The Radioactive Meat Train: 5 Chernobyl Secrets They Tried to Bury

In the days following the Chernobyl disaster, a secret mission unfolded high above the radioactive wreckage. Soviet TU-16 bombers, typically used for long-range military strikes, took to the skies with a new, urgent task: creating rain.

The operation was led by Yuri Izrael, head of the Soviet State Committee of Hydrometeorology. Two days after Reactor 4 exploded, a classified map arrived on his desk. It showed the radioactive cloud drifting towards Moscow.

With millions of lives at stake and the city preparing for the annual May Day parade in Red Square, an event that could not be canceled for fear of embarrassing the Soviet government, Izrael issued a fateful order: make it rain before the toxic clouds reached the capital.

Just 48 hours after the explosion of Reactor 4, the operation began. Artillery shells filled with silver iodide were loaded into TU-16 bombers at a Moscow airbase, and Soviet pilots set out to intercept the radioactive clouds.

The pilots initially circled the burning reactor within a six-mile radius, but the wind continually pushed the radioactive plume farther out, forcing the crews to follow the black clouds for hundreds of miles. As they intercepted the clouds, they released the silver iodide, which acted like ice crystals, causing water vapor to condense and fall as rain.

Villagers in the town of Narowlya, just 30 miles north of Chernobyl, watched in confusion as the sky filled with strange yellow and gray contrails. By 8 p.m., the clouds erupted into a deluge. Thunder rolled across the land, and black rain poured down in torrents, scouring radioactive particles from the air and sending them into the soil...