Midnight in Chernobyl

by Adam Higginbotham

  Maria Protsenko was waiting for them on the railway bridge at the entrance to the city. With a map of Pripyat folded under her arm, she was dressed for the hot weather in a blouse, skirt, and summer sandals. She was joined by a major from the army and another from the police. They shook hands. They all understood what they had to do. Nobody said much.

  As the first bus approached, the police major waved it to a halt, and Protsenko climbed aboard. She showed the driver the map and gave him his instructions: the buses were to proceed in groups of five; she told him which microdistrict they should go to, how to get there, the building they should stop at, and the route they should take out of the city. Then she climbed down, the policeman waved forward another group of buses, and Protsenko showed the next driver her map.

  Gradually, five by five, hour by hour, she watched as each of the one thousand vehicles drew away down the scenic incline of Lenina Prospekt and, with a sharp turn and a tart belch of low-octane gasoline fumes, disappeared into the city.

  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.

  * * *

  At around 3:00 p.m., Colonel Boris Nesterov, deputy commander of the Air Forces of the Kiev Military District, a helicopter pilot with twenty years’ experience who had served in Syria and seen combat in the mountains of northern Afghanistan, saw his target come into view ahead. Bringing the powerful Mi-8 transport in from the west at an altitude of two hundred meters, he prepared to cut his speed as he closed in on the red-and-white-striped vent stack of Unit Four. Behind him in the cargo compartment, the flight engineer had already slid open the side door and clipped his harness to the airframe; the pile of ten sandbags stood ready at his feet.

  Nesterov slowed to a hundred kilometers per hour, and gave the command: “Prepare to drop!”

  The ruins of Reactor Number Four came up fast. The colonel’s headphones filled with static, the cockpit thermometer spiked abruptly from 10 to 65 degrees centigrade, and the radiometer housed in the back of his seat ran off the scale. Through the cockpit glass between his foot pedals, Nesterov saw the pillar of white vapor and the edges of the reactor glowing red, like a blast furnace during smelting.

  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.

  The colonel throttled back to sixty kilometers per hour. He fought to hold the helicopter steady and hoped the flight engineer could keep his footing. “Drop!” he shouted. The engineer hefted the first of the sandbags out into the sky above Unit Four, then another; and another. “The cargo has been dropped!”

  Nesterov swung away to starboard and prepared to come around again.

  * * *

  At 5:00 p.m., Maria Protsenko folded her map, flagged down one last bus, and, climbing aboard, rode it down Lenina Prospekt, a lone passenger entering a deserted city. She directed the driver from one side of Pripyat to the other, stopping in each district to check on the results of her work. At six thirty, Protsenko returned to the ispolkom to tell the mayor that her task was complete.

  “Vladimir Pavlovich, that’s it. Everybody has been evacuated,” she said.

  With the exception of the maintenance staff and the men left behind to tend to the surviving reactors of the power station, the city was empty.

  As her report was passed up the chain to the chairman of the government commission, Protsenko felt no sorrow, only the satisfaction of an important job well done. It was just as they had it in the Young Pioneers: “the Party speaks—and the Komsomol says, It’s done!”

  It wasn’t until later that night that she began to feel sick: her throat was raw, and she developed a blinding headache; her feet and ankles burned and itched. She made no conscious connection to radiation, partly because she knew nothing about the effects of the radioactive alpha and beta particles in the dust that had blown around her bare legs during her hours on the railway bridge, but also because she preferred not to think about it. When the diarrhea began, Protsenko told herself she had eaten some bad cucumbers; the headaches and the sore throat—well, she had gone without sleep for two days. She soothed the itching by lifting her legs into the bathroom sink and running her feet under cold water. But it soon returned.

  Protsenko went back to her desk, where she once again took to drawing maps for the chemical troops, who were now conducting radiation surveys of the area every sixty minutes. They began sweeping the inside of the ispolkom itself for radiation and warned her that the hallways were all contaminated. The janitor was long gone, so Protsenko took a wet cloth and mopped the linoleum herself; there were no gloves, so she used her bare hands.

  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. One member of the power station staff traveled more than fifty kilometers away from the city, on a bus with his wife and children, before telling them to go on alone while he returned to the plant to help his colleagues; the driver dropped him in the city of Ivankov, where he had to talk the local militsia commander into allowing him to go back. Some evacuees persuaded their drivers to take them all the way to Kiev, but the Interior Ministry’s plan called for everyone from Pripyat to be distributed throughout the small towns and villages of rural Polesia, where they would be taken in—one family at a time—by farmers and kolkhoz workers.

  Viktor Brukhanov’s wife, Valentina, wept as she was driven away from the city. On Natalia Yuvchenko’s bus, the passengers whispered anxiously about where they might end up. They scoured the roadsides for the names of villages as they drove on through one settlement after another and saw the pity on the leathery faces of the peasants who stood in their yards to watch them pass.

  * * *

  On the third floor of the White House, the meetings of the government commission continued. Downstairs, Maria Protsenko remained at her desk. It was around 8:00 p.m. when she glanced out of the window and noticed a woman walking across the square into town. She was alone and carrying a suitcase. Protsenko couldn’t understand it. Every woman and child in the city was supposed to have been taken to safety hours ago. She dispatched a duty officer to go down and investigate and watched from her office as he stopped the woman and questioned her. They talked, the woman nodded and then carried on as before, taking her suitcase with her. When the guard returned, Protsenko discovered that word of the emergency in Pripyat had apparently not yet prevented the trains passing through the railway station from stopping there on their normal timetable. The woman was returning from a weekend away and alighted from the train from Khmelnitsky, three hundred kilometers away to the southwest—with no reason to believe that anything had changed in her absence.

  When the security guard explained to her what had happened, she seemed neither frightened nor panicked. Of course she would agree to be evacuated, she told him. “But first, I’m going home.”

  Yet, as the woman carried her suitcase back to her apartment building, she found Pripyat eerily transformed. In the space of just a few hours, Viktor Brukhanov’s beloved city of the future had become a ghost town. Abando
ned laundry flapped in the breeze on the balconies of Lenina Prospekt. The beaches were deserted, the restaurants empty, the playgrounds silent.

  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.

  PART 2

  DEATH OF AN EMPIRE

  10

  * * *

  The Cloud

  Lifted skyward on a pillar of fierce heat from the shattered core, convoyed by obliging winds, the invisible cloud of radiation had traveled thousands of kilometers since its escape from the carcass of Unit Four.

  Unleashed in the violence of the explosion, it had soared aloft into the still night air, until it reached an altitude of around 1,500 meters, where it was snatched by powerful wind currents blowing from the south and southeast, pulled away at speeds of between fifty and a hundred kilometers an hour, and flew northwest across the USSR toward the Baltic Sea. The cloud carried gaseous xenon 133, microscopic fragments of irradiated graphite, and particles composed of pure radioactive isotopes, including iodine 131 and cesium 137—which generated such heat that they warmed the air around them and took flight like hundreds of thousands of tiny hot air balloons. At its heart, it pulsed with some 20 million curies of radioactivity. By the time Soviet scientists finally began regular airborne monitoring near the accident site on Sunday, April 27—a full day after the accident occurred—the invisible monster had slipped away, leaving them ignorant of its size and intensity. Their measurements revealed only its tail. Within twenty-four hours, it had reached Scandinavia.

  At midday on Sunday, an automatic monitoring device at the Risø National Laboratory north of Roskilde silently logged the cloud’s arrival in Denmark. But because it was a Sunday, the readings went unnoticed. That evening, a soldier at the Finnish National Defense Forces’ measuring station in Kajaani, southern Finland, recorded an abnormal increase in background radiation. He reported it to the operational center in Helsinki, but no further action was taken. Late that night, the plume encountered rain clouds over Sweden, and the moisture in them began to scavenge and concentrate the contaminants it contained.

  When the rain finally fell from the clouds, around the city of Gävle, two hours’ drive north of Stockholm, it had become heavily radioactive.

  * * *

  Shortly before seven o’clock on Monday morning, April 28, Cliff Robinson was eating breakfast in a coffee room of the Forsmark nuclear power station, sixty-five kilometers southeast of Gävle on the Gulf of Bothnia. Robinson, a twenty-nine-year-old Anglo-Swedish technician in the plant’s radiochemistry lab, commuted to work each morning on a bus bringing construction workers to Forsmark, where they were building a large underground repository for nuclear waste.

  When he had finished his coffee, Robinson stepped into the locker room to brush his teeth. On his way back, he passed through a radiation monitoring point, and the alarm bell rang. Still half asleep, the technician was puzzled. He had only just arrived and hadn’t yet entered the reactor block: he couldn’t possibly be contaminated. But the alarm brought down a member of the plant radiation protection staff, to whom Robinson explained what had happened. He walked through the detector again. Once more, the bell sounded. But on a third attempt, the monitor remained silent. Baffled, the two men decided that the equipment was faulty. Perhaps the alarm threshold had been miscalibrated. The dosimetrist told Robinson to go back to work. The machine could be fixed later.

  Coincidentally, Robinson’s job in the lab was to measure radioactivity at Forsmark-1, within the station building and in what it expelled into the environment. The reactor was only six years old but had been plagued by minor technical faults, and leaking fuel rods had already led to several small radioactive releases that winter. His Monday-morning routine took him first to the upper levels of the plant to gather air samples from the vent stack and then to the lab to analyze them. This took time. At around 9:00 a.m., he went back downstairs for another coffee. But when he approached the radiation monitoring point, he saw his path blocked by a long line of plant workers, each of whom was setting off the alarm bell. Now more perplexed than ever, Robinson took a shoe from one of the men, placed it in a plastic bag to prevent cross-contamination, and returned to the lab. He put the shoe on the germanium detector, a sensitive tool for measuring gamma rays, and prepared to wait.

  But the results returned with terrible speed, exploding in steep, green peaks across the computer screen. Robinson’s heart froze. He had never seen anything like it before. The shoe was intensely contaminated with the entire spectrum of fission products usually found inside the core at Forsmark-1: cesium 137, cesium 134, and short-lived iodine isotopes—but also a number of other elements, including cobalt 60 and neptunium 239. These, he realized, could have originated only with nuclear fuel that had been exposed to the atmosphere. Robinson immediately telephoned his boss, who, fearing the worst, told him to return to the chimney stack and take a fresh set of air samples.

  At 9:30 a.m., the plant manager, Karl Erik Sandstedt, was alerted to the contamination. But the senior staff of Forsmark remained as confused by it as Robinson had been. They couldn’t trace it backward to a source within the plant, and yet, given the weather conditions, radiation levels on the ground outside conformed to what they would expect of a major leak from one of the Forsmark reactors. At ten thirty, Sandstedt ordered approaches to the station sealed off. Local authorities issued a precautionary alert: a warning was broadcast on the radio instructing the population to keep its distance from Forsmark, and police set up roadblocks. Thirty minutes later, Robinson was still in the lab, at work on his new batch of samples, when he heard sirens sound throughout the building: the entire plant was being evacuated.

  But by then, state nuclear and defense agencies in Stockholm had received reports of similarly high levels of contamination at a research facility in Studsvik, two hundred kilometers away from Forsmark. Air samples taken in Stockholm also showed elevated radiation and an isotope composition containing graphite particles, suggesting a catastrophic accident in a civilian nuclear reactor, but one of a very different type from those at Forsmark. By 1:00 p.m., using meteorological calculations developed to help monitor the Partial Test Ban Treaty on nuclear weapon trials, the Swedish National Defense Research Institute had also modeled prevailing weather patterns across the Baltic. These established beyond doubt that the radioactive contamination hadn’t originated in Forsmark at all. It had come from somewhere outside Sweden. And the wind was blowing from the southeast.

  * * *

  At around eleven in the morning Moscow time, Heydar Aliyev was in his office in the Kremlin when the phone rang, summoning him to an emergency meeting of the Politburo. As the deputy prime minister of the USSR, Aliyev was one of the most powerful men in the Soviet Union. Once the head of the Azerbaijani KGB, and one of only twelve voting members of the Politburo, he held joint responsibility for making the most profound decisions affecting the course of the empire. Yet by Monday morning, even Aliyev knew only the vaguest details about a nuclear accident in Ukraine. Not one word about Chernobyl had appeared in the Soviet press or been reported on radio or television. Authorities in Kiev, without prompting from Moscow, had already acted to suppress awareness of the situation by scientists. On Saturday, after instruments at the Kiev Institute of Botany registered a sharp increase in radiation, KGB officers arrived and sealed the devices “to avoid panic and the spreading of provocative rumors.” Even so, by the time General Secretary Gorbachev assembled the emergency meeting to discuss what had happened, Aliyev realized that radiation would soon be detected far beyond the borders of the USSR.

  The dozen men—including Aliyev; Prime Minister Ryzhkov; propaganda
chief Alexander Yakovlev; Gorbachev’s emerging conservative opponent, Yegor Ligachev; and Viktor Chebrikov, the head of the KGB—convened not in the usual Politburo conference room but in Secretary Gorbachev’s gloomy office on the third floor of the Kremlin. In spite of recent renovations, elaborately patterned carpets, and a domed ceiling hung with crystal chandeliers, the room was cavernous and uncomfortable. Everyone was nervous.

  Gorbachev asked simply, “What happened?”

  Vladimir Dolgikh, the Central Committee secretary in charge of the Soviet energy sector, began by explaining what he knew from his telephone conversations with Scherbina and the experts in Pripyat. He described an explosion, the destruction of the reactor, and the evacuation of the city. The air force was using helicopters to bury the ruined unit in sand, clay, and lead. A cloud of radiation was moving south and west and had already been detected in Lithuania. Information was still scant and conflicting: the armed forces said one thing, scientists another. Now they needed to decide what—or whether—to tell the Soviet people about the accident.

  For Gorbachev, this was a sudden and unexpected test of the new openness and transparent government he had promised the Party conference just a month earlier; since then, glasnost had been nothing more than a slogan. “We should make a statement as soon as possible,” he said. “We can’t procrastinate.”

  Yet the traditional reflexes of secrecy and paranoia were deeply ingrained. The truth about incidents of any kind that might undermine Soviet prestige or provoke public panic had always been suppressed: even three decades after it had happened, the 1957 explosion in Mayak had still, officially, never taken place; when a Soviet air force pilot mistakenly shot down a Korean Air jumbo jet in 1983, killing all 269 people on board, the USSR initially denied any knowledge of the incident. And Gorbachev’s grip on power remained tenuous, vulnerable to the kind of reactionary revolt that had destroyed Khrushchev and his program of liberalization. He had to be careful.