The explosion at Chernobyl in the Northern Ukraine on 26 April 1986 was less of a disaster for the surrounding inhabitants than for the Communist system. Though far from being the most serious nuclear accident that can be imagined, it suggested that humanity and the environment were less at risk from a catastrophe of this kind than might have been supposed. At the same time it showed that the Communist system was by then so fragile that the removal of faith in its nuclear programme played a major part in its eventual downfall.

LRB 8 July 1993 | PDF Download