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

Here, Higginbotham begins to explore in more detail the stark differences between the Soviet nuclear industry and that of its counterparts in the United States and Western Europe. Aside from the West’s mandate to use safer—though less efficient—PWR reactors rather than the dangerously unstable RBMK reactors, the most dramatic divide can be found in the United States’s relative transparency in the wake of the Three Mile Island partial meltdown and the Soviet Union’s obsessive dedication to secrecy around multiple nuclear accidents, most of which result in far more damage than the Three Mile Island incident. That incident is largely the result of human error, as plant operators take various actions in violation of US Nuclear Regulatory Commission rules. The fact that the United States even has a dedicated federal governing body overseeing the activity in its nuclear plants is itself a significant divergence from the Soviet Union, where around a half-dozen agencies enforce rules with little consistency or efficiency.

In the wake of the US accident—during which nobody gets hurts and operators quickly contain the radiation—anti-nuclear activists see their credibility and political influence increase as they effectively advocate for a slowdown in the United States’s nuclear ambitions. “In the United States, the development of the nuclear power industry, already dogged by rising construction costs and growing public apprehension, halted almost overnight” (73). The mere existence of anti-nuclear groups is something that differentiates the United States from the Soviet Union, where political repression—though somewhat on the decline by the 1980s—is still a powerful force in Soviet society. Beyond that, the Soviet Union works hard to maintain the myth that the heroic men in charge of its nuclear program are the closest thing the fiercely atheist Community Party had to gods. “Alongside the cosmonauts and martyrs of the Great Patriotic War, according to historian Paul Josephson, the nuclear scientists became ‘near-mythic figures in the pantheon of Soviet heroes’” (34).

To maintain this myth, the Soviet Union goes to great lengths to conceal the increasing number of accidents plaguing its reactor plants. Only around a year before the Chernobyl explosion, a burst relief valve at the Balakavo plant in Russia boils 14 men alive in a far more damaging accident than Three Mile Island. And yet the Soviet Union suppresses reports of the incident—like the Mayak explosion—and even operators at other Soviet nuclear plants are unaware of the accident. Perhaps the most absurd example of Soviet secrecy in regard to plant accidents happens at Chernobyl itself, four years prior to the explosion. In 1982, the Unit One reactor actually suffers a partial meltdown. While the vague existence of a problem is impossible to conceal from the workers there, the fact of the meltdown itself becomes classified as a state secret by the KGB. The technician who first reported the problem “would wait years before learning the truth about what happened” (70).

And yet, when the Three Mile Island disaster occurs—one that, again, pales in comparison to the Soviet Union’s own secret history of nuclear accidents—the USSR is quick to frame it in terms that speak highly not only of its own nuclear industry but also Communism in general, revealing the persistent theme of how Party ideology always supersedes truth and safety.

Having set the stage and establishing the factors of secrecy, ideology, recklessness, and over-confidence that all conspired to create a dangerous set of conditions, Higginbotham finally depicts the night of the accident itself. Here, the demands of the Soviet energy apparatus begin to play a major role. The fact that the turbine generator test is two years overdue and therefore a point of urgency is the result of numerous delays approved by Brukhanov in order to meet centralized power demands. Even on the scheduled day of the test, further delays ensue because the energy dispatcher in Kiev insists he needs all the power Unit Four can muster ahead of the long May Day weekend. This has the unintended effect of putting Leonid Toptunov—a reactor control engineer with only two months experience in that position—in charge of managing the power during the test, despite the fact that the task would have generally gone to a more senior operator. And it is Toptunov who commits one of the only errors that night that can truly fit the characterization of “innocent,” rather than borne out of recklessness or willful denial. As the systemic factors like these pile up ahead of the explosion, Higginbotham’s argument that the Chernobyl accident is a bureaucratic disaster as much as a technical disaster becomes even more persuasive.

Less innocent are the errors committed by Dyatlov the night of the explosion. In addition to advising Toptunov to lower the power needlessly in the first place—which leads to the sequence in which Toptunov’s error causes reactivity to bottom out—Dyatlov insists that the operators continue to conduct the test, despite the fact that the conditions of the reactor necessitate a full shutdown. A less stubborn man might have listened to Toptunov’s and Akimov’s very reasonable objections to these directives. But Dyatlov possesses an arrogance and disdain toward less senior plant workers that Higginbotham suggests is also a product of the Soviet Union and its dictates regarding following orders without question. “By crushing dissent and conjuring an air of infallibility, Dyatlov—like the Soviet state itself—expected his underlings to carry out his commands with robotic acquiescence, regardless of their better judgment” (78).

The overall takeaway from Higginbotham’s minute-by-minute depiction of the events leading up to the explosion suggests that despite numerous instances in which Chernobyl might have averted catastrophe, the plant’s operators continue to hurtle toward disaster, driven forward by a kind of institutional inertia endemic to the Soviet Union.