Chernobyl
History of a tragedy
Penguin
pag. 432
2018
(dal sito della casa editrice)
The gripping story of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, from an acclaimed historian and writer.
On the morning of 26 April 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.
In Chernobyl, Serhii Plokhy recreates these events in all of
their drama, telling the stories of the firefighters, scientists,
engineers, workers, soldiers, and policemen who found themselves caught
in a nuclear Armageddon and succeeded in doing the seemingly impossible:
extinguishing the nuclear inferno and putting the reactor to sleep.
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. 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.
A poignant, fast paced account of the drama of heroes, perpetrators, and victims, Chernobyl is the definitive history of the world's worst nuclear disaster.
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