Midnight in Chernobyl

by Adam Higginbotham

  The next morning, a shipment of parachutes was delivered to Chernobyl by helicopter: not surplus equipment, as General Antoshkin had suggested, but fourteen thousand brand-new paratroop canopies, requisitioned from airborne detachments all over the USSR. When Antoshkin conducted tests, he discovered that each chute could carry as much as 1.5 tonnes without breaking. By sunset, his crews had managed to hit the reactor with another 1,000 tonnes of absorbents. When the general delivered his report that night, he saw Scherbina’s face brighten for the first time since the bombing operation had begun.

  * * *

  On Wednesday, April 30—the eve of the annual May Day celebrations, which would fill the streets of towns and cities throughout the USSR with parades and rallies—the wind blowing over the Chernobyl plant shifted once more. This time it turned almost due south, carrying energetic alpha and beta contamination directly toward Kiev, along with dangerously high levels of gamma radiation, in the form of iodine 131—the radioisotope that concentrates dangerously in the thyroid gland, particularly in children. At exactly one o’clock that afternoon, radiation levels on the streets of the city began to rise abruptly. By nightfall, recorded radioactivity on Nauki Prospekt, near the heart of Kiev on the eastern bank of the Dnieper, had reached as high as 2.2 milliroentgen per hour (or 22 microsieverts per hour)—hundreds of times higher than normal. The progress of the radioactive cloud had been tracked by the weather-monitoring equipment of the USSR State Committee for Hydrometeorology, which that day sent classified reports of its findings to Prime Minister Ryzhkov in Moscow, but also to the leaders of the Ukrainian Communist Party in Kiev, including First Secretary Scherbitsky.

  Inside the Ukrainian Ministry of Health, the republic’s senior doctors, normally orderly and restrained, started to panic. They discussed the need to take precautions against radioactive aerosols and to broadcast a warning to the population. But they took no action. Valentin Zgursky, the chairman of the Kiev City Executive Committee—the city mayor, also responsible for coordinating its civil defense—had worked at a factory manufacturing gamma measurement tools and was familiar with the dangers of radiation. He tried to convince Scherbitsky to cancel the big May Day parade they had scheduled to pass through the center of the city the following morning. But the first secretary told him that the orders had come down from Moscow. Not only would the parade take place, but they were all expected to attend and to bring their families with them—to demonstrate that there was no reason for anyone in Kiev to panic.

  The following morning, preparations for the parade got under way as usual. Party organizers had hung banners, and spectators filled the streets. At ten o’clock, the first secretary was scheduled to open the parade from his position in the center of the tall reviewing stand overlooking the Square of the October Revolution. But with only ten minutes to go, he was nowhere to be seen; his central spot on the platform remained empty. The members of the Ukrainian Politburo, the city mayor, and the other assembled dignitaries became agitated: no one else but the first secretary had the right to start the procession, and he had never been late for the May Day parade in all his years in office. At last, his Chaika tore down the hill toward the rostrum and pulled up sharply. Scherbitsky climbed from the backseat, red faced and cursing.

  “I told him that we can’t possibly conduct the parade on Khreschatyk,” he muttered to the assembled dignitaries. “It’s not like Red Square. This is a ravine: there’s radiation pooling here. . . . He told me: You’ll put your Party card on the table if you bungle the parade.”

  The furious first secretary left no one in any doubt about whom he had been speaking to. The only man in the Union with the authority to threaten him with expulsion from the Party was Gorbachev himself.

  “To hell with it,” Scherbitsky said. “Let’s start the parade.”

  Soon after ten o’clock, the cheering crowds began their march down the broad avenue of Khreschatyk. The sun was warm, the atmosphere festive. There were seas of red banners and biers of brightly colored peonies in spring shades of magenta, yellow, and blue; ranks of Party veterans clad in gray suits and scarlet sashes; the girls of the Young Pioneers—the Communist Girl Scouts—in white uniforms and red neckerchiefs, waving boughs of cherry blossom; and young dancers in the embroidered blouses and billowing sharovary pants of traditional Ukrainian Cossack dress, swinging arm in arm in extended lines or spinning in tight circles.

  Carrying their children or leading them by the hand, the citizens of Kiev marched in dense blocks beneath the boulevard’s famous chestnut trees, clutching balloons and bearing placards depicting Soviet and Ukrainian Party leaders, past the fountains of the Square of the October Revolution, where six-story portraits of Marx, Engels, and Lenin gazed impassively from the grimy facades of the apartment buildings.

  Scherbitsky, who waved and smiled paternally from the rostrum as his subjects passed, had made some concessions to the perils of the fallout carried on the breeze: instead of four hours, the parade lasted only two; instead of between four thousand and five thousand people from every district, Party organizers gathered only two thousand. But the first secretary ensured that his grandson Vladimir participated in the march. Kiev mayor Zgursky brought his three sons and two grandchildren. Some on the rostrum that morning had armed themselves with dosimeters and consulted them discreetly, but constantly. Others simply stole occasional glances at the sky.

  Later, when the wind changed direction again, threatening to carry the plume of radionuclides north toward Moscow, Soviet pilots flew repeated missions to seed the clouds with silver iodide, designed to precipitate moisture from the air. The capital was spared. But three hundred kilometers to the south, peasants watched as hundreds of square kilometers of fertile farmland in Belarus were lashed with black rain.

  * * *

  In Moscow, the May Day procession swept through Red Square just as it did every year, and a carnival atmosphere filled the city. Workers from all over the Soviet Union paraded nine abreast past Lenin’s red granite mausoleum, waving paper carnations and scarlet banners as Gorbachev and the other members of the Politburo looked on. But afterward, Prime Minister Ryzhkov convened another urgent meeting of the Chernobyl Operations Group, attended by more than a dozen senior ministers, including those representing health, defense, and foreign affairs, as well as Ligachev and Chebrikov, the ideological and KGB chiefs of the USSR. Leading the nuclear scientists at the table was Anatoly Aleksandrov, head of the Kurchatov Institute.

  As the festivities continued in the streets outside, the group confronted the emergencies spiraling from Chernobyl. First, they heard how the scale of the crisis had overwhelmed the Soviet Health Ministry. Ryzhkov relieved the ministry’s chief of his responsibility for the medical response and handed control to the deputy health minister, Oleg Schepin. Ryzhkov instructed him to provide the group with daily reports of the number of victims of the accident hospitalized throughout the USSR and how many of them had been diagnosed with radiation sickness. Despite their relocation from Pripyat, Scherbina, Legasov, and the other members of the government commission had already been exposed to dangerous levels of radiation and had to be replaced as soon as possible. They would need to order medical supplies from the West and pay for them in hard currency; the group also had to give serious consideration to foreign doctors offering to come to Moscow and assist in treating radiation victims.

  Marshal Akhromeyev, the chief of the General Staff of the USSR, reported that Ministry of Defense troops had begun decontamination work in the area immediately surrounding the Chernobyl plant, but more men were urgently needed, as the radiation continued to spread. It was also clear that attempts to conceal the truth of what had happened from the international community seemed only to have made matters worse. Western diplomats and reporters were deluging Moscow with protests and questions about the nature and proportions of the accident. Ryzhkov resolved to organize a press conference for foreign journalists and delegated the details to Scherbina, Aleksandrov, and Andranik Petro
syants, chairman of the Soviet State Committee for the Utilization of Atomic Energy.

  Ryzhkov now assembled the members of the replacement government commission and gave them orders to fly to Chernobyl the following day. This new team would be led by Ivan Silayev, the fifty-five-year-old former Soviet minister of aviation industry. Its chief scientist, intended to replace Valery Legasov, was Evgeny Velikhov—Legasov’s next-door neighbor and rival to succeed old man Aleksandrov as head of the Kurchatov Institute.

  When the meeting concluded, Ryzhkov went to see Gorbachev in his office. The prime minister and Ligachev, the conservative Party boss, had decided that the time had come for them to visit the scene of the accident. Ryzhkov told the general secretary of his intentions and waited for Gorbachev to say he would join them. But apparently nothing could have been further from the Soviet leader’s mind. The next day, Ryzhkov and Ligachev—along with the head of the KGB—flew to Kiev without him.

  Accompanied by Scherbitsky, the Ukrainian first secretary, and the prime minister of Ukraine, the men from the Politburo flew by helicopter to the Chernobyl plant. They stopped in a village where evacuees from Pripyat had been temporarily resettled. Ryzhkov found the people he met to be strangely calm and suspected that they were still ignorant of the magnitude of the disaster enfolding them. When they asked when they would be allowed to return home, the ministers couldn’t say. They were told to wait and be patient.

  At 2:00 p.m., Ryzhkov and Ligachev sat for a briefing in the regional headquarters of the Party, in Chernobyl town. Talk turned to evacuating the settlements surrounding the plant. Scherbina told Ryzhkov that evacuation of the ten-kilometer zone had just begun.

  On the table were reconnaissance maps of the area around the nuclear plant, the result of separate military, meteorological, and geological surveys, all top secret and marked to show the spread of the radioactive fallout from the plant. Overlaid upon one another, they showed a ragged blot, centered on Pripyat and extending to the southeast, where it covered Chernobyl; it crossed the border into Belarus to the north, and a long trace of heavy fallout extended due west, forming a forked tongue reaching out toward the towns of Vilcha and Polesskoye. The contamination had spread far beyond the boundaries of the ten-kilometer zone and now imperiled tens of thousands of people across a vast area—in some places, as far as thirty kilometers from the plant.

  Prime Minister Ryzhkov examined the maps carefully. Some locations seemed safe for now, others were clearly not, and in some villages, the fallout was patchy and varied from street to street. Clearly something had to be done, but it was hard to know exactly what. Everyone in the room was awaiting his decision.

  “We will evacuate the population from the thirty-kilometer zone,” Ryzhkov said at last.

  “From all of it?” someone asked.

  “From all of it,” the prime minister replied and circled the area on the map for emphasis. “And start immediately.”

  11

  * * *

  The China Syndrome

  From high up on the roof of the Hotel Polesia, Colonel Lubomir Mimka had an excellent view: the center of Pripyat spread out before him in a bright panorama, from the glinting constructivist sculpture above the entrance to the music school on his left, to the row of colored pennants fluttering above the plaza to his right. He and his radio operator had the city to themselves. The hotel was empty, and even the birds had left: the twittering of sparrows that had once danced through the branches of the poplar and acacia trees on the streets below had long since ceased. Exploring the banquet hall downstairs, the two men had discovered a mysterious black carpet stretching from wall to wall, and it was only when the radioman had begun to cross it, sweltering in his rubber chemical protection suit, his boots crunching beneath him, that they realized the floor was covered with thousands of dozing flies, apparently intoxicated by radiation. Unspooling a fire hose from the wall, they washed the floor clean, and moved down there when the heat of the sun and the toll of the radioactivity upstairs became too much to bear. But from the eighth-story rooftop, framed by the heavy concrete supports of the outdoor terrace, Colonel Mimka’s sighting position on Reactor Number Four—just over three kilometers away but clearly visible on the horizon—was perfect.

  Almost from the beginning of the bombing operation, the air force had been using the hotel as an improvised control tower, but now General Antoshkin had also devised a system that enabled his pilots to drop hundreds of tonnes of material into the burning reactor every day. As one helicopter after another clattered into its run over Unit Four, Mimka watched from the roof and issued final instructions to the pilots over the radio, estimating distance and trajectory by eye. There were now dozens of machines involved—the medium-heavy Mi-8, the heavy Mi-6, and the superheavy Mi-26—taking off in a continuous carousel from three separate landing zones. Each carried at least one upturned parachute slung beneath its belly, filled with bags of sand or clay by civil defense troops and work gangs drawn from the local settlements. Lifting off from the field in a whirlwind of dust, they approached the reactor at a hundred kilometers per hour.

  Mimka waited until they were three hundred meters from their target, judging their position against the pylons rising from the transformer yards around the station. He gave the order “Ready!” and the pilot moved his finger to the release button. Two or three seconds passed. Mimka said, “Drop!” The pilot released the payload, and the helicopter, suddenly unburdened, turned quickly away—before returning to collect another cargo from the landing zone.

  Mimka rose at four o’clock each morning and was given a blood test for radiation exposure with his breakfast. He was in the air at six and took a reconnaissance flight over the reactor before being dropped in the square outside the hotel. He remained on the roof until the light gave out sometime after 9:00 p.m., and took the last flight of the day himself to log a second set of radiation and temperature readings over Reactor Number Four. Then there was decontamination and dinner at ten, followed by debriefing. Sleep came finally at midnight—and four hours later, a cadet was shaking him awake again.

  General Antoshkin had imposed an exposure limit of 22 rem on his men, although many routinely underreported it in order to keep flying longer. They were issued both bitter potassium iodide tablets and a sweet medicinal paste—shipped in from a pharmaceutical plant in Leningrad, intended to help combat radiation—which they called pastila. When the first shipments of lead arrived—in ingots and sheets and ten-kilogram bags of hunters’ shotgun pellets delivered from stores with the price tags still on them—the pilots improvised their own protection. They lined the floor of the cabins with the four- and five-millimeter-thick sheets and filled the wells of their seats—designed to accommodate parachute packs—from the bags of shot. They even had a rhyme about it: Yesli hochesh byt’ otsom, zakrivay yaitso svintsom. “If you want to be a dad, cover your balls in lead.”

  Even as the bombardment continued, Academician Legasov and the other scientists sent down from the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy and the Ministry of Medium Machine Building in Moscow still had little idea what was going on inside the burning reactor. The pilots were now targeting a red glow they could see inside Unit Four, but no one could be certain exactly what was causing it. Back in the capital, physicists were hauled into their offices at the Kurchatov Institute late at night to help calculate how much uranium fuel might still be left inside the ruins of Reactor Number Four. And five or six times every day, scientists joined the helicopter crews flying over the accident site to monitor radiation levels in the air and estimate the heat of the burning core by analyzing the radioactive isotopes in the atmosphere. They took surface temperature readings of the reactor, using a Swedish-made thermal imaging camera. They watched as the pilots’ payloads plunged toward their mark, and saw shaggy mushroom-shaped clouds of black radioactive smoke and dust rise a hundred meters into the air, hanging there before being snatched by the breeze and swept away across the countryside. As dusk fell, a beautiful
crimson halo rose above the building. Looking down at the incandescent mass on his reconnaissance flights above the reactor in the evening gloaming, Colonel Mimka was reminded of the lava he had seen among the volcanoes of Kamchatka in the Soviet Far East.

  At the very start, one member of the Kurchatov group in Chernobyl—the RBMK reactor specialist Konstantin Fedulenko—tried to tell Legasov that the whole helicopter operation might be misguided. He had seen for himself that each of the cargo drops into the shattered building was hurling heavy radioactive particles into the atmosphere. And, given the small size of the target—partially concealed by the tilted concrete lid of Elena—and the speed of the pilots’ approach, there seemed little chance that any of the sand or lead was making it into the eye of the reactor vault itself.

  But Legasov disagreed. He told Fedulenko that it was too late to change course. “The decision has been made,” he said. The two scientists argued for a few minutes, until Fedulenko eventually admitted the full extent of his fears: that all their efforts to quench the graphite fire were a total waste of time. He said they should just let the radioactive blaze burn itself out.

  Legasov didn’t want to listen. He insisted that they had to take immediate action—whether it was effective or not.

  “People won’t understand if we do nothing,” Legasov said. “We have to be seen to be doing something.”

  * * *

  Day after day, the volume of material dumped into the reactor mounted: on Monday, April 28, the helicopter crews flew 93 sorties and dropped a total of 300 tonnes; the next day, they managed 186 sorties and 750 tonnes. On the morning of Wednesday, April 30, they began dropping lead, and that day blanketed Unit Four with more than 1,000 tonnes of absorbents, including sand, clay, and dolomite. In the landing zones, the men of Special Battalion 731—a hastily created new formation of army reservists mustered overnight across the Kiev region—worked for sixteen hours a day beneath the whirling blades of the helicopters, piling sacks into parachute canopies and securing them to the cargo hard points of the aircraft. The hot weather and the rotor wash created an almost constant tornado of radioactive dust reaching thirty meters into the air. The soldiers wore no protective clothing—not even petal respirators. The dust filled their eyes and mouths and caked beneath their clothes. At night, they slept fitfully in their irradiated uniforms, in tents beside the Pripyat. At dawn, they rose to start again.