Midnight in Chernobyl *** (of 4)

Chernyobyl has entered the global lexicon as a stand-in for the planet's most devastating public nuclear disaster. The USSR was deep in the throes of a Cold War competition for global supremacy in science, technology, politics, power, and armaments, but built upon an impossible economic model. Compounding its economic failures to produce what Soviets actually needed in the quantities they needed them was a historical system of politics that relied upon sycophancy, falsification, and placation of superiors. The result was the construction of a nuclear power plant with serious design flaws because underlings were loathe to report errors to superiors.

Combine a faulty power plant, a government hellbent on proving its nuclear mettle on the global stage, and the inevitability of a combination of tiny, impossible to imagine human errors and the suspense of Chernobyl is laid bare. When the explosion of Reactor 4 finally occurred in October 1986, the scale of the explosion was so unpredictable that it took days to even comprehend. Part of the nuclear core burst into the atmosphere and part resulted in flames so hot no one knew how to extinguish them, especially as the emitted radiation was so intense it was impossible to get close enough to fight the fire, to prevent additional explosions, perhaps threatening three adjacent power plants.

 It is no small feat to assemble a clear, linear narrative from a nuclear explosion obfuscated by denial and secrecy, but Adam Higginbotham manages to sift through thousands of extant statements and documents and present a disaster as it happened. No government nor company can guarantee absolute safety, especially a country led by a leader whose motto appears to be, "Believe me, I am an innate genius, without need for anyone to question my authority or to regulate my behavior or the behavior of my subordinates."