In the thirty years since a reactor at the Atomic Energy Station exploded, triggering history’s worst nuclear disaster, Chernobyl has become 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 the entire world. Drawing on interviews, letters, unpublished memoirs, and documents from recently-declassified archives, Adam Higginbotham has written a harrowing and compelling narrative which brings the disaster to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 men and women who witnessed it firsthand. The result is a story that is more complex, more human, and more terrifying than the Soviet myth. This is an indelible portrait of one of the great disasters of the twentieth century, an investigation into how propaganda, secrecy, and myth have obscured the true story of one of the twentieth century’s greatest disasters, of human resilience and ingenuity, and the lessons learned when mankind seeks to bend the natural world to his will—lessons which, in the face of climate change and other threats, remain not just vital but necessary.