Today our guest is the writer Adam Higginbotham author of midnight in Chernobyl which tells the story of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986
Introducing him today will be Andrew Marshall a friend of the author and vice president at the Atlantic Council
Higginbotham's writing masterfully weaves together the history and science of the science of the nuclear age with personal stories of the men and women who
made their lives in Pripyat
written over more than a decade
Higginbotham's work has been called a triumph of investigative reportage by the author Hampton sighs. Please help me welcome Adam Higginbotham to politics of rose
Yeah, is that working yes, that's working so thank you very much everybody for coming welcome to politics and prose it's
Great to be here today with my friend Adam to talk about his outstanding book midnight in Chernobyl
It's a really gripping story of a horrific nuclear accident that took place in 1986
We're going to talk for about 30 minutes and then we're going to open for questions
And I'm sure looking at the audience. There will be a number of questions. I see some friends and some experts in the audience
Adam this is a really tremendous book. It's it's a thriller in many respects. It's a very dramatic story
It's a story about a terrible explosion. It's a story about human failure political failure. It's about heroism
It's about the people who struggle to deal with this. What was the what was it that drew you to this story?
Which element was it that brought you into the story in the first place?
is this can you hear me through this is this
What I
started with the story in back in 2006 as a reporter on assignment for the observer magazine in London and
At that point. I just wanted to kind of reconstruct the story
In a way that I hadn't seen done before because I recently read Walter Lords and like to remember about the sinking the Titanic
And I just thought that it seemed in theory that this was
You know a story that that could be done better justice than it had been in existing writing
By being reconstructed in that way by going back and finding as Lord did
Eyewitnesses and finding out what really happened
But then when I first went to Moscow he had almost exactly 13 years ago this month
And began talking to these men and women. I realized that everything I've read about it before had Chi had not suggested
The details of the story and the reality that I was discovering. The first thing was the because I was 17 when it happened
And I realized that I'd been just as much a victim of
Western propaganda
about the Soviet Union as as anybody in the Soviet Union had been you know the other way around and that
What I was expecting was to meet a lot of kind of faceless grey victims of the socialist experiment
But the people I talked to were looking, you know, what real people who were clearly like me and they'd had
you know, they'd had aims and aspirations and hopes and
fallibilities just like I had and
then I
also started
Finding out that there were things that just I hadn't read about anywhere that kind of revealed that there was much more to the story
than
then I'd suspected and that specifically
There was one guy who was a nuclear physicist named Veniamin Corey niche knockoff who I met in Kiev
And when I was reporting the observer story
I asked everybody I men the same question at one point or another which was what was the most frightening?
Moment of this experience for you because anybody was there at the time I expected them to say well there was this huge
explosion and I thought I was gonna die and then afterwards there was radiation at least and
Preened each took off didn't say that what he said was
Mmm, the most frightening moment for me. Well, I think that was probably around made of here when we began to suspect that
There was gonna be another
Second much much larger explosion and we were all going to die. And so were people for hundreds of meters in every direction
I was like
What what what are you talking about? How do I not know about this?
and so that was that was the one thing that really started me on the kind of route of
Reporting it out
And it's been 13 years in the making
Yes it has
I mean not constantly. I was doing some other things for the first seven or eight years of that but the last for you
So as you say the the central
Incident around which the the book revolves is this massive explosion
And for me I can say that is the most shocking and horrifying part of the book. It's on page 88
and
it's it's pretty horrifying and it's a big explosion and
you've already at that point in the book foreshadows where it comes from and what it results from what I
Don't mean in terms of nuclear physics, but what's the cause of that explosion what lies behind that explosion?
well, the kind of long tail of the explosion is the kind of the culture of secrecy in lies of the Soviet Union because it
was like, you know the make it was 20 years of making the explosion and eventually the the prime-minister risk of
You know said in the Politburo meeting in July the July following the explosion, but you know
This explosion was all this accident was always gonna happen somewhere
It just wasn't necessarily gonna happen in Chernobyl, but it was gonna happen at one of these reactors in some place at some time
But the proximate cause was a combination of
this terrible series of design faults that the designers of the reactor had known about
Almost since it was created
But hadn't really warned anyone and they kind of covered most of them up and certainly hadn't done anything to address them
And the one specific thing because there's a hole that there's like maybe six or seven major faults
and
the staff made a series of mistakes that brought all of these folks into this kind of terrible alignment like the kind of
Turning of a combination on the safe
and
The final one the most telling one was that there was a Fault in the way that the control rods worked
So the control worlds which you would introduce into the reactor at the point of shutdown or emergency shutdown
To turn the to effectively turn the whole thing off
Briefly for a few seconds would instead of completely reducing power would increase power
So it was analogous tips to stamping all the brakes of a speeding car and instead of the brake stopping the car
Suddenly speeding it up, and that was what?
Civitate of the explosion. Yeah, and there is that horrible moment
When as you say a number of things have gone wrong?
Things are already very very very very bad and they go to do the thing. Yeah
They think well, okay. That's what we have to do and that will
Bring this to an end and it does
But it brings it to an end with her with a horrifying explosion
Which is very dramatically described
It should be said that you you talked about that your experience of going to first report on this and
Meeting the people hearing the human stories, which is very often the cases as a journalist the really interesting thing
Is that you you start to have a sense? Gosh, these are real people with real lives
This this this place
Chernobyl Pripyat which is near Chernobyl which we sort of have this idea now and indeed it's not a terrific place clearly now
But we have this idea of a bit. Actually. It is quite lovely place now. It's rather beautiful and
Unspoilt. Yes. Well unspool by human hands lately. Could you talk a little bit about that?
Because you've been there and you've seen what it looks like
Yeah, I mean
I think what you're talking about, is that that
When it was still populated before 1936 it was it was like a nice place to live. But this this is written
This was really as something else that I discovered that hadn't been written about before
When I began reporting in 2006, so I you know well
I became aware of was the fact that this had been this kind of it was a great community
It was unlike other cities of the Soviet Union it was this kind of prized posting
For Soviet nuclear scientist and energy workers for exactly that reason it was kind of this beautiful
Newly built town with these big apartments beside a river
There was a Yacht Club discos at weekends and beauty parlor a scuba diving Club. I have their soccer team, you know and
Because it was supervised by the Ministry of Energy. It was better supplied and resourced than other towns in the USSR. So
you could buy like 16 varieties of sausage in the delicatessen and
Fresh cucumbers and you know one thing that was a really rare delicacy, which was fresh tomatoes
And it was important to me, but I was writing the book and reporting the book to be able to get across
Exactly, not merely what had happened on the night of the accident
But what I was like in this town beforehand and therefore what people had really lost
In addition to you know, the health effects. They had kind of lost this, you know this wonderful experience of living in this
You know city of the future
And what was it like to talk to these people to get their stories about what had happened?
This was something about which there was enormous secrecy at the time and for some some period afterwards how happy how happy
To talk how easy was it to get people to talk to you about what it happened
It really varied depending on who they were, you know, some former workers in the nuclear industry
Who still felt bound by these others of secrecy, they'd taken to this empire that had ceased to exist
You know back in 1991 and they would say I'm sorry
I can't possibly tell you about that work. I did on those nuclear submarines because that's that secret
And there are other people I met who you know nobody ever spoken to before because they had these
You know this relatively unimportant positions in the you know administration of the city. They would you know that like the bookkeepers or the
Administrators like that and they were they were only too happy to talk to me because nobody had ever told their stories before and
Then there were other people that you would expect you'll obviously expect not to want to talk to me like KGB officers
But it turned out that
the Ukrainian KGB has got a kind of
You know former members of the Ukrainian KGB association, which is headed by a former Ukrainian general
And so me and my fixer got in touch with him and had a word with him and he gave a lot of his former
officers the instruction
that they should talk to me now and some of those guys, you know, they would I
Because I was talking to almost all of these people through translators and one of these former KGB officers
I was talking to I just halfway through the interview
I stopped and I said if the translator look can you keep your not, you know could please help me out here?
You're really not doing a very good job here because you're not finishing a single sentence
I'm not hearing there is no object to any of the sentences you're repeating to me
And I'm not getting any information out of this and he was like, well no
I'm just translating exactly what he's saying and the guy was deliberately, you know
He'd spent his whole life talking like this and talked around and around and around for an hour and a half without saying a single
thing
You're hearing of Washington audience. Laughs about that. I suspect a
number of different reasons and indeed many people in the audience
I suspect are familiar with that style and approach to discussion I can imagine
And indeed you you had some useful conversations and some
Some help from from people in Washington to work on this as well. I think yes I did
Christian Osterman from the Wilson Center was very helpful in putting me in touch with people who translated documents and indeed in finding documents
The proofs central to the narrative, right?
Christian I think it's not here at the moment a former colleague of mine who works on
archive work around former Soviet Union apart from anything else
The Soviet Union and you've called it. I think a system a system based on lies
The Soviet Union as was Gorbachev was in relatively newly in power and
Struggled to deal with this struggled very badly to deal with this it took
The system a long time to accept what had happened
It took a long time for that information to spread it took a long time for people to accept
the causes and nature you want to talk a little about how they struggled and
In the end how they were able to deal with talking about this because they did in the end talk about this
they
Did talk about it, although not all of it in public
I mean, um
I mean to this day Gorbachev insists that he was completely he was in favor of complete openness
About what had happened from minute. It happened
But this is not really supported by the available evidence
the principal piece of which is that they the explosion happened of around 1:30 in the morning on on Saturday morning and
Gorbachev says in his memoirs that he or one of his many memoirs. He says that he called
an emergency Politburo meeting
This emergency Politburo meeting was so is an emergency that it took place at 10:30 on Monday morning
and then in this meeting they had a conversation about
Whether or what and whether they should release in information to the public about this
They ended up releasing a three line statement that said that there had been an accident
But they waited until eight o'clock that night to do that and then issued that statement through tasks
And it was clearly not an open and revealing statement. They didn't mention radioactive releases for a start
So I think it was that you know, no
I think I say in the book that no matter what call which office intentions it turned out that the old ways were the best
and
as a communications professional I was
Not wholly surprised by that journey of a message I should say
But I was also we were talking at breakfast this morning you were talking about how a year later
They effectively tried to put together a communications plan over how they had dealt with this and what a terrific job. They don't
Yes, they did laughs the documents. I came across that I hadn't been aware of before
was a report to the Politburo from the head of
Coastal radio I think which is the you know
The head of state propaganda for TV and radio who produced what is essentially a you'll note the term
but it's like a communications brief in which he suggested as the
First anniversary of the accident was coming up and there was going to be a lot of chatter about this in the media
globally, and within the Soviet Union
That they needed to prepare a strategy for it and he he had you know a long list of maybe eight or ten different
Suggestions of TV and radio programs which included one that was called pallets of the spring marketplace
Which suggested sending a TV camera crew down to the central fruit and vegetable market in Kiev and reporting on how?
Excellent and nutritious full of fruit and vegetables were in passing a Geiger counter
over the food to demonstrate how clean and nice it was I
Mean one should remember when all is said and done. This is a somber and terrible event in which many died
and where
Yes, there was cynical behavior of the sort you've talked about but there were also and the book shows us there
Are there are many tremendous acts of heroism. A lot of the book is about
The bravery of the men and women in in in many different functions whether in the emergency services first responders
The military who behave with really outstanding
Heroism and then that that's one of the things I think that lifts the book from being
Maybe the description of a disaster to something that's about the attempts of people to deal with this
Did you come out of the book with a particular individual who was?
Stood out above those as a hero figure. Well, there's there's two principal characters
because I think that a lot of the kind of the
heroism of the firefighters and the first responders is as you know has been reported before I mean not least by
Pravda because it took them a while that the Soviet authorities eventually fixed on a good
Angle to report the story from it and that was what they chose was to report there
yes of the firefighters, but to me that with the two people one was um
This woman Maria Prosecco, who was the chief architect of prypiat?
Before the accident and she's really like the kind of Unsinkable Molly Brown of the story
you know she presided over the the construction of the town and the city and then had to
To organize the evacuation and what what these people make they evacuated?
twenty-seven and a half thousand people in three hours, which is this kind of remarkable two other property wouldn't be
Work that way if they've not been in a centrally planned economy
But then, you know very tragically and to me movingly. She also has to preside over
organizing the
permanent fencing off of this city from the outside world in conjunction with the a that with the the KGB and
So she's one of the characters and you met her. Oh, yeah, she's she's without
Introducing any spoilers. She's she's definitely still around. Tell us a little bit about meeting her
Would you mean your journey to meet her and oh I see oh just that
That I I had read a reference to her and I'm not even sure that she was named in an old product clip
From the time from 86 and
And I really wanted to find this, you know, this this unnamed architect
Uh, so in an interview with the deputy mayor of prypiat
I happen to say at one point I said well
So I I've been I've been looking for this. This female architect is the chief architect of the town. I
You know, I wonder if you know anybody who would be able to tell me where she is and he said oh, yes
She's my next-door neighbor old Oh
Give you a phone number because it turns out you know in Soviet society
A lot of people would get you would be housed in in the same building as all the people you work with
So if I was going to your house you in the same apartment building as all the other people that worked at the Atlantic Council
So everybody worked on the appropriate s port calm, you know, isn't it his remain next-door neighbor's
But I said, you know I said to the translator on the way to the meeting I said
You know Alex, I just got this woman's telephone number. I don't know anything about her at all
I saw passing mentioned her in this clip from from years ago
It's this whole thing could be over in ten minutes. It could be totally uninformative bit of a fishing expedition
You know, we'll probably be out of there in time for lunch and six hours later
We've got you know halfway through talking about the things that Maria knew about one time because nobody had ever really interviewed her before
And she's she's kind of still she's still teaching actually design at the Salvador Dali
Institute in Kiev and
There's a another person whose heroism you owe. The the other person is Alexander. You've chenko
Who with his wife Natalia is one of the characters who whose story runs all the way through the book?
And you know he he is
More of an interesting character because he you know, he his experience reflects that of a much more ordinary
individual in the Soviet Union who did not kind of scale heights of enormous horror ISM
But but what he did on the night of the accident among other things
in saving his colleagues
Was at one point he joined
Three other men who was sent to try to establish whether or not the control rooms had fully descended into the reactor
and
Of course, there were no control rods by the time they were sent to do this
But they they they attempt to get into the center all to see what's happened. And there is this enormous airlock door
Which blocks the entrance to the central hall which was made of concrete and steel and you know in normal use is supposed to be
perfectly balanced so that you can
Open it easily and close it easily but it had been moved off its hinges and the the mechanism had to be broken
So they went in to look and he had to stand with his back against the door to hold it open
So that they wouldn't get shut into the central hall and died
and you know
That's one of the things that was most
Remarkable about what he did I think and I think there was a section that you thought you might read about. Yo
Ya ya, y'all hold the microphone while you go
Get yourself prepared him
I'm only reading one
Just a couple of chapters
Age comes to us all
Right
Upstairs inside the windowless senior engineers room on level 12.5
Alexander you've chenko was engulfed in dust steam and darkness
From beyond the shattered doorway came a terrible hissing sound. He groped along his desk for the telephone
Connecting with him with control room for but the line was dead
Then someone from control room three rang through with a command bring stretchers immediately
You've chenko gathered a stretcher and ran down stairs toward mark 10, but before he could reach the control room
he was stopped by a dazed figure his clothes blackened his face bloody and
unrecognizable
Only when he spoke 2d of Kenko realize it was his friend the coolant pump operator Victor dekhta renko
He said he had come from near his station and there were others still there who needed help
Probing the humid darkness with a flashlight your chenko came upon a second operator on the other side of a pile of wreckage
Still able to stand but filthy wet and grotesquely scolded by escaping steam
He was quivering with shock
But waved you've chen go away. I'm all right. He said help condemn shock. He's in the Pump Room
Then you've chenko saw his colleague Yuri, true group emerging from the gloom
Trager had been sent from control room number 4 to manually turn on the taps of the emergency high pressure coolant system and
Flood the reactor core with water
knowing this task would require at least two men if Junko told the injured pump operator where to go to get help and
Accompany tray up toward the coolant tanks
Finding the nearest entrance blocked by rubble. They went down two flights of stairs and immediately found themselves knee-deep in water
The door to the hall was jammed shut but through a narrow gap the two men glimpsed inside
Everything was in ruins. The gigantic steel water tanks had been torn apart like wet. Cardboard
And above the wreckage
weather
Where the walls and ceiling of the hole should have been they could see only stars
They were staring into empty space the bowels of the delighted station were led by moonlight
The two men turned into the ground-level transport corridor and reeled outside into the night
Standing no more than fifty meters away from the reactor shraeger band
You've chenko were among the first to comprehend comprehend. What had happened to unit 4
It was a terrifying
apocalyptic sight
The roof of the reactor Hall was gone and the right-hand wall had been almost completely demolished by the force of the explosion
Half of the cooling circuit had simply disappeared on the left the water tanks and pipe work that had once fed the main circulation pumps
dangled in midair
You've chanko knew at that moment that villarica demchoke was certainly dead
The spot where he had been standing lay beneath a steaming pile of rubble that by flashes from the severed ends of six thousand volt
cables as thick as a man's arm swaying and shorting on everything they touched showering the wreckage with Sparks and
From somewhere in the heart of the tangled mass of rebar and shattered concrete
From deep inside the ruins of unit four where the reactor was supposed to be
Alexander you've chenko could see something more frightening still a shimmering pillar of ethereal blue-white light
reaching straight up into the night sky
disappearing into infinity
delicate and strange an encircled by a flickering spectrum of colors conjured by flames from within the burning building and
Superheated chunks of metal and machinery the beautiful phosphorescence transfixed each anchor for a few seconds
Then Traeger be yanked him back around the corner and out of immediate danger
The phenomenon that had entranced the young engineer was created by the radioactive
Ionization of air and was in almost a certain sign of an unshielded nuclear reactor open to the atmosphere
Yeah horrifying moment and a
Moment when they must have started to realize also, I mean how many minutes?
Can a human being remain around that stuff?
various that went out onto the ledge
You know didn't last long, right?
And you talk in the book about how the rescue workers have to time their exposure if they're going to move stuff or lift stuff
All right, so pizza two minutes or seconds or seconds. Yeah
Just before we go to questions this this is a
Shift in your writing I know from knowing you for a while and briefly earlier when you talked about Pravda
I wouldn't sure if you'd said Prada
The first part of your writing career was actually under a different set of topics, which is rock and roll
Isn't this was a long time ago. This was a long time ago
But you worked in that field you had great distinction you interviewed met many of the great figures in the field
What happened? What happened man? What happened? Why did I eventually bow out?
What why did she deserve rock and roll for nuclear disaster? What happened?
Well the life style began
I
Think the part of the answer is that you know, I was always after the I
was always following the stories and eventually writing about rock music you run out of stories because they're
frankly pretty similar
But also I, you know, I eventually interviewed the people who tell the ultimate versions of all of those stories and you know
I also met my heroes
So in pretty quick succession, I interviewed Al Green and then I met and interviewed Keith Richards
and after I'd interview Keith Richards who was just brilliant and like
Everything that you would want him to be
I mean whatever the real Keith Richards is like he was really brilliant as being Keith Richards for like an hour and
And just wonderful to interview and absolutely charming and when I asked him if if he could explain to me what a ratchet life was
Reached into the waistband of his jeans and flicked this knife into my face and then explained to me exactly how you use it
Was still very shot
Anyone, like Nestle won't see what you do is if somebody comes up to you and you're getting into trouble he do so
You know I find this
And the blood runs into their eyes, I can't see what's going on
Then you kick him in the balls he run as fast as you can
And after I interviewed him, I just thought there's no point anymore I can't
And somehow it seems a short hop from Keith Richards to Chernobyl
well
Ironically his favorite drink at that point in his life was the nuclear waste which was a tumbler filled with ice
Filled almost to the brim with vodka and then topped off with a little bit of orange soda
Look disgusting. I think that's an appropriate point to
Head towards questions, which I hope will be about the book rather than about Keith Keith
and we have the first question whoever
Andrew thank you. I'm Rob Litvak from the Wilson Center. I work with Christian Osterman
So I'm glad you were able to use the wonderful archival resources. We have of the Wilson Center
I mean, it's a great resources all online. That's popularly priced at free so
Well, and hopefully we're gonna post some documents that I found. I'd be one that'd be wonderful
I was in Moscow when Chernobyl happened. It was a very weird thing at precisely what you were counted because I was on the
The Academy of science exchange
kind of living living there and
Information came from BBC and in embassies that said that the prevailing winds weren't prevailing so no panic
But you could see the like at the Kiev ski, lux all you know
Like just streams of people coming in that something big had happened. And as I recall that was the same month of the Americans bombed
Qaddafi exactly. I'm sort of right in the same time
It was it was sort of a kind of a weird time, but definitely was talking about
You know glass no stand I ringing so there was sort of an interesting test case now your book obviously
Which I look forward to reading
It touches on sort of how it was debated in the Soviet Soviet Union and the Denisova Union
I have an interesting kind of a different vector and I just be interested in your take on
You know your book in terms of the debate
We're having now about the future of nuclear power because you know in terms of scalable low-carbon energy. Mm-hmm
it's got to be in the mix for the next couple decades to I think it's something else and
Yet people think nuclear and they think Chernobyl Fukushima
I mean when Fukushima happened, you know three things that no one thought could ever happen, you know
Tsunami tidal wave. Yeah, and you know kind of earthquake. I mean, it's it's
The Germans checked out of nuclear energy at that point
So I just be interested in kind of does your book address at all like future of nuclear energy
Or do you have views on that?
yeah, it does a little bit the end because you know
when I embarked on this
I was pretty anxious not to you know fall into the trap of making it some treatise about you know
How terrible nuclear energy is because I just I'm really not convinced. That's the case. I mean in its most simplistic terms. I think that
If the Chernobyl accident was a was a kind of historical one-off and this kind of accident on this scale
Could really only have happened with this design of reactor in a society like the Soviet Union
You know in 1986 or you know in 1990
But so so, I think that that the most simplistic way of looking at it is to say you know
saying that this means that Chernobyl disaster means that you should no longer used nuclear power of any kind is like saying that
Because the Titanic sank you should no longer travel by the ocean liner, you know
The technology has moved on a lot and there is now a fourth generation nuclear reactor which you know in theory at least avoids
all of the problems of
This reactor of the Three Mile Island reactor of the Fukushima reactor all of which are old designs
all of which originated with
The needs of weapons production, you know
They all the designs originated with with reactors that were principally designed to manufacture plutonium and then were turned over to electricity
Generation because that was the reactor design that most people were using at the time and the fourth generation ones
You know in theory a much safer, they have passive safety systems and they produce far less
radioactive waste so I think that you know if there is a future in it it's those
Thank you, I
wondered about the
Ongoing nature of this and now that it's one caesium strontium half-life later
You know the that they say that maybe in twenty two eighty six when that stuffs down to less than 0.1%
What what's the long-term sort of clean up for Chernobyl like did the architects when when you talk to her say, oh
Yeah
I expected that fence that keeps people out to last for a hundred years and then
somebody when I'm dead will come up with the plan for the next 200 or
Or how did they how did they think of like the long term for this isolation of the you mean?
How do they think of it at the time back in 86 worked?
well
How is that thought evolved over time like then then and and now I mean they put the new containment over the right old sarcophagus
They cover that do you want to explain
you
What are they in order to cover up the reactor that was leaking radioactivity into the environment they built this thing that they called the
Sarcophagus which was essentially a giant steel and concrete tent over the top of the remains of the reactor
But they put it up very quickly and they had to do it a lot of it by remote control. So 10 years later
They discovered this was likely to fall down
So they began work on an international project to build a cover over the cover
Which is only just being completed which is called the new safe confinement
Which is supposed to make it safe another hundred years
But you talk about the the about Maria at Cinco fencing the place up, you know
she told herself that they were only doing this to keep looters aim because she
Really wanted to return to the town, you know, this had been you know
An important part of her life's work and she loved living there
So when the KGB major came and said Maria, I need you show me on the map where the sewers are
Let's find some places to to put these fence posts and she was like that's fine. You know, we'll be back in by Christmas
She certainly wasn't expecting
Never ever to come back. I
Was up until three o'clock last night reading your book
And I was almost late to this reading because I was still reading your book
So I i've just gotten to the part where they're worried about the second explosion
Alright, and my eyebrows are trying to climb right off my face
Yeah reading little bitch to my wife. So first well told its of ninety story an amazing book
Congratulations. Thank you. So very person you up. Yeah
I didn't catch. Oh, I'm sorry. I kept you awake. You did that's that's fine. So a personal question
So at the time I was 19
I was a college student and I was in Wales and now the Emperor few days after the accident I was
Touring castles in the countryside along with the bus group of other college students and I became a member
I mean thought at the time maybe this isn't such a good idea be walking outside in the rain after this accident out in Wales
I've never been able to get a clear idea of how much radiation I might have been exposed to. Can you say something about that?
Well, that's part of the problem is that is that at this point you won't be able to unless I think the one very reliable
Source of that kind of analysis. I understand is that
if you take one of your bones and grind it up and
Have that analyzed you can determine your strontium exposure
And teeth there's another good one
No, and you can you can have yeah
Actually, you can't you're right because you can go through a whole body gamma dosimeter, which will do a similar thing
But it's pretty at this point
And this is a lot of the problem in the territories that were were very thickly blanketed with radiation in the aftermath of the accident
Is that it's very hard to tell at this point. You know what your exposure was and what the impact on your health is
Due to that exposure rather than all the other things that might be having an effect on your health over that time
That's comforting interpreter. Thank you
My name is
Chuck I arrived to the United States from Ukraine three months ago staying at Buffalo at UB, but
arriving to Washington yesterday to attend
lecture at the Institute of
world politics about sanctions and
Accidentally, my friend
found that it will be the
Presentation today so I did not have chance to read the book, but from what you explained because I I was in Ukraine
It's at times honest. It's pretty
Worth yeah, but my question is
Have you heard about that project called Duga? Oh, yes, the the over the over the horizon writer
Because no I do not know but is
There is discussion in Ukraine that it projects Duga since it has been finally found
unrealistic
was one of the reason to stimulate this
Disaster in Chernobyl because it's close to that area. And after that area became irradiated it was a
natural decision to close that project but
The reason for closing was was another would you comment?
So this is a this is a theory that's actually the subject of a documentary film. I think called the Ross and woodpecker, right?
which is that the
the
The Chernobyl accident was was deliberately because I haven't seen this documentary
But I understand that it's the the idea behind the film is that the Chernobyl disaster was deliberately caused
By people who had built this massive over the over-the-horizon radar
Installation a few kilometers from the reactor and discovered that it was this colossal boondoggle and it was a giant waste of money
Although they were going to get in deep trouble with their superiors when they found out that it didn't work. So in order to
save their careers and possibly their lives they
they brought about this accident which
Contaminated such a vast area that it included its over the radar
over-the-horizon radar
installation
Causing everybody to be evacuated so their superiors would never discover
That it didn't work. I think that's the theory. Yeah, so, but but I haven't seen the documentary
But yeah, there is
You know, the reason for that documentary was it was the real?
Note which has been found. It means a
Group of scientists and remember the highest level of the member of the this Communist Party
You know and there are reports from the people who was working at
Chernobyl
Stations it there is some
Deviation from the normal function and what we supposed to do and the signal was just keep continuous
Nothing will happen
You know
It was the reason for that documentary and the people who investigate this but my question did you did not mention this?
I didn't mention because I never came across any evidence of that myself and nobody ever mentioned it there is in Wikipedia
But no, so I was aware of the documentary because it was it came out while I was researching the book
But I never I never spoke to any nuclear engineers who worked on the plant or anybody who?
Investigated it who mentioned that to me, but no, I do know I've read about it. Definitely angry
So I'm interested to take you back to some of the people that you spoke with in your interviews
Those who worked either at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant or in close proximity to it a lot of them
Had a
pardon the pun that you know a
Searing experience. Yeah
Were they?
Maybe you could comment Isis clothes that were arranged but were they?
Still feeling positively about nuclear power. Would they comment on this? Oh, yeah, absolutely
Disillusioned. How did they talk about that experience?
I think I mean
I'm not sure how accurately I could generalize but my memory of it is that the majority of the people that worked in the nuclear
industry who worked at the plant
remained for all their experience definitely in support of nuclear power afterwards
And they were you know, and actually some continued to work in the nuclear industry now, so there's this one character
or
Estonia Chuck who was in the control room on the night of the accident
And he ended up running
He was appointed as the acting head of Ukraine's nuclear safety
Agency pretty recently so no, I mean they definitely the majority of them to definitely support him
That seems on the face of it fairly extraordinary
Well, they were of the opinion that you know
It was a badly designed reactor and they'd been lied to and there's nothing intrinsically wrong with nuclear power
Fascinating so there's a an organization called children of Chernobyl it
It is set up to help address
I think some of the you know health issues it resulted from this, so I was curious if you
Ran into them or know anything about them and then in the larger picture, you know
Efforts to you know treat you know the severe radiation
You know problems that you know people suffered and you know, I'm pretty sure that you know
You're seeing you know, very high cancer rates, you know within Ukraine in the immediate areas and you know
What how is that being addressed at all? Well?
the problem with that and the the problem with the
the you know
Operations like Children's Chernobyl is is that actually because of the I mean partly because of the cover-up and the attempt to conceal
The information about people's health of the Soviet government did collect in the immediate aftermath of the accident
But also because of the poor health of people in the area generally speaking
It's actually very hard to kind of filter the signal from the noise and connect
People's poor health directly to their radiation exposure in the wake of the accident
And so I talked about this at the end of the book that you know
The official statistics are a lot lower the official unit UN statistics and not to another Soviet statistics
or a lot lower than you might expect so
out of a population of five million people
The projections were that
5000 would die of cancers directly linked to the accident and that's part of a wider number of
25,000 people across Europe who would suffer from other cancers that could directly be linked to the accident
But you can see that you know in a group of five million people five thousand people, you know, that's a tiny percentage
And it's so it's just it's really hard to make a direct connection between these things
and
You know the work that's being done by
organizations like children at Chernobyl
you know is as far as I can see addressing just as much the kind of poor health and
Poverty that there is in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and then they've economic crises that have overtaken these countries subsequently
As it is about, you know radiation for the accident. I
Think we have one more question No. Okay well and thank you very much Adam. Thank you
Midnight's in Chernobyl
You
