Antinuclear

An intense new HBO miniseries about the world’s worst nuclear accident turns the Chernobyl Soviet scientists into unlikely heroes in its portrayal of a world superpower approaching meltdown  3 May 2019  By Fred Pearce

Fifteen minutes into the second episode of HBO’s gripping saga of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, we are treated to an idiot’s guide to how a nuclear power plant works.

It is delivered by a top Soviet nuclear scientist, Valery Legasov, to a hapless, senior Soviet apparatchik as they fly to the unfolding disaster. As a plot device, it helps the viewer understand events as much as the politburo hack.

In a disaster movie about a nuclear accident, told over five hour-long episodes, you might expect the scientists who designed the plant to be the bad guys. But, at least in the first two episodes available for preview, they come out smelling of roses.

For the producers have bigger fish to fry – the entire edifice of communist rule in the Soviet Union, which was then only three years from toppling. It makes for a great story, but also has the ring of truth.

The central human narrative is the tension between boffins and bureaucrats. Legasov, based at the Kurchatov Institute, Moscow, the Soviet Union’s main atomic research institute, is the man who first understood the scale of the disaster.

He devised a way to douse the inferno by pouring thousands of tonnes of sand and boron into the stricken reactor from helicopters, and was also the first to insist on the evacuation of 50,000 local inhabitants who had been left to suffer the fallout by officials intent on covering up the entire disaster.

In later episodes, however, we can expect to see him blamed by politicos, who disliked his appetite for speaking truth to the incompetents in power. So much so that he ends up hanging himself in the stairwell of his apartment on the second anniversary of the accident, shortly after telling his story to Pravda.

This mini-series is brilliant and pointed storytelling, with gruesome early scenes of radiation sickness among the fire crews intercut with the local officials in their bunker, unwilling and unable to comprehend what was happening above them. Again, on the basis of the first two episodes, the story is told without taking too many liberties with the historical truth.

Its main take is that the accident exposed as never before the callousness and dysfunction of the Soviet elite. And that by making this finally visible to Soviet citizens, it undermined the best of Communism, a sense of common purpose.

It is a view shared by academics such as Kate Brown in her recent study of Chernobyl and its aftermath, Manual for Survival (Allen Lane, 2018). The dozens of plants workers, firefighters and helicopter pilots who died putting out the Chernobyl inferno, would never sacrifice themselves in that way again.

The disaster replaced the common purpose with a sense of betrayal. It did not just symbolise the failings of communist rule, but precipitated its collapse.

Early on, the series has Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev declaring angrily that the accident had to be kept secret because “our power comes from the perception of our power”. Chernobyl incinerated that perception, and their power was over. As he strung himself up, one imagines that Legasov already knew the truth.

Chernobyl, starring Jared Harris, Stellan Skarsgård and Emily Watson, premieres 6 May on HBO.

Fred Pearce is a New Scientist consultant and the author of Fallout: A journey through the nuclear age(Granta Books).