The word
“Chernobyl” has long been synonymous with the catastrophic reactor
explosion of 1986 — grim shorthand for what still qualifies, more than
three decades later, as the world’s worst nuclear disaster.
As
infamous as it is now, it’s easy to forget that the calamity seemed to
drift to international attention as if by accident. A full two days
after the meltdown began in Ukraine, with winds carrying radioactive
fallout into Europe, alarms went off at a nuclear power station in
faraway Sweden. Only then did Soviet officials deign to release a terse
statement acknowledging “an accident has taken place,” while studiously
neglecting to mention the specifics of what had happened or when.
“Aid is being given to those affected,” the statement concluded. “A government commission has been set up.”
In
his chilling new book, “Midnight in Chernobyl,” the journalist Adam
Higginbotham shows how an almost fanatical compulsion for secrecy among
the Soviet Union’s governing elite was part of what made the accident
not just cataclysmic but so likely in the first place. Interviewing
eyewitnesses and consulting declassified archives — an official record
that was frustratingly meager when it came to certain details and,
Higginbotham says, couldn’t always be trusted — he reconstructs the
disaster from the ground up, recounting the prelude to it as well as its
aftermath. The result is superb, enthralling and necessarily
terrifying.
Data: 06.02.2019
Fonte: www.nytimes.com
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