Top 60 Adam Higginbotham Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “For the first time, Soviet scientists admitted that 17.5 million people, including 2.5 million children under seven, had lived in the most seriously contaminated areas of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia at the time of the disaster. Of these, 696,000 had been examined by Soviet medical authorities by the end of 1986. Yet the official tally of deaths ascribed to the disaster to date remained the same as that announced the previous year: 31.”

— Adam Higginbotham

2. “Yet the economists in Moscow had no reliable index of what was going on in the vast empire they notionally maintained; the false accounting was so endemic that at one point the KGB resorted to turning the cameras of its spy satellites onto Soviet Uzbekistan in an attempt to gather accurate information about the state’s own cotton harvest.”

— Adam Higginbotham

3. “The CIA resorted to sending high-altitude U-2 spy planes to photograph the area. It was on the second of these missions, in May 1960, that Francis Gary Powers’s aircraft was shot down by a Soviet SA-2 surface-to-air missile, in what became one of the defining events of the Cold War. Although.”

— Adam Higginbotham

4. “Legasov didn’t want to listen. He insisted that they had to take immediate action – whether it was effective or not. “People won’t understand if we do nothing,” Legasov said. “We have to be seen to be doing something.”

— Adam Higginbotham

5. “This positive void coefficient remained a fatal defect at the heart of Atom Mirny-1 and overshadowed the operation of every Soviet water-graphite reactor that followed.”

— Adam Higginbotham

6. “Adding to or removing neutrons from the nucleus of a stable atom results in an unstable isotope.”

— Adam Higginbotham

7. “Nor did mortal man escape retribution for accepting Prometheus’s gift. To him, Zeus sent Pandora, the first woman, bearing a box that, once opened, unleashed evils that could never again be contained.”

— Adam Higginbotham

8. “The humiliation of enduring an expletive-spattered dressing-down delivered at screaming pitch was a ritual repeated daily in offices everywhere. It engendered a top-down culture of toadying yes-men who learned to anticipate the whims of their superiors and agree with whatever they said, while threatening their own underlings. When the boss put his own proposals to the vote, he could reasonably expect them to be carried unanimously every time, a triumph of brute force over reason.”

— Adam Higginbotham

9. “Brazil nuts, with a thousand times the average concentration of radium of any organic product, are the world’s most radioactive food.”

— Adam Higginbotham

10. “Maria Protsenko, who had maps of the city but no means to copy them. As photocopiers could be used to create samizdat materials, access to the few in the USSR was controlled tightly by the KGB.”

— Adam Higginbotham

11. “If we survive until the morning, we’ll live forever.”

— Adam Higginbotham

12. “Brobdingnagian.”

— Adam Higginbotham

13. “Alexander Borovoi continued to oversee the exploration and monitoring inside the Sarcophagus for almost twenty years after the accident and eventually located all but 5 percent of the missing fuel inside the building.”

— Adam Higginbotham

14. “But eighteen seconds is a long time in neutron physics – and an eternity in a nuclear reactor with a high positive void coefficient.”

— Adam Higginbotham

15. “They began using gamma rays to extend the shelf life of chicken and strawberries, they built mobile nuclear reactors mounted on tank treads or designed to float around the Arctic, and, like their US counterparts, they designed atomic-powered aircraft. But.”

— Adam Higginbotham

16. “Yesli hochesh byt’ otsom, zakrivay yaitso svintsom.”

— Adam Higginbotham

17. “Only when he showed her the dark specks of graphite on the leaves of her strawberry plants did she agree to return home.”

— Adam Higginbotham

18. “At home in Tashkent, where she lived with one of her three younger children, Brukhanov’s elderly mother was watching TV when the news broke.41 When she learned of her eldest son’s downfall, she staggered out of her apartment and into the street, where she suffered a heart attack and died.”

— Adam Higginbotham

19. “Medvedev’s Chernobyl Notebook was explosive. It depicted Viktor Brukhanov as a spineless fool, the mandarins of the Soviet nuclear industry as callous and incompetent, and showed Scherbina unnecessarily delaying the evacuation of the doomed atomgrad.”

— Adam Higginbotham

20. “Vitali Fedorovich,” Scherbitsky began, and Sklyarov braced himself. It was always a bad sign when the First Secretary used your patronymic. “You need to go there yourself.” Sklyarov, who had almost no interest in seeing a blazing nuclear plant at close quarters, tried to object. “The station is under the supervision of Moscow. It doesn’t belong to us,” he said. “The station might not be Ukrainian,” Scherbitsky replied, “but the land and the people are.”

— Adam Higginbotham

21. “Ideally, every single fission reaction should trigger just one more fission in a neighboring atom, so that each successive generation of neutrons contains exactly the same number as the one before, and the reactor remains in the same critical state.”

— Adam Higginbotham

22. “The accident and the government’s inability to protect the population from its consequences finally shattered the illusion that the USSR was a global superpower armed with technology that led the world.”

— Adam Higginbotham

23. “The work fell to military engineers and civil defense and chemical warfare troops under the command of the Soviet General Staff, many of them young conscripts. It was chaotic.”

— Adam Higginbotham

24. “At the trial, he had admitted his culpability as a manager for what had happened simply because that was his job. “The director has primary responsibility for everything that’s happening at the plant and with the staff. So I had to.”

— Adam Higginbotham

25. “More than eighty years later, Curie’s laboratory notes remain so radioactive that they are kept in a lead-lined box.”

— Adam Higginbotham

26. “At first, Captain Zborovsky wasn’t afraid of what lay ahead.18 After all, he thought, his commanders would never have given him an assignment that they knew was certain to kill him. Only when he had entered the plant did he begin to comprehend the threat he faced. The staff there had already seen many of their friends flown out for treatment in the special clinic in Moscow, and they looked at him with the pity reserved for a condemned man.”

— Adam Higginbotham

27. “The crews flew from dawn to dusk every day and at night returned to their airfield in Chernigov to decontaminate their machines, discard their uniforms, and scrub radioactive dust from their bodies in a sauna. But it proved almost impossible to entirely remove the radiation from the helicopters, and when they returned each morning to begin a new mission, the airmen found the grass beneath their parked aircraft had turned yellow overnight.”

— Adam Higginbotham

28. “He described the enduring costs of the accident, the 115,000 people he said would never return to their homes in the Exclusion Zone, the 2.5 million more living on land contaminated by radionuclides, and the hundreds of thousands of disabled Chernobyltsi who continued to require support from the state and society.”

— Adam Higginbotham

29. “The radiometers capable of taking higher readings remained locked in a safe and could not be released without orders from above.”

— Adam Higginbotham

30. “Exploring the banquet hall downstairs, the two men had discovered a mysterious black carpet stretching from wall to wall, and it was only when the radioman had begun to cross it, sweltering in his rubber chemical protection suit, his boots crunching beneath him, that they realized the floor was covered with thousands of dozing flies, apparently intoxicated by radiation.”

— Adam Higginbotham

31. “Aleksandrov also saved money by dispensing with the containment building, the thick concrete dome built around almost every reactor in the West, intended to prevent radioactive contamination escaping from the plant in the event of a serious accident – but which, because the RBMK was so enormous, would have doubled the cost of building each unit.”

— Adam Higginbotham

32. “As the Era of Stagnation began, the Soviet scientific establishment lavished resources on the immediate priorities of the state – space exploration, water diversion, nuclear power – while emergent technologies, including computer science, genetics, and fiber optics, fell behind.”

— Adam Higginbotham

33. “A neutron pulse surged through the dying reactor, and thermal power peaked at more than 12 billion watts.”

— Adam Higginbotham

34. “They lined the floor of the cabins with the four- and five-millimeter-thick sheets and filled the wells of their seats – designed to accommodate parachute packs – from the bags of shot. They even had a rhyme about it: Yesli hochesh byt’ otsom, zakrivay yaitso svintsom. “If you want to be a dad, cover your balls in lead.”

— Adam Higginbotham

35. “So, to save time, Sredmash decided to skip the prototype stage entirely: the quickest way to find out how the new reactors would work in industrial electricity generation would be to put them directly into mass production.”

— Adam Higginbotham

36. “They worked on their knees, in a widening pond of gamma-emitting water. The two-fingered rubber mittens of their L-1 suits were clumsy and hot; they threw them off and used their bare hands. An hour later, the task complete, the men retired, exhausted, with an odd taste of sour apples in their mouths.”

— Adam Higginbotham

37. “The scale of the structure dwarfed the men and machines working in its shadow, and neither could remain near it for long. If brought too close, the engines of the concrete pumps guttered and died, and the dials of the dosimetrists’ equipment went haywire, like compass needles in a magnetic field.25 It was a phenomenon the experts could never satisfactorily explain.”

— Adam Higginbotham

38. “Rather than dedicated emergency motors, the system was driven by the same electric servos that moved the manual reactor control rods, used by the operators to manage reactor power during normal operation.”

— Adam Higginbotham

39. “Despite the growing atmosphere of alarm among the physicists at the burning reactor, the government commission and the Politburo remained determined to conceal the news of a possible meltdown from the world beyond the thirty-kilometer zone.”

— Adam Higginbotham

40. “Steam pressure inside the sealed reactor space rose exponentially – eight atmospheres in a second – heaving Elena, the two-thousand-tonne concrete-and-steel upper biological shield, clear of its mountings and.”

— Adam Higginbotham

41. “The report made it clear that accidents were not merely possible under rare and improbable conditions but also likely in the course of everyday operation.”

— Adam Higginbotham

42. “Even the most gentle summer breeze recirculated dust carrying alpha- and beta-emitting particles into the air. Every rain shower washed radiation from the clouds and flushed more long-lived nuclear isotopes into the ponds and streams.”

— Adam Higginbotham

43. “The granite used to build the US Capitol is so radioactive that the building would fail federal safety codes regulating nuclear power plants.”

— Adam Higginbotham

44. “IAEA experts revealed at last the true magnitude of the technical cover-up surrounding the causes of the disaster: the long history of previous RBMK accidents, the dangerous design of the reactor, its instability, and the way its operators had been misled about its behavior. In.”

— Adam Higginbotham

45. “A fatal dose of radiation is estimated at around 500 rem – roentgen equivalent man – or the amount absorbed by the average human body when exposed to a field of 500 roentgen per hour for sixty minutes. In some places on the roof of Unit Three, lumps of uranium fuel and graphite were emitting gamma and neutron radiation at a rate of 3,000 roentgen an hour. In others, levels may have reached more than 8,000 roentgen an hour: there, a man would absorb a lethal dose in less than four minutes.”

— Adam Higginbotham

46. “Unlike thermal burns caused by heat alone, which heal slowly over time, radiation burns grow gradually worse – so their external beta burns expanded outward in waves from wherever radioactive material had touched them and ate into the tissue below.”

— Adam Higginbotham

47. “The capital was spared. But three hundred kilometers to the south, peasants watched as hundreds of square kilometers of fertile farmland in Belarus were lashed with black rain.”

— Adam Higginbotham

48. “But of the dozens of dangerous incidents that occurred inside Soviet nuclear facilities over the decades that followed, not one was ever mentioned to the IAEA. For almost thirty years, both the Soviet public and the world at large were encouraged to believe that the USSR operated the safest nuclear industry in the world. The cost of maintaining this illusion had been high.”

— Adam Higginbotham

49. “She roamed the streets with a ruler, checking on the quality of the concrete paneling in new apartment buildings. She chastised the construction workers for shoddy.”

— Adam Higginbotham

50. “The RBMK was so large that reactivity in one area of the core often had only a loose relationship to that in another. The operators had to control it as if it were not a single unit but several separate reactors in one.”

— Adam Higginbotham