Hardeep Matharu finds echoes of the nuclear explosion that helped end the Soviet Union in the UK’s response to COVID-19, which has resulted in one of the highest Coronavirus death rates in the world.
How Events Played Out
As children played and people went about lost in the peace of their everyday lives, the air was carrying a deadly killer. Then, as now, the threat was invisible but it was poisoning the bodies of those unwittingly hosting its particles. Breaking-up their DNA, killing and mutilating their cells, the people of Pripyat were walking around dying.
On Saturday 26 April 1986, the core of reactor number four of the Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Nuclear Power Plant – known as Chernobyl – exploded in Soviet Ukraine. For 10 days, the blaze released toxic radiation into the air across the country and beyond.
Thirty-three years later, following a cluster of cases of unexplained pneumonia, reports surfaced of a novel Coronavirus in Wuhan, China, on New Year’s Eve 2019. The first instances of the disease it causes, COVID-19, were confirmed in the UK just a month later, on Friday 31 January. The highly contagious virus, to which humans have no immunity and for which there is no vaccine, similarly lingers in the air, as well as on everyday surfaces we normally wouldn’t think twice about touching.
Chernobyl’s great irony was that the explosion occurred during a safety test on the ‘RBMK’ nuclear reactor. Attempts to restore its power, when it unexpectedly dropped to close to zero, led to it becoming highly unstable. When the crew thought they were averting disaster by pressing the fail-safe button AZ-5 to shut the reactor down, they were actually igniting it. The reactor core exploded. The impossible had occurred.
Chernobyl was no mere nuclear accident, just as the UK’s Coronavirus outbreak is not only an epidemiological phenomenon. The national reactions to both are symptoms of something deeper…
Unlike those working at Chernobyl that night, the UK Government was handed the gifts of both time and information when it came to the Coronavirus. It saw the devastation suffered by our European neighbours in Italy and Spain. It knew it would only be a matter of time until it arrived in the UK. Its most recent pandemic simulation, Exercise Cygnus, had warned in 2016 that the country’s “preparedness and response, in terms of its plans, policies and capability, is currently not sufficient to cope”. But, rather than learn from others and contain the virus, few timely measures were put in place. Just like the radiation which spewed from Chernobyl into innocent bodies, the Coronavirus was left to spread.
The few journalists who questioned the Government’s response were branded more dangerous than the virus itself by an establishment media intimately involved in protecting those in power no matter the cost. When a lockdown was eventually imposed on 23 March, it was already too late. The UK now has the second-highest COVID-19 death toll in the world, with 50,000 people having lost their lives.
The work of Soviet scientists, including Valery Legasov, uncovered the tragedy at the heart of Chernobyl: that the nuclear reactor’s key fail-safe was, in fact, an activator of destruction on an epic scale. The tips of control rods designed to re-enter the reactor in order to shut it down on the pressing of the AZ-5 button were made of graphite – a chemical which increased reactivity, rather than lowered it. It was cheaper. While those working at the nuclear power plant had no idea that this safeguard was an accelerator, a KGB report had highlighted the flaw in the RBMK reactor years before.
The UK Government was similarly not in the dark over COVID-19. Who then is to blame?
The explosion did not just destroy a nuclear reactor but the Soviet Union itself.
Legasov’s life changed forever when he was appointed chief of the commission investigating the Chernobyl disaster. Alongside the flaws in the nuclear reactor itself, human error was also discovered, which had created the conditions for the explosion to occur. Those who carried out the safety test were unprepared as there had just been a shift change and the behaviour of deputy chief engineer Anatoly Dyatlov was criminally reckless and certainly contributed significantly to what happened. Reasoning was flawed and conditions pressurised.
In our search for good men and devils, for black and white answers, it would be easy to paint Legasov as this story’s hero and Dyatlov its villain. To blame Boris Johnson alone for letting the Coronavirus spread, while clapping our health and care workers for dealing heroically with its fall-out.
But, it is not that simple.
Would anyone in the control room at Chernobyl that night have pressed the fail-safe button if they had known the ruin it would cause?
Unbending Realities
No amount of spin or propaganda can change the half-life of radioactive materials or the transmissibility and fatality rate of a novel virus. Chernobyl was no mere nuclear accident, just as the UK’s Coronavirus outbreak is not only an epidemiological phenomenon. The national reactions to both are symptoms of something deeper; of a rotting system – exposing and horrifying – revealing just how far detached we can become from the cost of human life in the face of lies.
They lied and lied and lied and lied but always, always was this enormous tub full of incredibly dangerous elements that was ready to blow up if the proper conditions were met.
Craig Mazin
The explosion did not just destroy a nuclear reactor but the Soviet Union itself. Independence movements – particularly in Ukraine and Belarus, the two most affected regions – found life in its wake and the empire fell five years later. In 2006, Mikhail Gorbachev, on whose watch the disaster unfolded, said that “the nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl… even more than my launch of Perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union”.
Having confronted the Soviet state with uncomfortable truths, Legasov’s career and professional standing disintegrated. Before hanging himself one day after the disaster’s second anniversary, he recorded a series of tapes about what had happened at Chernobyl. Although the Soviet Union had tried to hide key findings, with Legasov’s suicide, his concerns were finally heard. All remaining RBMK reactors were adapted to avoid the possibility of the disaster happening again – particularly the tips of the control rods.
In a fictionalised scene in last year’s hit dramatisation Chernobyl by Craig Mazin, Legasov tells a Soviet show trial that “our secrets and our lies… are practically what define us. When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there, but it is still there.”
The five-part series, which thoughtfully explores how truth lies in wait, ends with Legasov reflecting on its ultimate, unavoidable nature: “Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid… Where I once would fear the cost of truth, now I only ask: what is the cost of lies?”
Chernobyl was a meltdown of the Soviet facade, beneath which a ‘socialist’ state lived premised on brutality, individual survival and perverse incentives for those in power; the prioritisation of perception and principle over people. Its hypernormalised citizens, aware that they were lied to, were stuck in a numbing politics of eternity.
“It exposed the worst kind of Soviet lie to the world,” Mazin told The Chernobyl Podcast. “They were able, in various phases in the history of the Soviet Union, to visit terrible things upon their own people and yet still keep the people either believing out of faith or believing out of fear, which is not really believing but submitting. But, in this case, it seemed as if some sort of genie had leapt out of the lamp and could not ever be put back, in the same way that this nuclear reactor had opened up and the stuff that came out could not be put back in.”