Radiation expert Dr Ian Fairlie will discuss Prof. Kate Brown's new book on the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster - Manual for Survival - as well as the recent, highly acclaimed HBO/Sky TV drama-documentary 'Chernobyl'.

Based on a decade of archival and on-the-ground research, Manual for Survival is an account of the consequences of nuclear radiation in the wake of Chernobyl - and the plot to cover it up.

As Brown discovered, Soviet scientists, bureaucrats, and civilians documented staggering increases in cases of birth defects, child mortality, cancers and a multitude of life-altering diseases years after the disaster. Worried that this evidence would blow the lid on the effects of massive radiation release from weapons-testing during the Cold War, scientists and diplomats from international organisations, including the UN, tried to bury or discredit it.

Yet Brown also encountered many everyday heroes, often women, who fought to bring attention to the ballooning health catastrophe, and adapt to life in a post-nuclear landscape, where dangerously radioactive berries, distorted trees and birth defects still persist today.

An astonishing historical detective story, Manual for Survival makes clear the irreversible impact of nuclear energy on every living thing, not just from Chernobyl, but from eight decades of radioactive fallout from weapons development.

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- Dr Ian Fairlie is an independent consultant on radioactivity in the environment. His doctoral studies at Imperial College in London concerned radiological hazards of nuclear fuel reprocessing. Since then, he has served as head of the Secretariat of the UK Government's CERRIE Committee on internal radiation risks and as a consultant to the European Parliament and a range of NGOs, including CND UK.

- This event is co-hosted by Greater Manchester & District Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and Blackwell's.

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