gilda_elise

From journalist Adam Higginbotham, the New York Times bestselling “account that reads almost like the script for a movie” (The Wall Street Journal)—a powerful investigation into Chernobyl and how propaganda, secrecy, and myth have obscured the true story of one of the history’s worst nuclear disasters.

Early in the morning of April 26, 1986, Reactor Number Four of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station exploded, triggering one of the twentieth century’s greatest disasters. In the thirty years since then, Chernobyl has become lodged in the collective nightmares of the world: shorthand for the spectral horrors of radiation poisoning, for a dangerous technology slipping its leash, for ecological fragility, and for what can happen when a dishonest and careless state endangers its citizens and the entire world. But the real story of the accident, clouded from the beginning by secrecy, propaganda, and misinformation, has long remained in dispute.

Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews conducted over the course of more than ten years, as well as letters, unpublished memoirs, and documents from recently-declassified archives, Adam Higginbotham brings the disaster to life through the eyes of the men and women who witnessed it firsthand. The result is a “riveting, deeply reported reconstruction” (Los Angeles Times) and a definitive account of an event that changed history: a story that is more complex, more human, and more terrifying than the Soviet myth.

“The most complete and compelling history yet” (The Christian Science Monitor), Higginbotham’s “superb, enthralling, and necessarily terrifying...extraordinary” (The New York Times) book is an indelible portrait of the lessons learned when mankind seeks to bend the natural world to his will—lessons which, in the face of climate change and other threats, remain not just vital but necessary.

Though the book focuses on the accident at Chernobyl, the reader is given an in-depth history of nuclear energy, down to the make-up of the atom. But it’s written in a way that the reader is easily able to follow.

All of which brings you to the accident. There’s a lot to get through, but as the situation unfolds, I was reminded of our own situation; the right hand not knowing what the left is doing, so many more concerned at how they would look, rather than how to resolve the problem. It’s a sobering look at the folly of man.

But there are no true villains here. Only the hubris of men who thought they knew everything there was to know about the complex they were tasked with running. It would turn that there was much that they didn’t know.

But there are heroes, too. The workers and the firemen who ran into the reactor, some knowing what their fate would be. Many died; many would live years with the fallout, literally, of what their time in the plant would cause.

I do wonder how much better we would do, if such a situation were to arise here. As orders cascaded from one agency to another, I have a feeling that we would be found lacking.