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

Throughout the book, Higginbotham along with a number of individuals associated with the accident argue that a cloud of inevitability surrounds the Chernobyl explosion. On one hand, the number of factors—human, institutional, and subatomic—that had to go wrong to precipitate the Chernobyl incident makes it difficult to accept that such an accident is “inevitable.” There’s the flawed RBMK design; the failure of designers to properly inform operators of the flaws; the reckless implementation and operation of these reactors across the Soviet Union; the veil of secrecy surrounding nuclear incidents. And all that happens before the day of the explosion. There’s also the timing of the turbine generator test; Dyatlov’s order to lower the power; Toptunov’s mistake in carrying out this order; Dyatlov’s refusal to shut down the test at this precarious moment; the turbines exacerbating the positive void coefficient; and, finally, the AZ-5-induced runaway chain reaction. How could all of these things going wrong at once be “inevitable”?

And yet, all of these errors and flaws and quirks can to some degree or another attribute to qualities unique to the dysfunctional Soviet state. It’s something Legasov slowly comes to realize in the weeks following his triumphant testimony to the IAEA: