1
At 6.00 a.m. that Saturday, the Soviet prime minister, Nikolai Ryzhkov, was called at home by the minister of energy, Mayorets, and told about the accident at Chernobyl. There had been a fire; no one knew what had caused it; experts from the ministry were on their way; everything was under control.
To the good-looking and relatively youthful prime minister, with his thoroughly decent manner but slightly lugubrious expression, an accident in a nuclear power station was now added to a long list of other preoccupations: the war in Afghanistan, the campaign against alcoholism starting on 1 May, the American ‘star wars’ programme and the Herculean tasks imposed by glasnost and perestroika. Ryzhkov was relatively new to political power – like Gorbachev, he had only been brought onto the Central Committee by Andropov five years before – and the ladder he had climbed was not that of the party apparatus but that of industrial management and economic planning. At one time a miner, later an engineer, he had run the gigantic Uralmash military-industrial conglomerate in the 1970s and was as close to an apolitical technocrat as it was possible to be in the ideologically oriented Soviet system.
When he got to his office at nine – it would have been earlier on a weekday – Ryzhkov heard again from Mayorets. It now looked as if the accident was more serious than at first supposed. The fire was not just in the turbine hall, but had followed an explosion in the reactor itself. Although an experienced engineer, Ryzhkov knew nothing about atomic physics, and so ordered Mayorets to send out experts while he would form a commission of inquiry. The obvious man to head it was Ryzhkov’s dynamic deputy, Boris Scherbina, the minister responsible for fuel and power. Learning that he was in Orenburg on the Ural River, Ryzhkov reached him by telephone and told him of his appointment. He was to wind up his business in Orenburg as quickly as possible and go to Chernobyl. At 11.00 a.m. Ryzhkov signed the decree establishing the government commission.
The son of a railway worker from the Donetsk region of the Ukraine, Boris Yevdokimovich Scherbina had risen through the party apparatus in Kharkov to become first secretary of the industrial region of Tyumen, and from 1973 to 1984 was the minister of petroleum and gas industry enterprises. In this capacity he had been responsible for building a 4,500-kilometre pipeline to bring natural gas from western Siberia to be sold for hard currency in the West. Bedevilled by the difficulties endemic to any enterprise of this size, he also had to deal with a U.S. government ban on the sale of any American components for the pumping stations, whether manufactured in the United States or Western Europe; furthermore, the story was put out in West Germany that he was using convict labour from the gulags.
A small, wiry man, Scherbina had been rewarded for his achievements with four Orders of Lenin, a Hero of Socialist Labour, an Order of the October Revolution and promotion in 1984 to deputy prime minister, with responsibility for energy throughout the Soviet Union.
By noon that Saturday, having finished his business in Orenburg, Scherbina flew back to Moscow and went home to change his clothes and have lunch. At 4.00 p.m. he was back at Vnukovo airport, and with the other members of the commission, who had been waiting for a couple of hours, took off for Kiev. Knowing little about atomic physics, Scherbina invited Valeri Legasov to sit next to him on the plane, and asked him what might have happened. Legasov was unsure. He told Scherbina about the accident at Three Mile Island, but explained that a similar mishap was unlikely because the reactor at Chernobyl was of a different design.
When they landed at Kiev’s Juliana airport the commission was given a reception appropriate to Scherbina’s rank: a delegation of local party leaders was waiting on the tarmac in front of a long line of huge black Volgas and Zils. The Ukrainian Communists all looked anxious: because Chernobyl was an All-Union enterprise, they knew even less about what had happened than Scherbina and Legasov. They sped north from Juliana with a motorcycle escort provided by the militia, through the towns of Dymer, Ivankov and Chernobyl itself to the party building in Pripyat, which they reached at 8.00 p.m.
An operational headquarters had been set up in the office of the town party secretary, Gamanyuk. Two hours before, the minister, Mayorets, had chaired a meeting at which he had not only refused to countenance the shutdown of the first two reactors but had ordered the wretched Brukhanov to draw up a schedule for the recommissioning of the fourth unit by the end of the year so that Mayorets could placate Scherbina.
Scherbina was small, but like Napoleon he made up for his insignificant stature with a tough, determined manner, thin lips fixed in a hard expression and eyes that mesmerized his subordinates like mice before a snake. His manner terrified Brukhanov and offended the valiant General Ivanov, who felt he was being treated like a fool.
Scherbina asked for reports from the assembled experts and officials and listened with menacing silence to Mayorets, the minister of energy; Marin, responsible for atomic power in the secretariat of the Central Committee; Yevgeny Vorobyov, a deputy minister of health; Vasili Kizima, the head of construction at Chernobyl nuclear power station; Gennady Shasharin, Mayorets’ deputy; and Boris Prushinsky, the chief engineer of the State Committee of Atomic Energy, who with Nikolai Poloshkin from NIKYET had flown over the damaged reactor at a height of eight hundred feet in a helicopter belonging to the civil defence.
They told him what they had seen. The explosion had destroyed the reactor and ignited the graphite in its core. The upper biological shield, weighing one thousand tons, had been blown to one side, leaving the inside of the reactor open to the sky. It was red-hot from the graphite fire. The pumps and piping of both the main circuit and the emergency supply had been destroyed; so too were the separator drums and auxiliary tanks. It was clear that if any water was actually getting to the burning graphite, it was having no effect; if anything, it was making matters worse by creating radioactive steam.
Next came a report from the commander of the chemical troops, Colonel General Pikalov. A cossack from the Kuban, tall and vigorous with strong features, a florid complexion, thick, bushy eyebrows and a deep voice, he talked with the assurance of someone on his home ground.
Pikalov was the son of a cavalry officer and had served in the army since the age of sixteen when his class volunteered as snipers as the Germans approached their school in Rostov-on-Don. After Rostov, he had fought in Moscow, Voronezh, Stalingrad, Minsk, Berlin and Prague. He had been wounded three times (marrying the nurse who had tended him on the last occasion), and still had twenty fragments of shrapnel buried in his head. In 1945, he had joined the newly formed Military Academy of Chemical Warfare. Thirty years later, after a spell on the general staff, he had been put in command of the chemical warfare division of the Soviet Armed Forces. Earlier that Saturday, he had been attending the conference called by the minister of defence in Lvov. He had flown directly from there to Chernobyl in an Mi-8 helicopter, and had at once circled the reactor to assess the damage. Appalled by what he had seen, he had radioed Marshal Akhromeev in Moscow to alert units in Ovruc and to send specialized equipment from Kiev.
Pikalov now gave Boris Scherbina a preliminary assessment. As a result of the explosion in the fourth reactor there had developed two exceedingly dangerous sources of radioactive contamination. The first was the vapour rising from the reactor and forming a cloud that was drifting north-northwest; at midday, they had already measured a level of thirty-nine roentgens an hour fifty kilometres from the station. It was extremely fortunate that this highly radioactive vapour had been carried away from Pripyat by the prevailing winds, but Comrade Scherbina should bear in mind that the wind could change.
The second source of radiation, Pikalov explained, was the debris scattered by the explosion around the reactor. This was largely graphite, but there were also fragments of zirconium from the fuel-assembly casing, and even deposits of the uranium fuel itself. This second source made it extremely hazardous to approach the reactor for anything other than a very short period of time.
Dr Abagyan confirmed what Pikalov had said. This robust Armenian, director of VNIIAES, the All-Union Research Institute for Nuclear Power Plant Operation, had arrived that afternoon with dosimeters capable of measuring any level of radiation. He described how he and his assistants had at once tried to get through to the fourth unit. They had found the corridors flooded with highly radioactive water and therefore had climbed up to a window in the third unit that looked out over the damaged reactor. It was apparent from what they saw that the explosion had taken place in the core itself, and that a fire still raged in what remained of the graphite stacks. They had looked out for less than a minute, and in that short space of time had measured a dose of fifteen rems.
Scherbina remained calm. From what he had been told by these and other experts, it was apparent that they faced an accident of a catastrophic and unprecedented kind. A number of important decisions had to be made at once. The simplest was made first: the first two units, as well as the third, were to be closed down. The second question involved the evacuation of Pripyat. Scherbina turned to General Berdov, the deputy minister of the interior of the Ukraine and commander of the militia. He had been at Chernobyl since 5.00 a.m. and now reported that contingency plans had been drawn up to evacuate the town. Six hundred Icarus buses had been requisitioned from the city of Kiev, and a further 250 buses were available, as well as 300 cars and two trains. Already a number of families had left in their own cars, whether fleeing from the accident or for the weekend it was hard to tell. Roadblocks were now in place to prevent cars from approaching Pripyat. From the point of view of the civil defence, the greatest danger was mass panic, leading to a disorganized exodus through possibly contaminated territory. For that reason, Berdov had ordered his men not to wear masks or respirators in the town; there were not enough for the whole population, and to distribute some to the few would cause panic among the many.
Next, General Ivanov reported on radiation in the town. Ten different samples showed levels of between one and fifty milliroentgens per hour. However, the question of evacuation was legally the responsibility of the Ministry of Health. Scherbina turned to its representative, who took the view that evacuation was unnecessary. The established norms were as follows: at seventy-five rems, evacuation was mandatory; at twenty-five rems it was unnecessary; between twenty-five and seventy-five, it was a matter of judgment by the local authorities. Clearly, if present levels remained constant, the population was in no danger of receiving even the minimum permitted dose of twenty-five rems. The principal danger came from the short-lived radioactive isotopes of iodine 131, which would lodge in the thyroid gland; this was particularly hazardous for children. Therefore stable iodine should be distributed to saturate their thyroid glands and allow the radioactive iodine to pass through the body.
The physicists disagreed. They argued that it would be best to play safe. No one knew what was going on in the reactor. There could possibly be a power surge or a meltdown, and the direction of the wind could change. To have to evacuate the people of Pripyat at a later date under a cloud of highly radioactive aerosols would subject them to greater risk.
But other factors had to be taken into consideration. Could the evacuation of fifty thousand people be concealed from the rest of the population? It would not be reported by the media, of course, but rumours would quickly reach Kiev. Would these cause panic and a mass exodus of three million people from the city? And how would this look to the outside world? What effect would it have on the prestige and standing of the Soviet Union? Certainly there might be some casualties if they stayed, but they would be trivial compared to those of the Great Patriotic War.
For once the decisive Scherbina did not make up his mind. He would have to get further advice. General Berdov was to deploy the buses for an immediate evacuation; a final decision would be made in the morning. In the meantime the commission was to be divided into different teams to undertake specific tasks. Dr Abagyan was to collate data on the levels of radiation – to discover, above all, whether there was evidence that the reactor was still active. Academician Legasov was to suggest methods of limiting the effects of the accident. All were to report back when the commission reconvened at 7.00 a.m the next day.
2
Boris Scherbina now decided to take a look at the reactor for himself. With Valeri Legasov and Mayorets’ deputy, Shasharin, he took off in a helicopter from the square in front of the offices of the Central Committee and flew towards the red glow that lit up the night sky.
They were horrified by what they saw. In contrast to the clean, white exterior of an undamaged nuclear facility, the fourth reactor now looked more like an oil refinery or a steel works. With binoculars they looked down on the burning graphite, the red-hot biological shield, and the sinister blue glow in the core. It was terrible, but it was also awesome, and Legasov realized for the first time that they were facing a catastrophe of a historic kind, like the eruption of Vesuvius that had destroyed Pompeii, or the earthquake and fire in San Francisco.
The helicopter brought them down on the main square in Pripyat, and they went to the office of the party secretary to discuss what was to be done. While the others had been above the reactor, General Pikalov had made a survey of his own in an EMR2, a tracked reconnaissance vehicle based on the T54 tank for which Pikalov himself had drawn up the specifications. It was hermetically sealed and fitted with filters that removed radionuclides from the outside air. External dosimeters measured radiation, and lead panels in the armour protected those inside from gamma radiation. Three of these vehicles had been sent from Kiev. Pikalov had taken the first, and with a junior officer as his driver had set off from party headquarters in Pripyat, crashed through the wire fence that surrounded the power station and driven up to the wall of the damaged reactor. He was able to measure the level of radiation, and also the rate of emission of short-lived isotopes to help determine whether the reactor still remained active or not. This reconnaissance took about thirty minutes, and despite the protection of the armour gave the general and his driver a dose of thirteen rems.
With the data Pikalov had collected, together with measurements taken by Legasov and Abagyan, it was now clear that fission had ceased, but the burning graphite was still spewing millions of curies of radioactive particles into the sky. Something had to be done to put it out, and now Shasharin and Poloshkin, Marin and Mayorets, Ivanov and Pikalov, as well as Scherbina himself put forward a number of ideas – some wild and fanciful, like lifting huge tanks of water by helicopter and dropping them into the inferno, or building concrete walls around the reactor so that the fire fighters could approach it and spray it with water and foam. All were determined to take decisive, heroic action, but no one had the slightest idea what it should be.
As he listened, Legasov was dismayed by the ignorance of the officials and engineers. The operators had behaved well, remaining at their posts and obeying any orders they had been given, but those who had the scientific and technical knowledge to understand what had happened were paralysed with indecision, and those who had the authority and the habit of command knew nothing about atomic physics. Only one man combined both qualities and that was Legasov. He now described the situation to Scherbina as simply as he could. Fission had ceased in the reactor, but the graphite in the core was burning, sending millions of curies of radionuclides into the air. The average rate of combustion of graphite was about one ton per hour, and unit 4 had contained twenty-five hundred tons. Some of this had been thrown out by the explosion, but if as much as half remained it would mean that the fire would go on burning for nearly two months. It was therefore unacceptable to wait for the fire to burn itself out; clearly it must be extinguished.
There was a further and possibly more serious danger. If the temperature in the core increased, there was a danger that the uranium fuel itself would melt, with unforeseeable consequences. It was therefore imperative that the temperature in the core be reduced, but this could hardly be done with water; indeed, at temperatures over 2,500°C water itself breaks up into the explosive chemical components of hydrogen and oxygen. The only method to stop the emission of radionuclides and put out the fire was to smother the burning reactor with sand. This would have to be dropped into the crater by helicopters, and to the loads of sand should be added boron, dolomite and lead. The lead would cool the core; it boiled at 1,744°C and would absorb some of the heat. At these high temperatures the dolomite would break down into magnesium, calcium and carbon dioxide, which would also absorb the heat and generate an inert gas to smother the fire. Finally, the boron would absorb the neutrons and inhibit any further chain reactions.
Now at last Scherbina could show what he was made of; his dynamism could be released. He summoned the local air force commander, then turned to the assembled experts. How much sand would be required? There was a hurried discussion. The deputy minister of energy, Shasharin, estimated that the crater was four metres deep and twenty metres wide; therefore it would require three or four thousand tons of sand to achieve their objective. Was sand available? There were large deposits on the banks of the Pripyat River. And boron, dolomite and lead? Brukhanov and Kizima were told to make an inventory of what was available; otherwise supplies must be commandeered from further afield.
The young air force commander, Major General Antoshkin, now reported to Scherbina, having arrived in Pripyat an hour before, at 1.00 a.m. on the 27th. Scherbina described his mission: he was to seal the crater of the reactor with sand. ‘Everything now depends on you and your pilots, Comrade General. Only you can save the day.’
‘And when should the operation commence, Comrade Minister?’ asked Antoshkin.
Scherbina looked astonished. ‘Why, at once.’
3
Antoshkin had never been to Chernobyl before and had not yet seen the reactor, having arrived by car in the dark. It was still dark, and the only helicopters at his disposal equipped for night flying were two Mi-6s at the Chernigov airfield. He would have to establish a flight path, a landing pad and a control tower. But where? He asked for advice. From where could he get the best view of the power station? Someone suggested the Hotel Polessia next door. Antoshkin crossed to the hotel from the party headquarters and went up onto the roof. From there he looked out towards the glowing reactor. Then he looked down to the square below. That could be the landing pad, and this would be the control tower. He went back to the party headquarters and proposed this to Scherbina, who grumbled that the noise would interfere with the work of the commission. But Arttoshkin insisted, and the minister agreed.
At 4.00 a.m. Scherbina and the members of his commission finally retired to snatch some rest in the Hotel Polessia, only to be awoken two hours later by the roar of the huge Mi-8 helicopters that Antoshkin had ordered up from Chernigov at first light. The first, piloted by a Colonel Serebryakov, immediately set off on a reconnaissance mission over the reactor.
Meanwhile Antoshkin asked Scherbina where he could obtain the sand. With his natural impatience turned to exasperation by a short night’s sleep and the sudden appearance of a dry throat and irritating cough, Scherbina lambasted the air force commander in true Soviet style. Why turn to him? Had he not men under his command? Tell them to dig up the blasted sand! His men were pilots, Antoshkin replied. If they had to dig up the sand, their hands might shake as they flew over the reactor. Scherbina looked around him furiously and saw two deputy ministers, Shasharin from the Ministry of Energy and Meshkov from the Ministry of Medium Machine Building. ‘Here, General,’ he said. ‘Here are two comrades who will do the loading for you. Find some shovels and bags and sand. There must be plenty of sand around; the whole place is built on it. Find some, dig it up and drop it on the damned reactor!’
There was no arguing with a deputy prime minister. Meshkov, Shasharin and Antoshkin left the party headquarters to look for sand. They walked towards the river and there, next to a café, they found some that had been dredged out of the river for the construction of a nearby block of flats. Sacks were brought from a warehouse, and finally shovels, whereupon the general and the two deputy ministers set to work to fill the bags with sand.
Back at the party headquarters, Scherbina called for Kizima to summon a brigade of his construction workers, but the men were not to be found. Therefore he turned to three experts who were standing by, the manager of one of the construction combines for the atomic industry, Nikolai Antonshchuk, and his chief engineer, Anatoly Zayat, along with the head of the country’s hydroelectric operations, and ordered them to help. The three men ran down to the river. The sun had risen, and it was already hot; they found Meshkov, Shasharin and Antoshkin bathed in sweat. As they worked, Antonshchuk asked Shasharin whether the Ministry of Energy would pay out bonuses for those engaged in hazardous work. Shasharin, who already realized how dangerous it was simply to be in Pripyat, wearily said yes.
It quickly became apparent that six men were not going to be able to bag three thousand tons of sand, so rather than wait for Kizima and his men, Antonshchuk and Zayat drove off to the nearby Friendship collective farm. On this sunny Sunday morning, some of the peasants were working in the fields, others digging and planting on their private plots of land. Suddenly two sweating executives drove up and told them that they were wasting their time, that the reactor was damaged, that the land was contaminated, and that their help was needed to smother the reactor with sand. The peasants laughed at them and went on with their work. The two men drove on to a second group working in the fields. Again they told the same story and again they were ignored. They drove to the village to find the director of the farm and the party secretary. Slowly the truth sank in, and soon one hundred men and women from the Friendship farm drove to Pripyat to fill bags with sand.
Meanwhile, Colonel Serebryakov had returned from his reconnaissance mission over the reactor. The plan was to drop the sand from as low an altitude as possible to reduce the clouds of radioactive dust that it would raise. The colonel was also warned that the work would have to be done quickly; at a level of 250 metres the level of radioactivity was three hundred rems per hour.
Serebryakov reported to Antoshkin that the lowest they could safely fly over the reactor was two hundred metres; any lower and the hot air would foul the engines. The approach should be made at a speed of fifty kilometres an hour. The first batch of bags was brought up from the river and loaded onto the helicopter under the lash of Scherbina’s tongue. Shouting over the roar of the helicopter’s engines, he commented acidly on how good they were at blowing up power stations and how lousy at loading sand. Finally the helicopter took off with Colonel Serebryakov at the controls. Guided by a ground controller on the roof of the hotel and by his navigator, on board the helicopter, he hovered over the target while two members of the crew opened the door. As a blast of hot air hit their faces, they lowered the six sacks of sand over the side. It took seven long seconds for them to fall, but they finally disappeared with a puff into the white eye of the crater.
As the day wore on, Colonel Serebryakov and his crew flew twenty-two missions over the reactor; another twenty-two were flown by a second team under Lieutenant Colonel Yakovlev. By 4.00 p.m. a new squadron had arrived in Chernigov from Torzhuk. At 7.00 p.m. Antoshkin and Shasharin reported to Scherbina with some satisfaction that 150 tons of sand, as well as some boron, dolomite and lead, had been dropped on the reactor. Scherbina was furious. What was 150 tons? A drop in the ocean! They would have to do better than that.
All that afternoon, while the helicopters were flying back and forth from Pripyat to the reactor, the long line of six hundred buses moved through the town to evacuate the population.
When the commission had reconvened at 7.00 a.m. on 27 April it had again received conflicting advice. Pikalov reported that there had been a slight rise in the levels of radiation in the town, but that there was little danger as yet of anyone receiving a dose of twenty-five rems. However, contamination north of the reactor was much higher, so there would be some danger if the wind changed. Some argued that since the norms existed, they should stick to them; others that while the whole-body dose might be well within the limits, the actual dose received by the thyroid would be many times greater, and that Pripyat was a young town with seventeen thousand children. In such a volatile situation, it was better to be safe than sorry. Scherbina was persuaded. At 10.00 a.m. he ordered General Berdov to proceed with the evacuation.
4
An energetic, good-looking, dark-haired man of medium height whose whole life had been spent in the militia, Berdov now put into effect the plan he had drawn up the day before. He faced a considerable task: to move fifty thousand people in a matter of hours, with minimum exposure to the open air. He had read in a Soviet newspaper that after the accident at Three Mile Island, the evacuation had taken five days and that eighty-seven people had died in the rush. He was determined not to make the same mistakes. Therefore he drew up a schedule for the buses to pick up people from their homes so that no one would have to wait in the open air, and to move them out in a coordinated convoy before dispersing to the neighbouring towns and villages that he had alerted to prepare for the refugees.
Already that morning, members of the Komsomol Youth Movement had gone from block to block in Pripyat handing out iodine tablets for the children and advising people to stay indoors. Some took their advice; others did not. It was such a beautiful day that it was difficult to confine children to stuffy flats. However, at midday the announcement was made over the loudspeakers that the town would be evacuated. Everyone was to return to his or her block of flats and to prepare for an absence of three days. A guard was put at the entrance of every block, and no one was to be allowed to clog the roads by leaving in their own cars.
Some of the families had been forewarned. The taciturn Vadim Grishenka had already told his wife, Ylena, to pack a suitcase because evacuation was inevitable.
‘For how long?’ she asked.
‘Probably forever.’
‘But what about the May Day parade?’
‘There won’t be a May Day parade.’
Not knowing when she would return, or how secure the flat would be in their absence, Ylena put together all the things she prized most: her leather coat, her fur coat, her gold bracelets, her Italian shoes and her ice skates. Her daughter had a new rucksack, which she filled mostly with her party dress. By contrast, Lubov Lelechenko, assuming that they were to be taken out into the surrounding forest, put on her oldest clothes. Luba Akimov, who had spent the morning trying to keep her children away from the windows, along with Inze Davletbayev, Natasha Yuvchenko and the other wives of the injured operators who had been flown to Moscow, obediently packed their bags and waited for the buses.
Katya Litovsky, the pretty girl whom Nikolai Steinberg had recruited into the turbine hall in the early days of the Chernobyl power station, had to prepare not just her ten-year-old daughter, but her daughter’s friend, who was visiting. Lubov Lelechenko got a call from her daughter in Kiev, who wanted to know if they were going to Poltava for the May Day holiday, as planned, or should she come to Pripyat? Lubov dared not tell her daughter what had happened, so she handed the telephone to her husband. ‘We won’t be going to Poltava,’ he said. ‘But don’t come here.’
The editor of Tribuna Energetica, Lubov Kovalevskaya, told her mother that she was sure she would never return. Like Ylena Grishenka, she packed her best clothes, her party dresses and an expensive woollen shawl. She told her daughter and her niece who was staying at the time to change into clean clothes, and while they did so she packed their rucksacks, but failed to notice, as they went down to the entrance of their block of flats, that her old mother was still wearing her slippers.
One by one, the families climbed into buses, and when each was ready the policeman in charge reported by radio to the central controller. The numbers were fewer than expected: from a population of about fifty thousand only twenty-one thousand were loaded onto the buses and trains – an indication of how many had already fled. Flats were checked to make sure they were empty; and finally the signal was given for the convoy to move out.
After only two hours, General Berdov could report to Scherbina that the operation was complete. It was a remarkable achievement, a tribute to Berdov’s abilities and to the docility of the people. There was no hysteria and few complaints. But looking out of the window of the bus at the stricken power station, Lubov Lelechenko remembered the sense of doom she had felt when she had first caught sight of it on the hydrofoil coming from Kiev.
At Ivankov, forty miles from Chernobyl, the convoy split up, some buses going southeast towards Kiev, others northwest towards the towns of Narodici and Polesskoe. Katya Litovsky, with her daughter and her daughter’s friend, was set down in a village three miles from Polesskoe. The director of the local collective farm, responsible for finding the evacuees somewhere to stay, invited the peasant women who had surrounded them to make their choices. It was like a cattle market, the peasants with their gnarled faces, gold-capped teeth and tight headscarves staring at the crowd of urban folks in their best clothes. An old babushka invited Katya Litovsky and the girls back to her cottage, muttering as she went that it was just like the war. When they reached her cottage, they were given some food and then retired for the night, the three of them in one bed.
The cheerful Ylena Grishenka in her elegant leather coat was given a friendly welcome by a family of poor peasants in the village of Pukhovka, where she shared a bed with her daughter. There was no bathroom, but the next day some soldiers came to the village and rigged up an outside shower with water pumped from the pond. Everyone assumed that they were outside the zone of contamination. When their hosts asked Ylena if she would like to milk the cows, she said she was frightened of them. Nor could she help dig up potatoes; she had brought only her jewellery and Italian shoes.
Lubov Lelechenko, who had come with only a single change of clothes, was billeted in the house of the local collective-farm director in a village near Ivankov, together with the wife and daughter of Lyutov, the station’s scientific deputy chief engineer. The wife of the collective’s director was a teacher like Lubov, and the next morning took her to the village council because the teachers from Pripyat had been told to continue with their classes. But when Lubov stood up in front of the children and tried to teach them mathematics, she found that she was so disoriented she could not add the simplest sums, and her pupils had to help her.
Further dispersal of the evacuees was strictly controlled; members of the Communist party had their cards confiscated ‘for safekeeping’. Many left anyway, particularly those who, like Tatiana Palamarchuk or Katya Litovsky, had families in the Ukraine. It was difficult to get permits or money, and some parents lost their children in the confusion. Many people had a dry throat, some a hacking cough, and all were drawn and exhausted after being torn so abruptly from their beautiful town and comfortable homes. The very backwardness and isolation of the villages of the Polessia made them realize how agreeable life in Pripyat had been. As the old peasants kept repeating, it was just like the war.
5
That Monday morning, 28 April, a thousand miles to the north, the alarm went off at the Fosmark nuclear power station one hundred kilometres from Stockholm when a worker passed through the dosimetric control at the end of his shift. The levels of radioactive contamination on his clothes greatly exceeded the norm. Fearing that there was a leak from the Swedish reactor, evacuation was ordered of all inessential personnel.
Before the leak could be traced, meteorological stations in other parts of Sweden reported radioactive particles in the wind blowing across the Baltic from the Soviet Union. At first it was assumed that despite the test-ban treaty there had been an experimental detonation of a nuclear weapon, but an analysis of the isotopes soon established that the radionuclides must have come from a nuclear reactor. Although five times higher than background level, this radioactive contamination was not thought hazardous for the Swedish population, but it did suggest that there had been some kind of accident, possibly in the Ignalina plant in Lithuania. Swedish diplomats were instructed to make urgent inquiries to Moscow. Calls were made to three government agencies, including the Atomic Energy Commission; all denied that an accident had taken place. It was only at 9.00 p.m. that a statement was issued by the Soviet government’s official news agency, TASS:
An accident has occurred at the Chernobyl Atomic Power Plant. One of the atomic reactors has been damaged. Measures are being undertaken to eliminate the consequences of the accident. Aid is being given to those affected. A government commission has been set up.
The same statement was broadcast on the Moscow television news programme ‘Vremya’. It was the seventh item of news.
6
The brief admission that there had been an accident at Chernobyl had been agreed to after a long debate at a meeting of the Politburo that Monday morning. The news that fallout had been detected in Sweden told the Soviet leaders what their own subordinates had tried to conceal – that the explosion in the fourth reactor was not an industrial accident but a major disaster. The entire resources of the nation would have to be mobilized to deal with the catastrophe, and to do this a second commission was formed within the Politburo. It was headed by the prime minister himself, Nikolai Ryzhkov, and included among its members Yegor Ligachev, Vitali Vorotnikov, and the ministers of the interior and defence.
The Soviet leaders were acutely aware of the political as well as the ecological consequences of the disaster: not only the accident but the delay in announcing it had damaged their country’s prestige abroad. It had been humiliating to have had the truth forced out of them by Swedish diplomats. To be able to counter the malevolent exaggerations of Western propaganda, it was vital to have precise data from Soviet sources.
Measurements within ten kilometres of the reactor were supplied by General Pikalov. Already, on 29 April, he had sent in three groups of specially equipped helicopters, staggered at heights from fifty metres to two kilometres. Every two minutes each helicopter sucked in a sample of the air. By measuring the radioactivity, Pikalov was able to form an accurate picture of the level of contamination, and he reported to Ryzhkov and Scherbina that the active emission every twenty-four hours was about one hundred times higher than that estimated by the physicists on the ground.
To measure contamination over a wider area, Ryzhkov summoned the chief of the State Committee of Hydrometeorology, Yuri Israel. A tall man with a burly Russian look that belied the Semitic connotations of his family name, Israel had been a student of the eminent geophysicist Fedorov, and later his deputy director at the Institute of Hydrometeorology. He had considerable experience in measuring the levels of radioactivity in the atmosphere; at the time of the test-ban treaty, he and his colleagues had set up four thousand observation stations on land, in the air and on satellites in space to measure the different parameters in the earth’s atmosphere.
Alerted by Ryzhkov on 29 April, Israel assembled the same group of specialists and set off for Kiev. Eight aeroplanes and helicopters equipped with measuring equipment took off to track the plume of short-lived isotopes emanating from the reactor, while teams set out to measure ground contamination by the long-lived isotopes like caesium 137, strontium 90 and plutonium 239. At first it was difficult to distinguish between the radioactivity in the air and on the surface; but still, they were able to produce rough maps to show the contaminated areas by 1 May.
The man called upon to advise the commission on what to make of this information was the director of the Institute of Biophysics, Academician Leonid Ilyn. The son of an engineer and the grandson of an engine driver, Ilyn had served five years in the navy as a medical officer attached to the Black Sea fleet after graduating from the Leningrad Medical Institute. In 1963 he had returned to Leningrad to do research at the Institute of Radiological Hygiene. It was from here that he had travelled to Mayak to study the aftereffects of that accident, and to the nuclear testing grounds in Kazakhstan. In a safe in his office, Ilyn kept a lead box that held a wooden Russian doll containing the little black pearls formed by the melting of sand at the epicentre of a nuclear explosion.
The field of Ilyn’s research was the protection of human beings from radioactivity, and frequently he and his colleagues would conduct experiments on themselves to test the efficacy of stable iodine against contamination by radioactive iodine 131. He was also an able administrator; at the age of only thirty-three, he was appointed a deputy director of the Institute of Radiological Hygiene, and in 1967, before he was forty, he was chosen by Slavsky, the minister of medium machine building, to head the ministry’s Institute of Biophysics in Moscow.
A man of medium height, with strong features and a robust voice, Ilyn had kept the commanding manner of a naval officer. It was not difficult to imagine him as a provincial governor in czarist times. He was a member of the Communist party, but he was less of an ideological zealot than a Russian patriot, proud to have been born in Smolensk, where the armies of both Napoleon and Hitler had been routed; proud, too, of the achievements of Tolstoy, Tchaikovsky and Lenin, who had thrust his backward nation into the vanguard of mankind. A huge portrait of Lenin in inlaid wood hung on the wall of his office, which looked out over the Moscow River.
For all his qualities as a leader, Ilyn remained a scientist, and he continued his research into the effects of radiation. His work was classified, but his achievements were recognized, and in 1974 he was elected to the Soviet Academy of Medical Sciences. As his institute was funded by the rich Ministry of Medium Machine Building, much of its research related to defence – in particular, the provision of data on the possible consequences of a nuclear war. In 1970, soon after he had become director of the institute, Ilyn had cowritten and published a circular entitled ‘Temporary Instructions on Measures to Be Taken to Protect the Population in the Event of Nuclear Explosions’. The circular’s main point was the need to protect the thyroid gland from radioactive iodine 131 by taking pills of stable iodine. It also envisaged a serious leak of radioactivity from a civilian reactor, recommending a detailed contingency plan at every nuclear power station.
It was this document that specified the norms for evacuation, as well as recommending doses of iodine. It was approved by the deputy chief medical officer of the Soviet Union, but only a thousand copies were printed. It was updated in 1984 under the Commission of Radiation Safety, headed by Academician Ilyn, with only some minor amendments, but was given no wider circulation. To prepare too well for an accident might lead people to believe that it could happen.
More plausible was a war, and here Ilyn had been drawn into the propaganda battle with NATO strategists in the West. Because of the Soviet advantage in conventionally armed forces, it was said that the West would have to defend itself with nuclear weapons, using short-range rockets like the Minutemen and Cruise missiles against the Soviets’ wave of tanks.
Inevitably, the advantage of Soviet conventional superiority would be retained if public opinion in the West could be convinced that a nuclear war of any kind would have disastrous consequences for both sides. In March 1981, with Brezhnev’s personal physician, the cardiologist Yevgeni Chazov, later the minister of health, Ilyn attended the First Congress of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, in Airlie, Virginia. In 1984, with Chazov and Angelina Guskova, he published a book in both Russian and English called Nuclear War: The Medical and Biological Consequences: Soviet Physicians’ Viewpoint. Although peppered with Cold War rhetoric (‘There is truly no limit to the cynicism of top Washington officials and their NATO accomplices’), essentially it was an extrapolation of the research done on survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which showed the extensive and long-lasting harm done by radiation.
The intention of the book was to alert the public to the catastrophic aftermath of a nuclear war, and so to put pressure on Western strategists to abandon their ‘cynical’ first-strike option. Therefore it made the most of Japanese research, which established ‘a greater number of identifications of certain types of cancer’ among those who received ‘a more than 100-rad irradiation dose’:
Leukosis, especially in its acute forms, is one of the diseases that has been proved beyond reasonable doubt to stem from nuclear explosion effects. Leukaemic transformations of haemopoiesis are most likely to occur within 5 to 10 years following irradiation resulting in that period in a greater (fivefold to tenfold) increase of leukaemia, as against reference groups of persons who received a less than 10-rad dose. The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation publications over a number of years also contain strong evidence of excessive mortality from leukosis among men and women of all ages who as a result of nuclear explosion received doses of 50–200 rads, as compared with groups with less than a 10-rad dose and nationwide statistics.
For those who received a dose of more than two hundred rads, the probability of developing other forms of cancer was doubled; only for uterine and pancreatic cancer was it the same, and for rectal cancer the risk was reduced. Nor were smaller doses necessarily harmless; in his invective against the neutron bomb, Ilyn warned that ‘even small radiation doses will affect people very seriously.’ A dose of fifteen rads would not lead to radiation sickness, but ‘subsequently some of those irradiated are likely to develop malignant tumours or leukaemia. Negative genetic consequences may occur in several generations of the descendants of those initially exposed.’