Plokhy, S: Chernobyl

On the morning of April 26, 1986 Europe witnessed the worst nuclear disaster in history: the explosion of a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine. The outburst put the world on the brink of nuclear annihilation. In the end, less than five percent of the reactor's fuel escaped, but that was enough to contaminate over half of Europe with radioactive fallout. Dozens died of radiation poisoning, and tens of thousands were killed or sickened by radiation syndrome and related cancers in the years and decades that followed. In Chernobyl, Serhii Plokhy recreates the events at Chernobyl in all of their drama, telling the stories of the firefighters, scientists, engineers, workers, soldiers, and policemen who found themselves caught in a nuclear armaggeddon and succeeded in doing the seemingly impossible: extinguishing the nuclear inferno and putting the reactor to sleep. Plokhy also demonstrates why the disaster occurred and how it marked the beginning of the downfall of the Soviet Union. While it is clear that the immediate cause of the accident was a turbine test gone wrong, Plokhy shows how the deeper roots of Chernobyl lay in the nature of the Soviet political system and the flaws of its nuclear industry. The disaster was ultimately the product of the authoritarian character of the Communist party rule, the regime's control over the flow of scientific and politically sensitive information, the militarization of the Soviet economy, and the prioritization of economic development over ecological and humanitarian concerns. A little more than five years later, the Soviet Union would fall apart, destroyed from within by its unsustainable communist ideology and the dysfunctional managerial and economic systems laid bare in the wake of the disaster.