Sign in with Facebook
Athan Tolis's Reviews > Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe
Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe
by
by
As luck would have it, right about as I was finishing “Chernobyl� yesterday, I was invited to dine with my friend Gleb’s daddy, Peter, a veteran of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, the innocuous name Beria allegedly chose for the Soviet equivalent of the Manhattan Project.
With author Serhii Plokhy’s conclusions fresh in my mind, I put the question to him: who was to blame for Chernobyl? He did not hesitate: “culture� he answered. When the political decision was made to transfer responsibility for the nuclear reactors from their creators to the Ministry of Energy and Electrification, the authorities failed to also transfer the zero tolerance culture that had prevailed amongst the originators of the program.
Perhaps that’s an oversimplification and perhaps it’s a case of one man talking his book, but it’s an interpretation that I’m prepared to believe, because the one biggest shock you get from reading this well-researched tome is culture shock:
“Chernobyl� transports you from our world to the Soviet Union, a dark place where your personal target is to get promoted and your most important imperative is to make your boss look good.
To make him look good, in turn, your best option is to put pressure on whatever resources you have under your command. And if to make him look good you need to execute a testing procedure under imperfect conditions, well, so be it.
The book is a lot about people: you get to meet all the men in the control room, the firefighters who made the ultimate sacrifice, the scientists and the cleaners. You meet the twin bosses of the plant (both the scientist and --alarm bells!—the builder) the local head of the party, the KGB, the military, pretty much everybody up to Mikhail Gorbachev.
There’s heroes and villains here and the heroes are invariably tragic heroes: from the simple men who picked up with their bare hands the radioactive graphite bars that flew out of the exploding reactor to the scientists who ran toward danger in reactor 4 to the men and women who sailed as close as possible to their mandate when advocating evacuation, these were people who put their self-interest second. The villains come in two flavors: those (Gorbachev included!) who jumped to protect the system, and largely paid for it, and those who had a knack for sailing with the wind.
Watching the latter shift from singing the praises of nuclear energy to becoming advocates of the environment and national sovereignty and from there back to arguing for energy sufficiency is probably the most sickening part of the book, roentgens and rems notwithstanding.
But this is a comprehensive book: you find out about the reactor, its operators, the politics of the country it was built in, the mechanics of the explosion, the frantic efforts to control the fallout, the tragic effect on the neighboring population, and ultimately Chernobyl’s profound effect on the politics of the Ukraine and the Soviet Union itself.
The conclusion is that Chernobyl had a decisive contribution toward ending the Soviet Union.
I must say I was convinced.
With author Serhii Plokhy’s conclusions fresh in my mind, I put the question to him: who was to blame for Chernobyl? He did not hesitate: “culture� he answered. When the political decision was made to transfer responsibility for the nuclear reactors from their creators to the Ministry of Energy and Electrification, the authorities failed to also transfer the zero tolerance culture that had prevailed amongst the originators of the program.
Perhaps that’s an oversimplification and perhaps it’s a case of one man talking his book, but it’s an interpretation that I’m prepared to believe, because the one biggest shock you get from reading this well-researched tome is culture shock:
“Chernobyl� transports you from our world to the Soviet Union, a dark place where your personal target is to get promoted and your most important imperative is to make your boss look good.
To make him look good, in turn, your best option is to put pressure on whatever resources you have under your command. And if to make him look good you need to execute a testing procedure under imperfect conditions, well, so be it.
The book is a lot about people: you get to meet all the men in the control room, the firefighters who made the ultimate sacrifice, the scientists and the cleaners. You meet the twin bosses of the plant (both the scientist and --alarm bells!—the builder) the local head of the party, the KGB, the military, pretty much everybody up to Mikhail Gorbachev.
There’s heroes and villains here and the heroes are invariably tragic heroes: from the simple men who picked up with their bare hands the radioactive graphite bars that flew out of the exploding reactor to the scientists who ran toward danger in reactor 4 to the men and women who sailed as close as possible to their mandate when advocating evacuation, these were people who put their self-interest second. The villains come in two flavors: those (Gorbachev included!) who jumped to protect the system, and largely paid for it, and those who had a knack for sailing with the wind.
Watching the latter shift from singing the praises of nuclear energy to becoming advocates of the environment and national sovereignty and from there back to arguing for energy sufficiency is probably the most sickening part of the book, roentgens and rems notwithstanding.
But this is a comprehensive book: you find out about the reactor, its operators, the politics of the country it was built in, the mechanics of the explosion, the frantic efforts to control the fallout, the tragic effect on the neighboring population, and ultimately Chernobyl’s profound effect on the politics of the Ukraine and the Soviet Union itself.
The conclusion is that Chernobyl had a decisive contribution toward ending the Soviet Union.
I must say I was convinced.
Sign into ŷ to see if any of your friends have read
Chernobyl.
Sign In »
