Midnight in Chernobyl

by Adam Higginbotham

  Although the official record of the meeting would later appear to show broad agreement on the need to make a public statement about the accident, Heydar Aliyev insisted it was misleading. According to the deputy prime minister’s account, he advocated for immediate and total honesty: all of Europe would soon know that something terrible had happened, and this disaster was simply too big to hide. What was the point in trying to conceal what was already public? But before he could finish, Yegor Ligachev, widely regarded as the second most powerful man in the Kremlin, cut him off. “What do you want?” he asked truculently. “What information do you want to release?”

  “Come off it!” replied Aliyev. “We can’t conceal this!”

  Others at the table argued that they didn’t have enough information yet to tell the public and feared causing panic. If they released any news at all, it had to be strictly circumscribed. “The statement should be formulated in a way that avoids causing excessive alarm and panic,” said Andrei Gromyko, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. And by the time they took a vote, Ligachev had apparently prevailed: the Politburo resolved to take the traditional approach. The assembled Party elders drafted an unrevealing twenty-three-word statement to be issued by the state news agency, TASS—and designed to combat what the Central Committee’s official spokesman called “bourgeois falsification . . . propaganda and inventions.”

  Whatever Gorbachev’s intentions, it seemed that the old ways were best after all.

  * * *

  By 2:00 p.m. in Stockholm, Swedish state authorities were in unanimous agreement: the country had been contaminated as the result of a major nuclear accident abroad. Just over an hour later, the country’s Foreign Ministry approached the governments of East Germany, Poland, and the USSR to ask if such an incident had taken place on their territory. Soon afterward, the Swedes sent an identical communiqué to their representatives at the International Atomic Energy Agency. By that time, both Finnish and Danish governments had confirmed that they, too, had detected radioactive contamination inside their borders.

  Back in the town of Chernobyl, the single tiny hotel where Viktor Brukhanov had once sat on a bed and sketched plans for his nuclear future was filling up with exhausted apparatchiks sent from Moscow. Radionuclides continued to boil from the smoldering remains of Reactor Number Four, as the helicopter pilots of the Seventeenth Airborne Army attempted to cover the reactor and bring the graphite fire raging beneath them under control. Yet the Soviet authorities assured the Swedes that they had no information about any kind of nuclear accident within the USSR.

  That afternoon in Moscow, the Swedish embassy’s science attaché contacted the State Committee for the Utilization of Atomic Energy—the kindly public face of Sredmash, the Ministry of Medium Machine Building. But the committee would neither confirm nor deny a problem with any of their reactors. Early in the evening, at a cocktail party at the Swedish embassy, Ambassador Torsten Örn buttonholed an official of the Soviet Foreign Ministry and asked him directly if he knew of a recent nuclear accident within the USSR.

  The official told Örn he would make a note of the inquiry but provided no further comment.

  Finally, at 8:00 p.m. on Monday, April 28, almost three days after the toxic cloud first rolled into the night sky above Unit Four, Radio Moscow broadcast the TASS statement agreed upon in Gorbachev’s office. “An accident has taken place at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant,” the announcer read. “One of the atomic reactors has been damaged. Measures are being taken to eliminate the consequences of the accident. Aid is being given to those affected. A government commission has been set up.” In its brevity and frugality with the truth, the bulletin was typical of Soviet news reports, a continuation of the way the state had covered conventional industrial accidents for decades. An hour later, Radio Moscow’s World Service repeated the announcement in English, for foreign listeners, and followed it by cataloging the long record of nuclear accidents in the West. Both statements avoided mentioning when, exactly, the Ukrainian accident might have taken place.

  At 9:25 p.m. Moscow time, Vremya, the flagship nightly TV news show broadcast throughout the Soviet Union, carried the same twenty-three-word statement, read in the name of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. It was the twenty-first item of news. There were no pictures. Only the grave expression on the face of the anchor and the mention of the Council of Ministers suggested that something extraordinary might have happened.

  The following morning, Tuesday, April 29, the press in Moscow remained entirely silent about the accident. In Ukraine, the daily papers in Kiev reported the news, but their editors did their best to keep it quiet: Pravda Ukrainy printed a short report at the bottom of page three, beneath an article recounting the story of two pensioners struggling to have telephones installed in their homes. Robitnycha Hazeta—the Ukrainian workers’ daily—took care to bury its Chernobyl story below the Soviet soccer league tables and coverage of a chess tournament.

  Back in the Kremlin, General Secretary Gorbachev had convened the second extraordinary meeting of the Politburo in two days, once more at ten thirty in the morning. Now he was concerned that the initial response to the developing catastrophe had been flat-footed: radiation was still spreading, elevated levels had already been reported in Scandinavia, and the Poles were asking awkward questions. Was it possible that contamination could reach Leningrad—or Moscow?

  Vladimir Dolgikh gave his colleagues the latest news: the plume of radioisotopes drifting from Chernobyl had divided into three traces, heading north, south, and west, and the Ministry of the Interior had cordoned off an area of at least ten kilometers around the plant, but the levels of radiation released from the reactor were falling. Chebrikov, the KGB chief, disagreed: his sources saw no indication that the radiation situation was improving. In fact, they were facing disaster. Further evacuations in the area were already under way, there were almost two hundred victims of the accident hospitalized in Moscow, and Vladimir Scherbitsky, the Ukrainian premier, had reported outbreaks of panic in his republic.

  Everyone present agreed that they must seal up the reactor completely as quickly as possible. To take control of the situation, they moved to set up a special seven-person operations group, headed by Prime Minister Ryzhkov and including Dolgikh, Chebrikov, the minister of the interior, and the minister of defense. The group, granted emergency powers to command all Party and ministerial authorities throughout the Union, would coordinate the disaster response from Moscow, placing all the resources of the centralized state at the disposal of the government commission in Chernobyl.

  Discussion turned once more to what to tell the world about what had happened. “The more honest we are, the better,” Gorbachev said, suggesting that they should at least provide specific information to the governments of the Soviet satellite states, to Washington, DC, and London. “You’re right,” said Anatoly Dobrynin, recently appointed to the Central Committee after twenty years as the Soviet ambassador to the United States. “After all, I’m sure the photos are already on Reagan’s desk.” They agreed to cable statements to their ambassadors in world capitals, including Havana, Warsaw, Bonn, and Rome.

  “Should we give information to our people?” asked Aliyev.

  “Perhaps,” Ligachev replied.

  * * *

  On Tuesday evening, Vremya broadcast a new statement issued in the name of the Soviet Council of Ministers. This conceded that two people had been killed as a result of an explosion at the Chernobyl plant, that a section of the reactor building had been destroyed, and that Pripyat had been evacuated. There was no mention of a radioactive release. This time the report was relegated to sixth place, behind the latest encouraging news about the mighty Soviet economy.

  By then, the rest of the world’s media had the scent of a spectacular catastrophe behind the Iron Curtain, and Chernobyl had become headline news in the West. Newspapers and TV networks threw their correspondents into a hunt for more details, no matter how vaporous their sources. D
enied permission to travel to Ukraine and faced with a bureaucratic wall of silence, the foreign press corps in Moscow did what they could with scant material. Luther Whittington of the wire service United Press International, only recently arrived in the USSR, had bumped into a Ukrainian woman in Red Square just a few weeks earlier, who he believed had contacts in the emergency services. Whittington telephoned the woman at home in Kiev, and understood her to say that eighty people had been killed immediately and an additional two thousand had died on the way to the hospital as a result of the explosion. No independent confirmation could be found for these claims, and one of Whittington’s Moscow colleagues, Nicholas Daniloff of U.S. News & World Report, would later be convinced that the UPI man’s Russian was so primitive that he might have misunderstood what his source had said. Nonetheless, it was a sensational story that flashed immediately across the international wires, with predictable results.

  “ ‘2,000 DIE’ IN NUKEMARE; Soviets Appeal for Help as N-Plant Burns out of Control,” screamed the front page of the New York Post on Tuesday—the same morning that news of the accident was being modestly tucked away beneath the sports results in Kiev. In London the following day, the Daily Mail went with “ ‘2,000 DEAD’ IN ATOM HORROR.” That night, this lurid death toll became the lead story on TV news across the United States; a Pentagon source told NBC that satellite images of the plant had revealed such devastation that thousands of deaths were inevitable, and two thousand “seemed about right, since four thousand worked at the plant.” Soon afterward, US Secretary of State George Shultz received a secret intelligence assessment describing the Soviet claim of only two fatalities as “preposterous.”

  Meanwhile, the radioactive cloud had continued north and spread west to envelop all of Scandinavia—before the weather stagnated and the contamination drifted south over Poland, forming a wedge that moved down into Germany. Heavy rain then deposited a dense band of radiation that reached all the way from Czechoslovakia into southeastern France. The West German and Swedish governments lodged furious complaints with Moscow over its failure to promptly notify them of the accident and requested more information about what had happened, but to no avail. Instead, Soviet embassy officials contacted scientists in both Bonn and Stockholm seeking advice on nuclear firefighting, especially tips on how to extinguish burning graphite. The widening rumors, experts’ public speculation about a reactor meltdown, and now—more terrifying still—the possibility of a radioactive fire that could not be put out spread panic throughout Europe.

  In Denmark, pharmacies quickly sold out of potassium iodide tablets. In Sweden, imports of food from the USSR and five Eastern European countries were banned, a radioactive particle was reportedly discovered in a nursing mother’s breast milk, and government switchboards jammed with calls from people asking if it was safe to drink water or even go outside. In Communist Poland, where state television assured the public that they were not in danger, authorities nonetheless distributed stable iodine to children and restricted the sale of dairy products. In Holland, a Dutch radio ham reported listening in to a shortwave exchange in which someone in the Kiev area claimed that not one but two reactors in Chernobyl were melting down. “The world has no idea of the catastrophe,” the Ukrainian pleaded through the static. “Help us.”

  Soviet spokesmen dismissed these stories as opportunistic Western propaganda but, confounded by the state’s reflexive secrecy, had few facts with which to fight back. On Wednesday evening, Radio Moscow admitted that in addition to the two deaths, another 197 people had been hospitalized as a result of the accident, but 49 of them had already been released after checkups. The “radiation situation,” the announcer added obliquely, was “improving.” A single photograph of the plant, said to have been taken soon after the explosion, was also broadcast on television, demonstrating that it had not been destroyed entirely; at the same time, Radio Kiev announced its intention to stifle “Western rumors” of thousands of fatalities.

  Meanwhile, KGB chief Chebrikov notified his superiors that he was battling the bourgeois conspiracy at its source. He was, he told the Party Central Committee, undertaking “measures to control the activities of foreign diplomats and correspondents, limit their ability to gather information on the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, and foil attempts to use it for stoking the anti-Soviet propaganda campaign in the West.”

  That same day in Moscow, Nicholas Daniloff found that he was unable to telex his dispatches back to U.S. News & World Report headquarters in Washington, DC. He made arrangements instead to use the machine at the UPI office, twenty minutes’ drive across town. As he was getting ready to leave, Daniloff looked out of the window to see several men tugging at the cables beneath an open manhole in the courtyard—apparently attempting to sever his remaining communications with the outside world. It didn’t help: if anything, the Soviet attempts to hamper Western reporting made the rumors worse. By the end of the week, the New York Post was going to press with “unconfirmed reports” from Ukraine that fifteen thousand people had been killed in the accident, their bodies buried in mass graves excavated in a nuclear waste disposal site.

  * * *

  In the headquarters of the government commission in Pripyat, the emergency had continued to escalate. On Sunday evening, the young air force commander, General Antoshkin, went to the White House to report the progress of his pilots’ bombing operation to Chairman Boris Scherbina. Using just three helicopters, they had managed to dump ten tonnes of boron and eighty tonnes of sand into Unit Four by nightfall. It was a heroic effort, in terrible conditions, but Scherbina was unimpressed. Such quantities were a pathetic show in the face of a planetary catastrophe: “Eighty tonnes of sand for a reactor like this is like hitting an elephant with a BB gun!” he said. They would have to do better.

  Antoshkin ordered in heavy-lift helicopters, including the giant Mi-26, the most powerful helicopter in the world, nicknamed korova—“the flying cow”—and capable of carrying up to twenty tonnes in a single load. He stayed up that night trying to devise ways to increase the effectiveness of the operation. The next day, the commission drafted the population of several towns and villages in the nearby countryside into the effort to fill bags with sand. Antoshkin improvised an air traffic control system to speed up loading and requested decommissioned braking parachutes from MiG-23 fighter jets for use as improvised cargo nets. In the meantime, the flight engineers continued to heft the bags into Unit Four by hand and remained almost entirely unprotected from the gamma rays rising from the ruined building.

  The crews flew from dawn to dusk every day and at night returned to their airfield in Chernigov to decontaminate their machines, discard their uniforms, and scrub radioactive dust from their bodies in a sauna. But it proved almost impossible to entirely remove the radiation from the helicopters, and when they returned each morning to begin a new mission, the airmen found the grass beneath their parked aircraft had turned yellow overnight. Most crews flew a total of ten to fifteen sorties over the reactor, making two or three bombing runs each time, but the first pilots did even more: one returned seventy-six times to Reactor Number Four in the first three days. According to Antoshkin, when they touched down in the landing zones after the second or third sortie, some flight engineers leapt from their machines to vomit into the bushes on the riverbank.

  By the morning of Tuesday, April 29, the work of Antoshkin’s crews seemed to be having an effect: radioactivity escaping from the reactor began to fall, and the temperature dropped from more than 1,000 degrees to 500 degrees centigrade. But radiation levels in the deserted streets of Pripyat had now become so dangerous that the government commission was forced to withdraw to a new headquarters nineteen kilometers away in Chernobyl town. The territory immediately surrounding the plant—an area roughly one and a half kilometers in diameter, which officials soon began calling the osobaya zona, or Special Zone—was highly contaminated with both debris and nuclear fallout. Scientists, specialists, and those operators who h
ad stayed behind to tend to the needs of the remaining three reactors at the station now approached it only in armored personnel carriers.

  In Moscow, Prime Minister Ryzhkov chaired the first meeting of the Politburo Operations Group that afternoon, and the hammer of the centrally planned economy immediately began to swing. Academician Legasov and the other scientists calculated that a total of 2,000 tonnes of lead would eventually be needed to help smother the graphite fire, but Legasov was afraid to ask for such an enormous quantity of a scarce resource on short notice. Scherbina—an old hand in the ways of the system—went ahead and ordered 6,000 tonnes just in case, and Ryzhkov had every train carrying lead on the Soviet rail network redirected toward Chernobyl. The first 2,500 tonnes arrived the next morning.

  By the time the light failed on Tuesday night, Antoshkin’s helicopter crews had dropped another 190 tonnes of sand and clay inside the walls of Unit Four. But the fire blazed on, and radionuclides continued to pour from the wreckage of the reactor. A scientific report revealed to the Party in Kiev that levels of background radiation in the Ukrainian cities of Rovno and Zhitomir, more than a hundred kilometers to the west and southwest of the plant, respectively, had already increased almost twentyfold. The regional civil defense leaders had made preparations for evacuating the settlements within a ten-kilometer radius of the plant—ten thousand people in all—and pleaded with Scherbina to give permission for the operation to proceed. But, to their consternation, he refused.