Original subtitles

I was working at the nuclear power station at Forsmark in Sweden.

If you want to go into the controlled area, you had to put yourself in a monitor

that checked if you had any radioactive contamination on you.

This was just a normal procedure, but this morning the alarm went off.

No one could get through because the alarm went off all the time.

I didn't think it was really real.

So I asked one of the guys who stood in the queue to borrow a shoe

and started an analysis of it.

The rate by which the peaks rise tells you about the radioactivity

and this time it was just...

It was terrifying.

The alarm went off to evacuate the station.

At first, the Swedes thought that they had had a nuclear accident.

Later, Swedish scientists determined the origin was somewhere in the Soviet Union.

Details are emerging this morning of the serious accident

at a Soviet nuclear plant in the Ukraine.

It's being called the worst nuclear accident in history.

A giant reactor has suffered what experts tonight believe to have been a core meltdown.

Radiation, of course, is the big fear tonight.

It is the silent killer and apparently it continues to pour forth from Chernobyl.

It can cause immediate sickness and death.

There is a dramatic hike in a deadly form of thyroid cancer among children

exposed to that radioactive fallout.

The longer you live, eating and drinking in contaminated regions,

the more radiation builds up in your body.

President Reagan was out of the country,

but then-Vice President George Bush asked me how bad the reactor accident was

and I said, sir, in my opinion as a nuclear engineer,

this is the worst possible accident I can imagine.

There were incredible acts of bravery and heroism,

sacrifice and extreme patriotism.

We lost our friends.

We lost our neighbors.

So many young people died.

How do we actually understand

that this is not a nuclear accident?

What has happened if the Soviets won't tell us?

This was a global disaster.

Hundreds of millions of people wanted to know,

am I in danger?

Is the food safe to eat?

And the Soviets were quiet.

This was an unchecked nuclear core meltdown.

Over the course of the last 40 years,

I've never had an opportunity to speak about this in public before.

As a CIA officer, we're not generally dealing with the media.

In 1986, I had been a nuclear analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency.

I was 27 years old. I'd been working for the CIA for four years.

I remember coming back from lunch on the Monday, April 28th,

and the Soviets finally did acknowledge that there was a problem.

They put out a statement saying there had been an accident

at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant,

and that was a bit ominous because Chernobyl was a lot further away

than the ones we initially suspected.

Both the Swedish and Danish embassies sent envoys

to the Soviet foreign ministry today,

asking the Soviets to be more forthcoming.

Wyatt Andrews, CBS News, Moscow.

The entire diplomatic community and reporting community

was bombarding the Soviet authorities for answers.

We set out immediately to start tasking the resources

that we had to learn more about it.

Of course, we tasked the overhead reconnaissance satellites,

which was not nearly as ubiquitous as they are today.

So we had to go out and provide a justification

to get the satellite picture.

We kind of sold the idea that, well,

we might see emergency response crews and that sort of thing.

The next morning, our senior nuclear power analyst

got an excited call from the photo interpreters and said,

the reactor's blown up, just like you said.

And our reaction was, no, we lied about that.

We couldn't have done that.

That doesn't happen to reactors.

The images showed that the building was completely destroyed.

As a nuclear engineer, I was astounded

that the thing would have exploded in that manner

and that you would have this vast destruction.

That kind of nuclear core explosion had never happened before.

That emission of radiation had never happened before.

That was horrifying.

Soviet propaganda had spent years insisting

that the USSR's nuclear technology led the world.

Construction began on the Chernobyl power plant in 1970.

By 1986, there were four reactors online.

One of the unique things was their extremely large physical size,

much larger than similar reactors in the West.

Each of the reactors produced 1,000 megawatts of electricity,

which was enough to provide power to around a million modern homes.

The plant was located to the northwest of Kiev,

around 800 miles from Foshmark in Sweden,

where radiation from the accident was first detected in the West.

You have an enormous plume of radioactive material

that's coming across Europe.

So we knew that because of the great distances

and the amount being received at those distances,

this must be a very large release.

It's hard to quantify the effect that these radioactive isotopes

might have on your body and on your health.

Even at lower levels, it can cause long-term effects like cancer

that may show up years later.

I remember seeing from the bus

when I came back from Foshmark to Uppsala,

I saw some children playing.

I wanted to stop the bus and go out and ask them,

don't play here.

But it was not possible to stop that kind of bus.

No one knew what that level of radiation spewing into the air

would do to the atmosphere

and how far the contamination would spread

and how dangerous that might be.

At Foshmark, we spoke a lot, everybody in the control room.

The main thought was,

what was it like to be in Chernobyl,

in a power plant that had suffered such a fate?

I left for another life.

I didn't want to go back to the past.

We arrived at work about half an hour before the shift began.

My seat was on the right.

Two remote controls.

Immediately after the shift began, we started preparing for the experiment.

Reactor number four was scheduled to be shut down

for routine maintenance,

and the operators were taking the opportunity

to conduct a long-delayed safety test.

Ironically, the experiment was intended to allow them

to have better reactor safety in the event of a loss of power.

They had begun this experiment a day before the accident occurred.

Unfortunately, the experiment was interrupted by the grid controller

who needed more electricity so that the shutdown was prolonged.

The delay meant that the test had to be conducted by the midnight shift.

Alongside Igor Kirshenban,

the two members of the shift directly responsible for enacting the test

were Alexander Akimov, the head of the shift,

and Leonid Toptynov, controlling the reactor directly.

The reactor was infamously unstable during the process of shutdown.

Toptynov was not very experienced.

He would be overseeing the shutdown of a nuclear reactor

for the first time in his career.

They were tired, and they were trying to get it done,

because opportunities to do this kind of thing didn't occur very often.

The most senior man in the room was Anatoly Dyatlov,

who was deputy chief engineer for operations for the entire plant.

There had been several disagreements about the test protocol,

and the test had been delayed so long

that part of the experiment had been delayed

until the crew were threatening to leave.

Dyatlov, who was never a good-tempered individual,

had been awake for almost 24 hours.

The last thing that Dyatlov said to Akimov before the test began was,

What are you waiting for?

When I was told to launch,

I pressed the power button and turned off the generator from the network.

There was a terrible noise.

Something happened that no one could know about.

In 1986, I was 29 years old.

It turned out that in the evening,

we began patrolling around the nuclear plant.

We had a cooling pond near the nuclear plant.

We saw two barricaders that were exposed to radiation.

We had to undress and take these two out.

We took the barricaders out of the water.

There were about 400 meters from the reactor.

While we were taking these two out,

we heard a bang in the background.

Almost everyone turned around.

And immediately there was a second bang.

It was very loud.

Thunder, dust coming down from the ceiling.

The light was flashing.

The emergency switch was turned on.

I looked at the cloud above us.

It was spinning.

It was like ash.

It was very strong.

We drove 200 meters and stood in front of the fourth power unit.

I said, God, what is left of the building?

It was demolished.

Half of it was cut off.

Hello?

Is this the third or fourth power unit?

The third or fourth power unit.

Is there an explosion?

Yes.

Is the roof burning?

Yes, the roof is burning.

We began to receive various messages.

We brought a burned person.

It was Shashinok.

Vladimir Shashinok, who was monitoring the turbines,

was engulfed in radioactive steam.

He was soaking wet.

He was taken away.

Then he died.

Yatlov also came and kept saying,

I don't understand what happened.

There was no doubt complete confusion in the control room.

All they knew that something was wrong,

but they didn't know what it was.

They certainly didn't believe that the reactor could have been destroyed.

The Chernobyl power plant was laid out around a long central corridor.

The four reactors in a line.

Each of the reactors had its own separate control room,

and each of the control rooms was separated from the reactor hall

by many thick concrete walls.

Reactor 4 had been obliterated,

taking with it all of the sensors and equipment

that was supposed to communicate to them

what was happening inside the reactor core.

So they were completely in the dark.

It's burning!

There's an explosion on the main core.

The third reactor is between the third and the fourth.

Are there people there?

Yes.

When I was driving, I was looking.

There was a flame, like a candle was burning.

The pillar exploded right in the sky.

For these firefighters, this was something like they'd never seen before.

This strange glow coming from the reactor core meltdown.

Those firefighters put their lives on the line.

Very much like the firefighters at the World Trade Center on 9-11.

I mean, they knew what they were getting into,

and they went and did it anyway.

There's concrete there, there's mercury.

It's like a flame.

It was a bit scary that they couldn't control the situation.

They didn't know how much radiation we had.

Radiation as an intangible, odourless, potentially lethal force

is the invisible enemy.

The most frightening and lethal form of radiation is gamma rays,

which will pass straight through the body like a fusillade of machine gun bullets,

tearing apart the body at the cellular level, damaging DNA as it goes.

Those can cause fatal injuries, even from a very great distance,

and cannot be stopped by anything short of thick sheets of lead

or massive concrete blocks.

In the immediate aftermath of the accident,

pieces of the reactor itself were emitting fields of radiation

of thousands of roentgen an hour,

enough to cause a fatal dose to anyone who stood nearby

for a matter of minutes.

There were no suits, nothing.

We saw the pieces of flame.

I went to the roof of the air-raid shelter.

I saw the whole roof in holes.

It was hit, and that's how the radiation went in.

They were there armed with water and foam,

which is what you would bring to an industrial fire.

It was dark.

There was smoke.

Eyes of fire.

Broken, broken.

The boys were beaten up.

There was nothing to talk about.

You couldn't see who was what.

It was scary. Can you tell us about it?

Oh, how scary it was!

I was running.

I had a different idea.

They were shouting,

Where are the sleeves?

No, it was scary.

Give me the sleeves.

Give me the water.

How scary it was!

It was as if they were beating me up.

The fields of radiation on the roofs of the reactor buildings

were so intense that almost immediately

some members of the fire crews came down

with symptoms of acute radiation syndrome

and were taken from the scene already vomiting.

I said, I'm not feeling well.

They said, go down.

I said, go down one by one.

They said, come back soon.

People in the control room

still didn't really fully understand

exactly what had happened.

Even hours after the explosion had taken place.

Dyatlov came,

from another bypass.

He said calmly,

we need to send the rest.

Then Dyatlov came

and saw me again.

I said,

send the rest to the control room.

About 20 minutes later,

the main engineer of the plant came

and demanded that they

send the water to the reactor.

The reactor was not receiving any cooling water.

That would cause a reactor meltdown.

So they became fixated at that point

on getting water into the reactor.

But the gate valves on the cooling system

had to be turned manually.

Akimov and Tatunov left the control room

and went out to try to open valves

and establish new ways of cooling the reactor.

And they spent a long time there

in enormous fields of gamma radiation.

What they didn't realize was that

opening the valves was a complete waste of time.

Unfortunately, the reactor was already destroyed

and there was nothing they could have done

that would have helped.

Akimov and Tatunov

both received lethal doses of radiation.

They died a few weeks later.

They gave their lives in the effort

to try to do what they could.

I think that if Dyatlov hadn't sent me,

I would have had the same fate.

That's why I can say that Dyatlov saved my life.

On the morning of April 26,

the fire in the roof of the reactor building

had been extinguished.

The firefighters saved Reactor Building 3

and the rest of the complex.

I have nothing but admiration for these firefighters,

many of whom died in the days and weeks to come.

Among the firefighters who went to the roof of Unit 3,

several received lethal doses of radiation.

When the firefighters were there,

they were like baked meat.

The firemen managed to extinguish everything

that they found burning on the roofs of the reactor building

and in the grounds.

But something still remained on fire.

The fire in the reactor core was not out

and that was a much hotter fire

and much more difficult to deal with.

All this radioactive material is coming up in the plumes of smoke

where it can be transported around the site

and ultimately to other countries

and other places around the world.

You're talking about an unprecedented release of radiation

straight up into the air.

Every minute, every hour,

it was still raining down

huge amounts of radioactive particles.

The closest town was Pripyat,

three kilometers from the Chernobyl power plant itself.

There were no official announcements that morning

notifying anybody that an accident had taken place.

People went about their business in Pripyat

just as they always would on a fine spring morning.

No one was telling them that they were in mortal danger.

Our apartment was two kilometers from the power plant,

so it was very close.

In 1986, I was eight years old.

Pripyat was built to serve the power plant.

It was a happy city, I would say.

Many children, many flowers.

They planted lots of roses.

I was photographed in front of them for the town brochure.