Chirnubīl (Sā'at-i 1:23:40): Persian 1401

At 01:23:40 on April 26th, 1986, Alexander Akimov pressed the emergency shutdown button at Chernobyl’s fourth nuclear reactor. It was an act that forced the permanent evacuation of a city, killed thousands, and crippled the Soviet Union. The event spawned decades of conflicting, exaggerated, and inaccurate stories. This book, the result of five years of research, presents an accessible but comprehensive account of what happened. From the desperate fight to prevent a burning reactor core from irradiating eastern Europe to the self-sacrifice of the heroic men who entered fields of radiation so strong that machines wouldn’t work, to the surprising truth about the legendary ‘Chernobyl divers’, all the way through to the USSR’s final show-trial. The historical narrative is interwoven with a story of the author’s spontaneous journey to Ukraine’s still-abandoned city of Pripyat and the wider Chernobyl Zone. Complete with over 45 pages of photographs of modern-day Pripyat and technical diagrams of the power station, Chernobyl01:23:40 is a fascinating new account of the world’s worst nuclear disaster.