The Perfect Day for a Catastrophe : ABLAZE: The Story of Chernobyl, <i> By Piers Paul Read (Random House: $25; 400 pp.)</i>

No other event in the disintegration of the Soviet Union provides as apt a metaphor for glasnost as the radioactive cloud that arose from the smoldering ruins of Chernobyl, a catastrophe that achieved, in one thermonuclear flash, a paradoxically new form of diplomatic “openness.” As the breeze shifted to the west and a menacing blanket of ash fanned out across Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, the entire world suddenly and unnervingly understood that glasnost has a dark side: Borders and checkpoints are indeed “open,” easily bypassed and evaded by clouds that are heedless of maps and frontiers.

Piers Paul Read’s “Ablaze” recounts not only the dramatic events themselves, but the entire dismal history of the Soviet Union’s reckless disregard for safety as it attempted to wean the country off of fossil fuels by converting to nuclear energy, a campaign undertaken because of the paucity of oil, gas and coal in the populous western regions of Russia and the Ukraine. What’s more, Read tells this story without resorting to the flamboyant overstatements of docudrama. He scrupulously avoids the novelistic recreations of scene and dialogue that have become a hazardous waste product of contemporary nonfiction, the deadly fallout of hyper-realism that tends to supplant the impartiality and compelling narratives of journalism with a lame form of cinema verite.

Read’s story opens with an ominous account of the makeshift construction of the Chernobyl power station itself, which seems to have been slapped together from defective materials in an almost hilarious spirit of improvisation. This mishmash of faulty parts and sloppy workmanship nonetheless inspired unwavering confidence in the chief engineer, Nikolai Fomin, a brusque, dictatorial figure who acquired his knowledge of nuclear physics, not in a laboratory, but through a correspondence course.

When Fomin escorted distinguished visitors around the facilities of what one investigative reporter called “an accident waiting to happen,” he frequently compared reactors to samovars and once told the Ukranian minister of health that the chances of a meltdown occurring at the plant were as remote “as being hit by a comet.” During a routine test in the early hours of April 26, 1986, the comet struck and a disastrous power surge blew the lid off one of the four reactors, leaving the uranium core exposed to the elements, spewing out like a volcano molten nuggets of pure fuel and a toxic rain of burning graphite.

What followed is something straight out of a sci-fi film, with Sigourney Weaver dashing through a maze of smokey corridors in which ruptured pipes spit out scalding tongues of radioactive steam. Basking in a poisonous green glow that quickly turned their skin a rich shade of brown, incredulous engineers stumbled over twisted girders, dodging showers of blue sparks, while heroic volunteers prevented even more catastrophic explosions by plunging into lakes of contaminated water in order to drain the pool beneath the reactor (this macabre ordeal was sweetened with a bribe: a car, an apartment, a dacha and a generous pension for their families in the likely event that they didn’t survive their unprotected dip into this irradiated pond).

If the inside of the plant was a set right out of a movie, the scene outdoors was eerily calm--resembling, if anything, the painting by Brueghel depicting the fall of Icarus, with a jewel-like ship floating obliviously past an inconspicuous splash in the background, while a peasant unwittingly plows his field nearby.

It was the perfect day for a catastrophe.

On the morning following the disaster, uninformed inhabitants of the local community pushed baby carriages down the streets, hung clothes out to dry, fished in the reservoir that cooled the reactors and bathed in the warm sunshine. Just beyond the shadow of the plant’s towers, which loomed over the nearby city of Pripyat, a town of some 50,000 people, a young bride and groom celebrated their wedding on a nearby jetty, laughing and toasting each other as they enjoyed the clear blue sky and the cooperative weather.

After brilliantly evoking the fatal ironies of this invisible menace, Read provides an excellent analysis of the way the habitual reluctance of lesser officials to be the bearers of bad tidings led to a concerted policy of understatement, which kept the facts from the very people who needed to make informed decisions. Fears of the Politburo’s ignominious tradition of killing the messenger, coupled with its unwillingness to wash its dirty linen in public before gloating audiences in the West, meant that Gorbachev didn’t even acknowledge the accident until 10 days after the explosion, by which time hundreds of thousands of people had already been exposed to dangerously high levels of radiation.

So much skepticism was generated about the government’s candor in informing the public of the dangers it faced that, in rural communities, peasants were suddenly overwhelmed with uncharacteristic generosity and began bringing baskets of food to the homes of Soviet officials, whom they lavished with votive offerings of fruit and fish. Far from being an expression of deference, however, these gifts were, in fact, a test. Suspicious of the government’s disingenuous nonchalance about the threats posed by the accident, farmers transformed the party bosses into human Geiger counters, who, in order to prove the credibility of the dubious directives being issued by the health authorities, were invited to practice what they preached and eat the local produce.

Such distrust was not misplaced. When the Kremlin decided to slaughter 200,000 contaminated chickens, the radioactive meat was frozen until the short-lived radio-isotopes decayed, whereupon it was ground up with uncontaminated products and sold without the knowledge of the public as a traditional type of gourmet sausage; the theory behind this gruesome act of recycling was that the delicacy was so prohibitively expensive that it would be consumed only in minute, nouvelle-cuisine portions, thus minimizing the health risk by reducing the dosage of radiation to the daintiest of wafer-thin slices.

Read’s riveting narrative offers more than just a portrait of a spectacularly mismanaged crisis in which the Central Committee waged one last valiant campaign to conceal its mistakes from the public before the stifling consensus of its authoritarian rule sputtered out into ideological chaos. “Ablaze” is also a broader study of how a totalitarian government, accustomed to creating reality by controlling the dissemination of news, is finally preempted by nature itself, whose devastation was too vast to be glossed over by the tortuous falsifications of communist hard-liners. By exposing the government’s face-saving aversion to keeping the public well-informed, Chernobyl became a compelling force of perestroika, a disaster that radicalized Soviet citizens by discrediting their leaders, who proved to be unconscionably diffident and secretive at the very moment that their country urgently needed to know the truth.