Tv will continue to bring you new programs and publishing news. You can also watch all the past programs anytime at booktv. Org. Good afternoon everyone and if youve been with us the previous sessions,welcome back but if youre joining us for the first time , please welcome to North University 20 20 military writers symposium on weapon icing agent tactics with new implications. Id like to welcome you to our campus in our beautiful state and the only regret we have is that youre not able to be with us or in person to enjoy vermont university. Im author travis noris and i have the privilege of being a military symposium executive director and also director of the houston war center and also for everyone this issue is part of a program with george Universities Center for global resilience and security which is part of a larger initiative, the Environmental Security initiative. Where thrilled you are joining us today for a special presentation to award Adam Higginbotham that 20 20 military writers award. Id like to mention details before i introduce them and we present the award. For those of you that are not familiar with the kobe award or for those of you that are weve created a special video to provide context and background of the awards previous recipients and we ask that you go to our website, the link to the website has been pushed out via chat and you can just take acouple minutes to watch the video. It situates the prominence of the award so take a few minutes to watch that. We would also like to ask if you go to the schedule page on the military writers symposium website you will see that we have given and introduction to the military writers symposium. It will introduce you to the symposium and its background and why we are doing some of the things we are doing right now , this year. As you can imagine, this is our inaugural event virtually. For 25 years weve been praying and authors to our campus. This is our first time doing it virtually and this is also the first time weve partnered with north well. If you dont go to the military writers symposium website theres an icon you can select so you can receive a certificate for the article and its free this year so if youre interested in engaging on the topic even further sign up and you can interact with worldclass scholars and other peers that are interested in this particular subject. If you havent gone to the military writers symposium associates id like tosuggest that you rejoin. There are no fees other than an expectation you partner with us and help us grow and take it to higher horizons, youll find a newsreader and a letter from our chairman is also on our webpage so please take some time to look at these other features because they are part of the symposium. Its what has been brought to you through video and web design. So were here to present a special award. And adam, its such a pleasure to have you and us here at the university and we are thrilled to give you this years 20 20 awardfor our recipient. Your book has rave reviews and ill read some of those in the second but i want to provide a little bit of background for those that may not be familiar with your excellent book, midnight in share noble. Adam has a background in writing narrative nonfiction and hes been a feature writer and appeared in magazines which include the new yorker , wired, smithsonian and New York Times magazine and many of his stories have been developed for film and for television and i also would probably like to sit down and see that midnight in share noble is acandidate for that as well, for a feature. Midnight in chernobyl the untold story of the worlds greatest Nuclear Disaster was published in the United States by simon and schuster in 2019 and is an international bestseller. Its been translated into 21 different languages. Its named one of the New York Times books of the year and awarded the 20 20 Andrew Carnegie medal for accidents in nonfiction and i want to read a couple of quotes. Some of adams fears and other authors that show, midnight in share noble isa masterpiece of reporting and storytelling. It unlocks a world thats impossible to penetrate. Then a quote from the New York Times, super , enthralling and necessary terrifying. The accident unfolds with a cold inevitability. Amid rich reporting and scrupulous analysis, major themes emerge. Hes working on a new book about the disaster of the Space Shuttle 1986 challenger disaster and we look forward to that being released but it is my pleasure and honor to award of course, we would be in front of a large audience and we would bring you to the stage and all us administrators and president s would be here but we would like to just award you a 2020 award winner recipient, the unique nexus of the environment, a difficult story to tell and also as it relates to this Environmental Security so adam, its our pleasure to congratulate you and thank you once again for this excellent work in eliminating such an important topic. Where thrilled to know that you can translate it to so many different languages and its what this symposiumis all about. We are thrilled that your this years kobe award recipient. Thank you so much for the award and im very grateful to you and the justice department. [inaudible] the first book is an ascension so hes a great field. Now i want to give this presentation aboutthe book. Although i spent five years working exclusively on the project , reporting on the disaster that overtook the new sharenoble plant in 1986 , it stretches back much further. When i first traveled 14 years ago in 2006, at that point the share noble disaster hard facts of that would have happened partly because of its confusion and propaganda. Share noble also is etched permanently into history and i want to get the truth of what really happened to tell the story. In trying to reconstruct the events that destroyed the reactor, i was first inspired by reading a night to remember, also a brilliant account of the sinking of the titanic. They interviewed scores of survivors for the sinking and i wanted to do the same thing for the share noble disaster for the second half of the 20th century and write it like a history book but also a gripping narrative that recreates a minute tominute. It was important for me to tell the full story, not just what happened in the accident and beyond but to discover what theirlives were like before the explosion. And what they lost. When i first began meeting eyewitnesses i began to realize how my own conception of life and the soviet union had been colored by western propaganda. This is all throughout victims of the socialist experiment but individuals whose hopes and aspirations had been much like mine. Today should not share noble is synonymous with catastrophe but before the accident, that share noble plant was one of the jewelsof in the crown of the soviet nuclear industry. [inaudible] it was a prize for workers throughout the ussr. Many were specialists among the best in their field. Part of the appeal of working at share noble was a life impervious to house the technicians and their families. It was filled with spacious facilities and surrounded by white sand beaches on the banks of the river. The director made sure to satisfy the ussr, the shop of furniture and fresh vegetables that were hard to find even here amidst lamb, cucumber and even fresh tomatoes. There was a scuba diving club, a beauty parlor, i got club and discos and live music on the weekends. The public spaces were filled with culture and accelerating science and technology in the design ofthe true workers paradise of the future. But 1986 45,000 citizens were overwhelmingly young. The average age of the population was 26. The third of them were children. This on the left is alexander you should go, and engineer who had worked on the night of the accident and his wife natalia. The couple met with schoolchildren and married at southern university. This picture was taken on the night of alexanders 24th birthday before the accident. This is natalia and here he is in 1986. This on the far left is toptenov when they were both students studying nuclear engineering. To top it off the operator was pulling duty in the control room the night of the accident. The more i thought of the ussr i became involved in a scene only through the lens of cold war but i remain fascinated by the scale and contradiction of the soviet experiment. Now as i had the opportunity to revisit the share noble story from the recollections of those who lived it i began to recreate the Twilight Years of the soviet union on the page through the familiar landscape functionaries but how it really was. This was a strange filtering world of People Living beneath the earth and et al. Totalitarian system for the same wings and designs of people anywhereelse. I juggled the responsibilities of careers and family, [inaudible] this is a story populated by technicians and soldiers and apparatchiks, construction workers and newspaper reporters. [inaudible] they also listen to soviet rock music. They drank imported bottles and mustered up the latest in soviet manufacturing achieving weapons available on the black market. The city was part of a sprawling polyglot entire encompassing 100 street methodologies and languages from the ukraine to the coast and the soviet far east. One of the most fascinating characteristics was this one, standing in the center. Maria proschenko, brought back into the ussr by none other two razor alone in soviet territory. It was because of her chinese birth, eventually appointed the chief architect. By the time of the accident, she was overseeing an expanse of the city to accommodate population of 200,000 people in what was banned as the nuclear largest nuclearenergy complex in the world. This in the center is his exwife valentina, gathering mushrooms in the woods in 1980. He was 34 when he was given a job at the share noble station and arrived with nothing more than a snowcovered field and ariver in western ukraine. For the accident he had celebrated his 50th birthday and by then spent his entire professional life in the service of the communist party. Within the construction the club was three kilometers away. [inaudible] this picture was taken in the early 1980s, the western and where you can see renters and number four. By this time the industry had become sworn to secrecy. [inaudible] although probably not to hisface. He oversaw the soviet Weapons Program but also the most important area of the civilian Nuclear Power industry. The head of the soviet industry of Atomic Energy anatoly alexandra with is credited with use of the station. He before the accident both knew the design had numerous false. But they cover them up the little to rectify them and informed the men who operated reactions of the scale and significance. Unit four of the chapter came online at the end of 1983. By then plans were underway to build another station creating giant reactor 12,000 megawatt power. They intended chernobyl to become part of a network of atomic paths which would spread across the western part of the ussr by the end of the century. The operators in the control room at chernobyl and already discovered for themselves the army was not the price of technology but alexandra and spassky had told everyone. The military reactors. [inaudible] was inherently unstable and the design that they intended to build had only exacerbated these problems. The list of defaults was long and torturous ranging from those caused by the director to instrumentation failures at both share noble and emergency control room design in other circumstances that meant that reactor power can increase instead of fall as it was intended to. Taken individually none of the many faults would happen except in the unlikely event the operators would line up every single one of the false in a disastrous fall and then take a final initiating step by shutting the reactor down using the emergency control. This is exactly what happened in reactor number four at share noble early in the morning of april 26 1986. During the course of the longdelayed safety step the Chain Reaction began to run out of control and toptenov pressed the emergency shutdown resulting in an explosion that totally destroyed the reactor and in the control room he had no idea what had happened and was skeptical of the scale of the disaster unfolding even as employees elsewhere were involved in chaos. I like to read a book describing what that was like. Upstairs inside the window at the engineers room on level xii. 5, he was engulfed in the steamand darkness. He groped along his telephone connecting him with control room for. Control room three ran through with the command. You should go gather the stretcher but before he had breached the control room he was stopped and his close blackened, hisface bloodied and unrecognizable. Only then did yushenko realize it was his friend. He said he had come from the section and therewere other still there. Yushenko came across a second operator on the other side of the wreckage unable to stand a filthy wet and grotesquely scolded. He was quivering with shock but waived yushenko away. I will write. Then yushenko is colleague was recognizable, sent to control room number four to manually do the task of the highpressure cooling system and fill the reactor core with water. That would require at least two men and you should go went away to get help. They immediately found themselves in water. The door was jammed shut but the two men limped inside. Everything was in ruins. The water tanks had been torn apart by cargo and the wreckage where the walls and ceiling should have been they could see only stars. They were staring into empty space, the bowels of the station in moonlight. The two men turned into the corridor and ran into the night, straddling the more than 15 feet of the reactor, you reach an and alexandra were one of the first to comprehend what hadhappened to unit four. It was a terrifying, apocalyptic site. The righthand walls have been demolished by the force of the explosion. The floor had simply disappeared and the water tanks on circulation pumps battled in the air. Yushenko and his friend were certainly dead but felt like he had been standing beneath a steaming pile of rubble from the seventh ends of the table, swaying on everything they touched, showering the wreckage withsparks. And from somewhere on the tangled mass of shattered concrete, from unit four where the reactor was supposed to be, Alexander Yushenko could see something, a pillar of blue white right white light disappearing. Encircled by a flickering colors and flames in the burning building and superheated chunks of metal and phosphorescence transfixed him for a few seconds. And now was in immediate danger, created by the radioactive air within unshielded Nuclear Reactor into the atmosphere. Yushenko described the scene to me when i visited him at home and was still alive to talkabout it 20 years later. By then he had agreed to meet me. [inaudible] he know nothing of its involvement and he remained anxious to make sure they didnt find out about it which is why it wasundertaken in his living room. Others i would meet over the years were also bound by silence they had taken to an empire which had ceased to exist so i can campaign for soviet start, they subjected me to hours of bullying both in terms of our conversation before agreeing to the restriction. But many including former kgb officers, scientists were happy to discuss the accident. Having remained silent for years for fear of consequences in the dark future of the soviet state revealed everything they knew and disclosed documents, notebooks and metals. This is the first picture taken of reactor for after the explosion from a helicopter hovering over the scene on the afternoon of april 27, 1986. The explosion inspired a toxic radiation cloud in the atmosphere and the remainder of the reactor had become radioactive. A fire that no one in the world knew had to prevent. The directors initially told those in moscow the situation was under control and an even as they began to realize reactors were far worse. The soviet government was determined to keep it a secret from the outside world. The government arrived at control of the project but refused to sanction an evacuation forfear of revealing what had happened. Of the citizens were given no information, instead the roadblocks were thrown. Meanwhile, soviet air force helicopter pilots were drafted into the boron clay and led into the open mouth of the reactor in a desperate bid to put out the graphite fire and sort out the nuclear fuelthat remain inside. They were met by colonel boris netzer off, who had served in syria. [inaudible] in the ukrainian city of the trust where he was reading poetry. By then, he had had surgery for cataracts and induced viral radiation exposure. He had written his memoirs and was still flying jets at the age of 79. He had was finally enhanced over the city at 1 10 pm on sunday afternoon. Almost 36 hours had passed and more than 1200 had been gathered to speed their escape. The operators were coordinated by the architect without oversee the construction. She sat on the bridge at the mouth of a tim like this one and instructed them the drivers on where to meet their pickups. They had three hours to remove 27,500 people from the city. Only important documents, they were expected to believe they would be gone for three days and would soonreturn. By the morning of november 28, it was already clear to the members of the government that they were facing a catastrophe on a global scale. In moscow, a set part telling Mikhail Gorbachev and emergency meeting. He would face an unexpected test of the government agreed to the 27 congress of the soviet union and then was nothing more than a slogan. Gorbachev was in a tenuous position. He was vulnerable to being overwhelmingly conservative apparatchiks if they thought to you was too much of a reformer. To this day gorbachev says he insisted on openness about the accident from the outset but to begin with, lacked adequate information to remain with the public. Even if this is true, and this isnt taken, did not reflect any wish to come clean about what hadhappened that share noble. The soviet authorities continue to deny any knowledge of an accident until late last night and to do nothing to stop the spread of radiation and by then, almost all knew something terrible had happened. The invisible plume of radiation that began rising from the rooms in the early hours of saturday morning took slowly off and left across continental europe. By sunday had arrived in denmark where its presence