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

by Adam Higginbotham

Senior Lieutenant Alexander Logachev loved radiation the way other men loved their wives.

It was February 20, 1970. After months of deliberation, the Soviet authorities had at last settled on a name for the new power plant that would one day make the USSR’s nuclear engineering famous across the globe.

“someday there’ll be a celebration all throughout Oz that’s all to do with me”

The town of Chernobyl had been established in the twelfth century.

So when the pressures of the mammoth task he faced in Chernobyl became too much for him, he simply decided to quit. Yet when Brukhanov arrived in Kiev that day in July 1972, his Party-appointed supervisor from the Energy Ministry took his letter of resignation, tore it up in front of him, and told him to get back to work.