ABSTRACT
Just before midnight on Friday, April 25, 1986, Leonid Toptunov was about to begin the graveyard shift in the control room of the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin nuclear power station located near Chernobyl, just 130 kilometres northeast of Kiev and 600 kilometres southwest of Moscow. l The weather had been unseasonably warm that week, but the joyous May Day holiday celebrations were less than a week away. As Toptunov took off his street clothes and donned his pristine white overalls and white beret for the last time, he had no idea that in less than two hours he would become an unwitting participant in a catastrophic event of historic proportions.
