An accident waiting to happen

In the early days of the atomic age, Soviet students debated whether it was nobler to become a physicist or a poet. Some of them seem to have been genuinely torn, and one of those may well have been Anatolii Diatlov, who was the deputy chief engineer at Chernobyl during the late-night turbine test that led to the 1986 explosion. Such was Diatlov’s reverence for verse that he described the great blasts of steam, hot water and machine oil, along with the violent crackling and popping of the inundated electrical system, as ‘a picture worthy of the pen of the great Dante’.

The disaster, as Serhii Plokhy shows in his haunting new history, left Ukrainians grasping for similes and allegories. One of Diatlov’s colleagues reached for ‘Hiroshima’.Locals recalled the German invasion of 1941 and the ‘star called Wormwood’ that embitters the waters in the Book of Revelation (Chernobyl means ‘wormwood’ in Ukrainian and the city sits at the delta of the Prypiat and Uzh rivers).