The meltdown at Chernobyl was the real reason for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev, 26 April, 2006
 
Big E and 3N, the world’s two biggest corporations specialized in  nuclear waste treatment, are about to merge. The financial operation is being managed by Tita Zins, the principal shareholder and banker. On both sides, heads are going to roll, and layoffs have been planned. The waste is veritable manna: the shareholders can’t get enough of it. The battle will be held in an office tower in London. It will pit two formidable women against each other: Marthe, born in Teheran in the late 30s, for Big E; and Shizuko, born in Nagasaki the day the atomic bomb destroyed the city, for 3N. Unlike the Trojan War, this conflict will only last a day. That same day, June 2, 1988, President Reagan comes back from Moscow and informs the Queen of England and the world that the Cold War is over, and the two empires will merge. Gorbachev has given in. Long live the global marketplace!

From the laboratories of Princeton to the gulags of Siberia, via South African apartheid and Mao’s China, Meltdown is the novel of the 20th century – a perverse but charming century, when people thought that nuclear power was forever.