Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster
by Adam Higginbotham
View on GoodreadsHigginbotham's reconstruction of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster — the reactor's design flaws, the night of the explosion, the heroic and reluctant containment, and the Soviet system's catastrophic information management — written with the cooperation of many of the surviving participants.
Core ideas
- The RBMK reactor design had a positive-void coefficient at low power — a flaw the Soviet nuclear bureaucracy knew about, classified, and didn't fix — that made the disaster possible from a routine test gone wrong.
- The information-management failure was as consequential as the physical accident: the days-long denial cost lives in the immediate region and damaged the Soviet state's credibility in ways that contributed to its collapse over the next five years.
- The liquidators' story is the book's emotional spine — the firefighters, soldiers, miners, and helicopter pilots who absorbed lethal doses to contain the reactor are reconstructed as named individuals rather than statistics.
Published2019
Pages538
ISBN9781501134616
ReadNov 2024
