At one point, Meshkov unwisely insisted that the reactor was still perfectly safe if the regulations were followed precisely. “You astonish me,” Gorbachev replied. Then Valery Legasov admitted that the scientists had failed the Soviet people. “It is our fault, of course,” he said. “We should have been keeping an eye on the reactor.” “The accident was inevitable. . . . If it hadn’t happened here and now, it would have happened somewhere else,” said Prime Minister Ryzhkov, who argued that the intoxicating power handed to Aleksandrov and Slavsky had proved their undoing. “We have been heading
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