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August 27 - September 11, 2019
The Era of Stagnation had fomented a moral decay in the Soviet workplace and a sullen indifference to individual responsibility, even in the nuclear industry.
giant cooling reservoir around the station were rich in fish, which thrived in water that had circulated through the plant’s reactors as coolant before being flushed, still radioactive but pleasingly warm, toward the river.
hazards of the positive void coefficient made the new reactor inherently prone to explosion,
and provided no safety analysis of the void coefficient in the manuals accompanying each reactor.
disquieting list of major design defects,
Dyatlov—like the Soviet state itself—expected his underlings to carry out his commands with robotic acquiescence, regardless of their better judgment.
as someone whose father and grandfather had both died at the hands of the Party—he knew that it could be dangerous to try too hard.
can only imagine what would have happened here had something more serious occurred,”
“There is no truth to the rumor that alcohol is useful against radiation.”
“This is the first time that we have truly encountered a force as terrible as nuclear energy escaping human control. . . .
Sergey Sokolov—had
While those with severe radiation sickness and burns were to be described accordingly—“acute radiation sickness from cumulative radiation exposure”—the records of those with lower exposure and without severe symptoms were not to mention radioactivity at all.
The search for appropriate scapegoats began immediately.
In memos, meetings, and multiple interim documents, the barons of the Soviet nuclear industry—the scientists and the heads of the competing ministries that controlled it—competed to divert blame from themselves, ideally before the final report reached General Secretary Gorbachev.
Revealing to the world the true roots of the disaster—the design of the reactor itself; the systematic, long-term failures and the culture of secrecy and denial of the Soviet nuclear program; and the arrogance of the senior scientists overseeing its implementation—was unthinkable.
Afterward, they were decontaminated and demobilized and told to sign a pledge of secrecy before being sent back to where they had come from, clutching a small cardboard booklet: the official record of their total accumulated dose. Few regarded this document as accurate. Before leaving, some were presented with awards for distinguished service and given a choice of reward: cassette player or watch?
Yet some heroes would prove more equal than others.
Yet still the authorities maintained the illusion that the city was not dead but only sleeping and one morning would be awoken by the footsteps of its returning population.
understood the role the Party expected him to play on the stand and stuck almost unswervingly to the script.
Although none of the accused was tortured to confess or brought to the stand to denounce counterrevolutionary activity, no one doubted the outcome of the proceedings: it effectively became
one of the final show trials in the history of the Soviet Union.
the culture of secrecy and complacency, the arrogance and negligence, and the shoddy standards of design and construction.
warned that any Soviet republics thinking of leaving the Union were “playing with fire.”
the beginning of 1991, as many as six hundred thousand men and women from across the Soviet Union had taken part in cleanup work in the radioactive netherworld surrounding the site of Reactor Number Four and would be officially recognized as Chernobyl liquidators. In
acknowledgment of their service, many were issued special identity cards and an enameled medal depicting the Greek letters for alpha, beta, and gamma surrounding a scarlet drop of blood.
and so doctors wrote up their notes in code; their medical records were classified as secret.
