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The Lie That Couldn't Hold: How the Cover-Up Broke the USSR
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Reactor Four exploded at 1:23 am on April 26, 1986 — and the Soviet cover-up that followed proved more destructive than the blast itself. This chapter traces the silences, the lies, and the institutional rot that turned a nuclear accident into the beginning of the end for the USSR.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Here's something that doesn't get said enough about Chernobyl. The explosion didn't bring down the Soviet Union.
The explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in northern Ukraine wasn't an accident anyone saw coming that night. A safety test was underway on Reactor Four.
The initial symptoms of acute radiation syndrome can look like the flu. Nausea.
The city of Pripyat was built to house the workers and families of the Chernobyl plant. Thirty thousand people.
Meanwhile, the graphite core at Reactor Four was still burning. Graphite fires are not put out with water.
Mikhail Gorbachev had introduced glasnost as a governing principle in nineteen eighty-five. Transparency.
After the immediate emergency, the Soviet state mobilized what would eventually become six hundred thousand workers for the cleanup effort. They were called liquidators.
The engineering response to an open, burning reactor had no real precedent. The solution was concrete.
The radiation released from Reactor Four included large quantities of iodine-one thirty-one. That particular isotope concentrates in the thyroid gland.
Gorbachev later said that Chernobyl was perhaps the real cause of the Soviet Union's collapse. More than any arms race.
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