Anatomy of a nuclear disaster

Adam Higginbotham shows how an almost fanatical compulsion for secrecy among the Soviet Union's governing elite was part of what made the accident not just cataclysmic but so likely in the first place

Midnight in Chernobyl

The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster

Adam Higginbotham

Simon & Schuster 

538 pages; $29.95

The word “Chernobyl” has long been synonymous with the catastrophic reactor explosion of 1986 — grim shorthand for what still qualifies, more than three decades later, as the world’s worst nuclear disaster.
 

As infamous as it is now, it’s easy to forget that the calamity seemed to drift to international attention as if by accident. A full two days after the meltdown began in Ukraine, with winds carrying radioactive fallout into Europe, alarms went off at a nuclear power station in faraway Sweden. Only