Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy

"Here’s a story that we all grew up with. My generation can remember when it happened, 30 years ago. For much younger readers, it’s something that they will have heard about. What we’ve never really quite taken on board in this much detail is what was happening on the ground, both in the area immediately around Chernobyl, but also in Moscow: the different levels of power, how they dealt with this absolutely terrifying event, with people wanting to cover it up, to avoid blame, to try and save lives. But also having no ordered system for shutting down a disaster of this kind. It was chaos, absolute chaos, and of course, there was an enormous cover-up, because there was so much face to be lost. The book unpacks every single detail of this extraordinarily human blunder and the massive consequences that it went on to have. So it’s a tough book. Very well written, very well researched, absolutely fascinating about the end of the Soviet empire."

"It’s a brilliant book. Unsurprisingly, it’s about Chernobyl and the disaster which happened there in the late 1980s. The history of the construction, decline, and near-collapse of that reactor. It’s really well written, and it’s benefited massively from his access to declassified Soviet archives. It’s just a really thrilling book, as well as being a really interesting history of that time. But the reason why I think it’s also a brilliant political book is fundamentally what Plokhy reveals in his writing: that the failure of Chernobyl was fundamentally a failure of a political system as well as a failure of a scientific system. Because you have people incentivised to exaggerate production targets, to meet deadlines they shouldn’t have to meet . . . “What Plokhy reveals is that the failure of Chernobyl was fundamentally a failure of a political system” Now, of course, these are all system failures that exist freely within capitalism. I’m not saying that only a communist state could have a nuclear disaster—nothing like that. But it is a distinctly Soviet-era disaster. Although a disaster like Chernobyl could have happened under capitalism, the Chernobyl disaster is itself so distinct to the Soviet Union, to that kind of climate of secrecy and command and control. It really is just a brilliant insight into political failure, and a terrifying one. You realise that we think of it as a massive reactor failure, but actually, only about a quarter of the reactor failed. If the reactor collapsed completely, it would have wiped out life on this earth. It was a truly terrifying hypothetical scenario, and he brings this to life. You don’t need to know anything about either nuclear power or the period to follow it. No, though he nods to it in the foreword and the afterword, which is I think the appropriate place for a history book to go, ‘here’s how it relates to the present day.’ What really works well about it is he doesn’t feel that obligation to say, ‘This is how this relates to the present.’ It does the same thing that Yes to Europe! , Robert Saunders’ history of the 1975 referendum campaign, does very well: neither of them go, ‘Look, here’s how this matters in the present day.’ It’s just by reading it you inevitably think: ‘Hmm, well, there are loads of rogue states with a history of secrecy and a ‘success by any costs’ attitude which have nuclear reactors. There are loads of capitalist economies where people have to work ridiculous hours and hit ridiculous targets with nuclear reactors.’ And it’s impossible while reading the book not to draw the obvious parallel. It would have to be Chernobyl . I must have read it four times during the judging process, and I gained something new from it every time."

"This is a really good book. Plokhy is a historian of Ukrainian politics for the most part. He’s a prolific author and a very good historian. He’s really good here at laying down the background of the disaster itself, the plant’s construction, the days leading up to it, and the moments the accident occurred. He describes the problems with standardising construction materials and getting things built on time: there are these cycles of boom and bust where workers who usually work slowly then have to meet their end of the month or yearly quotas and just ram deadlines through. Plokhy describes the politics of building these plants and the accompanying nuclear city with it. Then he talks about the accident itself, the delay in informing the public, the censorship of news, the trial of the nuclear power plant operators (who he thinks were treated as scapegoats), and the political outcomes of all this deception. He argues that politically the accident amounted to a strong desire for Ukrainian sovereignty and separation from the Soviet Union . But he also focuses on the fact that Ukraine had itself been a nuclear power—it had a ring of nuclear missiles on its western border to defend the Soviet Union and a number of nuclear power plants. The Ukrainians were talked into giving these nuclear missiles to Russia in exchange for promises of protection of its sovereignty. At the end of the book, Plokhy makes a really interesting observation where he says that in 2014, the United States, the EU, and Russia —which had all guaranteed Ukraine’s sovereignty in exchange for the missiles—turned their backs on that promise. It’s hard to imagine the Russian annexation of Crimea and occupation of eastern Ukraine if it were still a nuclear power. He sees the passive acceptance of Russia’s actions was a real betrayal of the promises the EU, the US and Russia made in the 1990s to Ukraine. The explosion happened around 1am on April 26th, and by the following Monday, Sweden had reported that there had been an accident. The delay was not only the result of mendacity—it also took many hours to sort out, transmit and then come to believe that the impossible had occurred. Echelons of Soviet officials, whether they were cabinet party leaders or technical people, were sent to the accident site to try to determine what was going on. Each different ministry wanted their own guy on the ground to report to them because they couldn’t trust other sources or each other. So, it did take a while to piece together what exactly had happened. We see this in other major nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island and Fukushima. There were delays in reporting to the public what was going on. At Fukushima, Japanese officials waited not just a few days but two months before they admitted that there had been a meltdown of these reactors. American Met-Edison officials told the public everything was fine on the same morning they were venting radioactive gases from the reactor to save it from a greater explosion. HBO series partly relies on certain Cold War tropes we have about the Soviets. While Japanese don’t fit into that model, it would be interesting to see that docudrama as a sequel to Chernobyl. I have the transcript of the Politburo meeting in which the Soviets discussed the causes of the accident on July 3, 1986. It’s the first time that Gorbachev really was fully informed about what was going on—and he was furious that the Swedes were the ones to tell the world. Here he was, trying to promote the Soviet Union’s new look of openness and transparency, and he was seen as presiding over a huge cover-up. He actually points out that all of these people trusted the government. For the holiday weekend, they all went out for the May Day parades in Kiev, Minsk and other provincial and contaminated cities. Because of that unconscionable decision, families with their children were out marching and were exposed. The Ukrainian leadership wanted to call off the parade and send as many kids out of town as fast as possible, but the Moscow officials were worried about public hysteria. That’s a theme we see in almost every nuclear emergency: the public is supposed to trust their officials, but officialdom—whether Soviet, Japanese or American—does not trust the public with difficult information. In 1989, Soviet officials published the first maps of radioactive fallout from Chernobyl. Imagine if you’ve been living in the village and your kid hasn’t been well and you’ve been feeling poorly and then suddenly you realise, looking at the map, that you have been living for three years in high levels of radioactivity. That’s a pretty shocking and awful thing to learn. Even so, I didn’t see instances of people panicking, rioting, or of mass hysteria. Soviet records show that when people were finally told complicated and technical details, they possessed a profound and astounding ability to grasp knowledge above their pay grade and figure out what to do next. I think Plokhy puts that myth to rest. He does a really good job of describing a 1975 accident at a Leningrad reactor of the same type as Chernobyl—the RBMK reactor. He gives the best rendering in English of what went on with the Leningrad nuclear accident, which came very close to blowing up. At that point, Soviet nuclear engineers realised that they had a real problem with this RBMK reactor, in that when you pull most control rods out of the reactor and press the scram button (which suddenly drops the rods in), it does what it shouldn’t do: it speeds up instead of slowing down. It’s as if you have a car where when you slam on the brakes, it accelerates—that’s what happens with the RBMK reactor. That was a shocking realisation for Soviet nuclear engineers. When they learnt that in 1975, they changed the regulations prescribing that plant operators had to leave at least 30 control rods in the reactor at all times. But what they didn’t do was include in the instruction manual a note that if you didn’t follow this regulation, the plant will blow up like a nuclear bomb. They changed the operator manual, but not the design, to reflect the problem. Out of a knee-jerk urge for secrecy, they didn’t inform the operators just how important those instructions were. Isn’t that awful? We know a great deal about what they did and didn’t do, and the takeaway message is that a graphite reactor on fire is an intractable situation. Everything they tried did not work, and in Plokhy’s judgement they basically just had to let that reactor burn out on its own. The estimates of the radiation released are between 50 million and 200 million curies. The higher number is probably more correct. That’s an awful lot of radioactivity."