“Midnight in Chernobyl” by Adam Higginbotham
Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster
By Adam Higginbotham
2019
560 pages / 13 hours and 55 minutes
Nonfiction
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It Is April 6, 2020, as I write this review. The reason I am writing this particular review on this particular day is a tiny article that appeared this morning in my local newspaper, the Abilene Reporter News (yes, local newspapers still exist). The byline says, “Minsk, Belarus.” Here is the whole article:
A forest fire is burning in the evacuated area around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and is causing elevated radiation levels, authorities said Sunday. The blaze has spread to about 250 acres, said Yehor Firsov, head of Ukraine’s state ecological inspection service. The emergency services ministry said 130 firefighters and two planes were laboring to put out the fire. It said radiation levels had increased at the fire center. The blaze is within the 1000-square-mile Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
And this brings me to today’s book, Adam Higginbotham’s Midnight in Chernobyl, which was chosen as one of the 10 Best Books by the New York Times Book Review. If you ever have questions about the worth of a free press, this book will banish many of those questions. It is a brilliant piece of detailed investigative reporting and the best account of the Chernobyl disaster that we have.
The event happened in 1986, and it is quite remarkable that, even after 30-plus years, the event is not clearer in our minds. Maybe because it happened in the Soviet Union and not here. It is the closest the world has come to a nuclear disaster that could have killed hundreds of thousands. If you paid attention to that tiny article I pointed out at the beginning, you will notice that there’s a 1,000-square-mile exclusion zone even to this day. Draw a circle around your city that takes in 1,000 miles and try to imagine that area being totally uninhabitable for centuries.
This is one of those books where, if you’re listening to it on audio, you’ll probably take a few extra laps around the block to hear what happens next. Because most of us don’t really know the story. Higginbotham has come to know all the prime players and what they did or didn’t do, and there is both heroism and cowardice.
It will not come as a great surprise that even in the age of “openness,” the Russian government’s first reaction was to try to cover up just how bad it was. It feels distressing to watch all the government bureaucrats running for cover to make sure they don’t get blamed. But when other countries around them started recording unusual radiation readings, they had to deal with the problem. And the plain fact of the matter is that they really didn’t know how to contain the out-of-control reactor. As a matter of fact, they more or less made it up as they went. And of course at the end of the day the government had to find scapegoats to send to prison. It wouldn’t do for the higher-ups to actually be held accountable.
It is a cautionary tale. We learned a lot from this incident. I suppose we could take some comfort in that and say it could never happen again. But then, that’s what they said back then, too.