Andrew Leatherbarrow: “At precisely 01:23:40 on the morning of April 26th, 1986, a control room operator named Alexander Akimov made his fateful decision to press the Emergency Shutdown button at Ukraine’s Chernobyl nuclear power station. The reactor exploded, annihilating its containment building and sending a lethal cloud of radioactive particles across Europe. This unprecedented accident caused the permanent evacuation of the nearby city of Pripyat, a desperature struggle to contain Chernobyl’s exposed reactor core, and ultimately cost thousands of lives. So what happened, who really caused it, and what are Chernobyl and Pripyat like now? I had to find out more, so in 2011 I went to see the area for myself. In this book I aim to provide an accessible, but detailed and comprehensive account of the 1986 accident, plus the story of my own journey into the Chernobyl Zone.”