I actually love finding out I'm insufficiently informed - woefully ignorant. It's such a joy to learn new things. But Midnight in Chernobyl tore my understanding down and showed that the reality of the disaster was so much worse than I could have imagined.
Do I now understand nuclear physics? Not even a little but. But this book does an excellent job of walking the reader through some painfully complex science so that when the explosion finally occurs around chapter 7, you are well and painfully aware of just how easily this accident happened and you're just as surprised it didn't happen earlier and all over the Soviet Union.
That this accident could only have happened how it happened, when it happened, and how it was responded to in the Soviet Union cannot be understated. From the attempts to protect reputation, to oversell quotas and timelines, to the blind adherence to authority over safety, this disaster snowballed out of control and then only through the essential sacrifice of bodies was it contained.
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| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/moving_to_Chernobyl |
The true extent of the loss and fall out will never be known (mostly because the government didn't want to have to tell anyone), but the human toll is overwhelming and obvious from the pages of this book. Every chapter brought some knew horror of response and loss. At times I just needed to take a break and walk away from the staggering details. I definitely want to read this again as I think there is just more to be gleaned from a second reading.
5/5 Stars.
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