Midnight in Chernobyl

by Adam Higginbotham

  It was the central load dispatcher for the Ukrainian grid, who monitored the distribution of electricity throughout the republic from an office in Kiev. A call from the dispatcher in the middle of the night meant serious trouble somewhere in Ukraine’s vast network of power stations and high-tension lines. For a moment, Sklyarov hoped that—whatever it was this time—there had been no casualties.

  At fifty, Sklyarov had been a power man for his entire career. It had taken him sixteen years to work his way up from junior technician at a coal-fired power plant in Lugansk to station director—but after that, his ascent continued, to chief engineer of the Kiev electricity board and, eventually, head of the Energy Ministry itself. He was a lifelong Communist whose work had enabled him to travel far beyond the borders of the USSR but also brought him into frequent contact with the operatives of the dreaded “special services”: the KGB. Sklyarov’s glimpses of the reality of life beyond the Iron Curtain had only sharpened his cynicism, and his ascent through the ranks of the nomenklatura left him with a sense of how to tread carefully amid the minefields of Party politics.

  Although the staff of nuclear power plants in Ukraine continued to answer directly to Moscow, the electricity they produced was Sklyarov’s responsibility. While deputy energy minister, he had helped commission the first reactor at the Chernobyl station and now dealt directly with the mandarins of the USSR’s clandestine nuclear state, Aleksandrov and Slavsky. He had been kept informed of problems at the station, including the September 1982 meltdown in Unit One. Even in conventional stations, over his long career Sklyarov had already witnessed his fair share of accidents—downed lines, total blackouts, cable and oil fires—in which his men had been maimed or killed. But the sudden cascade of problems in Chernobyl now being described by the dispatcher sounded worse than anything even Sklyarov had experienced before.

  “There’s been a series of operational disturbances at the Chernobyl nuclear plant,” the dispatcher said. “Unit Four tripped out at 1:20 a.m. We’ve had a message about a fire at the station. Fire has broken out in the main hall and turbine hall on Number Four unit. We’ve lost contact with the plant.”

  Sklyarov immediately called the Ukrainian prime minister. When Alexander Lyashko heard the news, he told Sklyarov to take it to the top and call the first secretary of the Communist Party of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Vladimir Scherbitsky, leader of the republic and veteran member of the Politburo, was a hardline Party man—a sixty-eight-year-old Brezhnev crony with little interest in the reforming ways of Gorbachev. Scherbitsky had left instructions not to be disturbed for the weekend—he had left Kiev for the countryside, where he kept a coop of his beloved pigeons—and the guard who answered the phone at his dacha refused to wake the boss. Sklyarov called Lyashko back and explained the situation. Five minutes later, Scherbitsky was on the line, still half asleep.

  “What happened?” the first secretary mumbled.

  * * *

  The first emergency calls came in to the Union-level ministries in Moscow less than thirty minutes after the explosion. The secure high-frequency lines rang at the USSR Ministry of Energy, the Third Department of the Ministry of Health, and the central command of the Ministry of Defense, and the many tentacles of the centralized state began slowly to twitch with life. From Kiev, the head of the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs notified the local offices of the KGB, the civil defense, and the public prosecutor, as well as his superiors in Moscow.

  Boris Prushinsky—chief engineer of Soyuzatomenergo, the Ministry of Energy’s Department of Nuclear Power, and head of OPAS, the emergency response team recently created to respond to accidents at atomic stations—was at home in bed when he was woken by a call from the duty operator. She told him there had been an accident in Unit Four at the Chernobyl power plant. Then she read aloud the code signal used to signify its severity: Odin, dva, tri, chetyre. “One, two, three, four.” Prushinsky, barely conscious, struggled to recall what the numbers meant: A localized or general accident? A fire? Radiation? With casualties or without? It was no good. He grew impatient.

  “Tell me normally,” he said. “What happened?” It was 1:50 a.m.

  * * *

  At 2:20 a.m., a call from the central command desk at the Ministry of Defense roused Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, chief of the general staff of the Soviet army. There had been an explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant; it was possible that radionuclides had been released into the atmosphere—no one seemed to know for sure. Akhromeyev told the duty officer to gather more information, and summon a meeting of the general staff. By the time the marshal arrived at his headquarters an hour later, there were no new details. Akhromeyev began issuing orders regardless.

  The head of the USSR’s civil defense—the branch of the Soviet armed forces responsible for protecting civilians in the event of natural disaster, nuclear war, or chemical attack—was away at a conference in Lvov, in western Ukraine. The marshal found him by telephone and gave instructions to deploy immediately the mobile radiation reconnaissance unit of civil defense stationed in Kiev. He also alerted the special Soviet army brigade dedicated to dealing with radioactive contamination, based east of the Volga River, and arranged for men and equipment to be airlifted to Chernobyl. By the time he left Moscow to lead the operation, Colonel General Boris Ivanov, deputy commander of all civil defense forces in the USSR, understood that he was dealing with an explosion in the Chernobyl plant’s gas storage system and a fire in Unit Four. He planned to deploy his troops in accordance with existing plans to protect the workers and nearby population in the event of power station accidents: this was a scenario for which his staff had been specifically trained.

  * * *

  Boris Prushinsky listened as the duty operator gave him the decoded incident report: it was the maximum possible emergency, indicating a General Radiation Accident, with a fire and explosion. He asked the operator to get him a direct line to the power plant. Ten minutes later, a shift supervisor called him from Chernobyl but couldn’t provide any details: the technician said that the reactor had been shut down, and cooling water was being supplied to the core; there was no word yet on casualties. While still on the phone, he tried to raise Unit Four on his intercom, but got no reply.

  Prushinsky hung up and immediately gave orders to call out all eighteen members of the nuclear emergency response team—for the first time in its existence—and assemble them for a meeting at once. Then he called his friend Georgi Kopchinsky, a physicist who had spent three years as deputy chief engineer in Chernobyl and knew the plant and staff well. He was now in Moscow, serving the Central Committee of the Communist Party as a senior advisor on nuclear power. Prushinsky told him there had been an accident at the plant but that no details were available.

  “There was some kind of explosion,” he said. “The fourth power unit is burning.”

  Kopchinsky then telephoned his supervisor, Vladimir Marin, the Communist Party’s nuclear industry chief. They agreed that a Party team should convene at the Central Committee offices as soon as possible. Kopchinsky called for a car, dressed, packed a small suitcase, and left for the offices of Soyuzatomenergo on Kitaysky Lane. When he arrived, the director was at his desk. A KGB officer sat silently in the corner. As the members of the emergency nuclear response team arrived from their homes across the city, they made plans to coordinate their response to the accident with the other ministries and departments: the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, the Ministry of Health, and the State Committee for Hydrometeorology, which monitored weather and the environment throughout the Soviet Union.

  In the meantime, they tried again and again to reach someone in charge at the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station. There was no response.

  * * *

  At 3:00 a.m., Vladimir Marin was still at home when his phone rang a second time. It was Viktor Brukhanov himself, calling from the bunker beneath the plant. The director confessed that there had been a terrible accident at the power station—but assured his
boss that the reactor itself remained intact. Marin told his wife the news, then quickly dressed and ordered a car to take him to the Central Committee. Before leaving, Marin called his immediate superior, who then passed the message up through the Party hierarchy.

  As dawn broke over the Kremlin—and even as an increasing volume of high-frequency traffic flashed across the special telephone lines connecting Moscow, Kiev, and Chernobyl—Brukhanov’s reassuring assessment of what had happened began to percolate through the upper echelons of Soviet government.

  By 6:00 a.m., news of the accident had reached USSR energy minister Anatoly Mayorets, and he called the Soviet prime minister, Nikolai Ryzhkov, at home. He told Ryzhkov that there had been a fire at the Chernobyl station. One unit was out of commission, but the situation was under control: a team of experts was already on its way to the plant to find out more, and his deputy for nuclear energy—an experienced nuclear specialist—had been recalled from his holiday in the Crimea to lead a government commission on the scene. Ryzhkov told Mayorets to contact his team and call back as soon as he had more information from them.

  But over at Soyuzatomenergo, Georgi Kopchinsky and the other nuclear experts had already grasped that the reality might be far worse than anyone imagined. When they reached a shift supervisor at the station by phone, he had sounded incoherent and on the edge of panic. The agency’s director instructed him to find someone from the station’s senior management and tell them to phone Soyuzatomenergo immediately.

  Chernobyl’s deputy chief engineer for science was the first to call back. He calmly explained what he knew: Unit Four had been taken off-line for routine maintenance, and some kind of electrical tests were being carried out; exactly what, he couldn’t say. During those tests, an accident had occurred.

  But when asked about the progress of emergency cooling of the core—the vital work that would ensure Reactor Number Four could soon be repaired and brought back online—the Chernobyl engineer’s composure snapped abruptly.

  “There’s nothing left to be cooled!” he shouted. Then the line went dead.

  * * *

  From his office in Kiev, Ukrainian energy minister Vitali Sklyarov, under instructions to find out what was happening at the stricken plant, had been unable to gather any more concise and accurate information about the accident over the phone, so he dispatched his own deputy minister for nuclear energy to Chernobyl by car. In the two hours it took his emissary to reach the site, Sklyarov called the station again and again and spoke repeatedly with his superiors in Moscow. He gathered an impression of deepening despair. But nobody could tell him anything specific.

  At 5:15 a.m., the deputy called from the scene. The plant was still ablaze, he said. Fire crews were struggling to contain it. The roof and two walls of the reactor hall had caved in, the instruments were dead, and the supply of chemically treated water being pumped in to cool the reactor was running out. But when Sklyarov asked the urgent questions that had so far been evaded by everyone else he had spoken to—What was the level of radiation? What was the state of the reactor?—he found that even his own specialist had apparently become incapable of a straight answer.

  “Things are very, very bad,” was all he would say.

  What kind of accident could so confound technical comprehension?

  Sklyarov called First Secretary Scherbitsky once again and told him what he had.

  “Vitali Fedorovich,” Scherbitsky began, and Sklyarov braced himself. It was always a bad sign when the First Secretary used your patronymic. “You need to go there yourself.”

  Sklyarov, who had almost no interest in seeing a blazing nuclear plant at close quarters, tried to object.

  “The station is under the supervision of Moscow. It doesn’t belong to us,” he said.

  “The station might not be Ukrainian,” Scherbitsky replied, “but the land and the people are.”

  * * *

  In the bunker beneath the power plant, Director Brukhanov sat at his desk in a bewildered stupor, apparently still unable to recognize the true scale of the catastrophe and refusing to accept the radiation readings reported by his plant’s own head of civil defense. The chief engineer, Fomin, who had approved the Unit Four turbine test without bothering to notify Brukhanov that it was taking place, appeared to be in shock. His commanding self-assurance had snapped with the finality of a rotten branch, and he sat, repeating the same question again and again, in the small voice of a forlorn child: “What happened? What happened?”

  By eight in the morning, samples taken by technicians from the plant’s Department of Nuclear Safety revealed the presence of fission products and particles of nuclear fuel on the ground and in water around the station. This provided conclusive evidence that the core of the reactor had been destroyed and that radioactive substances had been released into the atmosphere. By 9:00 a.m., Interior Ministry troops wearing green rubber chemical warfare suits and respirators were blocking access to the plant, and Vladimir Malomuzh, the deputy head of the Party for the entire Kiev region, had arrived to assume overall control of the crisis. Inside Brukhanov’s office on the third floor of the main administration building, the Party chief stood by while the director heard reports from his heads of department. The doctor in charge of the plant sick bay provided details of casualties so far. There was one dead and dozens of injured; it was clear that they had been exposed to enormous levels of radioactivity and undeniably exhibited the symptoms of radiation sickness. Yet the chief of the station’s external dosimetry, tasked with measuring radiation beyond the plant’s limits, insisted there was no need to evacuate Pripyat. Vorobyev, the head of civil defense for the plant, tried to interrupt to say—once again—that they had a duty to inform the city’s population of the accident, but this time Malomuzh cut him off.

  “Sit down,” he snapped. “It’s not up to you.”

  Malomuzh instructed Brukhanov to give him a written situation report, which was then drafted by a handful of staff led by the plant Party secretary and brought to the director’s desk at around 10:00 a.m. The document was brief—a single typed page—describing an explosion, the collapse of the roof of the reactor hall, and a fire, which had already been completely extinguished. Thirty-four people involved in the firefighting were being examined in the hospital; nine had suffered thermal burns of varying degrees, and three were in critical condition. One man was missing, and another had died. There was no mention of any radiation injuries. The document stated that levels of radiation near Unit Four had reached 1,000 microroentgen per second—a tolerable 3.6 r/hr. But it failed to explain that this was the highest reading possible for the equipment used to take the measurements. It concluded with the assurance that the situation in Pripyat remained normal and that radiation levels there were being investigated. At the bottom, in the space provided, Brukhanov signed his name in blue ballpoint.

  * * *

  At around nine in the morning on Saturday, just as a military transport plane was lifting off from Moscow’s Chkalovsky military airport carrying Boris Prushinsky and his emergency nuclear response team toward Chernobyl, Prime Minister Ryzhkov arrived for work in the Kremlin. The son of a coal miner, an expert in logistics, Ryzhkov’s industrious management of the Soviet economy had driven his ascent through the ranks of government; at fifty-six, he was trim and energetic, a moderate ally to Gorbachev in his campaign for reform. He usually made it into his office a little late on the weekends, and today was no exception. As soon as he arrived, he called Anatoly Mayorets for a further update on the plant fire in Ukraine.

  The energy minister’s report was bleak. He now believed things were far more serious than he’d first thought: this was not the usual kind of accident at all. There had been an explosion in one of the reactors; the damage was extensive; the consequences were hard to predict; urgent measures were necessary. Ryzhkov told Mayorets to assemble a second, more senior team of experts and take a plane to Kiev at once. He sent orders to Aeroflot, to make an aircraft available. Then, according t
o the normal procedures set down for a major accident, Ryzhkov began organizing yet another, even more senior team—his own handpicked government commission—to travel to the scene and assume responsibility for addressing the accident and its consequences. As chairman, he chose Boris Scherbina, the balding, bulldog-faced deputy prime minister of the USSR in charge of all fuel and energy operations throughout the Union. Ryzhkov located him more than a thousand kilometers away in Orenburg, close to the border with Kazakhstan, where Scherbina was about to make a speech to local oil workers. Ryzhkov told him to wrap it up immediately and get back to Moscow, where a plane would be waiting to take him on to Ukraine.

  At 11:00 a.m., with the second team led by Mayorets already in the air, Ryzhkov signed a formal decree to establish the commission. He sent out word to gather its members—including senior figures from the Soviet Academy of Sciences, the Kurchatov Institute, the Prosecutor General’s Office of the USSR, the KGB, the Ministry of Health, and the Ukrainian Council of Ministers—as soon as possible.

  * * *

  Academician Valery Legasov, first deputy director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, woke that morning entirely ignorant of what was happening in Ukraine. It was a beautiful day, and he couldn’t decide whether to spend it with his wife, Margarita, go in to work at the department he chaired at Moscow State University, or attend a meeting of his Communist Party aktiv at the headquarters of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building.

  Ever the reliable Communist, Legasov chose the Party meeting. When he arrived, just before 10:00 a.m., a colleague mentioned an unpleasant incident at the Chernobyl plant. The meeting was led by Sredmash chief Efim Slavsky. It was the usual hot air: the old man declaimed at tedious length about the many successes and victories of the ministry and scolded a handful of individuals for their failures. Generally, everything was proceeding as wonderfully as ever: all their plans were being fulfilled, their targets met. In the midst of his traditional hymn to the glories of the nuclear power industry, Slavsky paused, and then mentioned that, apparently, there had been some mishap at an atomic station in Ukraine. But he added quickly that this plant was run by their neighbors at the Ministry of Energy. Whatever the accident was, it wouldn’t halt the onward march of Soviet nuclear power.