Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham Adam writes for The New Yorker, Wired, The Smithsonian and The New York Times Magazines. Published in 2019 the book is named a New York Times’ Ten Best Books of the Year. Adam won the 2020 William E. Colby Award for military and intelligence writing. The book also was awarded the 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non-fiction.
Due to the overwhelming positive response to HBO’s mini series this is a must read to learn the facts versus the dramatic and creative license of television.
The series gained widespread critical acclaim and received 19 nominations and won Emmy awards for Outstanding Limited Series, Outstanding Directing, and Outstanding Writing.
At the same time the series won Golden Globe awards for Best Miniseries or Television Film and actor Stellan Skarsgård won Best Supporting Actor in a Series, Miniseries or Television Film.
However Adam’s detailed account sheds truth to the horrors of Chernobyl. We are now learning a much greater internal understanding from a time when information was not freely available. Conversely, the Soviet nuclear power planning would bring the number of reactors at Chernobyl from four to eight.
Admittedly this ‘atomgrad’ city would remain a destination city for citizens. Creating a city for workers of the world for the coming nuclear age would power much of Soviet Ukraine. For the most part the birth of Pripyat came from a swamp area that was all part of Soviet nuclear planning in the late 1960s.
The very real and horrific China Syndrome
The China Syndrome, an American movie about an American nuclear meltdown. The movie was released just two weeks prior to the Three Mile Island accident. This wild scenario from the movie became an honest threat to the entire continent of Europe.
The threat facing Chernobyl was twofold: First, nuclear fuel melting down into the drinking water would easily poison the Dnieper River basin. This would impact over 30 million people directly and also risk poisoning the Black Sea. Secondly, as if it could get any worse, there was a risk of a second, more deadly explosion of the entire Chernobyl facility compassing reactors Numbers 1, 2, and 3:
pp. 333-334.
But the second threat was even more immediate and frightening to contemplate than the poisoning of the water table. The molten fuel would reach the Pripyat and the Dnieper only if it escaped the foundations of the building. Before that happened, it would have to pass through the steam suppression pools, the flooded safety compartments beneath Reactor Number Four. And some of the scientists feared that if the white-hot fuel made contact with the thousands of cubic meters of water held in the sealed compartments there, it would bring about a new steam explosion orders of magnitude larger than the first. This blast could destroy not only what remained of Unit Four but also the other three reactors, which had survived the accident intact.
Amounting to a gargantuan dirty bomb formed of more than five thousand tonnes of intensely radioactive graphite and five hundred tonnes of nuclear fuel, such an explosion could exterminate whatever remained alive inside the Special Zone—and hurl enough fallout into the atmosphere to render a large swath of Europe uninhabitable for a hundred years.
pp. 333-334
Astoundingly a few brave souls heroically saved Europe from a truly catastrophic event. Regardless of time, this secret development is shocking to learn.
Yet Adam reveals much more as he writes deeply of each of the three major villains responsible for the catastrophy:
Viktor Bryukhanov
Another element to dismiss from the HBO series was the deep role Viktor Bryukhanov enjoyed in the birth of both the reactor facility and the development of Pripyat. Bryukhanov held this role since early 1970, and moving into an apartment with his wife at Pripyat in 1972.
Anatoly Dyatlov
Dyatlov, the villain of the HBO series was a graduate of Moscow’s Engineering and Physics Institute. Serving in the Soviet navy, he was in charge of a classified program to develop nuclear submarines. A classified Laboratory 23 project accident exposed Dyatlov to over 100 rem of radiation. His nine year old son developed leukemia and died as a result.
Nikolai Fomin
Another villain with an amazing story that added to the tragedy. Fomin was a strong communist party secretary. He gained a political appointment to the role of plant manager without an education in atomic energy. He learned nuclear physics via correspondence courses. Shockingly Fomin attempted suicide in prison, was committed to a insane asylum, and yet gained a job at a nuclear reactor outside of Moscow upon release from prison.
Soviet nuclear program
Adam pushes further to reveal how the Soviets were hiding the implications of the accident. Only until a nuclear plant in Sweden was alerting the world, Mikhail Gorbachev indeed announced the horrific accident. It is engrossing to discover after so many years the amazing details of the accident. This is truly a powerful book addressing events hidden from the West in the first days of the accident. Consumer computer technology in 1986 did not exist. Certainly no iPhones or web browsers existed. The internet was not really available to consumers.
In conclusion, this is providing amazing insights to the mismanagement of the catastrophe. I have only scratched the surface of Adam’s valuable work. Certainly this book is a deep dive to the tragedy in contrast to the drastic interpretation found in the HBO series. Yet the HBO series is pushing me to also read Chernobyl 01:23:40 The Incredible True Story of the World’s Worst Nuclear Disaster by Andrew Leatherbarrow and Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich. Adam’s work is difficult to put down as the horror of history plays out over the pages.
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