On Chernobyl and Avoiding Our Own Hubris

I have not seen the entirety of HBO's Chernobyl miniseries, but I've had a longtime interest in all things nuclear.

For Christmas, my wife got me a copy of Adam Higginbotham's "Midnight in Chernobyl" which has, thusfar, been a fascinating read.

It's not technical, but technical enough to show Higginbotham did his homework and writes in a clear technical sense of the technology involved. And by dint of doughty research and extensive interviews with survivors, brought together more of an ensemble scale of the massive undertaking that taming the destroyed reactor was.

As HBO admits and I suspected in watching what clips of the miniseries I have watched, the TV show took some liberties, notably making Anatoly Dyatlov more of a villain than he was, and Boris Scherbina and Valery Legasov more of the heroes than they were. The book show many more people were involved in the hubris and bravado that the simplified narrative of the show was able to show (not that I'm knocking the show; it's also great, and had to take some liberties with personalities to make a more coherent story).

NPR does a pretty good interview with Higginbotham (trigger warning: Terry Gross, briefly) here.

Masha Gessen, writing for The New Yorker (for whom Higginbotham also contributes) says this about the show and the real story of Chernobyl, which I think is apt:

More often, however, we are given to believe that the three men who were put on trial—and especially one of them, a particularly unattractive villain by the name of Anatoly Dyatlov (Paul Ritter)—are to blame. We see him strong-arming younger, better men into actions that will ultimately lead to catastrophe. All because, it seems, he wants a promotion. In fact, it wasn’t the carrot of a single promotion, or even several promotions, and it wasn’t one nasty and abusive boss. It was the system, made up primarily of pliant men and women, that cut its own corners, ignored its own precautions, and ultimately blew up its own nuclear reactor for no good reason except that this was how things were done. The viewer is invited to fantasize that, if not for Dyatlov, the better men would have done the right thing and the fatal flaw in the reactor, and the system itself, might have remained latent. This is a lie.

It would be harder to show a system digging its own grave instead of an ambitious, evil man causing the disaster. In the same way, it’s harder to see dozens of scientists looking for clues when you can just create a single fantasy character who will have all the good disaster-fighting traits. This is the great-men (and one woman) narrative of history, where it’s a few steps, a few decisions, made by a few men that matter, rather than the mess that humans make and from which they suffer.

We are, in the West, in the United States, digging our own systematic graves as Gessen describes, where through politics and the tinny universes inside our own heads we become the "pliant men and women" that cuts corners, ignores precautions, and ultimately blows ourselves up because that is the way things are done. The hubris shown in book and show is the hubris I see growing in our own nation, and I don't like it. Which is a very good reason to continue being a student of history. Maybe if enough of us know better, we can reverse the trend.