The Ukrainian town that became emblematic of humanity’s worst collective nightmares.
At 1.23am on Saturday 26 April 1986, an explosion and subsequent fire at the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station in Soviet Ukraine sent a cloud of radioactive smoke into the atmosphere. Days later, alarm bells rang as several Scandinavian countries reported abnormally high atmospheric radiation. Initially, Soviet officials denied there had been an accident at all. But in the months and years that followed, the catastrophic fallout from the event has been estimated at around 400 times the magnitude of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Here are some books that bring the details of the world’s largest nuclear disaster into terrifying focus.
