By September, doctors at Hospital Six say that around 30 of its patients have died from injuries and sickness related to the Chernobyl explosion. Miraculously, Alexander Yuvchenko is not yet among them. After months spent on death’s doorstep, Yuvchenko’s bone marrow begins to function properly again, perplexing his doctors. Nevertheless, he still suffers enormous amounts of pain from the open wounds on his shoulder where doctors removed necrotized tissue. For a brief period in September, the hospital releases Yuvchenko. Gaunt, malnourished, and addicted to narcotic painkillers, Yuvchenko is back in the hospital days later.

Meanwhile, the rest of the 116,000 refugees from Pripyat and the surrounding villages are still in a state of limbo, struggling to find new jobs and new schools for their children. Some of the displaced plant specialists receive new jobs at other nuclear facilities across Ukraine where many of their new coworkers resent them. The refugees who are lucky enough to obtain new permanent housing in a remote suburb of Kiev also face resentment by their new neighbors. In July, the government finally allows residents to visit Pripyat to gather the belongings they left behind. They return to looted homes and refrigerators full of rotting food.

Around the first anniversary of the disaster, the Soviet Union submits a report to the IAEA detailing the levels of radiation it expects to reach the 75 million people in the Western USSR. The reports fails to mention the number of additional deaths it expects to see from contamination. Dr. Robert Gale, a hematology expert and one of the only Americans allowed to enter the Soviet Union to treat Chernobyl victims, estimates that another 75,000 people will die of cancer related to radiation from the Chernobyl explosion, almost half of whom live outside the Soviet Union.

On July 7, 1987, six men face trial for causing the Chernobyl explosion. They include Brukhanov, Fomin, and Dyatlov, along with night shift chief Boris Rogozkhin; Alexander Kovalenko, a workshop head who signed off on the test; and Yuri Laushkin, the plant’s nuclear safety inspector. The court makes clear that Toptunov and Akimov, had they not died as a result of the explosion, would also be criminally liable for the accident. In his opening remarks, Judge Raimond Brize makes no mention of the reactor’s design flaws.

The court allows each defendant to defend himself. While Brukhanov accepts responsibility for the accident as the plant’s director and admits to the lesser charge of administrative negligence, he hopes to avoid the more severe charge of abuse of power. When asked about what’s arguably his least justifiable act surrounding the accident—the false radiation readings he reports to Moscow—Brukhanov claims he did not read the document in question before signing it. Notably, Brukhanov makes no effort to assign blame to the reactor’s designers or the Soviet bureaucracy. “Brukhanov remained a creature of the system that had molded him” (316).

An increasingly unstable Fomin—who months earlier attempted suicide—accepts guilt and begs the court for mercy. Of the six defendants, only Dyatlov is confrontational. In his defiant testimony, Dyatlov absolves Toptunov and Akimov of guilt, instead laying blame on the designers and bureaucrats who failed to inform plant operators of the RBMK reactor’s design flaws.

On July 29, the court finds all six defendants guilty. Brukhanov, Fomin, and Dyatlov receive maximum sentences of 10 years, while the rest receive sentences between two and five years. Higginbotham calls the proceedings “one of the last show trials in the history of the Soviet Union” (317).

In a tacit admission of the designers’ complicity, the Soviet Union refits the three remaining Chernobyl reactors and 12 other RBMK reactors with improved safety mechanisms, yet:

little had really changed: more than a year after the disaster, the Politburo received a report showing that Soviet atomic power stations continued to be bedeviled by bad construction, poor staff discipline—and hundreds of minor accidents (321).

While Legasov continues to follow Party lines for the narrative surrounding Chernobyl, in private he’s racked with guilt by his failure to properly address the RBMK’s design flaws before the accident, along with his role in covering them up to the IAEA. He undertakes an ambitious plan to modernize Soviet atomic science, but Sredmash officials meet his proposals with fury and indignation. Meanwhile, serious health problems associated with radiation exposure continue to afflict his blood, bone marrow, and heart. Legasov’s increasing resistance to the Soviet Union’s nuclear bureaucracy coincides with a number of professional setbacks, and before long it becomes clear that Legasov will not replace Aleksandrov as the new head of the Kurchatov Institute. After making a series of candid tape recordings about his experiences at Chernobyl, Legasov hangs himself on April 27, 1988. When Aleksandrov learns of Legasov’s fate, he cries, “Why did he abandon me?” (326).

Over the next few weeks, the public inside and outside the Soviet Union learns more about the true causes of the reactor explosion, as well as the true extent of the radioactive contamination outside the Exclusion Zone. Legasov’s tapes, an excerpt of which get published in the Pravda newspaper, play a role in this. While a broad range of events contribute to the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991—most notably its war in Afghanistan which bankrupts the country—Higginbotham argues that the humiliation visited upon the Communist Party and its best and brightest scientists as a result of the Chernobyl explosion is a significant factor.