The worst nuclear disaster in human history occurred 40 years ago this week, after an explosion at Reactor 4 of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant in then-Soviet Ukraine.
The story of Chornobyl is a story of criminal negligence that led to the disaster as well as its aftermath. Soviet leaders didn’t alert their own people or the world of the unprecedented disaster in the days and weeks that followed. Instead, they engaged in a massive cover-up and misinformation campaign to hide what had happened at Chornobyl, widely known by the Russian transliteration of its name: Chernobyl.
The cost was thousands of lives, a global ecological catastrophe, and a hastened end to the Soviet empire of lies. Forty years later, Chornobyl sadly remains an active battleground of good versus evil amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Early on April 26, 1986, Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev was informed that authorities were working to contain a fire that had broken out on the roof of Reactor 4 of the plant. The reactor itself was intact, he was told. So Gorbachev “saw no need to awaken other members of the Soviet leadership or interrupt the weekend by calling an emergency session of the Politburo,” according to historian Serhii Plokhy.
But in hindsight, there was as little reason to trust Soviet leadership as there is to trust the Kremlin today, as it conducts its genocidal war against Ukraine.
In the days after the accident, the Soviet leaders discovered how truly bad things were: The core of Reactor 4 had exploded and was emitting – per hour – the equivalent of nearly twice the radiation of the atomic bomb deployed against the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945.
The residents of the city of Pripyat – where the plant was located – were given “no reliable information” from the authorities for nearly 36 hours after the explosion, as Plokhy recalled in his excellent book, Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe. The nearly 50,000 residents of Pripyat received “zero instruction on how to protect themselves and their children.”
Finally, at 1 p.m. on April 27, 1986, an announcement came that residents of Pripyat had 50 minutes to gather their belongings for an “urgent” evacuation. That evacuation was not completed until May 6. None of Pripyat’s residents would ever come back to their homes.
It was not Soviet authorities, but a British-born chemist in Sweden who discovered and alerted the world of the unfolding catastrophe. Cliff Robinson had been working at a Swedish nuclear plant in Forsmark on the morning of April 28, 1986. He recalled that on his way back from breakfast, the radiation detector at the plant started going off. After borrowing a shoe from a colleague, Robinson took it for testing and “saw a sight [he] will never forget” when the shoe was “highly contaminated… with many radioactive elements.”
After quickly determining the provenance of the radioactivity, Swedish diplomats sent an urgent message that same day to the Soviet Embassy, asking whether there had been a nuclear accident. The Soviets denied everything. Only after the Swedes alerted the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) did the Soviet Union finally admit there had been an accident at Chornobyl.
While they could no longer get around to admitting the disaster, the Soviet authorities continued to hide the extent of it for weeks.
“It was not until May 6 that announcements ran on Kyiv local radio and television warning the population to close their windows, to wash and peel vegetables, and to keep children indoors,” according to a firsthand account published by Robert McConnell, co-founder of the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation.
Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital with a population of nearly 3 million residents, was just 60 miles from Chornobyl. Once the word got out, there was a massive stampede out of the city. In response, the Soviets imposed severe travel restrictions, including blocking roads in and out of Kyiv.
“This horrid approach of disinformation and callousness continued for months,” according to McConnell. “Genuine assistance from the community of nations really never got to Ukraine and Belarus until all that was possible was too-long-delayed remedial efforts trying to comfort the afflicted.”
The catastrophe’s official death is 31 people, primarily first responders who perished at the site or shortly thereafter. But the true cost would come months and years later, when hundreds of thousands of people were diagnosed with various cancers and other afflictions from the radiation.
A staggering 8.4 million people in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia were exposed to radiation, official reports show. Of those, around 600,000 were the so-called “liquidators” – people subsequently involved in response clean-up and exposed to “high levels” of radiation. According to the United Nations, “millions continued to live in an environment where continued residual exposure created a range of adverse effects.”
In May 1986, the Soviet authorities started to build a “concrete sarcophagus” to cover the exposed reactor, which was completed six months later in November 1986. It wouldn’t be until 30 years later, in November 2016, that a New Safe Containment, designed to fully protect from radiation for an estimated 100 years, was installed with the help of the IAEA.
For the Ukrainian people today, Chornobyl is once again an active battleground of good versus evil.
On February 24, 2022, Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Russian troops dispatched from Belarus quickly captured the Chornobyl plant and held it until their withdrawal from the Kyiv region on March 31, 2022. During their occupation of the plant, the Russians stole equipment worth about 100 million euro and mined the site with an estimated 21,000 explosives. The Russians have since targeted the site with drones armed with high explosives, causing damage to the sarcophagus.
“What is the cost of lies?” asks Valery Legasov, the chief Soviet scientist sent to Chornobyl and the protagonist of the award-winning HBO series Chernobyl. Forty years later, the world is still finding out.
