But privately, Legasov had been struck by what he had heard Prime Minister Ryzhkov tell Gorbachev and the rest of the Politburo more than a year earlier: that the explosion in Chernobyl had been inevitable, and that if it hadn’t happened there, it would have happened at another Soviet station sooner or later. It was only then that Legasov had finally recognized the true scope of the decay at the heart of the nuclear state: the culture of secrecy and complacency, the arrogance and negligence, and the shoddy standards of design and construction. He saw that both the RBMK reactor and its
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