Chernobyl: History of a Nuclear Catastrophe

Plokhy approaches Chernobyl as a historian of the Soviet empire and finds a disaster that was not merely technical but civilisational — the reactor failure exposed every fault line in a system already dying. The lies told to operators, to firefighters, to the world, were not incidental but structural. This book and Higginbotham's account are best read together. Together they constitute an elegy for a system that could not survive its own secrets.