‘Chernobyl’ makes a case for the truth
Chernobyl is one of those names that carries with it a lot of baggage. If you were alive in the latter half of the 20th, you heard the word whenever nuclear power plants were discussed. It was a cautionary tale about the dangers of atomic energy at a time when the world was still learning how to handle the technology.
Because it happened in the Soviet Union during the mid-1980s, it wasn’t always easy to find out exactly what happened and how many human casualties there were. All I remember hearing was the world “meltdown” and how the radiation was spreading across an unknown number of miles. It happened on the other side of the world, so the actual danger seemed distant.
After watching a five-part miniseries on HBO, simply titled “Chernobyl,” I have much deeper appreciation for how awful the catastrophe really was. It wasn’t just a single explosion that killed a few nuclear power plant workers. It was a nuclear core failure that put millions of lives at risk without most people realizing it.
The first episode of the series shows firefighters responding to the explosion as if it were just any other fire. It wasn’t until some of them started getting radiation burns that the reality of the situation slowly started to settle in. Radiation poisoning is a strange thing. Depending how high of a dose your body absorbs, it can either cause an immediate and steady decline toward death or it can take years to kill you with cancer.
The initial death toll was around 30 people — those who were in the immediate blast zone — but the cumulative total ranges anywhere from 4,000 to 60,000 based on the number of cancer deaths in the Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, plus others across Europe. When watching the miniseries, I was struck by how many of the characters knowingly exposed themselves to high levels of radiation in order to try and contain the disaster. A lot of unsung heroes essentially agreed to shorten their lives in order to save others.
The main hero of the story is Valery Legasov, a nuclear chemist put in charge of investigating the cause of the accident and stopping the spread of radioactive material. The series shows how difficult it is for a truth-seeker like Legasov to operate in a totalitarian state like the Soviet Union. He is followed around by the KGB, harassed by government bureaucrats and coerced into coming up with an explanation that keeps his country from looking bad to the rest of the world.
“Chernobyl” raises interesting questions about how societies handle catastrophes. It made me wonder how a similar disaster would be handled in today’s world, whether in Russia or the United States. Would we willing to pursue the truth and tell the world, regardless of the consequences?
OUT FOR A WALK
KEVIN O’BRIEN
EDITOR
