Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster

by Adam Higginbotham

In the meantime, Viktor Brukhanov had given his blessing to a memorial to more ancient gods: a massive realist statue, in front of the city’s cinema, six meters tall and cast in bronze. It depicted a Titan, naked beneath the swooping folds of his cloak, holding aloft leaping tongues of flame. This was Prometheus, who had descended from Olympus with the stolen gift of fire. With it, he brought light, warmth, and civilization to mankind—just as the torchbearers of the Red Atom had illuminated the benighted households of the USSR. But the ancient Greek myth had a dark side: Zeus was so enraged by the theft of the gods’ most powerful secret that he chained Prometheus to a rock, where a giant eagle descended to peck out his liver every day for eternity. Nor did mortal man escape retribution for accepting Prometheus’s gift. To him, Zeus sent Pandora, the first woman, bearing a box that, once opened, unleashed evils that could never again be contained.