Adam Higginbotham is a journalist who began his career in magazines and newspapers in London and is now based in New York City where he has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, GQ, and The Smithsonian. He is the author of Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster.

“The explosion tore apart the reactor, lifted the biological shield, the huge lid on the top of the reactor, peeling off the top of it. The radionuclides then escaped into the building. There was a second explosion, which destroyed utterly the roof of the building. And then the radionuclides and this column of poisonous vapor just began roiling right into the atmosphere, where it was snatched away by high altitude winds and began traveling ultimately around the whole of the Northern Hemisphere.” Adam Higginbotham, author of “Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster”