Reviews and Comments

Higginbotham's book is unique is that he used a rare window of opportunity when Russia was in a short period of glasnost and was able to talk to people who directly participated in the events on all levels, from engineers to officials and firefighters. He was also able to access archive documents before Putin shut them down. The book in greatest detail describes the root cause for the disaster, which was entirely preventable on all levels - from reactor designers to the operators.

The systemic issues of the Soviet system however drove all of them right to the disaster - self-righteousness, all time increased targets, pressure on cutting costs and speedy delivery resulted in RBMK designers cutting corners wherever possible and not only skipping any security features but not even fixing well-known security problems. They were, at least, well-known to them, because the Soviet paranoia and secrecy prevented them from passing the information about the issues to the operators who had no clue e.g. about the temporary positive feedback loop in the moderation rods which were intended to quickly drop the reactor's power but instead, for a brief moment, they initially increased it. After the disaster happened, the authoritarian and fully vertical command and control structure prevented those on the ground from doing anything without permission from Moscow, which was fed -- by the same people - with calming lies about the scale and severity of the incident, because they were afraid of being accused of "panicking".

This led in significant delays in evacuation of the civilians and notifying other countries. In general, the whole book is really about the failure of the Soviet system in the first place, not nuclear power itself. It's quite ironic that after the Cold War ended, the West, with its obsession on transparency and safety, turned away from nuclear power and turned towards... Russian fossil gas, while Russia itself remained the pioneer in nuclear technologies worldwide.

P.S. this books should be especially carefully read by those who believe that elimination of the financial profit and private ownership of means of production is going to prevent enterprises from cutting corners or causing environmental disasters - it's not...