Announcer:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad streets in New York City, you're Inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership and vision in global business; the dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs and harness the engine of capitalism right here, right now, at the NYSE and at ICE's exchanges and clearing houses around the world. And now welcome Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
There's a big problem sweeping across a communist country, a potential health risk to millions. The rest of the world is trying to assess its impact across borders, employing all forms of human, electronic, and geospatial intelligence. In Washington, the federal government is mobilized in rapid response mode, reverberations are spreading across capital markets as well, including here at the New York Stock Exchange. At the scene of the problem, aid workers themselves venture into harm's way at lethal risk to life and limb. The effected area is effectively quarantined. The state rushes in with men and materiel to try to limit the damage and also care for the afflicted. The government launches an investigation. "What went wrong," the relevant minister's demand to know. "How, in God's name, do we stop it?" Yep, it could be a story ripped from the headlines.
Josh King:
Here at the NYSE, where our business continuity teams are monitoring developments related to the coronavirus very closely, we're taking all appropriate precautions, as our airlines, transportation hubs, and other institutions, to safely manage risk. On computer terminals around the world, energy traders, certainly, are hedging their bets, but what can we learn from history to tell us about the present? How can an event that metastasized in the same way 34 years ago guide us on what to expect next. Let's go back even further, 108 years ago, the middle of the night, April 14th, 1912, the RMS Titanic, the pride of the White Star Line, the ship that couldn't sink, on its maiden voyage from South Hampton to New York City, strikes an iceberg resulting in the deaths of more than 1500 passengers and crew. What warning signs were ignored? What unmade moves in those initial hours could have saved more lives?
Josh King:
Now, skip ahead to the middle of the night, April 26th, 1986, the vaunted RBMK nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, the pride of the peaceful atom, Soviet-style, civilian power generation. Like the Titanic going through its shakedown cruise in a manner of speaking, glorious on the outside, but in its design and workings, amidst staffing, perhaps a disaster in the making. Well, you can skip the perhaps. What happened that night? What seeds were planted decades before? What heroism followed? What lessons have we learned? How did decisions made decades earlier, whether it was Captain Edward John Smith at the helm of the Titanic or Deputy Chief Engineer Anatoly Dyatlov, inform how we should think about pandemics like the coronavirus.
Josh King:
Today on the show, Adam Higginbotham, one of the world's great narrative, nonfiction writers, author of the New York Times bestseller, Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster, one of the 10 best books of 2019 according to The Times today, out in paperback. Our conversation with Adam Higginbotham, that's right after this.
Announcer:
And now a word from Leslie Stretch, CEO of Medallia, NYSE ticker MDLA.
Leslie Stretch:
Medallia is a company that applies machine learning to customer experience. Our customers understand their customers in live time and change their experience for the better. Deep technology, deep machine learning, the category leaders in all the major industries, and we operate our environment at scale. We have the most eminent minds in machine learning and customer experience in the world. It's all about the people. Medallia is listed on the NYSE.
Josh King:
One of our most colorful IPOs of the last 12 of months here at the New York Stock Exchange was NYSE ticker symbol, SPCE (Virgin Galactic Holdings), the first space tourism company listed here, a SPAC, which spiked right after the opening bell was rung by its chairman, Richard Branson. The colorful billionaire was profiled by our guest today, Adam Higginbotham, who got his prolific start in narrative nonfiction with his piece on Branson, in The Independent on Sunday, back in 2000. Twenty years and following countless stories and countless journals about the range of fascinating people and amazing true crime stories that populate the planet, Higginbotham, last year, published Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster. It was a New York Times bestseller, widely acclaimed as one of the best books of last year, awarded the 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in nonfiction and now out in paperback from Simon & Schuster. Adam Higginbotham, welcome Inside the ICE House.
Adam Higginbotham:
Thank you for having me.
Josh King:
Congratulations on all the praise for the book.
Adam Higginbotham:
Thank you.
Josh King:
So how does being Inside the ICE House here in our library, which we've just entered, compare to being inside unit control room number four on Friday, April 25th, about 11:55 PM?
Adam Higginbotham:
There was quite a large group of people in the room at that time because they were preparing to do this long delayed safety test on the reactor. So, in addition to the hand full of people who would usually be in the control room at any given time, the operators on the desk controlling the reactor would only have been three or four people. There were more than a dozen men in the room and in the anteroom surrounding it, and it was extremely tense because this test had been long postponed and Anatoly Dyatlov, who you mentioned earlier, was determined to get this test taken care of, come what may. It was supposed to have happened the day before. It had been put off because the individuals who operated the Kiev electricity grid wanted as much electricity to come out of the power plant as they possibly could in this race to complete everything at factories in Ukraine before the holiday break for the Mayday holidays. So, there was a lot of pressure on everyone in the room to get this thing done as quickly as they possibly could.
Josh King:
This is reactor number four of the Chernobyl station, the Soviet government, the people of Ukraine, it was really going to be able to provide a large amount of electricity for the region. What were the hopes for the reactor at the time?
Adam Higginbotham:
Well, the reactor itself was the newest and most sophisticated version of this model of reactor, the RBMK, which was extremely large and alone, could produce a thousand megawatts of electricity, but it was one of only four reactors at the station, and they were in the middle of building another two reactors at the station, and these six reactors, when they came online, would then make Chernobyl the largest nuclear power plant in the world. And these were part of ongoing plans to make Chernobyl an absolutely massive, what the Soviets called a reactor park, which would eventually have 12,000 megawatts of electricity and absolutely massive installation producing this colossal electricity. And it was planned as a complex of these highly concentrated sources of nuclear energy that would spring up across the Western Soviet Union by the year 2000. They had these astonishing plans to build these huge plants.
Adam Higginbotham:
And the people that worked there were extremely proud of working at Chernobyl, which was one of the best. On paper, it was one of the best performing nuclear plants in the USSR. So, on the eve of the accident, everything seemed to be great. The plant was actually going to be awarded The Order of Lenin for its spectacular performance over the years. Reactor four had only come online in 1983, it was practically brand new, and this was the first maintenance shutdown that it had been set up for. And they were on the verge of the Mayday holiday. Everything was looking up. The weather outside was beautiful. Nothing could be further from anyone's-
Josh King:
What could possibly go wrong?
Adam Higginbotham:
Exactly.
Josh King:
You write at the end of the book, Adam, that the origins of the project go back many years with roots in the story that you first followed as a teenager. I was of a similar age, and I remember reading about it in Time Magazine, and those who've listened to this show for a while can sense that I'm a pack rat, and I dug out the May 12th issue of the magazine, which I'm sharing with you across the table.
Adam Higginbotham:
I've never seen it.
Josh King:
So you can thumb through it and look at all the fabulous liquor ads, but you quote so many of the contemporaneous stories at the time, both the Soviet press and American press, and certainly the press around Europe as they began to sense that radiation levels were higher. How did reporting hold up as you were reading 35-year-old accounts and trying to put it in a 2019 context?
Adam Higginbotham:
I mean, the initial reports in the Western press were wildly inaccurate. I mean, it's very understandable because the Soviet government established this total news blackout over what was happening in Chernobyl from the outset, and because most Western correspondents were sequestered in Moscow and were not permitted to leave the city to get anywhere near Kiev or Chernobyl itself in Ukraine, they just had to do their best with the limited resources at hand, which meant that they ended up reporting what was essentially just kind of rumor and hearsay. And the fact is that a lot of that stuff that was reported in the press at the time, the New York Post, I think, within a week of the accident, had reported that tens of thousands of people had been killed in this initial explosion and their bodies buried as radioactive waste in some giant pits over in the Ukraine, but that inaccurate reporting still informs a lot of what people think about what happened today.
Josh King:
That's right.
Adam Higginbotham:
I think that the reporting that you are talking about really has a lot to answer for even more than 30 years later, but then also, of course, you've got the Soviet reporting, which when it eventually started and didn't simply seek to minimize what had happened and really deny pretty much ... Bury reports of what had happened next to like the regional chess results, then that began to cleave to a fairly carefully developed propaganda line, which itself has continued through to this day, focusing on the exploits of heroic firefighters and such.
Josh King:
Back when you were at The Observer, your editors, Allan Jenkins, and Ian Tucker, they gave you this, as you described, thick envelope of hard currency and dispatched you on that initial trip to Russia and Ukraine. Tell us about this long, strange trip that has resulted in this book for you.
Adam Higginbotham:
Well, yeah. I mean, you mentioned the Titanic in the intro. I mean, a lot of the reason that I started doing this reporting in the first place was that at the end of 2005, I had read, for the first time, Walter Lord's book about the sinking of the Titanic, A Night to Remember, which was just, I don't know if you've read it, it's an amazing, concise and thrilling account of this disaster, but just of the night of the sinking, which he based on because he published the book in the early fifties, he based on having interviewed survivors of the sinking and also on the testimony from the congressional inquiries here and the board of inquiry in Britain. And after I'd read it, when I began looking at the Chernobyl disaster, I thought to myself, well, I could ... Nobody's ever written an account of what happened in Chernobyl from this perspective, in this way.
Adam Higginbotham:
So what I set out to do as a magazine story was simply to reconstruct the events of the night of the accident, just that night, through the experience of those people who survived. And after quite a long struggle with Ian and Allan to convince them that they should allow me to do this obviously spectacularly expensive story, I then went off to Moscow and to Kiev to begin interviewing eyewitnesses to what had happened. But it was in the first meeting that I had with Alexander Yuvchenko and his wife, Natalia, that I began to realize that all the reading that I'd done in the existing accounts that had been published in English, I didn't know the half of what had happened. And a lot of what I had read proved to be inaccurate. And at that point, I realized that there was a much larger, more true story to be told.
Josh King:
Did you have adequate facility in Russian language to be able to dive as deep into this as you needed?
Adam Higginbotham:
I didn't and don't speak a word of Russian or Ukrainian. I think I can say yes, no, please, thank you, and atomic energy station, but nothing more than that.
Josh King:
How did you manage then-
Adam Higginbotham:
I mean-
Josh King:
... all the stuff that you needed to wade through?
Adam Higginbotham:
I had a huge amount of help. I worked with excellent fixers and translators and interpreters, right from the beginning, right from that first meeting in Moscow where I worked with a wonderfully named Olga [Tukush?] , who was my interpreter, who was a brilliant simultaneous translator, who had actually worked with Bill Clinton on his first trip to Moscow.
Josh King:
So I told you earlier that I heard your long form podcast, A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite, which focused on the largest improvised bomb in US history, but your topics and titles are so compelling. For Businessweek, in 2013, you wrote The Profiteer about a conman who may $38 million by selling golf ball finders to Iraq as bomb detectors. Is munitions a source of endless fascination for you?
Adam Higginbotham:
It's not so much ... I would say those stories that I really enjoyed reporting and they're fascinating tales, but I think that more broadly, what has sort of emerged from the work as I look back on it, because I certainly didn't do this consciously at the time, is that what I'm interested in is the interaction of human beings and technology. Whether it's Chernobyl or whether it's writing about the guys who clean the windows of high rise buildings in Manhattan, or IEDs in Afghanistan and Iraq, there is definitely a thread running through there, and it's not merely explosions.
Josh King:
This thread that could be the interaction of humans and technology, where does that come from? Were your parents educators or scientists, or how did you get shaped into this direction at some point?
Adam Higginbotham:
That's a very good question. I have no idea. Neither of my ... I mean, my father was a pharmacist, so that's as close to technology as I get in my kind of genetic makeup, but my high school physics teacher would be absolutely astonished to discover that I'd written a book about nuclear physics or that touches on nuclear physics because I was terrible at it at school. So no, I don't know. I think that there's something about high technology that brings out elements of human nature that I find interesting.
Josh King:
I mean, talking about, though, your father as a pharmacist, you wrote about fentanyl in Details in 2007, the anatomy of a mysterious and lethal epidemic, what sort of family background did you bring into looking at that and why didn't the country hear the alarm earlier about dangers of opioids?
Adam Higginbotham:
Well, it's interesting because that story did ... I did do that story a very long time ago, and the head of the DEA field office in Chicago, when I was reporting the story, indicated to me that there was a significant connection in this story to Mexican cartels, which, at the time the fentanyl story was being reported to the extent it was in the press, seemed quite unlikely, and obviously, in the intervening years, it's become clear that's actually a major part of the fentanyl story. It's taken a very long time for the opioid crisis to kind of make itself felt in the media, and that's because the people that it affected are people that most people in the media don't care about. Those were certainly ... The victims of that crisis in Chicago and those other major cities like Detroit back in 2006, 2007, they were not people who would usually make the news. So I think that's a big part of it.
Josh King:
So the story of Chernobyl, the sort of developing the nuclear power, the peaceful atom as the Russians called their first reactor for civilian electricity generation, leads eventually to the Mayak Production Association and an accident in the Urals in 1957. The Americans, in the height of the Cold War, want to check it out, and here's what happened.
Speaker 7:
U-2 Pilot Francis Gary Powers makes his first public appearance since he was exchanged for Soviets by Rudolf Abel. Powers testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee using a model of his plane. His capture and trial in the Soviet Union caused an international furor in 1960. Now, he is vindicated by the Central Intelligence Agency and praised by the senators. Still a mystery is the external explosion, which sent his super secret reconnaissance plane down deep inside Russia.
Josh King:
I mean, growing up as a kid, the story of Francis Gary Powers, like what we talked about earlier, how sort of stories, propaganda, mythology thinks that Powers was probably over some missile site or military installation. He was going to check out an atomic accident.
Adam Higginbotham:
Well, he was going to check out something. They didn't know what it was, which is why he was sent over in the first place. But yes, one of the sites that he was sent to photograph was the Mayak Production Facility, which is where the Soviets had experienced this massive nuclear accident, which although they very successfully covered it up, prior to Chernobyl, was the world's worst nuclear catastrophe.
Josh King:
I mean, lead us up to ... Because I love this part of the book, as you sort of talk about the beginnings of Soviet civilian power generation, the peaceful atom and how things were ... Queen Elizabeth cutting the ribbon on a nuclear power plant in Great Britain, et cetera. So all of this sort of preliminary research that sets us up for April 1986, recap that story for us a little bit.
Adam Higginbotham:
Well, I mean, the story that I kind of tell in microcosm there is part of what fascinated me initially about all of the background to the Chernobyl accident, which is that, although, we in the West like to think of this as a uniquely Soviet experience and something that could only have happened in the USSR, actually the history of recklessness and expediency and coverup in the nuclear industries in both the West and the Soviet Union have an enormous amount in common.
Adam Higginbotham:
And so, there were nuclear accidents here in the United States. There was the Windscale accident in Great Britain not long before, I think, not long before the Mayak accident, and all of these things were covered up and a lot of them took place for similar reasons, which were national pride, military secrecy, and the fact that the roots of the civilian nuclear power generating industry have always been entangled with the military origins of the atom bomb and atomic technology. So, I mean, I just think that there's ... Though in my original drafts of the book, there was a lot more about these similarities between the nuclear industry in the USSR and in the West.
Josh King:
We talked about the Titanic, the ship that could never be sunk. So you do, in this part of the book, draw the comparisons between the types of reactors being built in the United States and the RBMK as a direct descendant of this peaceful atom reactors, it's the pride of the ministry of machine building, but like the Belfast ship builders of Harland and Wolff who built the Titanic, there were inherent flaws in the design of the RBMK. What were they?
Adam Higginbotham:
Well, there was a whole laundry list of flaws, and the crucial thing really is that they knew about these flaws almost from the outset and more than 10 years before the Chernobyl accident, but they both covered them up and those that they did attempt to address, they sort of slow walked. The reactor was extremely unstable, especially when operated at low power. It was very capricious and difficult to operate.
Josh King:
You talk about like two people having to do this ballet of turning switches and knobs.
Adam Higginbotham:
Yes. I mean, all the reactor operators I spoke to made it very clear that this was not an old man's job, both because of the psychological stress of operating these kind of giant behemoth machines, but also because of the physical requirements of the work. One guy told me that if a man is digging a ditch, he breaks into a sweat after 15 minutes, but operating an RBMK, you'd be soaked with sweat after five or 10. And so, although they had chairs to sit on at the control panels of the reactor. They would never use them because they would be on their feet, constantly monitoring and pulling control rods up out of the reactor and trying to control its behavior all through an eight-hour shift. So, it was physically exhausting.
Adam Higginbotham:
And so there was this ... The problems were so myriad that each individual problem in the design of the reactor was not, in itself, enough to cause any kind of catastrophe, but if the operators inadvertently brought all of these problems into a confluence, then it could result in a complete catastrophe, which is actually what happened on April 26th and of all the problems there were in the design of the reactor, probably the most frightening and significant was that of the design of the control rods themselves, which meant that in the case of an emergency, when the control rods were inserted into the reactor, they could briefly cause a spike in reactivity inside the reactor core instead of reducing it, which is what they were designed to do. So it's as if, in a speeding car, stamping on the brakes would suddenly make the car speed, speed up, instead of slowing down,
Josh King:
All of the characters, Adam, in Midnight in Chernobyl are drawn in such a riveting, personal way, the management and staff of the Chernobyl station, the firefighters, the government leaders, the nuclear experts like Valery Legasov, and even the chief architect of the city of Pripyat, Maria Protsenko. Of her, you write that she had a very un-Soviet eye for detail. Tell me about Maria and what Pripyat represented to the Soviet Union at the time.
Adam Higginbotham:
Pripyat is a kind of fascinating place, and when I started work on the book, it was very important to me to try and make sure that I could bring to life, as vividly as possible, what the city was really like, because certainly my own preconceptions, when I began reporting the magazine story, about what life was like in the Soviet Union were, I began to realize, deeply colored by the same kind of Western propaganda that I had grown up with and most people in the West had, that really mirrored the sort of propaganda that people in the USSR were told about life in the West. And so I imagined that Pripyat was this kind of extremely grim place to live, and everybody was sort marching in lockstep to the dictates of the communist party and that they lived these kind of miserable gray lives of kind of robotic subservience.
Adam Higginbotham:
And of course, as soon as I began talking to people that actually lived there, they made it clear that they thought it was a wonderful place. It was this sort of sylvan environment. The ministry of energy had put an enormous amount of money and resources into making it an attractive place to live because they wanted nuclear engineers and power engineers to come here from all over the Soviet Union to live and work in this very prestigious project. So in actual fact, although I think if you'd gone there from Kansas in 1985, you wouldn't have thought much of it, but to the average Soviet citizen, Pripyat was an absolutely fantastic place.
Josh King:
Was it interesting finding her as such an influential female character in the story?
Adam Higginbotham:
Yes, and the way that I came across her was pretty interesting because I had just chanced across her name in an old Pravda Report from 1986 or 1987, and she was just mentioned by name as being the architect in the city, and I'd never read anything about her anywhere else. And when I was interviewing the deputy mayor, Alexandr Esaulov, the deputy mayor of Pripyat, I happened to say to him, as I did while interviewing a lot of sources, I brought up the names of other people that I wanted to try and find. And I said, "Alexandr, do you know ... I don't suppose you've heard of this woman, Maria Protsenko. I was wonder you might know any way I could reach her." And he said, "Oh yes, she's my next door neighbor in fact. I'll call her now if you want."
Adam Higginbotham:
And so, in the middle of the interview, he picked up his cell phone and phoned her and explained that there was this guy here who was interested in talking to her, in which she agreed to do that. And then as soon as we'd finished talking to Esaulov, we then got in the car and went to see Maria. But because all I'd done was picked up her name in this old newspaper report from the Soviet press, I had to explain to the translator on the way. I said that we were going to see this woman. I don't know anything about her. This is a bit of fishing expedition. There may nothing, she has nothing to say of interest. Maybe she doesn't have a story. So we'd probably be in and out there in half an hour. And then five hours later, we finally wrapped up the first interview because-
Josh King:
In English or Russian?
Adam Higginbotham:
In Russian.
Josh King:
Yeah. Are you recording and then going to get a transcript or how do you work?
Adam Higginbotham:
So what would happen is that I would have simultaneous translation through the course of the interview, and then I would go away and translate and then transcribe all of that, and then when I was fact-checking the book, I had another translator go back over the interview tapes and verify that the simultaneous translation was accurate. That's how I do it. And so, at the end of our five hours, I'd realized that we'd only got a fraction of Maria's story, and so then, over the coming years, we went back again and again, and she's a wonderful person and had never spoken to a Western reporter before and had only spoken to one other or two other reporters in Ukraine before, because she was initially, while the Soviet Union was still in existence, still felt banned by these oaths of secrecy she'd taken to the state and was terrified of disclosing what she'd witnessed.
Josh King:
You've got a chapter in the book devoted to the China syndrome, not the movie, but the theory, but what the hell, let's listen to Jack Lemmon and Wilford Brimley anyway, because they're so damn good.
Jack:
Shut the isolation valves.
Speaker 7:
You're going to need that feedwater later.
Jack:
Want to go down there and do it by hand? Do it!
Speaker 7:
Closing isolation valves.
Jack:
Would everybody please go back to their stations? We'll try to handle the goddamn feedwater.
Speaker 7:
Hey, Jack!
Jack:
What?
Speaker 7:
Look at this water level indicator, water level's low.
Speaker 8:
It says it's high. Jesus Christ!
Jack:
Barney, give me feedwater! Goddamn it! the core.
Speaker 9:
Operations.
Jack:
This is Jack Godell. We have a serious condition. We've got to get everybody into safety areas and make sure that they stay there.
Speaker 10:
All personnel proceed directly to safety areas. Caution. Code six. This is not a drill.
Josh King:
Code six. This is not a drill, Adam. That was a scram incident at the fictitious Ventana Nuclear Power Plant outside Los Angeles. But what really happened at the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station, 62 miles north of Kiev after midnight, April 26th, 1976. You write that the China syndrome actually got pretty close to happening.
Adam Higginbotham:
The China syndrome is, as they explain in the movie, I think, the idea is that a meltdown can take place in a nuclear reactor and this ball of hot nuclear material and fuel in the reactor reaches such high temperatures that it burns through the base of the reactor and burns through the foundations of the building and then travels through the earth, all the way through the earth and comes out the other side in China.
Josh King:
Not bloody likely.
Adam Higginbotham:
It's both geologically, physically and geographically impossible because if you look at the globe, you can see that China is not actually on the other side of the world from Idaho or wherever the meltdown is taking place. But what did happen in Chernobyl was that the base plate of the reactor was blown off in the course of the explosion, and so this super heated mass of what came to be called corium of material from the core, nuclear fuel that then fused with sand and steel and aluminum and other material that it essentially ate from around it in the reactor building, then began seeping down through the basement, through the sub reactor levels of the building into the basement.
Adam Higginbotham:
And in the end, did come very close to the foundations of the building, although it did not finally eat through the foundation plate of the building and make its way into the earth. Soviet scientists really were terrified that this was going to happen. And so they mounted these enormous simultaneous efforts on various fronts to try and prevent this happening, because this was their nightmare scenario and something for which they had made no preparations, whatever.
Josh King:
Right. I mean, you say that people really did not have the response, any kind of a response plan, for this kind of an accident. The Time Magazine that you and I have been looking at with its full yellow headline, one word, "Meltdown," it's the May 12th issue, and it could have been on newsstand, I guess, as early as May 5th, the way Time used to deliver their magazines, but here is Ted Koppel on his show, April 28, 1986. Let's have a listen.
Ted Koppel:
Moscow television tonight.
Speaker 12:
[foreign language 00:31:53]
Ted Koppel:
For the first time ever, the Soviet Union admits it has had a nuclear accident, and it's clearly a major one.
Speaker 13:
It's almost certainly the most severe accident that has ever taken place in the short history of civilian nuclear power.
Ted Koppel:
Good evening. I'm Ted Koppel and this is Nightline. It seems virtually certain that what the Soviets have experienced is a nuclear meltdown. How serious and far reaching would the effects be?
Josh King:
So Adam, how does the news actually get out? That was, what, two days later, and you talked about earlier, the first trickles of news were hidden behind the chess reports in Pravda-
Adam Higginbotham:
Right.
Josh King:
... but as you were reconstructing the sort of distribution of the stories about the accident, where were the first blips heard?
Adam Higginbotham:
Well, the Soviets did attempt, for the first 72 hours, to completely deny that anything untoward had happened. And what finally broke the news was radioactive particles from the accident being discovered at a nuclear plant in Forsmark in Sweden, a thousand miles from Chernobyl, and this was on Monday morning. So the accident took place overnight from Friday to Saturday, and the reactor began burning in the early hours of Saturday morning, and this radioactive plume was carried Northwest by high altitude winds, and radioactive particles fell over Sweden on Monday morning. And what happened was a technician at the Forsmark plant set off the radiation alarms on his way into work-
Josh King:
Because he thought there was a problem at his plant?
Adam Higginbotham:
Well, he set off the radiation alarms because he'd got radioactive particles on his shoes from walking into the plant from outside in the car park, because radioactive rain had fallen on Sweden overnight, but he set off these alarms and this was mystifying to him because he knew that he hadn't been inside the reactor block. So although these were contamination alarms that were supposed to detect problems within the plant, he couldn't work out how this had happened, but like many other nuclear plants elsewhere in the West, there had been problems at the Forsmark Nuclear Plant. So their immediate conclusion was, oh no, it's happened again. We got some problem, got some radioactive material leaking out of Forsmark one. So they went to take further atmospheric tests because it so happened that this guy who first set off the alarms worked in the laboratory where his job was to take these kind of tests.
Adam Higginbotham:
And so he began taking air samples and then he went down for a second cup of coffee a bit later in the morning. And by this time, he was surprised to see that there was this huge line of other workers arriving for the first shift at work of that day, and they were all setting off the alarms. So this was even more mystifying. So then he took a shoe off one of these guys who were setting off the alarm, put it in a plastic bag to prevent cross contamination, took it upstairs to his lab and took it and put it on a gamma spectrometer to analyze what kind of contamination was on the shoe. And usually this contamination is of such a level that he would sit there and wait for five or 10 minutes or something for the results to come back. But as soon as he put it on-
Josh King:
Spectrometer.
Adam Higginbotham:
... the spectrometer, the results came back instantaneously. So it was horribly contaminated, but it was contaminated with other things that did not, could not have come from inside the Forsmark reactor. And at that point, he realized that they were dealing with something that he was really not prepared for.
Josh King:
How was the needle thread? How does the news get out of Sweden and start to spread across the world that there's been an accident?
Adam Higginbotham:
Well, so then the Swedes, through the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, they then start asking around in Soviet republics-
Josh King:
Polite terms.
Adam Higginbotham:
And in Moscow, they asked the IAEA representative, whether or not he knows of any problems at Soviet plants, and of course, they deny all knowledge of this. And then it reaches the point where the Soviet ambassador is holding a drinks party that evening and goes up to one of the Soviet representatives and says the same thing, and the Soviet representative says, "Oh no, not us. Don't know what you're talking about." But gradually, what has happened during the course of the day is that at 10:30 that morning, the politburo with Mikhail Gorbachev has had an emergency meeting where they discuss what their options are, and in subsequent years, Gorbachev, always keen to polish his reputation in the West, has insisted that he was in favor of releasing all information-
Josh King:
Getting out a statement quickly, right?
Adam Higginbotham:
... all information as quickly as possible, but he was restricted by a lack of hard information coming out of Chernobyl, but the decision that was taken by the politburo that morning does not reflect that, regardless of what his professed intentions are. So that night, they agreed that they would release a, I think, three-line statement saying that an accident had taken place at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and measures were being taken to clean it up, but it didn't say when it had happened, it didn't mention radioactive releases, didn't mention the fact that anybody had died. It didn't give any indication of the scale of the developing catastrophe. And in that, it was typical of the way the Soviet media reported accidents and catastrophes of any kind.
Josh King:
In its review of your book, Adam, The Wall Street Journal wrote, "It reads almost like a script for a movie. Mr. Higginbotham has captured the terrible drama." And indeed, Adam, every nonfiction narrative destined for the silver screen needs a compelling American character to draw in audiences, but that's already happened because in 1991, there was the movie, The Final Warning with John Voight as Dr. Robert Gale, and Jason Robards as the billionaire oil tycoon, Armand hammer. Let's take a listen.
Speaker 14:
Breakfast tomorrow, Dr. Yuri Andreyev. He's a hematologist at hospital six coming by to take me to the hospital. No, Dr. Hammer, the New York Post is wrong. There's absolutely no evidence so far as I can gather of mass graves of 2000 dead. Apparently, there are four dead so far and 30 cases that Hospital 6 transferred from Kiev. So I will tell them-
Andre Durand:
No, no, never tell them anything. They're all sensitive. Try to gain their trust. Remember, in American medicine, we're used to competitive maneuver and grantsmanship.
Josh King:
And boy, Robards going on to great roles after that one in 1991, but Adam, what role did Dr. Gale and Mr. Hammer play in the recovery from the disaster?
Adam Higginbotham:
I mean, I think the most significant role they played for the Soviet government was a propaganda one because they contributed to the impression of openness that an American doctor could be welcomed into a Soviet hospital to help deal with and mitigate the suffering that was caused by the accident. And they shipped in ... Gale and Hammer both cooperated to ship in a lot of advanced medicines and equipment that was used in Hospital 6 to treat the most badly affected patients who were shipped in from Chernobyl in the hours after the accident. But the treatments that Gale was expert in did not really help any of the patients that were treated.
Josh King:
Bone marrow transplants?
Adam Higginbotham:
Because he was an expert in bone marrow transplants, and that was not ... That was a kind of ... That was a treatment of last resort.
Josh King:
Yeah.
Adam Higginbotham:
And I think he recognized, at the time, that this was unlikely to save a lot of the most badly injured victims of the accident and indeed, most of them died. So I think their most significant contribution, as I say, was this sort of top line propaganda.
Josh King:
One substance that plays a huge role in Midnight in Chernobyl, beyond all the radioactive isotopes and the graphite, is good old-fashioned concrete. You said something like whenever Russians want to get rid of a problem, they just pour concrete on it. I don't know how you exactly phrased it, but by Midsummer in 1986, they're creating the sarcophagus, 12,000 tons of concrete were being churned out every 24 hours by shred mash plants. What level of sort of sophistication of your understanding of both the benefits and also drawbacks of concrete did you learn in writing this book?
Adam Higginbotham:
Well, concrete is extremely effective at shielding human beings from radiation because you require a material that's extremely dense, and so you can use, as it turns out as I discovered, a special kind of heavy concrete to create radioactive protection for human beings. I mean, the interesting thing about the way that the sarcophagus was described both in the Soviet press and subsequently in the Western press, was, again, revealing of Soviet propaganda is that Alexander Sich, who studied the accident, the source term of the accident as it's called in his MIT thesis, actually put the figures together and calculated that if the amount of concrete that the Soviets said, at the time, was put into the sarcophagus, this protective structure that was built around the ruins of reactor four, had actually gone into it, it would be this massive cube of solid concrete that kind of reached hundreds of feet into the air.
Adam Higginbotham:
So it doesn't ... Even what they say about their own use of concrete doesn't really make sense, and what they ultimately built was more akin to a sort of tin roofed shed over the ruins of the reactor, which is why we now see a new sarcophagus having been completed just recently.
Josh King:
Massive arch.
Adam Higginbotham:
Exactly.
Josh King:
And we're going to talk more about that after the break. When we come back, the legacy of the worst nuclear disaster in history, more of my conversation with Adam Higginbotham, author of Midnight in Chernobyl. That's right after this.
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Josh King:
Back now with Adam Higginbotham, author of Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster. Before the break, we were talking about the origins of nuclear power and the events leading up to and during the years immediately after the disaster in Ukraine 34 years ago, chronicled so rivetingly in Adam's book. Now we consider the effect of that event on all of us. So Adam, one of the most harrowing scenes in the HBO mini series showed a helicopter crashing over reactor number four. Here's Jared Harris as Valery Legasov and Stellan Skarsgard as Boris Shcherbina watching the bombing run from a nearby rooftop.
Base Command:
Please proceed.
Pilot:
Copy. We'll go one by one in rotation.
Legaslov (Harris):
Remind them about the perimeter.
Stasiuk:
They cannot fly directly over the fire. A minimum of a 10-meter perimeter.
Base Command:
Ten-meter perimeter, copy. Lead one, per preflight, maintain minimum 10-meter perimeter.
Pilot:
Copy that. 40 meters, 35, 30.
Legaslov (Harris):
No, no, no, they're too close!
Stasiuk:
They can't get over the fire or at least, the wind will have to carry it.
Legaslov (Harris):
Tell them!
Josh King:
I watched the actual crash of the helicopter on YouTube. You write a lot about the helicopter bombing operation in the opening salvos of the battle of Chernobyl with their upside down parachutes lashed to the choppers, and yet, as you write about the complex expedition created to unravel the mysteries of a disaster, you say that only the smallest trace of the bombed material found its mark. Reflect on the many failed and sometimes deadly experiments in the immediate response.
Adam Higginbotham:
That's extremely dramatic. It sounded extremely dramatic just listening to the audio, but I think if they'd done a more accurate job, they would've prefaced the whole show with one of those title cards that says inspired by real events because what you've just heard, none of that took place. And so that actual crash that you refer to as depicted as taking place in these early days of attempts to liquidate the catastrophe at the end of April/beginning of May, and it actually happened in October. I mean, long after there was no fire, there were no more radioactive emissions, and it crashed because it struck a-
Josh King:
One of those construction cranes that were still-
Adam Higginbotham:
A crane, yeah.
Josh King:
... ready to build the next reactor, right?
Adam Higginbotham:
Exactly. And had nothing to do with radiation or a 10-meter perimeter or not being able to go over the fire or any of that extremely dramatic sounding stuff. But no, you're right, the analysis that they did in the years after the catastrophe revealed these attempts to put out the fire and smother the reactor with these bombing loads of bags of sand and boron and lead and clay were almost completely pointless, and although these extremely courageous helicopter pilots flew these missions over the reactor again and again for 10 days or more, it did nothing to put out the fire, and eventually, it seems quite likely that the fire went out on its own, and similarly, the efforts that we referred to earlier about attempting to head off the China syndrome, where they had these ...
Adam Higginbotham:
They, first of all, attempted to pump in gaseous nitrogen around the reactor to stifle the fire and deprive it of oxygen, and then they mounted this astonishing effort to build a heat exchanger directly beneath the reactor building, in the earth beneath the reactor building, in order to cool the earth, and then head off the possibility of the China syndrome. They actually completed this thing, and it was all ready to go, but it was never turned on because by the time it was finished, they realized that the China syndrome was not actually going to take place at all.
Adam Higginbotham:
So, all of these people put themselves in harm's way for what ultimately was no reason at all. But in their defense, you have to say that the Soviet scientists, they were calculating on the worst case scenario for every possibility, the worst thing they could possibly imagine happening. And it was obviously better to try and do these things rather than sit back and do nothing, which with hindsight, is what some physicists say today, is that the best thing they could have done, would've been to have just stood there and watched it burn from a safe distance, but of course, nobody would've tolerated them doing that.
Josh King:
Right, right. I mean, I know that the death toll from the disaster is a matter of ongoing dispute. I think you heard that Nightline comment about the death toll of being four and other people having a different view and the long term effects of those who are exposed and their offspring will always be cloaked in controversy, but I know you've tried to address this. I think I heard you on the long form podcast, but I'm sure you're asked about this all the time, but what is your perspective on what the long term casualty count is of Chernobyl?
Adam Higginbotham:
Well, I mean, the confusion, I think, partly results from people deliberately misrepresenting the reported facts in order to make the coverup and the controversy seem greater than it is. So, you'll see people write that the Soviet Union said that there were only ever 31 deaths as a result of the accident. Well, that's not really true. What they say is that by the end of 1986, the number of direct casualties attributed to acute radiation syndrome and other effects of the accident immediately was 31. But nobody says now only 31 people have died as a result of the accident because there are individuals who I interviewed in the course of my reporting for the book who've died. You'll interview their doctors, and you'll say, "Was that a result of the accident?" They'll say, "Of course, it was. This guy died of leukemia in 2008 and that was because of his exposure in 1986." But it's true that it seems that the number of deaths that can be directly attributed to the accident is in the dozens, but that's because of a lack of information.
Adam Higginbotham:
The people that have been most closely studied in this respect are the liquidators, the people who were either the first responders, like the firemen and the plant staff who went into fight the fires and to try and contain things in the hours after the accident, and then, this group of hundreds of thousands, up to 600,000 people, who were cycled through the exclusion zone in the four years after the accident to try and contain and clean up everything. Those are the people who've been subjected to relatively intensive scientific study. But what people are really interested in, I think, when they talk about deaths attributable to the accident is people in the wider population, people who just went about their daily lives farming and milking cows or going to the office, who lived in the areas affected by the catastrophe.
Adam Higginbotham:
And that area is very large. The areas of the Russian Republic of Belarus and of the Ukraine that we can describe as being heavily affected by the results of the accident contain five million people, but those populations have never really been closely studied in the same way as the victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, who were made the subject to what's called Life Span Study, which is a study that continues to this day where these people's lives and illnesses and deaths and descendants have been closely studied year on year since 1945. Now that has not happened with the people, the five million people, who lived in those most deeply affected areas, but the other thing is that it's very hard to connect radiation directly to many illnesses, specifically cancer, partly because the background rate of cancer in the human population is extremely high and the potential connection between some of those cancers and radiation release from Chernobyl would represent a very small proportion of that background level of cancer.
Adam Higginbotham:
And the exception to that is thyroid cancer, which is the one cancer that you can really draw a straight line to from the radiation released by Chernobyl and that illness, and in that case, there are about 10,000 cases of thyroid cancer. I think it's ... I mean, it's gradually ticking up all the time, but I think the last data I saw was about 10,000, but thyroid cancer is relatively easy to cure and is very rarely fatal. So again, you're not talking about deaths, but you are talking about the direct effects of the accident. And the fact is that the treatment for thyroid cancer is to have your thyroid and your thyroid's pretty important. So it's very debilitating to suffer from that. And among the cohorts of liquidators, what's been revealed so far is that there's an uptick in heart disease and in radiation-induced cataracts, for example.
Adam Higginbotham:
So we know that the radiation makes people very sick if they've been exposed to a certain level of it, but the real controversy lies in chronic exposure to low level radiation. So, the fallout that still is in the environment that people live around and it's not ... It may be on the similar level to that you'd be exposed to if you lived in Denver, for example, where at high altitudes, you can get higher background radiation rates, and that's where the controversy lies, but in terms of numbers of deaths, as you say, I don't think we're ever really going to know what the answer is because epidemiology is extremely complicated, because the Soviet government concealed lots of information initially, because the studies haven't been done. So it remains mysterious and thus controversial, I think.
Josh King:
I remember reading all of the coverage, I think, back in 2016 of the completion of this gigantic arched shelter over the site of reactor four, large enough to encase the entire cathedral of Notre Dame or what's left of it. What's it like now in Pripyat and in the rest of the exclusion zone? You write toward the end of the book about how wildlife has had an amazing rebound in the area, but I think you've been back within the last few years, what do you find in this area today?
Adam Higginbotham:
Well, we should be careful about what you say. I think I write that it's perceived that wildlife has had this miraculous recovery, and it's become like a radioactive safari park, but the truth is that it seems that there's a lot more wildlife inside the exclusion zone now than there was in 1985 before the accident, for example, and that is not necessarily because of the fantasy of nature rebounding in the face of mankind's idiocy. I think it has more to do with the fact that the Ukrainians and the Russians are extremely enthusiastic hunters and fishermen, that the exclusions zone was, despite being quite rural, nonetheless, an industrial zone in the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union does not have a great ecological record of looking after the environment.
Adam Higginbotham:
And so, what's happened is that in the absence of people, there are a lot more wolves and bears and birds of prey in the exclusion zone than there were before, but that's not because they're immune to radiation, because the animals that live in the exclusion zone have been shown to suffer from the deleterious effects of exposure to radiation. What we can say is that radiation is bad for animals, but human beings are a lot worse. And as to what it's like now, I mean Pripyat is now a pretty significant tourist attraction. I think that 100,000 people went there last year, and so many people now go that ... And this has happened since I last went, there are now at least two souvenir booths on the perimeter of the exclusion zone where you can buy mugs and t-shirts marked with radioactive symbols to commemorate your visit to one of the world's most radioactive towns.
Josh King:
We've all watched the role that Ukraine has played in the current impeachment of the US president and the leaders of the former Soviet state that led up to it, on a broader level, looking back, how do you think the psychological damage from the Chernobyl effect affected the economy of Ukraine over the years?
Adam Higginbotham:
I mean, I think the Chernobyl disaster remains part of the psychological impact of Soviet rule as a whole over Ukraine. And it's difficult to separate those things. I mean, the one obvious effect of the accident is that a lot of people in Ukraine, if they suffer from any illness, might be tempted to blame it on radiation release by the accident, both because the effects of radiation are extremely mysterious to the man in the street and also because the Soviet government deliberately downplayed or covered up the true effects of radiation in the first place. And so, I mean, that has a pretty significant psychological effect. The radiation obviously has its own genuine physical effect on people, but it's very hard at a certain point this far out, more than 30 years from the accident, to separate the physical from the psychological. And so, it's just become part of the fabric of Ukrainian society, I think.
Josh King:
It's clear, as you were just saying, the Soviet Union mishandled sharing the disaster news to shield from embarrassment and pride. What doesn't seem clear is if the plant had existed as it is in any other place on earth, we talked about Sweden, we talked about UK, we talked about the US, would the disaster still have been inevitable? I mean, do you think it could have been prevented in another environment?
Adam Higginbotham:
I'm not sure that the plant would've been built if it had been constructed in any other society. Similar plants were built in the United States for the manufacturer of plutonium to build bombs, but this kind of technology was never ... Would probably never have left the drawing board in a Western country because the resources were there to go with other reactor designs. So the PWR, the pressurized water reactors, that became the industry standard in the West, were not built in such numbers in the USSR because they lacked the tooling and the technology to produce them as quickly as they wanted to according to their plan.
Josh King:
As we wrap up, Adam, in the introduction to the show, I drew some parallels between the disaster at Chernobyl, the sinking of the Titanic and the pandemic currently unfolding from its origin at Wuhan. As you reflect on everything that you've learned from your time on the ground and sifting through the archives, as you look across to China and watch these stories unfold, what's your perspective?
Adam Higginbotham:
I think that there's a temptation to ascribe the effects of Chernobyl, the scale of the Chernobyl catastrophe to the Soviet impulses to cover up and conceal information and to this idea that it's all about untruth. And while that obviously played a part and is clearly playing a part in the way this current pandemic is playing out, I don't think that's really the major lesson that I take away from the Chernobyl disaster. I think that the Chernobyl disaster has much more in common with other accidents that are a result of overconfidence in technology and what Diane Vaughn, who wrote about the Challenger disaster, termed the normalization of deviance.
Adam Higginbotham:
I think that really, it has many more parallels with the Titanic sinking, with the Challenger disaster, and then with the 737 MAX crashes and then not merely with engineering problems, but also with technology in its wider sense, like the problems that have been caused by our overconfidence in use of Facebook, for example and algorithms and artificial intelligence. I think that what we need to be aware of is letting technology run away with us in this way and thinking that we are masters of these things, and I think that's my principle lesson to take away from Chernobyl and not one merely of impulse to cover things up, but one of hubris and overconfidence.
Josh King:
The normalization of deviance.
Adam Higginbotham:
Exactly.
Josh King:
Adam Higginbotham, thank you so much for joining Inside the ICE House.
Adam Higginbotham:
Thank you.
Josh King:
It's been a great conversation. That's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Adam Higginbotham, author of Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster, now out in paperback from Simon & Schuster.
Josh King:
If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us, and if you've got a comment or a question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at icehouse@the ice.com or tweet at us at @ICEHousePodcast. Our show was produced by Pete Asch and Jessica Laskowski with production assistance from Ken Abel and Steve [inaudible 01:00:59]. I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next time.
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