In the city of Pripyat in Ukraine, built for workers at the nearby Chernobyl nuclear power plant, stands a bronze statue of the god Prometheus clasping fire in his outstretched arms. It was intended to symbolise the triumph of human ingenuity in taming and harnessing the forces of nature – in particular, the fire locked inside the atomic nucleus, released in a controlled manner from radioactive uranium to generate power.
Now the statue has taken on a very different meaning. Like Prometheus, Pripyat seems to have been punished for the hubris of stealing this inner fire. It is a ghost town where weeds and wilderness encroach on deserted apartments still scattered with the abandoned relics of a population evacuated suddenly more than 30 years ago, surrounded by an exclusion zone in which the radiation levels from the disaster are still too high for human habitation. Visitors arriving for official tours find scenes straight out of Andrei Tarkovsky's cult film Stalker. (The survivalist horror game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is set in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.) Swings rust slowly in silent playgrounds; signs saying “meat” and “cheese” still hang in empty supermarkets. Guides with Geiger counters warn of areas still too “hot” with radioactive contaminants to enter.
The explosion of Reactor Four at the Chernobyl plant on 26 April 1986 was the worst nuclear accident in history. The old adage about learning from history so as not to repeat it has a chilling resonance here. But what exactly should we learn? These three books attempt to figure that out. The answer is, unsurprisingly, complicated.
On the reasons for the accident, Serhii Plokhy (a Russian-Ukrainian-American historian) and Adam Higginbotham (a British-born journalist working in the US) are consistent. At the time, the Soviet authorities placed the blame on human error: the mishandling by operators on the night-shift of what should have been a routine shutdown to run basic tests on the safety system. In one of the last show trials of the ailing state during Mikhail Gorbachev's era of glasnost and perestroika, the personnel concerned were sent to prison – the harshest sentence (ten years) being imposed on the plant's director, Viktor Bryukhanov, who was accused of “moral collapse… as a leader and as a man”.
But history vindicates the assertions of these accused men that the reactor was poorly designed, with a fatal flaw creating the potential for unstable, runaway behaviour that none of them could have foreseen. That's what turned a minor error into a disaster. To acknowledge that, however, would mean placing blame on powerful individuals in the Soviet nuclear programme and admitting to the world that its science and engineering were substandard – as well as recognising the dangers posed by other reactors of this type operating in Russia and the satellite states. (They were quietly modified anyway.)
In this respect, Chernobyl exemplifies the malaise of the Soviet system, where impossible targets were set and imposed by bullying and threats, corners were cut and citizens kept in the dark, sometimes at vast risk. Most deplorable of all was the cavalier attitude of Moscow to the danger and hardship that the accident inflicted on populations in Ukraine and Belarus. Radiation levels were repeatedly minimised or dismissed and decisions about the evacuation of Pripyat and the surrounding region, and of children from nearby Kiev, were made more on the basis of appearance and inconvenience than the safety of the inhabitants. If there are lessons to be learned, one is surely that a political system that depends on fear of authority and reprimand, and that strictly rations knowledge down a chain of expertise, is primed for disasters like this. These shortcomings aren't just found in authoritarian states.
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