Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster

Early in the morning of April 26, 1986, Reactor Number Four of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station exploded, triggering history’s worst nuclear disaster. In the thirty years since then, Chernobyl has change into 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 all the world. But the actual story of the coincidence, 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Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews conducted over the course of more than ten years, in addition to letters, unpublished memoirs, and documents from recently-declassified archives, Adam Higginbotham has written a harrowing and compelling narrative which brings the disaster to life through the eyes of the women and men who witnessed it firsthand. The result is a masterful nonfiction thriller, and the definitive account of an event that changed history: a story that may be more complex, more human, and more terrifying than the Soviet myth.

Midnight in Chernobyl is an indelible portrait of some of the great disasters of the twentieth century, of human resilience and ingenuity, and the lessons learned when mankind seeks to bend the flora and fauna to his will—lessons which, in the face of climate change and other threats, remain not just vital but necessary.