Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster

“But at the Ministry of Energy in Moscow, knowledge and experience were regarded as less important qualifications for top management than loyalty and an ability to get things done. Technical matters could be left to the experts.” 

To serve as the director of the Chernobyl plant, the bureaucrats in Moscow install Brukhanov, an electrical engineer with Party loyalty but little knowledge of nuclear power. This is a perfect example of one of the book’s chief arguments: that the realities of the Soviet bureaucracy and that of the Communist Party helped create the conditions that led to the Chernobyl disaster. For example, had Brukhanov known more about nuclear power, he might have known more about the risks of the AZ-5 button and communicated those risks with his plant operators.

“The USSR was buckling under the strain of decades of central planning, fatuous bureaucracy, massive military spending, and endemic corruption—the start of what would come to be called the Era of Stagnation. Shortages and bottlenecks, theft and embezzlement blighted almost every industry. Nuclear engineering was no exception.”  

The economic conditions created by decades of poor planning, military quagmires, and widespread corruption in the Soviet Union helped set the stage for a nuclear disaster like Chernobyl. While the explosion was the result of a broad range of factors—design flaws, human error, and terrible luck at a subatomic level—Higginbotham repeatedly returns to the theme that a disaster like Chernobyl was almost inevitable, given the dysfunction and recklessness of the Soviet state in respect to its nuclear program.

“Alongside the cosmonauts and the martyrs of the Great Patriotic War, according to historian Paul Josephson, the nuclear scientists became ‘near-mythic figures in the pantheon of Soviet heroes.’” 

The worship reserved for the Soviet nuclear scientists—both among government officials and the general public—serves two important roles in Higginbotham’s argument that the Chernobyl disaster resulted from cultural and bureaucratic conditions unique to the USSR.