Book review – Midnight in Chernobyl

I finished reading this book a few weeks ago, and there are a few striking parallels with the current Wuhan coronavirus situation. In both cases, a human tragedy struck at an authoritarian socialist state; in both cases, within the state, there were voices for and against transparency and openness; in both cases, lives were lost, and the cause of death is invisible to the naked eye (one is caused by nuclear radiation, while the other by a virus); in both cases, there were heroes and ostensible villains.

And strikingly to my mind, in both cases, there appears to me to be a widespread bias against the non-Western state in the reporting. Adam Higginbotham has done a tremendous job documenting the blow-by-blow details of the Chernobyl incident; there are many details that are disclosed for the first time in this book. However, there are many instances where he criticizes the bureaucrats for not doing more to save lives, or for not being transparent and open, especially when he compares these against the norm of Western democracy. He barely gives credit to the fact that the Soviet Union was able and did muster the entire state’s resources to prevent the disaster from spreading further, or that the Soviets made the right key decisions (for example, to sacrifice men to drain the water in the steam suppression pools, which would have caused a massive secondary hydrogen explosion if the remnants of the core contacted the water) Or that the Soviets literally emptied Kiev of buses to evacuate the entire city of Pripyat, literally over a few days.

Similar heroics are being undertaken by the Chinese in the past few weeks in Wuhan and Hubei province. And again, there seems to be nary a voice of praise within most Western media reporting.

If we stop for a moment to think about the US responses to hurricanes or other national disasters, it should be clear that the Chinese and Soviets pulled off miracles at a scale and speed that the US hasn’t been able to do. I’m not saying that these centralized authoritarian states are great. But the predominant bias seems to remain anti-authoritarian, rather than giving credit where credit is due.

The other thing that truly impressed me from the book, was reading about the very quick live-research by Soviet scientists at the Kurchatov institute. When it was clear that Soviet computing lacked the power to simulate the effects of the melting nuclear core, these scientists resorted to creating their own unpredecdented live experiments, by heating fragments of the core with lasers, mixing with concrete to see the effects, etc. It was these experiments that provided them with the insight that the melting nuclear core would melt through concrete and steel, hit and ignite the water pooling beneath the reactor, and also contaminate the groundwater beneath Chernobyl. This was later validated with the discovery of the Elephant Foot. This was great science, done at supersonic speed.

The last thing that struck me was how human technology is truly primitive when compared against Nature. After the explosion, large parts of the reactor’s roof was heavily radioactive, preventing further work to stabilize the situation. The Soviets tried using robots meant for moon exploration, as well as a West German robot for radioactive environments, to clear the roof of radioactive materials. Both types of robots didn’t survive, as their circuitry got fried by the gamma radiation.

In contrast, humans were better able to withstand the radioactivity; the Soviets thus employed bio-robots, which were subsequently known as the “liquidators”. Isn’t it a marvel that organic human and animal bodies are actually better able to withstand radiation, than the finest human technology?