Midnight in Chernobyl  Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham (2019 nonfiction)

Reactor Unit Four of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station blew up in an explosion in the early morning hours on April 26, 1986, a catastrophic event that was to change the lives of tens of thousands of people in Eastern Europe, Ukraine and the USSR. It was also to forever change the world’s view of the use and dangers of nuclear power, of the horrors of radiation sickness, and begin to expose the corrupt, secretive, state-controlled nuclear power and political system of the then Soviet Union. Alan Higginbotham, in a totally engaging (need one say frightening?) account of the events leading up to the explosions, fires and dispersal of a radioactive cloud over eastern Europe, has written a superb book. He brings an exhaustively researched story of the design and development of the power unit, the roles of the engineers and technicians in starting and then desperately trying to contain the collapse of the reactor, the heroic attempts to put out the fires and radioactive plumes of smoke and debris, and the decade’s long efforts of the Soviet government to conceal the effects of the explosion. When this book was published it was greeted with enthusiastic reviews from all the major book review sources: “a masterpiece of reporting and storytelling”; "superb, enthralling and necessarily terrifying”; "top-notch historical narrative”; "a stunningly detailed account”; "wonderful and chilling”. How could one not put this book near the top of one’s “to read” list? Highly recommended.

 

Reviewed by Ned Lyke

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