Chernobyl

Craig Mazin, the writer and director of the HBO's mini-series based on the Chernobyl disaster, and Johan Renck, have created one of the most compelling pieces of television drama this year. Yes, there are things that aren't historically accurate; the helicopter crash over the open reactor core and the composite character of Ulana Khomyuk. But to harp on these is to completely miss the point. The story here is of incompetence and cowardice, juxtaposed with genius and bravery. It is of our limited ability to control the complex systems we create.

Stellan Skarsgard does a tremendous job of portraying the tension between political correctness (Soviet style) and reality, as in the first two episodes, he begins to understand the enormity both of what has happened to the reactor and to him (radiation poisoning). The show paints a wonderful picture of short-cuts, miss-steps, heroism, callousness and patriotism. It shows how in complex systems, both technical and societal, small deviations can aggregate and amplify to create catastrophic outcomes.

The Chernobyl explosion was in part a technical flaw, but one that was brought to the fore though a series of human stupidity, ambition, loyalty and obedience. The control room supervisor, Anatoly Dyatlov, acted recklessly (with a dose of arrogance that may or may not have been "historically accurate"). But, as Lagasov notes in the final courtroom scene, he may have been relying on the AZ-5 emergency reactor shutdown procedure working to make the core safe. But the Soviet system had suppressed a finding that suggested that the graphite tips on the control rods might cause a problem when the rods were reinserted into an out of control core.                       

The series is beautifully crafted, with moments of calm interspersed with high drama. It is satisfyingly complete with the exposition of the disaster in the first episode and a more detailed recapitulation of the disaster woven into the final scenes. And it is chock full of shocking small reminders of the enormity of the event; the chunk of graphite from the core that burns a firefighter's hand, the radiation burns on the face of the technician Dyatlov sends into the reactor building just after the explosion, the sealing of the dead firefighters' coffins, first in lead-lines steel jackets, welded shut, and then interred in a concrete filled mass grave. Or the "bio-robots" (soldiers) running across the roof of the reactor building throwing radioactive debris back into the core, or the crews sent to shoot any animals still alive in the vicinity of the plant. All is set against the ominous backdrop of police state surveillance coordinated by by a frighteningly evil head of the KGB in a wonderful understated portrayal by Alan Williams.         

In the end the message is simple; with the best will in the world, and clearly that was sorely lacking in many instances in Soviet Russia, complex systems are hard to control and can quickly blow up in your face. And that lesson is as applicable to the complex system of checks and balances in American democracy and the slow moving catastrophe of man-made climate change (or the global financial markets), as it is to the Soviet nuclear power industry in the 1980s.