Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster

“The USSR was buckling under the strain of decades of central planning, fatuous bureaucracy, massive military spending, and endemic corruption—the start of what would come to be called the Era of Stagnation. Shortages and bottlenecks, theft and embezzlement blighted almost every industry. Nuclear engineering was no exception.”  

The economic conditions created by decades of poor planning, military quagmires, and widespread corruption in the Soviet Union helped set the stage for a nuclear disaster like Chernobyl. While the explosion was the result of a broad range of factors—design flaws, human error, and terrible luck at a subatomic level—Higginbotham repeatedly returns to the theme that a disaster like Chernobyl was almost inevitable, given the dysfunction and recklessness of the Soviet state in respect to its nuclear program.

“Alongside the cosmonauts and the martyrs of the Great Patriotic War, according to historian Paul Josephson, the nuclear scientists became ‘near-mythic figures in the pantheon of Soviet heroes.’” 

The worship reserved for the Soviet nuclear scientists—both among government officials and the general public—serves two important roles in Higginbotham’s argument that the Chernobyl disaster resulted from cultural and bureaucratic conditions unique to the USSR. First, this worship blinds both officials and the scientists themselves to the possibility that a harrowing nuclear disaster could ever occur on Soviet soil, leading to reckless decision-making in terms of design and operation. Second, the need to preserve and maintain these hero-myths to both the Soviet public and the outside world leads the USSR to cover up serious accidents, giving plant operators and dangerous sense of over-confidence about the safety of their nuclear reactors.

“The staff of Soviet nuclear power plants, faced with ever-increasing production targets and constantly malfunctioning or inadequate equipment, and answerable to a bewildering and dysfunctional bureaucracy, had long become accustomed to bending or ignoring the rules in order to get their work done.” 

One of the most important questions surrounding the causes of the Chernobyl disaster involves how much blame nuclear design officials share for not properly informing plant directors and operators of the AZ-5 flaw and the positive void coefficient. While men like Legasov and eventually the international atomic community come to view the designers’ efforts as woefully insufficient, this quote suggests that the pressures placed on plant workers by Soviet demands for energy may have led them to break important protocols anyway, even had they known about the design flaws.

“Legasov coauthored another essay in which he boasted, ‘In the thirty years since the first Soviet nuclear power plant opened, there has not been a single instance when plant personnel of nearby residents have been seriously threatened; not a single disruption in normal operation occurred that would have resulted in the contamination of the air, water, or soil.’” 

In addition to serving as another example of the Soviet Union’s misguided over-confidence about the safety of its nuclear plants, this quote serves to illustrate the level of willful denial among nuclear officials. It is difficult to imagine that Legasov, as the deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute, was unaware of serious meltdown and explosion incidents like the Mayak disaster or the Balakavo incident in which 14 men died while boiled alive. And yet as a loyal Communist, Legasov must maintain the myth of Soviet nuclear prowess lest he lose his job and standing in the Party.

“He would later insist that it was the explosion of Reactor Number Four—and not his own bungled reforms—that proved the catalyst in the destruction of the Union he had so desperately wished to preserve. In April 2006, he wrote, ‘The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl twenty years ago this month, even more than my launch of perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later. Indeed, the Chernobyl catastrophe was an historic turning point: there was the era before the disaster, and there is the very different era that has followed” 

Although one can reasonably suggest that Gorbachev seeks to absolve himself for the dissolution of the Soviet Union by laying blame on an incident set in motion long before his ascension to General Secretary, the fact that a former head of the Soviet state places so much emphasis on the Chernobyl explosion as a factor in precipitating the end of the USSR. At the same time, with so many other factors pulling the Soviet Union toward its demise, it is difficult to assign a precise measurement to the impact of the Chernobyl accident.

“The temperature inside the reactor rose to 4,650 centigrade—not quite as hot as the surface of the sun.” 

Quotes like this illustrate the sheer power these men wielded in their manipulation of nuclear energy, reminding readers of the Prometheus myth Higginbotham uses as a recurring motif. In the myth, Zeus punishes Prometheus for stealing fire from the gods and gifting it to humanity. In many ways, the Chernobyl incident is a 20th century analogue to the myth, except there’s nothing supernatural about the death and destruction wrought by the Soviet nuclear program’s efforts to harness the power of the sun. 

“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.” 

Even after the explosion, the false sense of confidence Brukhanov and other officials hold in respect to Soviet nuclear reactors is so endemic that it persists in blinding them to the possibility of grievous nuclear accident, even as one unfolds around them. And it is at this point that Brukhanov’s behavior evolves beyond mere negligence into the realm of willful denial and inaction—both of which arguably lead to a greater number of deaths.

“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.” 

Another one of Higginbotham’s themes is that the Chernobyl disaster was 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. 

“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.” 

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 receives 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.

“In the space of just a few hours, Viktor Brukhanov’s beloved city of the future had become a ghost town. Abandoned 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.” 

As a so-called atomgrad, the city of Pripyat served for many years as an economic bubble of prosperity amid the breadlines and empty grocery store shelves that plagued Soviet citizens who weren’t fortunate enough to live in the shadow of a nuclear power plant. But the speed with which Pripyat becomes a ghost town in the wake of the Chernobyl explosion emphasizes the grim bargain citizens make by choosing to enjoy the economic fruits of an atomgrad.

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

As scientists begin to question the efficacy of the helicopter drops—and in turn whether it’s irresponsible to subject the pilots to massive doses of radiation in service of a hopeless task—Legasov emphasizes the need to keep up appearances, even if doing so clashes with the reality on the ground. This attitude will resurface during the investigation and the efforts to obscure the role design flaws played in the Chernobyl explosion.

“In the West, scientists had been simulating the worst-case scenarios of reactor meltdowns for fifteen years, in ongoing research that had only intensified after the disaster in Three Mile Island. But Soviet physicists had been so confident of the safety of their own reactors that they had never bothered indulging in the heretical theorizing of beyond design-basis accidents. And appealing directly to Western specialists for help at this stage seemed unthinkable.” 

This is a particularly galling example of the significant divide between the Soviet nuclear industry and its counterparts in the United States and Western Europe—an important theme that reemerges throughout the narrative of the Chernobyl explosion. Despite its seriousness, the Three Mile Island accident is effectively contained—in part due to the U.S.’s commitment to safety and emergency contingency plans—and robust studies have failed to identify a connection between the radiation emitted as a result and increases in cancer or other diseases. And yet, the incident puts the United States on course to drastically reduce its nuclear efforts. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union experiences at least two disasters prior to Chernobyl that dwarf Three Mile Island in terms of environmental damage and loss of life. Nevertheless, the incidents get covered up or ignored, participating to the conditions that allowed the Chernobyl disaster to transpire.

“The civil defense and the Ministry of Health had failed utterly in their responsibilities. There had been no clarity or plan. People leaving the evacuation zone had not even received blood tests for radiation exposure. The fiasco made a mockery of the USSR’s decades of preparation for the consequences of nuclear war.” 

Higginbotham makes a point of identifying how the Chernobyl accident exposes severe weaknesses not only in the USSR’s nuclear program but across the Soviet bureaucracy. To the extent that American spies had knowledge of the Soviet response to Chernobyl, seeing the USSR flounder in a time of crisis surely must have boosted the United States’s confidence in the waning days of the Cold War. Even more importantly, the Soviet Union’s response would have had the opposite effect on its own citizens, lending credence to Higginbotham’s argument that Chernobyl played a major role in the dissolution of the USSR. 

“The members of the government commission applied an enduring Soviet remedy to the mountain of radioactive rubble at the north wall: they ordered it covered with concrete.” 

The fact that the signature Soviet response to a problem is to bury it in concrete is at once representative of the Union’s slipshod approach to crisis management and also a powerful metaphor for its dedication to burying any piece of information that calls into question the narrative of its own prowess—including the RBMK design flaws that led to the Chernobyl explosion in the first place.

“Only ten square kilometers of the zone would ever be truly decontaminated. A total cleanup would have required nearly six hundred million tonnes of topsoil to have been removed and buried as nuclear waste. And, even with the seemingly unlimited manpower at the disposal of the Soviet Union, this was regarded as simply impossible.” 

This quote illustrates two major narrative threads surrounding the Chernobyl incident. The first is the sheer magnitude of the environmental damage caused by the explosion’s prolonged release of radiation. The second is that despite the countless acts of heroic self-sacrifice and impressive ingenuity performed by those involved with relief and cleanup efforts, the dispiriting reality is that much of this work—from the helicopter drops to the clearing of the flooded safety compartments—had only a marginal impact on improving conditions in and around the ruined plant. 

“For thirty years, you told us that everything was perfectly safe. You assumed we would look up to you as gods. That’s the reason why all this happened, why it ended in disaster.” 

While Gorbachev can’t seem to acknowledge his own responsibility for the Chernobyl disaster as the Soviet head of state, he makes a point here about the arrogance and overconfidence of Soviet nuclear scientists that resonates over the course of much of the book’s narrative. The quote also recalls Higginbotham’s Prometheus motif. For the crime of stealing fire, Zeus doesn’t only punish Prometheus. He also punishes humanity by sending Pandora to Earth. Pandora proceeds to open a box unleashing all the evils of humanity, a grim metaphor for the Chernobyl explosion itself. 

“In a society where the cult of science had supplanted religion, the nuclear chiefs were among its most sanctified icons—pillars of the Soviet state. To permit them to be pulled down would undermine the integrity of the entire system on which the USSR was built. They could not be found guilty.” 

In addition to outlining the Politburo’s motivations for covering up the role of the Soviet Union’s nuclear designers in causing the Chernobyl accident, this quote once again identifies conditions unique to Soviet society and culture that played a significant role in precipitating the disaster. While the Communist Party worked hard to suppress religion over the second half of the 20th century, it created a different kind of worship centered on the state and in particular its scientists. But the very elements of religion that Communism claimed to forsake—specifically, a denial of reality—make their way into the Soviet Union’s cult of science, with dangerous results.

“Even the machines intended for use on the surface of the moon were no match for the inhospitable new landscape they encountered on the roof of the ruined plant.” 

In a terrifying observation, Higginbotham points out that the Chernobyl explosion so damages the land and air in the immediate vicinity of Unit Four that the area becomes more hostile than the moon itself. While Higginbotham is by no means a nuclear alarmist, descriptions like these emphasize the immense risks that authorities must question when calculating the rewards of nuclear power.

“Despite all the humiliations and hardships that had befallen him, and the apparent inevitability of his fate, Brukhanov remained a creature of the system that had molded him. He understood the role the Party expected him to play on the stand and stuck almost unswervingly to the script.” 

Throughout the narrative, Brukhanov repeatedly subjugates his own identity in service of the Party, its ideologies, and its needs. This journey in which Brukhanov experiences an erasure of the self begins as early as 1972, when he attempts to quit his job as plant director, and a Party liaison rips up his resignation letter. It emerges again in the immediate wake of the explosion, when Brukhanov’s dedication to Party orthodoxy makes it impossible for him to acknowledge that a Soviet power plant could suffer such a severe calamity. And finally, it emerges at the trial when Brukhanov makes little effort to defend himself against charges brought against him by the Party.

“The academician insisted that nuclear power represented the zenith of atomic science and was essential for the future of civilization. But privately, Legasov had been struck by what he had heard Prime Minister Ryzhkov tell Gorbachev and rest of the Politburo more than a year earlier: that the explosion in Chernobyl had been inevitable, and that if it hadn’t happened there, it would have happened at another Soviet station sooner or later. It was only then that Legasov had finally recognized the true scope of the decay at the heart of the nuclear state: the culture of secrecy and complacency, the arrogance and negligence, and the shoddy standards of design and construction.”

The notion that the Chernobyl incident—despite the multitude of factors that had to go wrong for it occur—was in fact an inevitable event is a common theme throughout the book. Here, however, Higginbotham identifies key individuals involved in the incident who express this belief, an astonishing admission considering the Party’s unwavering faith in itself, its bureaucratic structures, and its ideologies.

“The cloud of radiation that spread out across Europe, making the catastrophe impossible to conceal, had forced the touted openness of Gorbachev’s glasnost on even the most reluctant conservatives in the Politburo. And the general secretary’s own realization that even the nuclear bureaucracy had been undermined by secrecy, incompetence, and stagnation convinced him that the entire state was rotten. After the accident, frustrated and angry, he confronted the need for truly drastic change and plunged deeply into perestroika in a desperate bid to rescue the Socialist experiment before it was too late” 

Here, Higginbotham makes his strongest argument that Chernobyl is a major factor contributing to the fall of the Soviet Union. By accelerating Gorbachev’s dedication to openness under glasnost and the reforms of perestroika, the Chernobyl explosion helps break the stranglehold on information and economic activity the Soviet Union enjoyed during the height of its powers. While other factors certainly play a role—in particular the war in Afghanistan which all but bankrupts the Soviet Union—history cannot easily dismiss the importance of Chernobyl as an event with massive social and political ramifications.

“What began as more open reporting from Chernobyl—the news stories in Pravda and Izvestia were followed by TV documentaries and personal testimonies in popular magazines—widened to include open discussion of long-censored social issues, including drug addiction, the abortion epidemic, the Afghan war, and the horrors of Stalinism. Slowly at first, but then with gathering momentum, the Soviet public began to discover how deeply it had been misled—not only about the accident and its consequences but also about the ideology and identity upon which their society was founded. The accident and the government’s inability to protect the population from its consequences finally shattered the illusion that the USSR was a global superpower armed with technology that led the world. And, as the state’s attempts to conceal the truth of what had happened came to light, even the most faithful citizens of the Soviet Union faced the realization that their leaders were corrupt and that the Communist dream was a sham.” 

After addressing Gorbachev’s own thoughts about the hard truths Chernobyl revealed about the Soviet Union, Higginbotham turns his attention to the media and the public’s reaction to the country’s failure to prepare for such a calamity, as well as its failure to properly manage the ensuing crisis. He further points out that the disillusionment reaches far beyond the current administration or the specific individuals involved in the Chernobyl explosion to include the system itself, and the ideologies that underpin it.

“He told the delegates that the origins of the Chernobyl disaster lay in a combination of ‘scientific, technological, socioeconomic, and human factors’ unique to the USSR. The Soviet nuclear industry, lacking even rudimentary safety practices, had relied upon its operators to behave with robotic precision night after night, despite constant pressure to beat deadlines and ‘exceed the plan’ that made disregard for the letter of the regulations almost inevitable.” 

Here, a nuclear specialist invokes the word ‘inevitable’ to describe the Chernobyl incident, only this time in a public forum. Like previous arguments to this effect, the speaker attributes the accident to factors that are unique to the Soviet Union, suggesting that if the explosion hadn’t occurred at Chernobyl, it would have occurred at one of the country’s other nuclear facilities. While it may seem strange to suggest that an incident that required so many things to go wrong could not have gone another way, that conclusion is consistent with the testimony of numerous nuclear specialists and Higginbotham’s own views as well.