What Chershnev didn’t know in the early hours of the morning of April 30, 1986, was that a radioactive cloud had already caught up with them and blanketed the city on the eve of its annual May Day festivities. But there was no bypass road at the time - and orders were orders.
The measuring device was sounding off loudly on that night 33 years ago, not because of the convoy’s cargo - 30 antiaircraft missiles, three of them tipped with nuclear warheads - but because of where and when the post-midnight parade had kicked off: at the Chernobyl air defense missile base just three days after the explosion of a reactor at the adjacent Chernobyl nuclear power plant that had sent enough radioactivity spewing into the air that it at one point had the potential of poisoning much of Eastern Europe.Ĭhershnev knew that the missiles, the trucks and his crew were badly contaminated and that they should not have been ordered to drive through a city of more than 2 million people. Viktor Chershnev led a convoy of 30 military trucks through the center of sleeping Kiev. Seated in a jeep and clutching a screeching Geiger counter, Lt.