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Books

The Chernobyl catastrophe was a foregone conclusion

12 May 2018

9:00 AM

12 May 2018

9:00 AM

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.

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