Currently Reading: Midnight in Chernobyl and The Radium Girls

Sometimes, when I read nonfiction history – particularly well-known history – I find myself sort of wishing that I didn’t know how badly the story is going to turn out for various people or places.  It’s hard not to wish there was some way to sort of tap the people on the shoulder and tell them not to go or stay or do whatever they’re about to do.  The last two books I read were heavy on this particular sense.

In a weird sort of reading twist, I wound up reading both Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster (Adam Higgenbotham) and The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women (Kate Moore) within a couple weeks of one another.  Both were excellent, well-researched, and truly fascinating – though, fair warning, also pretty gruesome at times.

While Chernobyl has become sort of shorthand for nuclear disaster and I knew from taking some Russian and Eastern European history classes in college (the Chernobyl power plant is located in what is now Ukraine) that what had happened was terrible, I never really appreciated the true impact of the meltdown.  Higgenbotham’s book walks through the major design flaw in the Soviet RBMK nuclear reactors of the time, the technicians and workers on duty at the time of the disastrous test, and then, of course, the aftermath, including the Soviet government reaction.  As someone who grew up as the USSR was crumbling (the Berlin Wall fell when I was 7) and who often heard Mikhail Gorbachev hailed as a champion of openness, Higgenbotham’s dissection of how much cover-up was done by Gorbachev’s government in the wake of Chernobyl was particularly eye-opening.

I was surprised at how well Higgenbotham managed to translate complex nuclear concepts into something even a very non-engineering/physics person could reasonably understand.  He definitely describes the scenes vividly – the descriptions of the incredibly radioactive chunks of graphite from control rods being thrown everywhere around the plant and people touching these as well as the meltdown of the core of the reactor are evocative and horrifying.  I also hadn’t realized that Chernobyl had continued to produce electricity until 2000 when the final reactor was turned off and the plant decommissioned.

The Radium Girls was no less interesting.  A biography of the women employed by two plants from 1917 to the 1930s who were hired to paint glowing dials on clock and watch faces, many of the women eventually suffered extreme health complications and death from radium poisoning.  Women were taught to put the brushes they used to paint the dials in their mouths to get the point fine enough to do the detail work on the clock and watch faces, which meant they absorbed a considerable amount of radium through just their daily work.  I found myself (with a modern appreciation for the dangers of radium) blanching when I read accounts of how women would wear their best dresses to the factory so that the dresses would get coated with radium dust and literally glow during evenings out.

Unfortunately, radium tends to collect in the bones for a variety of horrifying effects, ranging from bones riddled with holes, bone marrow that no longer produced blood cells correctly, sarcomas, and terrible dental abscesses.  As well, infertility, miscarriage, and stillbirth were also ways the radium girls suffered.  I remember reading at one point about a tumor that had grown to 45 cm, double checking because 45 cm?!  I could barely imagine it, but I had, alas, read it correctly.

Despite the fact that factory owners deliberately buried or manufactured evidence when suspicions began to mount that the radium paint was toxic, laws were not in the workers’ favor, and the women’s illnesses were dismissed through judgmental (and incorrect) diagnoses such as syphilis, a group of five women led by Grace Fryer in New Jersey were able to bring a lawsuit that proved the first crack in the dam to bringing the truth to light.  A lawsuit by the Illinois women, led by Catherine Wolfe Donohue (fired after many years of service because she was beginning to limp and the company perceived this as potentially frightening to the other women who were starting to worry about radium poisoning) and attorney Leonard Grossman finally prevailed in 1939 after years of fighting all the way up to the US Supreme Court.  These cases helped form the basis for occupational protection laws.  The suffering of the radium girls was enormous, the corporate malfeasance immense, and I was very struck by how hard these courageous women fought to make sure others would not face their fate.

Both of these were excellent, though I probably wouldn’t read them back to back again.