Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future

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The official death toll of the 1986 Chernobyl accident, 'the worst nuclear disaster in history', is only 54, and stories today commonly suggest that nature is thriving there. Yet award-winning historian Kate Brown uncovers a much more disturbing story, one in which radioactive isotopes caused hundreds of thousands of casualties, and the magnitude of this human and ecological catastrophe has been actively suppressed.

Based on a decade of archival and on-the-ground research, Manual for Survival is a gripping expos? of the consequences of nuclear radiation in the wake of Chernobyl and a wider plot to cover up the truth, in which scientists and diplomats from international organizations, including the UN, tried to bury or discredit evidence of the health consequences of radiation during the Cold War. An astonishing historical detective story, Manual for Survival makes clear the irreversible impact of nuclear energy on every living thing, not just from Chernobyl, but from eight decades of radiaoactive fallout from weapons development.The official death toll of the 1986 Chernobyl accident, 'the worst nuclear disaster in history', is only 54, and stories today commonly suggest that nature is thriving there. Yet award-winning historian Kate Brown uncovers a much more disturbing story, one in which radioactive isotopes caused hundreds of thousands of casualties, and the magnitude of this human and ecological catastrophe has been actively suppressed.

Based on a decade of archival and on-the-ground research, Manual for Survival is a gripping expos? of the consequences of nuclear radiation in the wake of Chernobyl and a wider plot to cover up the truth, in which scientists and diplomats from international organizations, including the UN, tried to bury or discredit evidence of the health consequences of radiation during the Cold War. An astonishing historical detective story, Manual for Survival makes clear the irreversible impact of nuclear energy on every living thing, not just from Chernobyl, but from eight decades of radiaoactive fallout from weapons development.
Kate Brown is the author of A Biography of No Place, which won the George Louis Beer Prize from the American Historical Association for the best book in International History, and Plutopia, which won seven awards, including the Dunning and Beveridge prizes from the American Historical Association for the best book in American history. She is the first historian of the Soviet Union to be nominated to the honorary Society of American Historians, and her research has been funded by the American Academy in Berlin and by Carnegie and Guggenheim fellowships. She teaches environmental and nuclear history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Baltimore County, and lives in Washington, DC.