First Paragraph

Senior Lieutenant Alexander Logachev loved radiation the way other men loved their wives. Tall and good-looking, twenty-six years old, with close-cropped dark hair and ice-blue eyes, Logachev had joined the Soviet army when he was still a boy. They had trained him well. The instructors from the military academy outside Moscow taught him with lethal poisons and unshielded radiation. He traveled to the testing grounds of Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan, and to the desolate East Urals Trace, where the fallout from a clandestine accident still poisoned the landscape; eventually, Logachev's training took him even to the remote and forbidden islands of Novaya Zemlya, high in the Arctic Circle and ground zero for the detonation of the terrible Tsar Bomba, the largest thermonuclear device in history.

- From Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster by Adam Higginbotham