Midnight in Chernobyl Read online

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  Contents

  Note on Translation and Transliteration

  Maps

  Cast of Characters

  Prologue

  PART 1 BIRTH OF A CITY

  1. The Soviet Prometheus

  2. Alpha, Beta, and Gamma

  3. Friday, April 25, 5:00 p.m., Pripyat

  4. Secrets of the Peaceful Atom

  5. Friday, April 25, 11:55 p.m., Unit Control Room Number Four

  6. Saturday, April 26, 1:28 a.m., Paramilitary Fire Station Number Two

  7. Saturday, 1:30 a.m., Kiev

  8. Saturday, 6:15 a.m., Pripyat

  9. Sunday, April 27, Pripyat

  PART 2 DEATH OF AN EMPIRE

  10. The Cloud

  11. The China Syndrome

  12. The Battle of Chernobyl

  13. Inside Hospital Number Six

  14. The Liquidators

  15. The Investigation

  16. The Sarcophagus

  17. The Forbidden Zone

  18. The Trial

  19. The Elephant’s Foot

  20. A Tomb for Valery Khodemchuk

  Epilogue

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Glossary

  Units of Radiation

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Photo Credits

  Index

  For Vanessa

  Note on Translation and Transliteration

  This book is a work of history. Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian words have been spelled in accordance with the Library of Congress transliteration system and occasionally simplified further to make them as readable as possible in English. The names of places and people, and the units of measurement, are those commonly used in the Soviet Union at the time the events took place.

  Cast of Characters

  The Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station and the City of Pripyat

  MANAGEMENT

  Viktor Brukhanov plant director

  Nikolai Fomin chief engineer; deputy to the plant director

  Anatoly Dyatlov deputy chief engineer for operations

  STAFF

  Alexander Akimov foreman, fifth shift of reactor Unit Four

  Leonid Toptunov senior reactor control engineer, fifth shift, Unit Four

  Boris Stolyarchuk senior unit control engineer, fifth shift, Unit Four

  Yuri Tregub senior reactor control engineer, Unit Four

  Alexander Yuvchenko senior mechanical engineer, fifth shift, Unit Four

  Valery Perevozchenko reactor shop shift foreman, fifth shift, Unit Four

  Serafim Vorobyev head of plant civil defense

  Veniamin Prianichnikov head of training in plant nuclear safety

  FIREFIGHTERS

  Major Leonid Telyatnikov chief of Paramilitary Fire Station Number Two (Chernobyl plant)

  Lieutenant Vladimir Pravik head of third watch, Paramilitary Fire Station Number Two (Chernobyl plant)

  Lieutenant Piotr Khmel head of first watch, Paramilitary Fire Station Number Two (Chernobyl plant)

  Lieutenant Viktor Kibenok head of third watch, Paramilitary Fire Station Number Six (Pripyat)

  Sergeant Vasily Ignatenko member of third watch, Paramilitary Fire Station Number Six (Pripyat)

  PRIPYAT

  Alexander Esaulov deputy chairman of the Pripyat ispolkom, or city council; the deputy mayor

  Maria Protsenko chief architect for the city of Pripyat

  Natalia Yuvchenko teacher of Russian language and literature at School Number Four, and wife of Alexander Yuvchenko

  The Government

  Mikhail Gorbachev General secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; leader of the USSR

  Nikolai Ryzhkov chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers; prime minister of the USSR

  Yegor Ligachev chief of ideology for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union; the second most powerful figure in the Politburo

  Viktor Chebrikov chairman of the Committee for State Security (KGB) of the USSR

  Vladimir Dolgikh secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee with responsibility for heavy industry, including nuclear power

  Vladimir Marin head of the nuclear power sector of the Heavy Industry and Energy Division of the Communist Party Central Committee

  Anatoly Mayorets Soviet minister of energy and electrification

  Gennadi Shasharin deputy Soviet minister of energy, with specific responsibility for nuclear energy

  Vladimir Scherbitsky first secretary of the Communist Party of Ukraine and member of the Soviet Politburo; leader of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine

  Alexander Lyashko chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine; the Ukrainian prime minister

  Vladimir Malomuzh second secretary of the Kiev Oblast Communist Party

  Vitali Sklyarov Ukrainian minister of energy and electrification

  Boris Scherbina deputy chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers; first chairman of the government commission in Chernobyl

  Ivan Silayev deputy chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers, responsible for the engineering industry; member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR; second chairman of the government commission in Chernobyl

  The Nuclear Experts

  Anatoly Aleksandrov chairman of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, responsible for the development of nuclear science and technology throughout the USSR

  Efim Slavsky minister of medium machine building, in control of all aspects of the Soviet nuclear weapons program

  Nikolai Dollezhal director of NIKIET, the Soviet reactor design agency

  Valery Legasov first deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute, the immediate deputy to Anatoly Aleksandrov

  Evgeny Velikhov deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute; scientific advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev and rival to Valery Legasov

  Alexander Meshkov deputy minister of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building

  Boris Prushinsky chief engineer of Soyuzatomenergo, the Ministry of Energy’s department of nuclear power; leader of OPAS, the ministry’s emergency response team for accidents at nuclear power stations

  Alexander Borovoi head of the neutrino laboratory at the Kurchatov Institute and scientific leader of the Chernobyl Complex Expedition

  Hans Blix director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, based in Vienna, Austria

  The Generals

  General Boris Ivanov deputy chief of the general staff of the USSR’s Civil Defense Forces

  General Vladimir Pikalov commander of the Soviet army chemical troops

  Major General Nikolai Antoshkin chief of staff of the Seventeenth Airborne Army, Kiev military district

  Major General Nikolai Tarakanov deputy commander of the USSR’s Civil Defense Forces

  The Doctors

  Dr. Angelina Guskova head of the clinical department of Hospital Number Six, Moscow

  Dr. Alexander Baranov head of hematology, Hospital Number Six, Moscow

  Dr. Robert Gale hematology spec
ialist at UCLA Medical Center, Los Angeles

  Prologue

  SATURDAY, APRIL 26, 1986: 4:16 P.M.

  CHERNOBYL ATOMIC ENERGY STATION, UKRAINE

  Senior Lieutenant Alexander Logachev loved radiation the way other men loved their wives. Tall and good-looking, twenty-six years old, with close-cropped dark hair and ice-blue eyes, Logachev had joined the Soviet army when he was still a boy. They had trained him well. The instructors from the military academy outside Moscow taught him with lethal poisons and unshielded radiation. He traveled to the testing grounds of Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan, and to the desolate East Urals Trace, where the fallout from a clandestine radioactive accident still poisoned the landscape; eventually, Logachev’s training took him even to the remote and forbidden islands of Novaya Zemlya, high in the Arctic Circle and ground zero for the detonation of the terrible Tsar Bomba, the largest thermonuclear device in history.

  Now, as the lead radiation reconnaissance officer of the 427th Red Banner Mechanized Regiment of the Kiev District Civil Defense force, Logachev knew how to protect himself and his three-man crew from nerve agents, biological weapons, gamma rays, and hot particles: by doing their work just as the textbooks dictated; by trusting his dosimetry equipment; and, when necessary, reaching for the nuclear, bacterial, and chemical warfare medical kit stored in the cockpit of their armored car. But he also believed that the best protection was psychological. Those men who allowed themselves to fear radiation were most at risk. But those who came to love and appreciate its spectral presence, to understand its caprices, could endure even the most intense gamma bombardment and emerge as healthy as before.

  As he sped through the suburbs of Kiev that morning at the head of a column of more than thirty vehicles summoned to an emergency at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, Logachev had every reason to feel confident. The spring air blowing through the hatches of his armored scout car carried the smell of the trees and freshly cut grass. His men, gathered on the parade ground just the night before for their monthly inspection, were drilled and ready. At his feet, the battery of radiological detection instruments—including a newly installed electronic device twice as sensitive as the old model—murmured softly, revealing nothing unusual in the atmosphere around them.

  But as they finally approached the plant later that morning, it became clear that something extraordinary had happened. The alarm on the radiation dosimeter first sounded as they passed the concrete signpost marking the perimeter of the power station grounds, and the lieutenant gave orders to stop the vehicle and log their findings: 51 roentgen per hour. If they waited there for just sixty minutes, they would all absorb the maximum dose of radiation permitted Soviet troops during wartime. They drove on, following the line of high-voltage transmission towers that marched toward the horizon in the direction of the power plant; their readings climbed still further, before falling again.

  Then, as the armored car rumbled along the concrete bank of the station’s coolant canal, the outline of the Fourth Unit of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant finally became visible, and Logachev and his crew gazed at it in silence. The roof of the twenty-story building had been torn open, its upper levels blackened and collapsed into heaps of rubble. They could see shattered panels of ferroconcrete, tumbled blocks of graphite, and, here and there, the glinting metal casings of fuel assemblies from the core of a nuclear reactor. A cloud of steam drifted from the wreckage into the sunlit sky.

  Yet they had orders to conduct a full reconnaissance of the plant. Their armored car crawled counterclockwise around the complex at ten kilometers an hour. Sergeant Vlaskin called out the radiation readings from the new instruments, and Logachev scribbled them down on a map, hand-drawn on a sheet of parchment paper in ballpoint pen and colored marker: 1 roentgen an hour; then 2, then 3. They turned left, and the figures began to rise quickly: 10, 30, 50, 100.

  “Two hundred fifty roentgen an hour!” the sergeant shouted. His eyes widened.

  “Comrade Lieutenant—” he began, and pointed at the radiometer.

  Logachev looked down at the digital readout and felt his scalp prickle with terror: 2,080 roentgen an hour. An impossible number.

  Logachev struggled to remain calm and remember the textbook; to conquer his fear. But his training failed him, and the lieutenant heard himself screaming in panic at the driver, petrified that the vehicle would stall.

  “Why are you going this way, you son of a bitch? Are you out of your fucking mind?” he yelled. “If this thing dies, we’ll all be corpses in fifteen minutes!”

  PART 1

  BIRTH OF A CITY

  1

  * * *

  The Soviet Prometheus

  At the slow beat of approaching rotor blades, black birds rose into the sky, scattering over the frozen meadows and the pearly knots of creeks and ponds lacing the Pripyat River basin. Far below, standing knee deep in snow, his breath lingering in heavy clouds, Viktor Brukhanov awaited the arrival of the nomenklatura from Moscow.

  When the helicopter touched down, the delegation of ministers and Communist Party officials trudged together over the icy field. The savage cold gnawed at their heavy woolen coats and nipped beneath their tall fur hats. The head of the Ministry of Energy and Electrification of the USSR and senior Party bosses from the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine joined Brukhanov at the spot where their audacious new project was to begin. Just thirty-four years old, clever and ambitious, a dedicated Party man, Brukhanov had come to western Ukraine with orders to begin building what—if the Soviet central planners had their way—would become the greatest nuclear power station on earth.

  As they gathered near the riverbank, the dozen men toasted their plans with shots of cognac. A state photographer posed them between long-handled shovels and a theodolite, the helicopter waiting, squat and awkward, in the background. They stood in the snow and watched as Minister Neporozhny drove a ceremonial stake, centimeter by centimeter, into the iron ground.

  It was February 20, 1970. After months of deliberation, the Soviet authorities had at last settled on a name for the new power plant that would one day make the USSR’s nuclear engineering famous across the globe. They had considered a few options: the North Kiev, or the Western Ukraine, or, perhaps, the Pripyat Atomic Energy Station. But finally, Vladimir Scherbitsky, the formidable leader of the Ukrainian Communist Party, signed a decree confirming that the station would take the name of the regional capital: a small but ancient town of two thousand people, fourteen kilometers from where Brukhanov and his bosses stood in the snow-covered field.

  The town of Chernobyl had been established in the twelfth century. For the next eight hundred years, it was home to peasants who fished in the rivers, grazed cows in the meadows, and foraged for mushrooms in the dense woods of northwestern Ukraine and southern Belarus. Swept repeatedly by pogrom, purge, famine, and war, by the second half of the twentieth century, Chernobyl was finally at peace. It had evolved into a quiet provincial center, with a handful of factories, a hospital, a library, a Palace of Culture; there was a small shipyard to service the tugs and barges that plied the Pripyat and the Dnieper, the two rivers that met nearby. Water permeated the surrounding countryside, an endlessly flat landscape of peat bogs, marshes, and sodden forests that formed part of the Dnieper River basin, a network of thirty-two thousand rivers and streams that covered almost half of Ukraine. Just fifteen kilometers downstream from the site chosen for the new power station, the rivers joined and flowed onward to the Kiev Sea, a massive hydroelectric reservoir providing fresh water to the two and a half million citizens of the republic’s capital, two hours’ drive away to the southeast.

  * * *

  Viktor Brukhanov had arrived in Chernobyl earlier that winter. He checked into the town’s only hotel: a bleak, single-story building on Sovietskaya Street. Slight but athletic, he had a narrow, anxious face, an olive complexion, and a head of tight, dark curls. The oldest of four children, Brukhanov was born to ethnically Russian parents but raised in Uzbekis
tan, amid the mountains of Soviet Central Asia. He had an exotic look: when they eventually met, the divisional KGB major thought the young director could be Greek.

  He sat down on his hotel bed and unpacked the contents of his briefcase: a notebook, a set of blueprints, and a wooden slide rule. Although now the director and, as yet, sole employee of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station, Brukhanov knew little about nuclear power. Back at the Polytechnic Institute in Tashkent, he had studied electrical engineering. He had risen quickly from lowly jobs in the turbine shop of an Uzbek hydroelectric power plant to overseeing the launch of Ukraine’s largest coal-fired station in Slavyansk, in the industrial east of the republic. But at the Ministry of Energy in Moscow, knowledge and experience were regarded as less important qualifications for top management than loyalty and an ability to get things done. Technical matters could be left to the experts.

  At the dawn of the 1970s, in a bid to meet its surging need for electricity and to catch up with the West, the USSR embarked upon a crash program of reactor building. Soviet scientists had once claimed to lead the world in nuclear engineering and astonished their capitalist counterparts in 1954 by completing the first reactor to generate commercial electricity. But since then, they had fallen hopelessly behind. In July 1969, as US astronauts made their final preparations to land on the moon, the Soviet minister of energy and electrification called for an aggressive expansion of nuclear construction. He set ambitious targets for a network of new plants across the European part of the Soviet Union, with giant, mass-produced reactors that would be built from the Gulf of Finland to the Caspian Sea.

  That winter, as the 1960s came to a close, the energy minister summoned Brukhanov to Moscow and offered him his new assignment. It was a project of enormous prestige. Not only would it be the first atomic power plant in Ukraine, but it was also new territory for the Ministry of Energy and Electrification, which had never before built a nuclear station from scratch. Until this point, every reactor in the USSR had been constructed by the Ministry of Medium Machine Building: the clandestine organization behind the Soviet atom weapons program, so secret that its very name was a cipher, designed to discourage further curiosity. But whatever the challenges, Brukhanov, a true believer, gladly enlisted to carry the banner of the Red Atom.