68 pages • 2 hours read
Adam HigginbothamMidnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “Death of an Empire”
Chapter 10 Summary: “The Cloud”
Around 7:00 am on the Monday morning following the explosion, Cliff Robinson, a technician at the Forsmark nuclear power station located over 1,000 kilometers from Chernobyl in Sweden, sets off a radiation monitoring alarm. Having gone nowhere near the reactor block that day, Robinson assumes the alarm to be broken. But after dozens of other plant workers set off the alarm, Robinson takes a shoe from one of the workers and places it in a gamma ray detector which finds a wide range of fission products, including isotopes only formed when the atmosphere suffers exposure to nuclear fuel. By 2:00 pm, Swedish nuclear officials agree that the country’s contamination derives from a nuclear incident abroad, a fact they confirm with their counterparts in Finland and Denmark. The wind patterns over the previous 72 hours strongly suggest that the accident occurred somewhere in the Soviet Union.
Meanwhile, Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and his Politburo executive committee debate what the Soviet Union should tell the international community and its own people about the incident. “For Gorbachev, this was a sudden and unexpected test of the new openness and transparent government he had promised the Party conference just a month earlier” (173). It isn’t until 8:00 pm that the Soviet Union releases a terse 23-word statement acknowledging the accident but providing scant details other than that “one of the atomic reactors has been damaged” (175).
Over the next couple days, a few more details emerge in the Soviet press, including the deaths of Khodemchuk and Shoshanek, along with the evacuation of Pripyat, but there is no mention of the radiation cloud that has now reached as far west as Germany and Czechoslovakia. Amid this vacuum of information, Western press outlets like the New York Post run sensationalist stories estimating death tolls as high as 15,000 people.
Back at Chernobyl, General Antoshkin’s pilots drop 10 tons of boron and 80 tons of sand onto the exposed reactor, but Scherbina isn’t impressed. Antoshkin pushes his team harder and enlists locals from surrounding villages to help fill sand bags. By the third day, the drops seem to have an effect, as radiation slowly begins to fall and the estimated temperature of the core drops from 1,000 degrees centigrade to 500. This comes at the expense of the health of the pilots, however, who frequently sprint out of the helicopter upon landing after a drop to vomit.
In Moscow, Prime Minister Ryzhkov and the Party’s ideology chief Yegor Ligachev tell Gorbachev it is time for them to visit Chernobyl for themselves. They expect Gorbachev to say he will join them, but the General Secretary stays silent. Once the pair is on-site, Scherbina shows Ryzhkov a map of the radiation cloud indicating that populations as far as 30 kilometers away face an imminent threat. Ryzhkov agrees to evacuate all towns and villages within 30 kilometers of the Chernobyl plant.
Chapter 11 Summary: “The China Syndrome”
Despite the drop in radiation and temperature, some of the scientists on-site doubt whether the increasingly frequent helicopter drops are responsible for the decrease—given the very small likelihood that the materials are actually making it into the core and not blocked by the tilted reactor lid. But despite the fact that the commission may be endangering its pilots with little to show for it, Legasov insists that the drops continue. He tells one naysayer, “People won’t understand if we do nothing. We have to be seen to be doing something” (190).
On Thursday, the core temperature suddenly spikes to 1,700 degrees and the radiation output increases from three to six million curies overnight. As a result, two new terrifying threats emerge. The first is that the material in the core becomes so hot—around 2,800 degrees centigrade, Legasov estimates—that it melts down through the concrete below to the groundwater connected to the Dnieper River basin and eventually the Black Sea itself, poisoning the water supply for 30 million Ukrainians. This meltdown scenario is known as the China syndrome, named after the 1979 Jane Fonda film of the same name in which a character theorizes that a core meltdown will travel through the entire Earth and reach China. While scientists don’t seriously believe a core meltdown would continue burning all the way to China, the consequences of it reaching the water table below the ground are disastrous enough. The second threat is that the molten fuel leaks into water suppression chambers, resulting in a steam explosion obliterating anything and anyone in a one-and-a-half kilometer radius and throwing “enough fallout into the atmosphere to render a large swath of Europe uninhabitable for a hundred years” (192).
Other than continuing to drop material on the core, the commission can do little to guard against the first scenario at the time being. Instead, the scientists turn their attention to halting the steam explosion scenario. At the moment, the valves that release the water from the suppression chambers likely remain submerged in the basement safety compartment that Toptunov and Akimov inadvertently flooded. The commission must first determine how much water is in the flooded safety compartments and then devise a way to pump out the highly radioactive water to reach the valves. It’s determined that Captain Piotr Zborovsky, a physically-imposing 36-year-old member of the 427th Red Banner Mechanized Regiment, will lead a dangerous reconnaissance mission into the bowels of the plant to record the water levels. Radiation levels just outside the reactor wall are high enough to cause a fatal dose in 15 minutes. Zborovsky can’t imagine how much radiation his body would absorb directly below the core itself.
Because explosives are too dangerous, Zborovsky and five volunteers break through the reactor wall with sledgehammers, working in 12 minute shifts. When they finally break through, Zborovsky lowers from a rope into the safety compartment where he discovers four meters of water so radioactive it feels as hot as bathwater. After two days during which some of the smartest Soviet scientists struggle to figure out where to send the water, Zborovsky himself thinks to ask one of the plant’s engineers, who informs him of two open-air pools just one-and-a-half kilometers away.
Meanwhile, Legasov, Scherbina, and the rest of the commission have spent so much time near the explosion site they all suffer from chronic redness and rawness in their eyes and throats. A new delegation relieves the commission. Legasov’s counterpart on the new commission is Evgeny Velikhov, a rival of his who has the ear and trust of Gorbachev. Perhaps because of this rivalry, Legasov chooses to stay behind while Scherbina and the others return to Moscow.
Chapter 12 Summary: “The Battle of Chernobyl”
On Friday, May 2, the evacuation of the 30-kilometer radiation zone is still underway. Over 100,000 people successfully relocate, but up to 6,000 are “simply lost” (202), according to Ryzhkov. Those who do escape the zone don’t receive blood tests for radiation exposure. So far, 1,800 individuals receive hospitalization as a result of suspected radiation sickness, including 445 children, most of whom at facilities ill-equipped to handle their ailments. “The fiasco made a mockery of the USSR’s decades of preparation for the consequences of nuclear war” (202).
Around 8:00 pm on Tuesday, May 6, Zborovsky and a team of 24 men embark on the difficult task of pumping the water out of the safety compartments. They have just 15 minutes to run the hoses through the most dangerous radiation zones, and they manage to complete it in just five minutes. It isn’t until around 4:00 am on Thursday that they complete the water-pumping task and the valves to the water suppression chamber are accessible. For his trouble, Zborovsky receives an envelope with 1,000 rubles in cash.
With the possibility of a steam explosion seemingly eliminated, scientists formulate a plan to address the grievous consequences of a potential meltdown. Fortunately, the core temperature has since plummeted from 2,000 to 300 degrees centigrade. Some scientists believe this means the worst case meltdown scenario is unlikely. Moscow’s theoretical physicists put the chances of a meltdown at one-in-10 and add that the only way to eliminate this possibility is to excavate a chamber deep below Unit Four five meters high and 30 meters square to house a water-cooled heat exchanger. The Ministry of Medium Machine Building construction chief’s reply is terse: “Build it” (216).
Chapters 10-12 Analysis
As the cloud of radiation from the Chernobyl explosion reaches Scandinavia within 24 hours, the Soviet Union finds itself in uncharted territory: For once, the country must come clean about a nuclear disaster. The Chernobyl explosion also happens to coincide with General Secretary Gorbachev’s glasnost campaign, signaling an increased openness and transparency on the part of the Soviet Union with respect to both its own citizens and the international community.
‘We should make a statement as soon as possible,’ said [Gorbachev]. ‘We can’t procrastinate.’ Yet the traditional reflexes of secrecy and paranoia were deeply ingrained. […] And Gorbachev’s grip on power remaining tenuous, vulnerable to the kind of reactionary revolt that had destroyed Khrushchev and his program of liberalization. He had to be careful (173).
The Chernobyl incident offers an instructive example of the extent to which glasnost represents a legitimate shift in Soviet policy as opposed to an empty political slogan. At least at the start of the fiasco, the Soviet Union maintains a tight grip on the information coming out of Chernobyl, releasing terse and vague statements that provide little information about the details of the incident, the radiation involved, or the evacuation protocols. “Whatever Gorbachev’s intentions, it seemed that the old ways were best after all” (174). This approach would evolve over the course of the disaster, but at this point at least, the Soviet Union only shares what is impossible to hide from the outside world.
Perhaps ironically, much of the nominally free press in the United States fills this vacuum of information with irresponsible reports which were arguably even less based in fact than the Soviet Union’s own whitewashed version of events. The Tuesday following the explosion, The New York Post runs a cover story proclaiming “‘2,000 DIE IN NUKEMARE” (177). By the end of the week, the Post’s “unconfirmed” death toll rises to 15,000. “If anything, the Soviet attempts to hamper Western reporting made the rumors worse” (179).
At the disaster site, the question of heroism in service of a doomed effort once again emerges, this time with respect to General Antoshkin’s helicopter drops. As pilots fly dangerously close to the gaping maw of the ruined reactor while absorbing severe doses of radiation, many of the scientists on the ground question the likelihood that much if any of the material dropped from the sky hits its mark. When one scientist advises Legasov to discontinue the drops, which are potentially ruining the health of the helicopter pilots in vain, Legasov disagrees—not with the premise that the drops are hopeless, but with the notion that their efficacy matters at all. This kind of thinking will infect much of the recovery and cleanup efforts surrounding Chernobyl. In the absence of any real emergency contingency plans, the Soviet Union must make up for this by giving off the appearance of acting swiftly and decisively, of being in control. But this emphasis on appearance over reality results in an enormous amount of wasted suffering on the part of individuals involved in relief efforts, not to mention wasted money at a time when the Soviet Union cannot afford it. Later, these acts of heroism—in vain or not—act as powerful propaganda tools when the USSR begins to shape the story of the relief efforts as a triumph of bravery.
The lack of preparation for such a calamity also offers another counterpoint to the United States’s approach to emergency planning. The Soviet Union’s poor performance in this area is a result of both its dangerous over-confidence in its nuclear program but also its refusal to invest heavily in technologies like computers which are indispensable tools for modeling disaster simulations. Moreover, due to their pride, “[…] they had never bothered indulging in the heretical theorizing of beyond design-basis accidents. And appealing directly to Western specialists for help at this stage seemed unthinkable” (194).
Higginbotham also makes a point of identifying how the Chernobyl accident exposes severe weaknesses not only in the USSR’s nuclear program but across the Soviet bureaucracy, including in the civil defense and the Ministry of Health. To the extent that American spies had knowledge of the Soviet response to Chernobyl, seeing the USSR flounder in a time of crisis surely must have boosted the United States’s confidence in the waning days of the Cold War. Even more importantly, the Soviet Union’s response would have had the opposite effect on its own citizens, lending credence to Higginbotham’s argument that Chernobyl played a major role in the dissolution of the USSR.
