Midnight in Chernobyl
The 25th of April, 1986, at Chernobyl, Ukraine, was a watershed moment in world history. The accident altered not just the world's perspective of nuclear power and the science that gave rise to it, but also our knowledge of the planet's delicate ecology. With images of abandoned homes and playgrounds beyond the 30-kilometer Exclusion Zone's barbed wire, rusting graveyards of contaminated trucks and helicopters, and farmland lashed with black rain, the event cemented the notion of radiation as an invisible killer for all time.
Chernobyl was also a pivotal event in the demise of the Soviet Union and, with it, the United States' Cold War success. It was a political and financial disaster for Moscow, as well as an environmental and scientific disaster. With a total cost of 18 billion rubles—equivalent to $18 billion at the time—Chernobyl bankrupted an already teetering economy and revealed to its people a state founded on falsehoods.
The complete tale of what happened that night in the control room of V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant Reactor No.4 has never been told—until now. Journalist Adam Higginbotham tells the full dramatic story, including Alexander Akimov and Anatoli Dyatlov, who represented the best and worst of Soviet life; denizens of a vanished world of secret policemen, internal passports, food lines, and heroic self-sacrifice for the Motherland, through two decades of reporting, new archival information, and firsthand interviews with witnesses. Midnight in Chernobyl, an award-winning nonfiction novel that reads like a science fiction novel, depicts not only the final epic struggle of a dying empire, but also the story of individual heroism and desperate, ingenious technical improvisation joining forces against a new type of enemy.
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