HistoryInFive: Most people think about the accident at Chernobyl and the aftermath, but few people think about what life at Chernobyl (and the adjoining city of Pripyat) was like prior to the calamity. What was life like for the families who lived there?

Adam Higginbotham: The Chernobyl power plant was a prized posting for nuclear specialists and energy workers from all over the USSR, partly because Pripyat, an “atomic city” specially built to house them, was such a great place to live. There’s a popular conception of the Soviet Union as an empire of faceless automatons living out their lives in shades of gray misery—but the citizens of Pripyat were mostly young people, and a third of the population were children. With brand-new apartment buildings surrounded by lush countryside, the city had a beauty parlor, a yacht club and regular discos at weekends. The director of the power station made sure that the shops and grocery stores in Pripyat were much better stocked than those even in Kiev, with French perfume, numerous different kinds of meat and sausage—and even fresh vegetables like cucumber and tomatoes.

Hin5: How did the world come to know about Chernobyl, and in what ways did the initial reporting about the incident come to mythologize it and distort the truth?

AH: News about the accident broke because a radiation alarm went off inside a nuclear power station 700 miles away in Sweden more than two days after the explosion. Even though the Swedes quickly figured out that the fallout had come from the direction of Chernobyl, the Soviet authorities continued to deny all knowledge of an accident until later that night, and then spent months attempting to minimize the true nature of the catastrophe. Ironically, their attempts to conceal what had happened led to western reports that greatly exaggerated the number of casualties caused by the initial explosion: within the week, the New York Post was reporting that 15,000 people were dead, and their bodies secretly buried in a nuclear waste dump, leading to misunderstandings that persist to this day.

Hin5: The incident at Chernobyl in April 1986 was not the world’s first nuclear accident, nor was it the last. What’s distinct about Chernobyl?

AH: Chernobyl was a unique historical event, because of its epic scale—releasing more radiation into the atmosphere than any other accident, affecting a population of at least five million people, involving up to 500,000 men and women in the cleanup—and its timing, taking place just as the USSR teetered on the edge of collapse. It is also unique because of the way it has since seized the popular imagination. I was first inspired to write about the accident when I read A Night to Remember, Walter Lord’s book about the sinking of the Titanic, which Lord famously compared to “the last night of a small town.” For the citizens of Pripyat, that’s exactly what the disaster became. Like the story of the Titanic, Chernobyl was both a human drama that cut through a cross section of society, but also a parable of heroism, cowardice and man’s technological hubris in challenging the forces of nature.

Hin5: This book is full of heroics (and the opposite). Who is one of the more memorable heroes of this book?

AH: The courage of the firefighters, soldiers and nuclear specialists who tried to contain the accident is often astonishing. But to me one of the more memorable heroes is Maria Protsenko, the chief architect of Pripyat: a formidable 40-year-old mother of two, who before the accident was busy planning an expansion of the city to accommodate a population of 200,000 people. After the explosion she organized its evacuation, stayed behind after the last civilians had left, and eventually was given orders to help the KGB close the empty city off from the rest of the world.

Hin5: In what ways did the secrecy of the Soviet state and the KGB contribute to the accident? Who received the blame—correctly or incorrectly—and who, in actuality, should have?

AH: The paranoid secrecy ingrained in the Soviet state paved the way to the accident. Everything associated with the nuclear industry was classified, and the KGB kept a tight lid on the power station. The designers of the reactors used in Chernobyl had known for years that they were fraught with problems, but deliberately concealed and failed to rectify them. Previous accidents at Chernobyl and elsewhere—which would have provided the reactor operators with valuable lessons about the reactors and the dangers they presented—were covered up and blanketed with secrecy. In an attempt to preserve this clandestine ecosystem—and to protect their own reputations—the leaders of the nuclear industry and the reactor designers attempted to place all blame for the accident on the plant director and the men operating Reactor Number Four on the night of the explosion.

Hin5: What kind of engineering and international cooperation was required to contain and minimize the damage from the accident?

AH: At first, Moscow refused all Western offers of assistance with the disaster, for fear of exposing their own secrets and to preserve Soviet prestige at a time when the USSR still maintained the illusion that it led the world in advanced technology. So the battle to contain the radiation pouring from the reactor was fought entirely with Soviet manpower, and pieces of equipment bought from the West with hard currency. But after the collapse of the USSR, five years later, the massive steel and concrete tomb the Soviet engineers erected over the ruin of Reactor Number Four was found to be unstable. The international civil engineering project funded by contributions from the United States and throughout Europe, designed to cover and secure the reactor—the New Safe Confinement-- has so far cost more than $1.5 billion, and is still not complete.

Hin5: Is Midnight in Chernobyl a cautionary tale? If so, in what ways?

AH: I’d go back to the Titanic, which foreshadows this story in many ways. Chernobyl is a cautionary tale in that it warns us of overconfidence in technology.  Just as the Titanic was regarded as unsinkable, Soviet nuclear chiefs convinced everyone that their reactors were among the safest in the world. Many people who worked at the plant—from the director downwards—believed that an explosion inside one was simply impossible. It was this overconfidence as much as anything else that led to the disaster. But the reactor was a uniquely Soviet design, and the circumstances of the accident specific to that time and place. Chernobyl should no more discourage the development of nuclear reactors than the Titanic stopped anyone travelling by ocean liner.

Hin5: How many people perished as a result of the events at Chernobyl?

AH: Two plant workers died on the morning of the accident as a direct result of the explosion; within the next five months, another 29 people had died from the effects of radiation poisoning sustained that night: I tell many of their stories in Midnight In Chernobyl.  By 2004, a further 19 plant staff and emergency workers had died, not all of them of radiation-related illnesses. The number of deaths caused by the accident in the wider population is a much more controversial question, clouded by politics and the complexities of epidemiology. In 2008 a United Nations study concluded that out of the more than five million people living in the worst affected areas of the former Soviet Union, 5000 would die of additional cancers directly connected to the radiation released from Chernobyl, part of a total of 25,000 extra cancers of all kinds predicted throughout Europe attributed to the accident. But these statistics—and the much higher numbers of total deaths projected by other researchers—can only ever be estimates, because of the initial attempts to conceal data by the Soviet authorities, and the difficulties of tracking the health of so many people over their lifetimes. The true impact may never be known.

Hin5: What has become of the site today? A tourist site? A haven for animals? An eternal tomb?

AH: Today the plant and the city remain in the middle of more than 1000 square miles of depopulated no-man’s-land—the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone--that straddles the border between Ukraine and Belarus. Although many of the radionuclides that contaminated the land have naturally decayed over the 30 years since the accident, highly toxic hotspots of fallout remain the area. But the Exclusion Zone is also home to several hundred peasants who either sneaked back into their ancestral homes after the evacuation—and wildlife, including several rare and endangered species, which have returned to populate the land in the absence of farmers and hunters. The abandoned city of Pripyat has become a popular tourist attraction, a destination for regular bus trips from Kiev; the plant itself is in the process of being decommissioned, and contains the tombstone of Valery Khodemchuk, killed in the explosion, whose body was never found.

Hin5: What did it take to research, report, and write this book?

AH: I made my first reporting trip to Russia and Ukraine shortly before the 20th anniversary of the accident, in 2006. It was then that I first met the men and women who would become some of the main protagonists of the book. But to tell the story I wanted to tell, I had to track down another 60 or 70 individuals, and conduct hundreds of hours of interviews, in malls and cafes, in snow-bound villages and in the gardens of country houses, in hospitals and bewildering apartment complexes. Where possible, I corroborated individual accounts with one another, but also using declassified documents, published and unpublished memoirs, letters, books, films and photographs. I visited the protagonists’ former apartments in Pripyat, went inside the plant itself, and travelled to important locations in Kiev and Moscow. I mined archives and libraries in Russia, Ukraine, Britain and the United States, and worked with a small team of translators and researchers to locate and translate key documents and texts into English. To understand the science of nuclear engineering and radiation biology, I interviewed specialists in each field and reviewed as much of the extensive scientific literature on Chernobyl as I could get my hands on. Finally, I had to winnow the resulting mountain of material into a concise narrative; as a result, hundreds of stories and dozens of characters with fascinating lives were left on the cutting room floor.