Adam Higginbotham — “Midnight in Chernobyl”
The human stories of the worst nuclear accident in history.
Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster, by Adam Higginbotham (Bookshop.org / Amazon)
Hello! And welcome to the ScienceBorg Librarian. My name is Vasile Decu, I’m a science journalist, amateur astronomer and professional bookworm. And this is my book talk blog, where you’re invited to read (and soon listen to) interesting conversations with some of the best authors of nonfiction books, from media to tech, history and nature.
Adam Higginbotham’s spectacular history of the Chernobyl disaster is not just a great document (and documentary) of things past, but still, unfortunately, a very relevant read to understand our world. Some lessons were learned, some, we see, were not.
Ukraine is once again facing carnage, death, an existential crisis and also the invisible but all too deadly danger of radiation, which now springs, I think, from an even worse system than the one that made Chernobyl’s reactor 4 explode decades ago, on that fateful night of April 26th, 1986.
Midnight in Chernobyl is an essential book. It’s so well written and researched, that it takes you there, in Pripyat’s apartments and streets, in Chernobyl’s control rooms, in the firefighters’ cars and hospital corridors, better than any documentary or “docu-drama” (whatever that means, and I’m looking at you, HBO…); it also explains what truly happened and dispels the myths, prejudices and exaggerations that muddled our understanding of such an important event; and, vitally, it humanizes those names on the paper, it gives them back their life, by listening to them and telling their stories.
And it also shows, for those with eyes to read and hearts to feel, the incredible power for sacrifice and the resilience of the Ukrainian people in the face of tragedy. As we see them again, this year, and day and night now, in their cities bombarded by Russians, on the front lines and under occupation, and in the train stations and refugee centers where I often go as a volunteer in my country of Romania.
If you‘ll enjoy these interviews, learn from them, discover great books or great people through them, please buy me a coffee and/or a chapter of a new and bloody expensive hardcover, via Buy Me a Coffee or Donorbox.
Illustration: Cristina Ion/Vasile Decu
Vasile Decu: Thank you for this talk — and also for your book. It’s such an important and necessary history, especially given all the myths about Chernobyl. I encountered them all the time, from my school years to current popular culture.
Adam Higginbotham: Thank you. Yes, part of the reason to write the book in the first place was because there’s a lot of nonsense written and talked about the accident. So I really wanted to make sure that everything that I put into the book was properly sourced. And I tried to address as many of these myths and exaggerations as possible.
Everybody, every reviewer of your book said that it’s a thriller, that it’s terrifying, but I feel they’re thinking about the radiation, mostly. But we, in Eastern Europe… I, when I read it, was horrified by the system that made it happen.
Yes, indeed.
Chernobyl was an accident waiting to happen. Not just an accident of human error. We have a saying in Romania… ‘The dead man did it’.
(Laughs) Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right and I hope this comes through in the book. That the immediate, proximate cause of the accident was a series of decisions on the part of the operators and serious design faults in the reactor. But the broader cause of the accident was the Soviet system. You’ve got a political and social system that was built on lies and secrecy and it was this that ultimately laid the path towards the disaster.
Lots of people say that nuclear technology was such a new science back in those days, especially for civilian use, that they were playing with fire. How well was this science understood at that time?
I think that the science was very well understood. I mean, we’re talking about 1986 and people had been working on this technology since the mid ’40s. It’s a pretty long time. I think that the fundamentals of nuclear science were very well understood. The problems came when they refused to accept the limitations of the reactor design that they had decided to roll out. Because they knew that there were problems with this type of reactor design from the very beginning — because its roots go back to these military reactors that were initially used to manufacture plutonium for atom weapons. And so they knew that these were not easy reactors to deal with and they knew that they had these instabilities and problems. I don’t think it was a lack of understanding of the science. I think it was a lack of will to appreciate how dangerous they could be in everyday operation if they tried to roll them out into civilian use. I think that’s part of the problem here.
They knew the limitations. They knew the possible accident scenarios, but the system, the communist system, made it that they didn’t reach the operators, the lessons weren’t heard and weren’t applied.
First of all, they chose this reactor design because it was expedient, because it was convenient, because the potentially much safer designs, of the water cooled, water moderated designs, the VVER, they couldn’t make those quickly enough and they couldn’t build them on a large enough scale. So they essentially did this because they wanted to press ahead with the atomic energy program. They just didn’t have the available technology, or the tooling, or the manufacturing capability to build the safer model of reactors. They went with this one. That was the initial problem. And then, once they chose to do that, then, as you say, they knew that there were problems with it, but they kept the problem secret. And so when there were these accidents that provided early warnings of the catastrophe to come, but they didn’t share that information with the operators of those reactors — as broadly as they should have done. Some of this information was sent out in technical advice, but its significance and its importance and the dangers of it were not highlighted to the people operating the reactors.
Can we blame that on this bad mix of scientists and party people, party hacks, fools?
Obviously, the mixture doesn’t help, but when you’re looking at someone like Anatoly Aleksandrov, the head of the Kurchatov Institute, it’s hard to tell… I didn’t delve too deeply into his background and his personality, but it seems to me that, yes, it wasn’t necessarily an ideological problem with Aleksandrov, so much as a problem of ego and arrogance. That he just thought that he would push this through and everything would be fine. It was a lack of consideration for the people who would be operating the reactors, really. It was just a kind of…. an arrogance and a callousness, I think.
We have several myths about Chernobyl. One of them says that the accident happened because of the young people working there. That they were too inexperienced, and that it was their fault.
Well, I mean it’s certainly true that Leonid Toptunov, the reactor control engineer, who was in the control room that night, was inexperienced. That’s not a total myth. He was inexperienced, he’d only been in that job for two months, I think, when the accident happened. Something that is a myth, that seems a pretty widespread belief, is that the people operating the reactors at Chernobyl were technically incompetent. Which, from the people that I spoken to, I think is certainly untrue. These were specialists who had years of training and many of them had had years and years of practical experience. Dyatlov, for example, if you read Grigori Medvedev’s book, The Truth about Chernobyl, you come away perhaps with the impression that Dyatlov was incompetent. That he didn’t know what he was doing. But it’s clear that Dyatlov had decades of experience and he was a specialist and he had experience in these smaller marine reactors that he’d overseen the installation of into the Soviet submarine fleet. And then, when he arrived at Chernobyl, in the early 70s, he did everything he could to learn as much as possible about the RBMK model and about the technical specifications. Every technical update that came through. And he was widely respected, even among those people, the many people who worked at Chernobyl who disliked Dyatlov and found his manner abrasive and rude and inconsiderate and dictatorial. It seems that the consensus was that everybody agreed that he knew exactly what he was doing. And you won’t gonna find anyone who knew more about reactor engineering than Anatoly Dyatlov. So, while I think it is true that some of them were inexperienced, I think that broadly it was the case that these people knew a great deal about what they were doing. But I think that they did not appreciate the potential dangers of the equipment they were working with. You know, again, when I spoke to reactor engineers who worked there at that time, one of them said to me, when I asked him about this, because this was… My initial conception when I began reporting the book was that nobody was aware of the fact that what they were doing was dangerous in any way. They just thought it was like working in a coal fired power station. That’s a good story. But it’s just not true. So there’s one reactor specialist I spoke to who said to me ”Well, we didn’t think we were working in a soft toy factory”. He made it clear that he knew that working with nuclear energy was hazardous. But they just didn’t appreciate the specific problems that there were with the RBMK. All I’m really saying is that like a lot of the elements of the story, I think, it’s not black and white. There was inexperience, but there was also a great deal of knowledge and a lot of training and a lot of experience. So it was a bit of both.
Your book takes us from the streets of Pripyat to the reactor control room. You really make a coherent story out of so many testimonies, you place us there, and all these people are human beings, not just names or characters.
That’s great to hear, because a lot of the work that I did on this was was to try and make that happen.
Illustration: Cristina Ion/Vasile Decu
They did not stood a chance, once that reactor went critical down in the lower parts. They could not do anything.
That’s right. It seems possible that essentially as soon as they began the preparations for the test it was already too late. Nikolai Steinberg, who headed the second inquiry into the accident… I specifically asked him at what point could they have stopped what they were doing and averted a catastrophe. And he said that even at this point we don’t really know the answer to that question, because the accident sequence and what was really happening inside the reactor has never been studied in close enough detail to know whether it was possible. After the point that Toptunov made the mistake that resulted in the reactor power falling almost to zero, if there was any moment after that, in anything they did, where they could have averted a catastrophe. It seems possible that for up to an hour before the actual explosion it was already too late.
What was for you, as a researcher, your favorite story or the characters that fascinated you the most?
There are a few. The obvious one is Viktor Brukhanov, who I think is a fascinating character. He was someone who was young, ambitious, and optimistic. And he was prepared to pursue his own way and seemed to be independently minded when he first arrived there, then was kind of bent to the Party’s will. And yet… remained well liked by people in the town and people who worked at the plant. He was a kind and quite sensitive, an uncommonly sensitive individual for somebody in that position of Soviet management. Although he was officially held responsible for failing to evacuate the city, for sending men into areas of high radioactivity in the immediate aftermath of the accident and then for really denying that a major accident had taken place… I think that, for me, in that time immediately after the accident and those few hours after the accident, what I saw was someone who was so overwhelmed by what was happening around him that he simply couldn’t believe it. I find that theory fascinating because there are several individuals who should have known better, but were faced with such an enormous catastrophe that I think they were simply unable to comprehend what was going on. I don’t think that Brukhanov was necessarily, deliberately recognizing the disaster taking place and denying that it had happened, because he wanted to keep his job or something. I think that there is this fascinating syndrome that happens in these moments, a terrible syndrome that happens in these circumstances where human beings simply can’t come to comprehend what’s going on. I think that may have been what happened to Brukhanov. It’s certainly something the Boris Prushinsky, who came down with the nuclear emergency response team from Moscow, explicitly writes about in his memoir of what happened. Like gazing out of the window of the helicopter at the reactor and simply struggling to comprehend what he was seeing.
And then, for the rest of Brukhanov’s life… You know, he thought he was at the zenith of his career as the day dawned on April 25th. Everything was going right then, in spite of all this struggles. He had just turned 50. He just celebrated his silver wedding anniversary. His daughter was pregnant with their first grandchild. The plant was about to be awarded the star of the Order of Lenin. He was going to be promoted to Moscow, and then it’s all… In an instant, it’s all destroyed. And now he remains this kind of fascinating figure. On the occasions when I met him, he seemed like a kind of shell of a person. But then, when we started talking about what his regrets were, it was like he remembered this, you know, the great plans for Chernobyl 2 and how he would have presided over these, eventually, a dozen reactors at the plant. So I think he’s a really interesting, complex character.
But then there’s also Maria Protsenko, the chief architect of the city, who I just think is a wonderful, fascinating person. When I first interviewed her, I thought I was gonna talk to her for 20 minutes — and then, five hours later, we left and I’d only discovered kind of half of what she had to say. I went back again and again to meet her. She’s fascinating!
And then there’s another character who’s …. I don’t think he’s even named in the narrative. He’s named in the footnotes, Georgi Reikhtman. I don’t know whether you remember, there’s a bit where I mention that there’s this former submarine reactor room officer who sat down at the control panel of the reactor during training. And he says “What is this hulking piece of shit doing in civilian operational hands?” He is an amazing character, because he had this whole career in the Navy before he went to Chernobyl. He was cashiered from the Navy because they had a purge of anyone with a Jewish background. As a result of an incident when there was a mutiny on a Soviet Navy destroyer. Afterwards, Reikhtman went on to be the person who was effectively the… He was put in charge of the fourth reactor after the sarcophagus was built. So he had this very senior position where he was the kind of the controller of this destroyed reactor, the years after the accident happened. Those are three of the people that I found particularly interesting.
I was most impressed of the sacrifice of many of those people. I always wonder what I’ll do in a crisis, how fear would change me, how I’ll react. Many of them were horrified and really scared, but they still did their jobs, from operators to firefighters.
Right, right. In some cases, I’m not sure what motivated those people. This is something I was keen to try and tease out really when I was reporting. Many of the accounts that have been written about the accident up till now, you know, they just cleave to these stereotypes. So the people that you read about are either, depending on who’s writing, they will either be totally incompetent or heartless apparatchiks; or they’ll be these noble, courageous individuals who go into a nuclear blaze full of principles and self-sacrifice.
The Soviet model citizen.
Right. Exactly, exactly. But, of course, what I find is that it’s always more complicated, it was often more complicated than this. People like Alexander Petrovsky, the sergeant in the initial firefighting response, who goes up to the roof of the reactor building three to help his comrades and is extremely broke. He gets up there and he has this experience where the radiation is such that he goes blind for few seconds and then his courage just evaporates. And he ran, he and his colleague ran away. To me, that’s a real human response. And so there’s courage and fear in the same place. When he told me that story, I just thought, well, this is a real story of Chernobyl. This is not, you know, the stories of the firefighters that you read in Pravda; and these are not the stories of the incompetent managers that you read about in Medvedev’s book. It’s a combination of the two. This is a real experience — this is what really happened.
It’s impressive and you must be proud of it — you talked with a lot of people involved in this history. How hard was it to talk to them, to find them. Were they willing to share their stories?
I deliberately tried to get to as many people as possible. This sort of reporting that I do relies on talking to as many people as you can, for as long as you can. Face to face and on their own. And most of the people that… I mean, all the people I spoke to eventually were willing to talk.
I would say that the principal difficulties resulted from people who talked to a lot of writers and journalists in the past. The impression that I came away with from some of those people is that they had become wary of talking to journalists, because they had gradually realized that these people came and spoke to them and revived the most terrible memories of their entire lives in many cases, and sort of reanimated these experiences for them. But they were just interested in talking about the worst things that happened. They wanted to come to harvest horror stories from them. And then, once they got those terrible stories out of them, they would just leave and then the individuals would never hear from them again.
So some of what I had to do with some people was to show them that I was interested in, as you say, showing them to be human beings. I was interested in talking to them about their whole lives, both because I wanted to understand them and their experience, but also because it was, you know, the only way that you’re going to recreate them as human beings on the page and the reader will then see them as fully formed individuals. So then I would start talking to them about where they went to school, where they grew up, you know, what their life was. I was always very interested in their lives before the accident. Those were somewhat tricky interviews to do, for that reason. Because the interview subjects themselves had these very well justified fears of talking to journalists. In other cases, there were people who had been paid by journalists to talk to them in the past, and so they had come to expect that. But I could not do that. There were several people who said ‘well, yes, I will talk to you, but you know you will have to pay me’. And I just couldn’t do that, because then you’re sort of tainting the testimony. But there were other people who I was very surprised that had agreed to talk. You know, I spoke to several KGB agents from the Ukrainian KGB. And it turned out that they have their own society of former KGB agents. So me and Taras Shumejko, who worked with me as a as a fixer and a researcher, contacted the head of the organization, who was a former general in the Ukrainian KGB, and then he phoned some of his former officers who had worked at the plant and told them that they should talk to me. And then they were only too happy to talk.
So it varied depending on what the background of the individuals was. There were a lot of people I spoke to who had never spoken to a journalist before. And some of those people were happy to talk because they felt that otherwise their stories would be lost. Or they felt that nobody was interested in talking about it anymore. That nobody was interested in finding out what had really happened. So there were quite a few people who would seem very grateful that I sought them out and wanted to talk to them about it.
You’ve been there. You’ve been to Ukraine several times, to the city and the plant itself.
Yeah. I’ve only been inside the plant once.
How was your experience, even approaching the site that terrifies the whole planet?
It’s interesting. I’ve been there many times. Near the plant, in the city and the exclusion zone. But I almost always went there in the winter. And in the winter it really is a kind of forbidding, frightening place. But then, around the time, actually exactly on the occasion of the 30th anniversary, I went there towards the end of April. I went to Pripyat on April the 25th. And just as it had been exactly 30 years before, it was a beautiful day. It was very warm, hot like summer. The trees and the flowers were all in bloom and there were birds singing, butterflies in the undergrowth. And there was no one else in the city that day, except me and my fixer and the guide — you have to have a guide when you go there, the government insists upon it.
And so that day, we were… I was going round and visiting the apartments of some of the protagonists in the story. So that I could find where exactly they were, what you could see from the window of their apartment, how the apartments were arranged. You know, what the wallpaper was like. But then, at one point around the middle of the day, we were all walking through one of the courtyards of one of the apartment complexes which were all overgrown with trees and… I mean, you may have been there yourself, but I’m sure you’ve seen pictures of it. It was beautiful, it was an absolutely gorgeous day. And it was very peaceful. You could see what a beautiful place it would have been to live when the city was still filled with people. But then at some point my fixer and the guide turned a corner and disappeared. And I was left standing in this overgrown courtyard, entirely alone in this silent and deserted city. I didn’t know where they were. And for a few seconds I suddenly felt… as I would feel if I was really the last man on Earth. I was absolutely terrified! (laughs) That was one of the most frightening moments of being in the exclusion zone — not, you know, being in the shadow of the fourth reactor, but just this instant of thinking, well, this is what it would be like if there was no one else left. If humanity had just vaporized. This is what the world would be like.
I remember your scene with that lady that came on the late train, and she didn’t knew that the city was evacuated and she came back to an empty city. “I want to go home before they send me away.” There are a lot of scenes that stick with you.
Your book is important because we can learn from this accident. A lot of things. Nuclear energy is going to come up again in a pretty big societal debate, I think.
What do you think? What do you think the lessons of the accident are?
First of all don’t do it in a communist country (we both laugh).
There is this myth recently in my country… the myth of the efficiency of a dictator. That when you’re in an authoritarian state, things get done quickly and good. But it’s the other way around. The materials are bad. The managers are incompetent. The competent people are afraid to talk. Accidents are hidden and the important stuff is swept under the rug. A lot of bad stuff can happen in such a system.
Tell me there are not people in Romania who think that Ceaușescu was good for the country?
Paradoxically, after 30 years people forget. And they start saying ‘mayyyybe the system would work again’… It’s a kind of political and societal Alzheimer…
Wow. Right.
The thing about the lessons of the accident in terms of nuclear energy… I mean, it’s commonplace for people to say “Well, nuclear energy is a terrible idea. Look at Chernobyl.” But I think that’s a bit of a fallacy. Because there were so many things about the accident that could only have happened in the Soviet Union. The kind of reactor, the absence of any kind of culture of safety in operating a nuclear plant. They didn’t had any of the procedures that are now in place in Western nuclear plants and in former Soviet nuclear plants, I imagine. The reactor itself is uniquely dangerous. On the conduct of the test was this kind of terrible confluence of different elements of malpractice, and poor design, and the Soviet system, and the demands of the production quotas. There’s so many parts of it, I think, that came together in a way that could only have come together in the 1980s in the Soviet Union. And behind it all lay this kind of overconfidence in technology. And so the analogy that I’ve sometimes used is of saying that, in that way, it has a lot in common with the Titanic disaster. The sinking of the Titanic was a result of technological hubris, in the same way that the designers of the Titanic and the White Star Line insisted that the ship was unsinkable. You know, Aleksandrov had managed to convince everybody that the RBMK was this wonder of of Soviet technology, one of the safest reactors in the world. If you say that, as a result of the Chernobyl accident, people should not engage in nuclear power, then you would say that as a result of the sinking of the Titanic nobody should take ocean liners anymore. They are very unique events and I don’t think that they have wider repercussions for the use of the technology as a whole. Nuclear engineering has come a long way and I think that there is available technology that is a lot safer than those kind of reactors.
Even as a reporter, you must have had an idea of the story of Chernobyl before you started your research and interviews. In all those years of documenting, what was something that wasn’t quite as you thought it was or even entirely wrong?
Well, I think one of the things was this idea that the staff of the plant was incompetent. It became clear as soon as I began talking to reactor control engineers who worked at the plant that they knew exactly what they were doing and they had a huge amount of experience. And even the guys who were in their early 20s or mid 20s, they were extremely well trained. One guy who was on the 8:00 a.m. shift, and so arrived at the plant seven hours after the explosion, he had trained at MEPhI as a reactor designer. He wasn’t merely there to operate these things. His training had taken him to the point where he was expecting to be able to design new models of reactors. These people weren’t ignorant potato farmers. They were technical experts with years of training.
And more broadly than that, I think one thing that I discovered quite early on, but was one of the things that sort of propelled me into writing a book, was that I was 17 when the accident happened. And when I began talking to eyewitnesses and people who lived in Pripyat I began to realize that I had been just as much of a victim of Western propaganda about the Soviet Union as the people I was talking to would have been victims of Soviet propaganda. Because my conception of what these people were like was that they would be these kind of faceless drones of the socialist system. They were gray people, marching in lockstep toward a freezing doom. That they didn’t have any free will of their own. Of course, it wasn’t true. They were people just like me, maybe a little bit older than me at the time of the accident, but they have a lot in common with me. They were people who had hopes and expectations and they wanted to start families and they wanted to live in this place that was really nice and in the countryside. They wanted to work in a new and exciting enterprise, a field of technology that was on the cutting edge. Early on, that was something that I found very arresting. I realized that these weren’t the people that I’ve read about in books, in several of the accounts that I’ve read before I began reporting in Russia and Ukraine — where these people were just names on the page and they all seem to be the same. There was nothing to differentiate from one another or from other victims of the socialist experiment. And so I was impressed by how my own assumptions and expectations of what these people were like were totally wrong. So that would be the biggest thing.
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