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

Around 7:00 am on the Monday morning following the explosion, Cliff Robinson, a technician at the Forsmark nuclear power station located over 1,000 kilometers from Chernobyl in Sweden, sets off a radiation monitoring alarm. Having gone nowhere near the reactor block that day, Robinson assumes the alarm to be broken. But after dozens of other plant workers set off the alarm, Robinson takes a shoe from one of the workers and places it in a gamma ray detector which finds a wide range of fission products, including isotopes only formed when the atmosphere suffers exposure to nuclear fuel. By 2:00 pm, Swedish nuclear officials agree that the country’s contamination derives from a nuclear incident abroad, a fact they confirm with their counterparts in Finland and Denmark. The wind patterns over the previous 72 hours strongly suggest that the accident occurred somewhere in the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and his Politburo executive committee debate what the Soviet Union should tell the international community and its own people about the incident. “For Gorbachev, this was a sudden and unexpected test of the new openness and transparent government he had promised the Party conference just a month earlier” (173).