The Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986 is one of those events, like the sinking of the Titanic, that rapidly takes on a symbolic significance. On its own it would have been enough to grip the attention of the world, but it was also a metaphor for an era. It seemed to capture the former Soviet Union: the arrogance, the sclerosis, the secrecy, the disregard for human life.

The challenge for any writer is how to reclaim the disaster from the myths that have grown up around it. Chernobyl was not just a metaphor for the ultimate failure of the USSR experiment, but a catalyst of it: it helped to spark a mass mobilisation against the government, to heighten distrust and to erode any remaining faith in the communist dream.

The complex event has attracted a sudden rush of attention. Last year, Serhii Plokhy’s prize-winning history of the disaster, Chernobyl, was published, and now here are two other substantial books. Adam Higginbotham uses all of the techniques of the top-notch longform journalist to full effect. He swoops us into the heart of the catastrophe, as a team of radiation experts from the Soviet army races towards the destroyed reactor. Then he hauls us out again, to the birth of the then-hopeful atom-town of Pripyat in 1970, and traces its gradual populating by “cheerful optimists in the city of the future”.

He repeats this microscope/telescope approach throughout his account, interspersing action sequences drawn from his interviews with survivors, as well as court documents and memoirs, with more carefully plotted historical accounts that show how a disaster of this kind was always likely. He introduces his characters cautiously, allowing us to get to know them as managers, engineers and officers, before they are thrown into the world’s worst nuclear catastrophe.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Reactor no 4 after the explosion, April 1986. Photograph: SVF2/UIG via Getty Images

The combination of corner-cutting, poor design, slipshod construction, obsessive secrecy and ignored experts led to flaws at the heart of the power station’s Reactor no 4. It “was a pistol with the hammer cocked. All that remained was for someone to pull the trigger”, Higginbotham writes. He has done his research and writes well; if his book has a downside, it is that it feels a little formulaic. If you have read Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control, or anything by Michael Lewis, you will know how it ends: with a final chapter that wraps together the micro and macro themes, poignantly and efficiently.

Kate Brown does not seek, as Higginbotham and Plokhy do, to conjure up the moment of the disaster and explain how it happened. She focuses on what came after: the consequences of the horrendous radioactive materials bursting into the atmosphere, where they mingled with clouds, and rained down in a toxic brew across much of Ukraine and Belarus. Her key question is why, considering the appalling nature of the catastrophe, we have not learned more lessons from it: “Why, after Chernobyl, do societies carry on much as they did before Chernobyl?”

One of her first targets is the accepted narrative of Chernobyl itself, one created by Soviet propagandists to salvage some positive publicity from the disaster. Higginbotham spends many pages describing the heroism of the firefighters who sacrificed their lives battling the first blaze, but Brown looks past their story to ask about all the victims the Kremlin did not want the world to know about. “Moscow leaders’ strategy was to admit only what could not be denied.”

Since much of the most heavily radioactive rainfall was far from the immediate exclusion zone around the destroyed reactor, an awful lot could be denied; and it was. And not just in the USSR. Officials and experts from the US, France and other western countries, alarmed by how the disaster might spur opposition to nuclear technology, were happy to conspire in concealing the health consequences. Thousands of deaths have never been properly investigated, which means the opportunity was never taken to study in detail how radioactivity affects us. Brown often follows the descriptions she gives of a victim’s decline with a sentence such as: “His death is not included in the official count of 54 Chernobyl fatalities.”

Even the much repeated and optimistic tale that plants and animals are thriving in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl is, in Brown’s telling, essentially false. Some animals may be surviving, but the area as a whole is wrecked, right down to the vanished micro-organisms that should be converting radioactive leaves into soil. We want to believe that nature can mend anything we destroy but, in reality, the destruction continues: it is “etched in the ecosystem of the Zone, in the bodies of mice, the leaf litter of the forest floor, the tumours that cloud the vision of barn swallows”. There is no redemption in Brown’s book.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ukranian children receive treatment in Tarara, Cuba. Since 1990, Cuba has treated 18,000 Ukranian children for illnesses attributed to the radioactivity unleashed by the reactor meltdown. Photograph: Claudia Daut/Reuters

She is at her best when she delves into remote archives, detailing the health problems that village children suffered, and the government’s refusal to take them seriously. She tracks down the people who worked in the factories that shifted huge volumes of radioactive wool. She traces a load of poisoned meat that travelled around the old USSR for four years in a freezer wagon, with no one prepared to accept it, before it was buried in a concrete trench.

“Wherever I looked (and I was usually the first researcher to sign out the files), the evidence of a public health disaster was overwhelming, and it came from almost every possible quarter,” she writes. She did find some heroes, including courageous doctors and scientists who put care for their patients and writing up studies ahead of maintaining the official line from Moscow that damage from the disaster had been contained. But they are few in number: most people colluded in the propaganda, which prevented the evacuation of children and adults from some of the most heavily irradiated places on earth and thus contributed to their early deaths.

Her aim is to make up for the gap in scholarship around the disaster, and to learn from it. Manual for Survival is sometimes polemical, sometimes scientific; it also at times resembles a travel book. The facts she uncovers are devastating – particularly the statistics on infections, cancer, eye disease, anaemia and other conditions – and her writing is full of passion, but perhaps it needs more calculation to get its argument across. It asks a lot of questions, but does not provide enough answers.

I found myself wishing these two books had been combined. Higginbotham’s elegant prose would have made Brown’s facts sing. And Brown’s admirable uncovering of the hidden story behind Chernobyl would have elevated Midnight in Chernobyl into the pantheon of non-fiction greats.

• Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster is published by Bantam (£20). Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future is published by Allen Lane (£20). To order a copies go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.