut corners, cook the books, and fudge regulations.
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.
When the Ministry of Energy in Moscow learned that the roof of the plant’s turbine hall had been covered with highly flammable bitumen, they ordered him to replace it. 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. When the district Party secretary instructed him to build an Olympic-length swimming pool in Pripyat, Brukhanov tried to object: such facilities were common only in Soviet cities of more than a million inhabitants. But the secretary insisted: “Go build it!” he said, and Brukhanov obeyed. He found the extra funds to do so by fiddling the city expenses to hoodwink the state bank.
And as the fourth and most advanced reactor of the Chernobyl plant approached completion, a time-consuming safety test on the unit turbines remained outstanding. Brukhanov quietly postponed it, and so met Moscow’s deadline for completion on the last day of December 1983.
But, like a spoiled lover, the Soviet Ministry of Energy and Electrification would not be satisfied. At the beginning of the 1980s, the USSR’s punishing schedule of nuclear construction had been accelerated further, with breathtaking plans for more and increasingly gigantic stations throughout the western territories of the Union. By the end of the century, Moscow intended Chernobyl to be one part of a dense network of atomic power megacomplexes, each one home to up to a dozen reactors. 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.
In 1985 Brukhanov received instructions for the construction of Chernobyl Two, a separate station of four more RBMK reactors, using a new model fresh from the drawing board and even more Brobdingnagian than the last. This station would be built a few hundred meters away from the existing one, on the other side of the river, along with a new residential area of Pripyat to accommodate the plant workers. A bridge would be required to reach it, and a new ten-story administration building, with an office at the top from which the director could survey his sprawling nuclear fiefdom.
Brukhanov worked around the clock. His superiors could usually expect to find him somewhere in the station at almost any time of the day or night. If something went wrong at the plant—as it often did—the director often forgot to eat, and would subsist for a full twenty-four hours on coffee and cigarettes. In meetings, he withdrew into inscrutable silence, never offering two words when one would do. Isolated and exhausted, he had few friends and confided little, even to his wife.
Brukhanov’s staff, too, had changed. The spirited team of young specialists who had first colonized the freezing settlement in the woods all those years ago, and then worked to bring the first reactors online, had moved on. In their place were thousands of new employees, and Brukhanov found maintaining discipline difficult: despite his technical gifts, he lacked the force of personality necessary for management on the Soviet scale. The plant construction chief, a domineering and well-connected Party man whose authority rivaled that of the director, derided him as a “marshmallow.”
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. Some were trainee nuclear engineers—aspiring to become a part of the highly qualified technical elite known as atomshchiki—who came to watch the experts at work. But others were mechanics and electricians who came from elsewhere in the energy industry—the “power men,” or energetiki—who harbored complacent assumptions about nuclear plants. They had been told that radiation was so harmless “you could spread it on bread,” or that a reactor was “like a samovar . . . more simple than a thermal power plant.” At home, some drank from glassware colored with iridescent patterns that, they boasted, were created by having been steeped in the radioactive waters of the plant’s used fuel coolant pond. Others listlessly filled out their shifts reading novels and playing cards. Those who actually had important work to do were known—with a bureaucratic frankness that hinted at satire—as the Group of Effective Control. Yet the dead weight of unwanted manpower tugged even at those with urgent responsibilities and infected the plant with inefficiency and a dangerous sense of inertia.
At the top, the experienced team of independent-minded nuclear engineering experts who had overseen the start-up of the station’s first four reactors had all left, and senior specialists were in short supply. The chief engineer—Brukhanov’s principal deputy, responsible for the day-to-day technical operation of the station—was Nikolai Fomin, the former plant Party secretary and an arrogant, blustering apparatchik of the old school. Balding, barrel chested, with a dazzling smile and a confident baritone voice that rose steeply in pitch when he became excited, Fomin had all the overbearing Soviet charisma Brukhanov lacked. An electrical engineer, his appointment had been pushed through by the Party in Moscow over the objections of the Ministry of Energy. He had no previous experience in atomic power but was ideologically beyond reproach—and did his best to learn nuclear physics through a correspondence course.
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By the spring of 1986, Chernobyl was, officially, one of the best-performing nuclear stations in the Soviet Union, and the word was that Brukhanov’s loyalty to the Party would soon be rewarded. According to the results of the latest Five-Year Plan, the plant was due to receive the state’s highest honor: the Order of Lenin. The staff would win a financial bonus, and Brukhanov would be awarded the star of the Hero of Socialist Labor. At the Ministry of Energy, the decision had already been taken to promote Brukhanov to Moscow, and Fomin would take his place as plant director. The news would be announced on the May 1 holiday, with a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.
Brukhanov had also raised Pripyat from nothing, creating a beautiful model town cherished by its citizens. And despite the appointment of a city council, almost every decision about the atomgrad—no matter how trivial—remained subject to his approval. From the outset, the architects had called for the city to be populated with a lush variety of trees and shrubs—birch, elm, and horse chestnut; jasmine, lilac, and barberry. But Brukhanov was especially fond of flowers and ordered them planted everywhere. At a meeting of the ispolkom in 1985, he announced a grand gesture. It was his wish that the streets would blossom with fifty thousand rosebushes: one for every man, woman, and child in the city. There were objections, of course. How could they possibly find so many flowers? Yet, by the following spring, thirty thousand good Baltic rosebushes had already been purchased at great expense from Lithuania and Latvia and planted in the long, raised beds beneath the poplar trees on Lenina Prospekt and everywhere around the central square.
Here, on the elevated concrete plaza along Kurchatov Street, at the end of the picturesque promenade into the city, the plans called for Pripyat to have its own statue of Lenin, an architectural necessity for every major town in the USSR. But a permanent monument had not yet been built. The city council had announced a competition for a design, and the plinth where it would stand was occupied by a triangular wooden box, painted with an inspiring portrait, a hammer and sickle, and a slogan: “The name and mission of Lenin will live forever!”
In the meantime, Viktor Brukhanov had given his blessing to a memorial to more ancient gods: a massive realist statue, in front of the city’s cinema, six meters tall and cast in bronze. It depicted a Titan, naked beneath the swooping folds of his cloak, holding aloft leaping tongues of flame. This was Prometheus, who had descended from Olympus with the stolen gift of fire. With it, he brought light, warmth, and civilization to mankind—just as the torchbearers of the Red Atom had illuminated the benighted households of the USSR.
But the ancient Greek myth had a dark side: 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.
2
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Alpha, Beta, and Gamma
Almost everything in the universe is made of atoms, fragments of stardust that compose all matter. A million times smaller than the width of a human hair, atoms are composed almost entirely of empty space. But at the center of every atom is a nucleus—unimaginably dense, as if six billion cars were crushed together into a small suitcase—and full of latent energy. The nucleus, formed of protons and neutrons, is orbited by a cloud of electrons and bound together by what physicists call “the strong force.”
The strong force, like gravity, is one of the four principal forces that bind the universe, and scientists once believed it was so powerful that it made atoms indestructible and indivisible. They also believed that “neither mass nor energy could be created or destroyed.” In 1905 Albert Einstein overturned these ideas. He suggested that if atoms could be somehow torn apart, the process would convert their tiny mass into a relatively enormous release of energy. He defined the theory with an equation: the energy released would be equal to the amount of mass lost, multiplied by the speed of light squared. E=mc2.
In 1938 a trio of scientists in Germany discovered that when atoms of the heavy metal uranium are bombarded with neutrons, their nuclei can, in fact, be broken apart, releasing nuclear energy. When the nuclei split, their neutrons could fly away at great speed, smashing into other nearby atoms, causing their nuclei to split in turn, releasing even more energy. If enough uranium atoms were gathered in the correct configuration—forming a critical mass—this process could begin sustaining itself, with one atom’s neutrons splitting the nucleus of another, sending more neutrons into a collision course with further nuclei. As it went critical, the resulting chain reaction of splitting atoms—nuclear fission—would liberate unimaginable quantities of energy.
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. Some seventy-eight thousand people died instantly, or immediately afterward—vaporized, crushed, or incinerated in the firestorm that followed the blast wave. But by the end of the year, another twenty-five thousand men, women, and children would also sicken and die from their exposure to the radiation liberated by the world’s first atom bomb attack.
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Radiation is produced by the disintegration of unstable atoms. The atoms of different elements vary by weight, determined by the number
of protons and neutrons in each nucleus. Each element has a unique number of protons, which never changes, determining its “atomic number” and its position in the periodic table: hydrogen never has more than one proton; oxygen always has eight; gold has seventy-nine. But atoms of the same element may have varying numbers of neutrons, resulting in different isotopes, ranging anywhere from deuterium (hydrogen with one neutron instead of two) to uranium 235 (uranium metal, with five extra neutrons).
Adding to or removing neutrons from the nucleus of a stable atom results in an unstable isotope. But any unstable isotope will try to regain its equilibrium, throwing off parts of its nucleus in a quest for stability—producing either another isotope or sometimes a different element altogether. For example, plutonium 239 sheds two protons and two neutrons from its nucleus to become uranium 235. This dynamic process of nuclear decay is radioactivity; the energy it releases, as atoms shed neutrons in the form of waves or particles, is radiation.
Radiation is all around us. It emanates from the sun and cosmic rays, bathing cities at high altitude in greater levels of background radiation than those at sea level. Underground deposits of thorium and uranium emit radiation, but so does masonry: stone, brick, and adobe all contain radioisotopes. 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.
Midnight in Chernobyl Page 3