On Oct. 8, 1957, a Soviet newspaper reported that residents of Cheliabinsk, a city near the Ural Mountains, had spotted an “intensive luminescence, sometimes changing to pale pink and pale blue,” along the horizon. Cheliabinsk was located too far south to have had much experience with the aurora borealis, but the newspaper told its readers they happened to be seeing just that — a rare and gorgeous treat. “The Northern Lights,” the article concluded, “will remain visible in the Southern Ural latitudes.”
What readers were seeing would indeed remain visible, but the rest of the sentence was a lie. Those “Northern Lights” were in fact billions of irradiated particles that had been released into the air when a plutonium production plant exploded in nearby Kyshtym. It’s just one of many obfuscations, deceptions and outright fabrications recounted by Serhii Plokhy in “Atoms and Ashes,” his frightening new history of nuclear disasters across the world.
