68 pages • 2 hours read
Adam HigginbothamMidnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 6-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 6 Summary: “Saturday, April 26, 1:28 a.m., Paramilitary Fire Station Number Two”
As a “purple cone of iridescent flame” (91) leaps 150 meters out of Chernobyl’s Unit Four, the 14 men on watch at Paramilitary Fire Station Number Two hear the alarm sound. Shift commander Lieutenant Vladimir Pravik calls in a three-alarm fire which summons every fire brigade in the Kiev area.
Back at Chernobyl, unaware that the reactor core’s obliterated, Dyatlov instructs two trainees, Viktor Proskuryakov and Alexander Kudryavstev, to attempt to lower the control rods by hand. He proceeds to instruct Akimov to find some way to get water into the reactor. Yuri Tregob, a reactor control engineer from an earlier shift who stays behind for the test, receives instruction to turn on the emergency coolant system by hand in order to flood the reactor.
Meanwhile, a dazed Yuvchenko runs into Tregob and decides to accompany him in his attempt to turn on the coolant system, a two-man job. They make their way to the reactor hall to find everything in ruins, the roof and most of the walls obliterated and the wreckage lit by moonlight. “Alexander Yuvchenko could see something more frightening still: a shimmering pillar of ethereal blue-white light, reaching straight up into the night sky, disappearing into infinity” (94).
As Yuvchenko and Tregob run to report on the state of the reactor, they encounter the two trainees sent to lower the rods, now accompanied by Yuvchenko’s immediate supervisor, Valery Perevozchenko. While Yuvchenko knows the attempt is pointless, he accompanies the trio. “Orders were orders” (98). To keep the broken airlock door from shutting them inside the reactor hall, Yuvchenko stays behind to hold the door open. As the others stare over the gaping maw of the reactor ruins, “all three received a fatal dose of radiation in a matter of seconds” (99). Elsewhere in the plant, workers come across the lifeless body of Vladimir Shoshanek, a turbine operator and the second person to die as a result of the explosion.
When Lieutenant Pravik’s fire brigade arrives, he finds the ground littered with glowing red graphite. Pravik and squad commander Leonid Shavrey enter the building in search of the source of the fire. Unable to locate it, Pravik attempts to extinguish the smaller fires on the roof of Unit Three. But the roof, littered with radioactive fuel pellets emitting thousands of roentgen an hour, cause an explosive chemical reaction when hosed with water. Before long, Pravik and Shavrey return down the stairs, vomiting and incoherent.
When Director Brukhanov finally arrives at the plant just before 2:00 am, he thinks to himself, “I’m going to prison” (97). He directs Serafin Vorobyev, the plant’s chief of civil defense, to open the bunker below the plant, designed in the event of a nuclear war. Before long, the bunker is full of 30 or 40 department heads and local officials, including the mayor of Pripyat and the plant’s KGB chief. Brukhanov calls a number of officials in Moscow and Kiev, telling them only that there has been a collapse and that Dyatlov is investigating the situation. As more information comes in, the men “could not overcome the power of their faith that a nuclear reactor would never explode” (104).
Vorobyev drives around Unit Four taking radiation measurements with a radiometer that measures up to 200 roentgen an hour. The radiometer needle is maxed out for most of the drive. When he reports these findings to Brukhanov and insists that they notify the town, Brukhanov wants to wait until he receives an assessment from Korobeynikov, the head of the plant’s safety team. An hour later, Korobeynikov tells Brukhanov exactly what he wants to hear—that the radiation levels, while slightly elevated, are only 13 microroentgen an hour. After once again verifying his figures and insisting that they notify the town, Brukhanov tells Vorobyev, “Your instrument is broken. Get out of here!” (107). When Vorobyev tries to contact Ukrainian and Belarusian authorities himself, he finds that he’s forbidden from making long-distance calls.
When Perevozchenko enters Control Room Number Four to report what he has seen, Dyatlov is just as incredulous as Brukhanov about the reactor’s possible destruction. He continues to instruct his staff to find a way to flood the reactor hall with water, including Toptunov and Akimov, who feel responsible for the disaster at hand. Meanwhile, the elevated radiation levels throughout Unit Four are taking their toll on Dyatlov, who suffers frequent spasms of vomiting. Shortly before dawn, he staggers to the bunker to offer a situation report, “weak and retching, radioactive water squelching in his shoes” (108). When Brukhanov asks what happened, Dyatlov can only throw up his hands and say, “I don’t know. I don’t understand any of it” (109).
After two hours of working ankle-deep in highly radioactive water showering from the ceiling, Toptunov and Akimov finally manage to open one of the cooling valves. Their effort is in vain, however, as the water flows uselessly out of shattered pipes, running down hallways and stairwells and eventually flooding the basement. “Many more hours would pass, and other men would sacrifice themselves to the delusion that Reactor Number Four survived intact, before Director Brukhanov and the men in the bunker acknowledged their terrible mistake” (110).
Chapter 7 Summary: “Saturday, 1:30 a.m., Kiev”
Over the 24 hours following the explosion, the wheels of the Soviet bureaucracy move slowly to address the situation. At the Kremlin in Moscow, Brukhanov’s reassuring report that the reactor is still intact spreads. Other on-the-ground reports from Chernobyl are rare but disturbing. Around dawn, Soviet nuclear officials from the Soyuzatomenergo agency reach one of the plant’s shift supervisors by phone who is too panicked and incoherent to be helpful. A few minutes later, a more senior engineer calls the officials back and calmly explains that an accident occurred during routine maintenance. But the engineer’s composure abruptly disappears when asked about cooling the core, shouting, “There’s nothing left to be cooled!” (116) before hanging up.
As the sun rises over Chernobyl, Brukhanov still fails to acknowledge the full scope of the calamity, refusing to believe the core’s destruction, despite the verified existence of uranium fuel and fission products on the ground. Vladimir Malomuzh, the second-ranking Communist Party official in Kiev, arrives to assume control of the crisis. At Malomuzh’s request, Brukhanov instructs his staff to draft a written report. The single typed page details an explosion, a roof collapse, and an already-extinguished fire, but fails to mention that the core is both destroyed and exposed. It also lists radiation levels of 2.3 roentgen an hour, without mentioning this is the highest possible measurement on the device used to establish this figure.
Back in Moscow, Soviet Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov handpicks members of a government commission that will travel to Chernobyl and manage the situation. Installed at the head of the commission is Boris Scherbina, the “balding, bulldog-faced” (119) deputy prime minister in charge of fuel and energy operations. Also on the commission is Valery Legasov, the 49-year-old Kurchatov Institute deputy director and “reliable Communist” (119) who just a few months earlier wrote, “There has not been a single instance when plant personnel or nearby residents have been seriously threatened” (74).
That evening, Legasov and Scherbina arrive at Pripyat’s Hotel Polesia where Boris Prushinsky—chief engineer at Soyuzatomenergo in Moscow—says he has confirmed for himself that the core is gone and that they must evacuate Pripyat. Scherbina, “a veteran of gas pipeline explosions and other industrial catastrophes” (126), responds, “Why are you being so alarmist?” (127). As members of the commission and other scientists and authorities debate whether to evacuate the city and how to smother the fire,
Legasov looked around him in consternation: the politicians were ignorant of nuclear physics, and the scientists and technicians were too paralyzed by indecision to commit to a solution. Everyone knew that something must be done—but what? (128).
Chapter 8 Summary: “Saturday, 6:15 a.m., Pripyat”
By morning on Saturday, Pripyat’s hospital admits 90 patients with radiation sickness or injuries related to the explosion. These patients include Toptunov, Akimov, Dyatlov, Pravik, and Alexander Yuvchenko. Yuvchenko’s wife Natalia tracks him down at the hospital. He looks healthy aside from what looks like a severe sunburn across his shoulder and arm. The hair on his temples have also turned completely white. With KGB agents everywhere, Yuvchenko tells his wife to return tomorrow at the same time with his toothbrush, toothpaste, and something to read.
Some of the first shift workers at Chernobyl call home and send coded messages to loved ones telling them to leave the city. But militsia police authorities turn back anyone who tries to leave Pripyat. That night, all of Pripyat’s phone lines and even the radios go silent.
Many people left the radio on constantly—at one time, switching it off was regarded with suspicion—a susurrating trickle of Party enlightenment in every kitchen. When the boxes were silenced and the phones went dead, even those in Pripyat who had spent the afternoon soaking up the sunshine began to realize something unusual was happening (149).
Malomuzh orders that the sickest patients receive a transfer to a more specialized—and more secure—hospital in Moscow. When plant engineer Sasha Korol arrives at the hospital looking for his friend and colleague Toptunov, the patients are already moving onto buses. Toptunov looks healthy but is in a bewildered daze. Korol collects as many names and addresses as he can with plans to share this information with loved ones.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Sunday, April 27, Pripyat”
Legasov estimates that if gone unchecked, the core will burn for at least two months, “releasing a column of radionuclides into the air that would spread contamination across the USSR and circle the globe for years to come” (153). But the graphite and nuclear fuel are too hot to quench using water or foam, and the blaze too radioactive to approach on foot.
On Sunday morning, Scherbina finally acknowledges that Pripyat must begin evacuation, but first he wants to see the blaze with his own eyes from a helicopter. As Legasov and Scherbina take the two-minute helicopter ride from Pripyat to the power station, the full seriousness of the disaster dawns on Scherbina. “To even the most recalcitrant Soviet eye, it was clear that Unit Four of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant would never again generate a single watt of electricity” (155).
At 10:00 am, the commission issues an evacuation order for the city of Pripyat. The order doesn’t stipulate the duration of the evacuation but implies that citizens need only bring clothes and food to last two or three days. When Natalia returns to the hospital to deliver supplies to Yuvchenko, he is already gone. Later that day, Sasha Korol arrives at Natalia’s house while making visits to the families of those he spoke to on the bus. Korol gives Natalia 100 rubles—a month’s salary—and a carton of milk for her two-year-old, Kirill.
After making the decision to evacuate the city, the next dilemma facing the commission is how to smother the fire. Scherbina knows he wants to use a helicopter fleet led by Major General Nikolai Antoshkin to drop materials on the fire, but which materials to use is still an open question. Legasov eventually decides on a cocktail of clay, lead, and dolomite.
Meanwhile, the Chinese-Russian city architect Maria Protsenko helps carry out the formidable task of evacuating 51,300 men, women, and children from the city. By 5:00 pm, 1,225 buses have emptied the city.
Chapters 6-9 Analysis
It is a testament to the scourge of Soviet over-confidence in its nuclear program that even after there is clear evidence of a reactor explosion, Brukhanov and other plant officials refuse to accept the possibility of such a catastrophe. And as for the workers like Yuvchenko who gaze upon the ruined reactor themselves and therefore must believe their own eyes, the fear of disobeying orders from above causes them to put their lives at risk in the futile effort to salvage a reactor that is beyond saving. Later in the book, when Perevozchenko dies a gruesome and painful death from radiation poisoning while the tissue of Yuvchenko’s arm rots down to the bone, the phrase—”Orders were orders” (98)—reappears with grim resonance.
This theme of heroism in service of a doomed cause re-emerges throughout the book, as brave men and women sacrifice their health and often their lives in the pursuit of halting a disaster that’s become out of control. Despite their lack of experience with radiation and nuclear physics, even the firefighters who first respond on the scene to put out the blaze know the danger that awaits them as they enter the tremendous gamma-fields in and outside Unit Four. One firefighter tells his comrades, “Lads, it’s the guts of the reactor. If we survive until the morning, we’ll live forever” (95). That a firefighter with no connection to the plant is able to acknowledge the seriousness of the disaster before Brukhanov is a testament to the closed-minded over-confidence of senior Soviet nuclear officials.
Indeed, it takes many hours for Brukhanov and his senior staff to finally admit their mistakes. This incredulity and sense of willful denial—fed by decades of nuclear hubris and an unwavering belief in the Communist principles that led them to this point—cause Brukhanov and others to make a series of critical errors that almost certainly result in further loss of life. Brukhanov refuses to accept his civil defense chief’s alarming radiation readings, suggesting the man’s instrument is incorrect. Had he accepted the readings as fact, Brukhanov would have known that it is both useless and dangerous for plant workers and firefighters to remain at Unit Four. But in what’s certainly his most unjustifiable action as plant director, Brukhanov refuses to issue an evacuation order, enabling all those wasted acts of heroism by men like Yuvchenko, Toptunov, Akimov, and Pravik, the latter three of whom die within weeks of Acute Radiation Syndrome.
Brukhanov’s refusal to acknowledge the core’s destruction also slows the centralized response from Moscow. Higginbotham makes clear that the Soviet Union’s emergency response mechanisms are slow and poorly-conceived, and Brukhanov’s failure to properly alert Moscow only further slows down these mechanisms. While this is certainly a personal failure that Brukhanov himself owns, one can’t forget that Brukhanov is in many ways a product of the Soviet bureaucracy that birthed him, only able to act with orders from on high and refusing to believe that such a disaster could occur under the infallible watch of the great Communist Party.
As morning dawns on Pripyat, most of the city’s residents are equally unconcerned about the troubling rumors coming out of the Chernobyl power station or the ominous plume of black smoke where the Unit Four reactor once stood. Even more so than the officials and engineers who work within the industry, the Soviet public dogmatically believes that the USSR’s nuclear prowess is infallible and unmatched. It is only when the town becomes cordoned off and the phones cut that the citizens of Pripyat begin to worry. But what’s most alarming—more so than the wreckage off in the distance blackening the sky, more so than the reports of patients admitted to the hospital vomiting and incoherent and covered in burns—is the sudden silence from their household radios. This signals another one of Higginbotham’s major themes: The Chernobyl disaster is one of the earliest and most dramatic instances of the Soviet people beginning to mistrust their government and to question whether the extent to which the Communist Party’s dedication to its own ideology is sincere. As the steady stream of Party propaganda goes silent across households in Pripyat, this foreshadows the impact the Chernobyl disaster will have on the broader Soviet population.
Finally, these chapters detail the arrival of the Soviet commission tasked with leading relief efforts. Aside from Legasov, most of the commission takes a cavalier attitude toward the radiation slowly entering their bodies. “The chairman seemed to regard the dangers of radiation with the haughty disdain of a cavalry officer striding across a battlefield bursting with cannon fire. And almost everyone else on the commission followed his lead: mentioning the radioactivity surrounding them seemed almost tactless. Among the ministers, an air of Soviet bravado prevailed” (162). In addition to this quote’s role as yet another example of Soviet over-confidence with respect to nuclear power, the use of military imagery to describe Scherbina’s and the rest of the commission’s refusal to take the threat of radiation seriously is telling. The Soviet nuclear industry evolved out of military ambitions—specifically efforts to replicate the atomic bombs the United States dropped on Japan to end World War II. And while its network of nuclear power plants received frequent praise within the Soviet Union as a shining example of cutting edge technology used in the service of building a civilian Communist utopia, the legacy of the industry’s militarized roots remains strong.
