Winner of the 2018 Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction winner of the 2019 Pushkin house Russian book prize, On the morning of April 26, 1986, a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Soviet Ukraine exploded. The outburst put the region on the brink of nuclear annihilation and contaminated over half of Europe with radioactive fallout. In Chernobyl, Serhii Plokhy follows the stories of the firefighters, scientists, engineers, workers, soldiers, and policemen who found themselves caught in a nuclear Armageddon and succeeded in doing the seemingly impossible: extinguishing the inferno and putting the reactor to sleep. As Plokhy convincingly argues, the disaster was not just the result of a turbine test gone wrong, but also the failure of the Soviet political system and the prioritization of economic development over humanitarian concern. Chernobyl is the definitive history of the nuclear disaster, but also an urgent call to action by one of its survivors. Book jacket.