The Movie

The movie fades up to the sounds of rain pattering as Cillian Murphy’s version of a young J. Robert Oppenheimer watches. Then, with a cut to a massive explosion, we get some text on the screen that reads:

“Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity.”

Then, just as quickly as it cuts to the quote, it cuts back to an older J. Robert Oppenheimer.

The True Story

As you can probably guess, that comes from Greek mythology. It’s not really a direct quote of anything, though, but rather it’s more of a paraphrased synopsis of the Prometheus myth.

The whole story is thousands of lines of text, so I won’t include the whole thing here either, but I’ll add a link to it in the show notes if you want to read it all. The movie’s summary is pretty good, though, considering they’re breaking it all down into just a couple lines.

Prometheus was a Titan who was bound by Zeus’s servants Hephaestus, Power, and Force as punishment for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to the humans. That’s how humans were able to progress to a more civilized society with technology thanks to harnessing fire. When he was bound, Prometheus’s torture was basically being exposed to the scorching sun by the day, freezing at night, and then an eagle would eat his liver. The next day, the liver would regenerate and the cycle repeated itself.

The Movie

Back in the movie, we see Oppenheimer going to Europe to study under Patrick Blackett in Cambridge. He’s played by James D’Arcy in the movie. While Oppenheimer is there, the movie focuses on a rather curious moment when Oppenheimer injects Blackett’s apple with potassium cyanide. Then, the next day, he seems to have a change of heart and when he rushes back to the classroom while Neils Bohr is talking to Blackett, and Oppenheimer knocks the apple down just in time, claiming there was a wormhole in the apple.

The True Story

While the movie doesn’t really focus on Oppenheimer’s time as a student in the United States as it does in Europe, it is correct to mention him going to Europe to study under Patrick Blackett at Cambridge.

To back up for a moment, though, what we don’t see much of in the movie is Oppenheimer’s time at Harvard. He went there in 1922 when he was 18 years old and majored in chemistry. That’s how he got interested in physics, when one of his professors named Percy Bridgman taught a course on thermodynamics that interested Oppenheimer. And so, after graduating summa cum laude in 1925 after only three years, Oppenheimer went to Christ’s College, Cambridge, to study physics.

More specifically, that was at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Physics. Oppenheimer was there for about a year from 1925 to 1926.

And that scene with the poisoned apple? That really happened!

The movie implies that Oppenheimer was rather clumsy in the lab, and that’s a bit of truth that frustrated Oppenheimer. On top of that, Professor Blackett was an incredibly demanding teacher. This grew into a resentment for Blackett and by the time the autumn of 1925 rolled around, the then-22-year-old Oppenheimer was struggling badly and feeling incompetent with his lab work.

So, Oppenheimer used chemicals from the lab and injected them into an apple on Blackett’s desk. There’s some debate around exactly what he used and how much—after all, it’s not like this is the kind of thing that gets documented—but we know it happened because he confessed what he’d done to one of his friends. It was most likely cyanide, and probably wasn’t enough to kill him, just to make him sick.

But, that’s irrelevant, because just like we see in the movie, Blackett never ate the apple. Although the movie shows Oppenheimer having a change of mind and rushing back to toss the apple before Blackett can eat it, and that part of the movie seems to be a bit of dramatic license.

The sources I saw merely mentioned that Professor Blackett simply tossed the apple without ever knowing it had been poisoned. There’s nothing I could find that suggested Oppenheimer had a change of mind and rushed back, or that he was even there when the apple was discarded.

The Movie

Going back to the movie, during the apple scene we also see Oppenheimer talking to the visiting lecturer Neils Bohr. In that conversation and due to Oppenheimer’s lack of skills in the lab, Bohr recommends Oppenheimer go to Germany to study theoretical physics under Max Born because there’s no lab work required for that.

The True Story

Since we already learned the poisoned apple story didn’t happen exactly like that in the movie, it’s probably not a surprise to learn this other side of it didn’t happen the same way either.

What is accurate, though, is that the Oppenheimer did meet the Danish physicist Neils Bohr. While the movie doesn’t really mention much about who he was other than to suggest Oppenheimer was looking forward to hearing him speak. He won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922, so when he visited Cambridge just a few years later, I can only imagine how excited Oppenheimer must’ve been to meet one of the most respected minds in his field.

Unlike what we see in the movie, though, it wasn’t Neils Bohr who recommended Oppenheimer go to Germany to study under Max Born.

As you might expect, Max Born was a German physicist and he was also highly respected in the 1920s, and after World War II went on to become one of the people who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics.

So, probably the biggest change is the movie simplified the events.

In the true story, Oppenheimer actually met both Neils Bohr and Max Born while he was at Cambridge. Not necessarily at the same time, though, so it makes sense why the movie simplified it all. But amidst Oppenheimer’s depression from his poor lab work, and I’m sure the whole apple debacle didn’t help, but Oppenheimer decided to leave Cambridge to go to the University of GURT-in-en (Göttingen) in Germany so he could study theoretical physics under Max Born.

GURT-ing-en

Unlike his time in Cambridge, Oppenheimer flourished in his theoretical studies. Just six months after moving to Germany, Oppenheimer graduated with his PhD and co-authored the Born-Oppenheimer approximation with Max Born. He was making a name for himself.

The Movie

After studying in Germany, the movie talks about Oppenheimer returning to the United States where he sets up the theoretical physics department at the University of California, Berkley. Then after all of this setup of Oppenheimer’s education and early career are taking place while we see black and white sequences with Robert Downey Jr.’s version of Lewis Strauss hiring Oppenheimer to work at what the movie only calls “the Institute.”

The True Story

This is where we really start to see the movie bouncing around in the timeline, because Oppenheimer wasn’t appointed as the director of the Institute for Advanced Study until 1947. That’s clearly after World War II and the Manhattan Project. Since we’re following the movie’s timeline of events, we’ll be bouncing around a bit as well, but here is a quick overview of Oppenheimer’s timeline in the true story.

After graduating with his doctorate from the University of Göttingen in Germany in March of 1927, Oppenheimer stayed in Europe for post-doc studies where he spent time in Leiden and Zurich studying under the great minds of the day.

In the fall of 1929, he returned to the U.S. and accepted a position as an associate professor at UC Berkley. He stayed there, but in the spring of 1930, he also started teaching at Caltech. For the next twelve years he went back and forth, splitting time teaching as a full professor at UC Berkley while also being a full professor at Caltech, although he had a special agreement with UC Berkley to release him for six weeks out of the year to teach at Caltech for a term.

This is the time that he built UC Berkley’s theoretical physics program into something of renown that we hear Robert Downey Jr.’s version of Lewis Strauss mention in the movie. But that was in 1947 when Oppenheimer joined the Institute, as we talked about before.

So, from 1930 until 1942, he was splitting time at UC Berkley and Caltech. In 1942, he was given leave to work on the Manhattan Project, and then he returned to Caltech in 1946. He resigned both Caltech and UC Berkley in 1947 to take the job of director at the Institute for Advanced Study.

The Movie

Speaking of the Institute for Advanced Study, in the movie that’s where we see another famous scientist: Albert Einstein. If we’re to believe the movie’s version of history, Oppenheimer seems to think Einstein is a has-been. For example, there’s a line of dialogue early in the movie when Strauss tells Oppenheimer that Einstein is the “greatest scientific mind of our time.” Oppenheimer replies by saying, “Of his time.”

The True Story

While I couldn’t find anything in my research to indicate this exact line of dialogue about Einstein being the greatest scientific mind of “his” time, but the movie is correctly capturing the essence of the relationship between Einstein and Oppenheimer. Before he worked at the Institute, Oppenheimer visited Princeton in 1935. After that, he wrote a letter to his brother where he said, “Princeton is a madhouse: its solipsistic luminaries shining in separate & helpless desolation. Einstein is completely cuckoo.”

About ten years later, Einstein said of the theory Oppenheimer was primarily focusing on, “The quantum theory is without a doubt a useful theory, but it does not reach to the bottom of things. I never believed that it constitutes the true conception of nature.”

Despite these differences, they still had a mutual respect and were cordial with each other. After Einstein passed away in 1955, Oppenheimer wrote publicly that, “…physicists lost their greatest colleague…”

The Movie

Heading back to the movie’s timeline, there’s a line of dialogue from Lewis Strauss as he’s showing Oppenheimer around the Institute when he says the position comes with a house for his family: His wife and two children.

And that introduces us to the next major plot point, because the movie doesn’t focus on Robert Oppenheimer’s personal life a lot, but we do see two relationships that he has…and according to the movie they overlap. First, he has a girlfriend named Jean Tatlock, but then he gets a married woman named Kitty Harrison pregnant. Since Kitty is pregnant, Robert leaves Jean while Kitty leaves her husband to marry Robert. But then, later in the movie, we see Robert having an affair with Jean again.

The True Story

This back-and-forth sort of relationship that we see in the movie does a pretty good job capturing what J. Robert Oppenheimer’s personal life was really like. The key thing the movie does, though, is to mess with the timeline because once again it’s jumping around.

Remember, Oppenheimer’s job at the Institute was in 1947. So, his wife at that time was the woman we see in the movie: Kitty Harrison. She’s played by Emily Blunt.

Kitty’s surname in the movie is actually from one of her husbands before Oppenheimer. Her maiden name was Vissering. She married Frank Ramseyer in 1932, then had that annulled in 1933. The next year, she married Joe Dallet. That lasted until he died in 1937, and then in 1938 she married Richard Harrison. They were divorced in 1940 when she married J. Robert Oppenheimer.

The two children Robert and Kitty had together, Peter and Toni, were the only kids either of them had.

The Movie

In the movie, we see Robert having an girlfriend in Jean Tatlock. But he sleeps with Kitty Harrison, who was a married woman as we just learned, and gets her pregnant. So, Kitty divorces her husband, Robert breaks things off with Jean, and then Robert and Kitty get married.

The True Story

Once again, the movie gets the essence of the story correct, but the timeline was sped up and changed from history.

So, here’s a quick rundown to unravel the historical timeline.

Robert Oppenheimer met Jean Tatlock in the Spring of 1936 when he was teaching at UC Berkley. She was a student there, and it didn’t take long for a romance to blossom. And if you’re wondering, since he was a teacher and she was a student, he was 32 and she was 22. Their relationship developed quickly and Jean had a big influence on shaping Robert’s left-leaning political views. Robert proposed to Jean twice, both of which she rejected, and then in the Spring of 1939, she broke it off with him.

A few months later, in August of 1939, Robert met Kitty Harrison at a party hosted by another physicist. At that time, she was 29 and he was 35. Almost immediately, an affair started. They didn’t hide it, either, as there were reports of Robert and Kitty driving around together in the open.

In the summer of 1940, there was a notable event when Robert Oppenheimer invited Richard and Kitty Harrison to his ranch in New Mexico. Richard Harrison declined the invitation saying he was too busy with work, but Kitty accepted. So, another physicist named Robert Serber along with his wife Charlotte, picked up Kitty in Pasadena and drove her to Oppenheimer’s ranch in New Mexico where they found Robert’s brother, Frank, and Frank’s wife Jackie there.

So, again, the affair wasn’t really a secret. Oh, and at that time, Kitty was pregnant with Robert’s child…who would be Peter, their firstborn.

Well, you can probably see where this is going.

On November 1^st, 1940, Kitty divorced her husband. The very next day, on November 2^nd, 1940, she married Robert Oppenheimer.

But…things weren’t all sunshine and rainbows, because only a couple months after marrying Kitty, who should show back up in Robert’s life? Jean. She reconnected with him and the historical record shows that Robert’s first New Years celebration as a married man, he spent it not with his wife Kitty, but Jean Tatlock.

For the next few years, Robert and Jean maintained contact a couple times a year. While we don’t know the specifics of what happened each time, it’s probably safe to say they were romantic connections.

Despite this, from what we can tell, Kitty knew about Robert’s affair with Jean, and she seemed to tolerate it. Although, to be fair, some have debated just how much she knew. Maybe she only knew them to be friends at first. We don’t really know for sure where that line was crossed, but we know from the FBI tapping their lines in 1943 that Oppenheimer himself said he told Kitty about the affair with Jean, so we can assume she at least knew by then.

The Movie

Speaking of Jean, I’ll throw out a quick content warning here, because something else we see in the movie is a suicide. It happens when Oppenheimer tells Jean that he can’t do the affair anymore, she gets depressed and takes her own life. Robert is shaken by this, but Kitty tells him that he doesn’t get to commit the sin and then make other people feel sorry for him.

The True Story

Unfortunately, that’s true. That was in January of 1944 when Jean was discovered in her bathtub in San Francisco. There was an unsigned note that suggested suicide, and officially it was ruled to be the result of ingesting sedatives and alcohol.

The movie makes it seem like she did it because Robert broke off their affair, but there’s been a lot of controversies surrounding her death.

For example, the note was unsigned. An autopsy suggested she’d eaten a full meal before she died, which the doctor at the time found curious since it’d slow down the effect of the drugs she’d ingested. Her body was discovered by her father, John Tatlock, who moved it from the bathtub to the sofa and then burned a bunch of her letters in the fireplace before calling the funeral parlor—it was the parlor that contacted the police some four hours after she’d died.

Curious things, perhaps, and to be fair as with many debated events in history, not all of those are documented as well as others. But, if there was a conspiracy around her death, that begs the question: Why?

Well, to go down that road, we’d have to remember the timeline. January of 1944. At this point, Robert Oppenheimer was working at the top-secret Manhattan Project. Jean Tatlock was a known member of the Communist Party. If you recall, a moment ago I mentioned the FBI tapped Oppenheimer’s line in 1943 and those revealed that he talked to Kitty about the affair with Jean. The whole reason the FBI was tapping his lines to begin with was because of his association with the Communist Party. They started that in March of 1941, even before he was recruited into the Manhattan Project. Of course, it didn’t stop once he was heading up the top-secret project, so that’s why some think perhaps there was a government coverup to kill Jean Tatlock to keep atomic secrets from getting into the hands of the Soviets.

Then again, Oppenheimer himself believed Jean committed suicide. She was clinically depressed, and she worked as a psychiatrist, so she had access to sedatives pretty easily.

What do you think? If you have any other details or research you’ve done, let me know!

The Movie

For now, if we head back into the movie for the next major plot point, it’s Oppenheimer being recruited into the Manhattan Project by Matt Damon’s version of General Leslie Groves.

But the way we see this happening in the movie, Groves tells Oppenheimer that his name didn’t even come up in the search for a project director even though it was Oppenheimer who brought quantum physics to America. So, the impression I got from the movie was basically if it wasn’t for Groves then Oppenheimer wouldn’t be involved in the Manhattan Project at all.

The True Story

In the true story, that’s not really how it happened. To know what really happened, let’s go back to around the time of Oppenheimer marrying Kitty in late 1940, and then Peter being born in May of 1941. While that was going on in his personal life, in his professional life, Oppenheimer was collaborating on a radiation lab with Ernest Lawrence, who won the 1939 Nobel Prize in physics. That lab was where Lawrence had invented the cyclotron, a particle accelerator he’d patented back in 1932.

After the United States entered World War II, Lawrence recruited Oppenheimer to work on fission and fast neutron experiments at the UC Berkley lab. As you recall, he’d built the theoretical physics program there, so from July to September of 1942, Oppenheimer assembled a group of theoretical physicists to come up with the principles of a bomb design. Seeing as Oppenheimer was the one who built the theoretical physics program at UC Berkley anyway, over those few short months he became a leader of that group.

So, all of that is to say:

That is why U.S. Army General Leslie R. Groves recruited Oppenheimer on October 15^th, 1942 to head up something called Project Y. About a month later, the two men visited Los Alamos, New Mexico for what they called Site Y.

The Movie

And that leads us into something else about the movie, because for a movie called Oppenheimer, it makes sense to focus on him as the main character. We do see a few others, like Isidor Rabi and at one point Robert brings his brother Frank in on the project, but the movie also mentions having to build a town with churches and schools and such, so it’s obviously not showing us the full scale.

The True Story

Now would be a good time to clarify the term “Manhattan Project” and why I’m referring to something in Los Alamos, New Mexico. This project was a lot bigger scale than what we see in the movie.

So, General Groves was from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and in August of 1942, they created something they called the Manhattan Engineer District, or MED. On the surface, it was routine construction in New York City. The true purpose was to cover up the work required for the atomic bomb project.

Over time, that name morphed from the Manhattan Engineer District to the Manhattan Project even though the project itself had sites around the country. As we just learned, Los Alamos, New Mexico was considered “Site Y,” while Oak Ridge, Tennessee was “Site X” and Hanover, Washington was “Site W.”

The Los Alamos location was where the primary work for the bomb design. That’s where Oppenheimer was at, along with about 6,000 workers. The other sites, Oak Ridge and Hanover, were more for providing the materials needed and they were much larger in scale than Los Alamos. There were about 50,000 people working in Hanover that focused primarily on producing plutonium, while Oak Ridge had another 75,000 people focusing on enriching uranium.

So, all in all, the Manhattan Project was a lot larger than what we see in the movie. But again, it’s called “Oppenheimer” and not “Manhattan Project.”

Actually, if you want to learn more about this, I’ve got another companion episode to this one with historian Alice Lovejoy that focuses more on the movie’s portrayal of the Manhattan Project. You can find that over at basedonatruestorypodcast.com/oppenheimer.

The Movie

Back to the movie now, and something that’s very easy to do when we’re watching a historical movie is to look at it from today’s perspective with the knowledge we have today. With that in mind, I thought Oppenheimer did a good job doing was helping us get a sense for what it was like before the nuclear age, because we see Oppenheimer having a major concern that an atomic bomb might start a chain reaction that would just keep going and going until the entire atmosphere has been destroyed and, by extension, everyone and everything on the planet would die.

The True Story

While the movie dramatizes the specifics of it, it’s very true that Oppenheimer and other scientists working on the Manhattan Project considered the possibility that detonating a nuclear device might start an unstoppable chain reaction that’d basically ignite the Earth’s atmosphere and end the world.

Although, as scary as that sounds, it’s often described as more of a “nonzero” risk. So, technically it’s not zero percent chance, but a miniscule chance that from a practical perspective is basically zero.

Except, we’re talking about the end of the world here, so you can understand why even a “nonzero” risk is still worth making sure it doesn’t happen.

The fear was mostly from the physicist Edward Teller, who was worried that a fission bomb would ignite the nitrogen in the atmosphere, or perhaps the hydrogen in the ocean, and just keep using that as fuel to burn. That was as early as 1942.

So, they did the math.

It wasn’t until 1946 that two other physicists at Los Alamos named Hans Bethe and Emil Konopinski formally published a paper that proved the reaction couldn’t continue on forever due to dropping air density and temperature thresholds. That was after the Trinity Test in 1945, but they’d obviously been working on it before then and from what we can tell, they had the math figured out by the time of the test, just hadn’t published the formal paper before it.

The Movie

Speaking of the Trinity Test, let’s head back to the movie because we’re at the point of the test itself. According to the movie, there’s an immense pressure to just use the atomic bomb to end World War II. The military has a list of 11 Japanese cities, and they want to drop two bombs on two of those cities. With a tight deadline, they need to detonate an atomic bomb to make sure it works and gather data like what’s a safe operating distance.

That’s how we get the test. In the movie, Groves asks Oppenheimer what they should call the test, and Oppenheimer says, “Batter my heart, three-person’d god.” Groves replies, “What?” to which Oppenheimer replies, “Trinity.”

It’s the first time an atomic bomb has been detonated and according to the movie, the test appears to be a massive success. As he’s watching this is when we see Oppenheimer use the now-famous quote, “I am become death. The destroyer of worlds.”

The True Story

In the true story, there wasn’t really a list of 11 Japanese cities like we see in the movie. There was actually about 16 cities that were considered by what the U.S. called the “Target Committee,” which was made up of 12 people at its height. Oppenheimer was the chair of the committee, along with members of the military and other scientists in the Manhattan Project.

By the spring of 1945, the 16 Japanese cities were narrowed down to five cities: Kyoto, Hiroshima, Yokohama, Kokura, and Niigata. They were chosen for size, military value, surrounding terrain to help amplify the bomb’s effects, as well as minimal previous bombing so they could see what effect the atomic bomb would have compared to other bombings.

Then came Monday, July 16^th, 1945. The day of the Trinity Test.

The name itself is something the movie alludes to when we see Oppenheimer say, “Batter my heart, three person’d God.” That’s a line from the 17^th-century poem from John Donne called Holy Sonnet XIV, which refers to the Christian Trinity. Much later when Groves asked him about the name, Oppenheimer said he wasn’t entirely sure why he picked it other than to think that “Trinity” might fit in with common Western-style names like “Three Rivers,” “Three Peaks,” and so on.

So, he must’ve thought the name “Trinity” wouldn’t attract much attention. Until it exploded, of course.

And the way see the Trinity Test itself happening in the movie is a pretty good re-enactment of what really happened that weekend. There were about 425 people at the Trinity Test site, which was roughly 210 miles south of Los Alamos, New Mexico. That broke down into about 250 scientists and engineers running the test, another 150 or so military as security, and between 20 to 30 VIPs. That included General Leslie Groves, who joined Oppenheimer at the primary command bunker that they called S-10,000 because it was 10,000 yards south of ground zero. That’s about 5.7 miles.

There were also scientists at N-10,000, and W-10,000, but there were mountains to the east so there wasn’t an E-10,000 post.

As for the goggles we see in the movie, those were real as well. The standard gear was dark lenses that filtered UV, and people were ordered to lie face-down, backs turned and put your arms over your eyes. Of course, not everyone did that. Most famously, Richard Feynman chose not to wear goggles and instead watched through the windshield of a truck.

At exactly 5:29 a.m. Mountain Time, the “Gadget” as they called it, detonated on a 100-foot tower. To say the blast exceeded all expectations was an understatement.

Radiation was higher than expected and people at the posts some 5.7 miles away were knocked over by the blast’s shockwave, although there weren’t any major injuries.

That brings us to the line, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

That’s a line from the Bhagavad Gita, a 700-verse Hindu scripture that Oppenheimer paraphrased into that now-famous quote. Chapter 11, Verse 32 says, “I am Time, the destroyer of worlds, grown great, come to consume the worlds.”

Oppenheimer never uttered those words aloud, but in a 1965 documentary for NBC, Oppenheimer recalled that seeing how successful the Trinity Test was, he recounted that he remembered the Bhagavad Gita verse.

The Movie

Heading back to the movie’s version of events, the very next scene after the successful Trinity Test is some military guys saying, “With respect, Dr. Oppenheimer, we’ll take it from here.” And with that, they pack up a bomb and drive away. It happens so quickly in the movie, it’s almost as if that seems to be that they had a successful test, so that’s immediately the end of the Manhattan Project overall.

The True Story

That’s not really what happened. At least not nearly as fast as the movie makes it seem. So, once again, let’s unravel the true story’s timeline.

The Trinity Test was July 16^th, 1945.

About three weeks later, on August 6^th, the uranium gun-type bomb called “Little Boy” was dropped on Hiroshima, resulting in between 70,000 and 80,000 deaths instantly. The movie shows Oppenheimer finding out about the bombs through the radio, but he still worked at Los Alamos, where he found out that evening along with everyone else. Cheers erupted among the teams at Los Alamos on hearing the news, and Oppenheimer joined in the champagne toasts. Although, despite the celebrations, he also had moral qualms with the news.

Three days later, more news. The plutonium bomb “Fat Man” was dropped Nagasaki, with between 35,000 to 40,000 deaths instantly. Back in Los Alamos, there weren’t the same kind of celebrations. Oppenheimer was reported to say, “No, this is too much.”

On August 14^th, 1945, Japan announced their intent to surrender. That’s U.S. time, in Japan it was August 15^th. This effectively ended World War II, although the official surrender document wasn’t signed until September 2^nd.

Then, on October 16^th, exactly three months after the Trinity Test, Oppenheimer resigned from his position in Los Alamos. The Manhattan Project continued on without him, though, until it was disbanded on August 15^th, 1947. As for Oppenheimer, he returned to Caltech where he resumed teaching, but quickly realized his heart wasn’t in it anymore.

The Movie

That leads us right up to Oppenheimer’s meeting with President Truman that we see in the movie. You know, the one where Oppenheimer says, “I feel that I have blood on my hands.” Truman replies with, “You think anyone in Hiroshima or Nagasaki gives a shit about who built the bomb? They care who dropped it. I did.”

Then, as Oppenheimer is shown out of the Oval Office, we can hear Truman in the background saying, “Don’t let that crybaby back in here.”

The True Story

That was a real meeting that took place on October 25^th, 1945, not long after Oppenheimer resigned from Los Alamos. And the movie is correct to show that Oppenheimer told President Truman that he feels like he has blood on his hands. Truman’s reply was a little different than the movie, albeit with the same effect. Ray Month’s book called Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center quotes Truman as saying, “Blood on his hands; damn it, he hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don’t go around bellyaching about it.”

Then, he called Oppenheimer a crybaby and said, “I don’t want to see that son of a bitch in this office ever again.”

Except, unlike what we see in the movie, all of that supposedly happened after Oppenheimer had already left so it’s not like it was something he heard as he was leaving like the movie shows.

The Movie

After leaving the Manhattan Project, the movie circles back to something it shows throughout with Lewis Strauss answering to Congress about hiring Oppenheimer for the Institute.

While I was watching that play out in the movie, it gave me the impression that despite Oppenheimer’s contributions to the war effort, his reputation was almost immediately tarnished after the war because of what the movie calls “left-wing associations” and being tied to communism. The movie also seems to imply that Strauss was orchestrating it all, which is quite a turn for the guy who hired Oppenheimer at the Institute.

The True Story

For the most part, the way the movie shows this happening is pretty accurate. It’s dramatized, naturally, but the core elements are there.

What the movie skips are a few years between that meeting with President Truman at the end of 1945 and Oppenheimer’s 1946, when he consulted in Washington on atomic policy and was appointed to the Atomic Energy Commission, or AEC. That leads us up to 1947, which actually takes us back to the beginning of the movie when we learned that Lewis Strauss recruited Oppenheimer to be the director of the Institute for Advanced Study.

What started out as a good relationship turned sour mainly due to Oppenheimer’s Communist ties, such as his wife Kitty and his brother, Frank, who was a confirmed member of the Communist Party USA from 1937 until around 1940.

After World War II, Oppenheimer was famous, but as the Cold War sparked what we now know as the Red Scare, people started to grow suspicious of him. Rumors spread, and anyone with top secret clearance like Oppenheimer had for the Manhattan Project was called into question.

As for Lewis Strauss, that relationship started to sour a couple years after he recruited Oppenheimer. In fact, now that the Manhattan Project is a National Park, here’s a quote from the National Park Services’ website to explain the exact moment Strauss stopped liking Oppenheimer:

Robert Oppenheimer, testifying before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy including Lewis Strauss in 1949 on the military usefulness of Iron 59 said in part, “You can use a shovel for atomic energy. In fact you do. You can use a bottle of beer for atomic energy. In fact you do.” These and other comments by Oppenheimer, who was known for making biting remarks, caused people to laugh. Strauss looked foolish and was furious. “There was a look of hatred there [on Strauss’ face] you don’t see very often…” said one observer.

It wasn’t just that one comment, though, as you’ll notice that article talks about “other comments.” The Los Alamos National Laboratory’s website has another article that discusses another comment from Oppenheimer in that same hearing:

Strauss believed that radioactive isotopes had military value and argued against exporting them. However, with little patience for those he considered intellectually inferior, Oppenheimer publicly humiliated Strauss by saying, “My own rating of the importance of isotopes . . . is that they are far less important than electronic devices, but far more important than, let us say, vitamins.”

In response, Strauss didn’t hide his look of hatred. Oppenheimer had publicly revealed that Strauss knew little about physics, particularly nuclear science.

After that hearing, Lewis Strauss held a grudge against Oppenheimer. So, as Oppenheimer’s public image started to deteriorate into the Cold War era of the early 1950s, Strauss certainly didn’t want to do Oppenheimer any favors. Quite the opposite, actually, because Strauss asked the FBI to track Oppenheimer in 1953. They did, and delivered a report to Strauss on November 20^th, 1953, which Strauss sent directly to President Eisenhower. Upon reviewing the report, Eisenhower decided to revoke Oppenheimer’s security clearance. That happened on December 21^st, 1953, and Oppenheimer was given the choice to resign or appeal. He appealed the decision, which was heard by a three-man panel. They voted two-to-one not to reinstate the security clearance.

And with that, Oppenheimer’s government career was effectively over. But even though the movie doesn’t talk much about the rest of Oppenheimer’s life, let’s fill out the rest of the true story.

Despite his government career effectively coming to an end when his security clearance was revoked, Oppenheimer was still the director at the Institute for Advanced Study, but in 1954 he started taking vacations with his wife and daughter to the small island of Saint John in the U.S. Virgin Islands. They enjoyed sailing together, and they must’ve loved it there because in 1957, Oppenheimer bought some land and built a vacation home there.

He continued working for the Institute for Advanced Study and in March of 1963 he was awarded the Enrico Fermi Award. That’s kind of a lifetime achievement award for scientists with the medal physically given by the President of the United States. Oppenheimer winning that award was a big deal considering how he’d been shunned by the scientific community.

Unfortunately, though, JFK was assassinated before he was able to give the award to Oppenheimer, so President Lyndon B. Johnson formally gave him the award in December of 1963. Jackie Kennedy attended the ceremony and told Oppenheimer how much her husband wanted him to have the medal.

Oppenheimer was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1965. He tried radiation treatment, but it was unsuccessful, so he resigned from the Institute for Advanced Study in 1966 due to his health. Then, on February 18^th, 1967, J. Robert Oppenheimer passed away in his sleep at home in Princeton at the age of 67.

I thought I’d end our story today with more recent news from just before the movie’s release in 2023. Because in 2022, the U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm issued this press release:

Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer occupies a central role in our history for leading the nation’s atomic efforts during World War II and planting the seeds for the Department of Energy’s national laboratories—the crown jewels of the American research and innovation ecosystem.

In 1954, the Atomic Energy Commission revoked Dr. Oppenheimer’s security clearance through a flawed process that violated the Commission’s own regulations. As time has passed, more evidence has come to light of the bias and unfairness of the process that Dr. Oppenheimer was subjected to while the evidence of his loyalty and love of country have only been further affirmed. The Atomic Energy Commission even selected Dr. Oppenheimer in 1963 for its prestigious Enrico Fermi Award citing his “scientific and administrative leadership not only in the development of the atomic bomb, but also in establishing the groundwork for the many peaceful applications of atomic energy.”

The Department of Energy has previously recognized J. Robert Oppenheimer in other ways including the creation of the Oppenheimer Science and Energy Leadership Program in 2017 to support early and mid-career scientists and engineers to “carry on [Dr. Oppenheimer’s] legacy of science serving society.”

As a successor agency to the Atomic Energy Commission, the Department of Energy has been entrusted with the responsibility to correct the historical record and honor Dr. Oppenheimer’s profound contributions to our national defense and the scientific enterprise at large. Today, I am pleased to announce the Department of Energy has vacated the Atomic Energy Commission’s 1954 decision In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

There’s text on the screen telling us we’re in Pripyat on April 25^th, 1986. It’s 12 hours before the explosion.

Nikolai Fomin is meeting with Anatoly Dyatlov. He says once the safety test can be completed successfully, Viktor Bryukhanov will be promoted. That means Fomin will take Bryukhanov’s place and someone will need to fill Fomin’s place. Dyatlov says he wants to be considered for that position.

Just then, Bryukhanov enters the room. The test is ready to go, Fomin says. But Bryukhanov stops him short. He’s been trying to get this test done for three years and of course now that it’s almost here, he gets a call from the grid controller in Kyiv. They can’t lower the power for another ten hours. As frustrated as that makes them, they’ll have to delay the test. Dyatlov says he’s not worried about it. He’ll just go home to get some sleep and come back in the night to oversee the test personally.

I couldn’t find anything in my research to suggest this specific conversation took place, but the dialogue sets up some things that were very real.

It is true that promotions were in store for many of the characters we see in the series. There were talks of Bryukhanov being promoted. That would mean he’d leave Chernobyl and go to Moscow. That would also mean his role would need to be filled, and Nikolai Fomin was in line to do just that.

It’s also true that there was a delay in the test, although it was Nikolai Fomin who fielded the request to delay the test. If things had gone to plan, the test would’ve already been done by the time the weekend rolled around.

To fill in some historical context, the test they were running was simulating if the station lost power. They wanted to determine if a slowed turbine could provide enough electrical power to operate the core’s cooling water pumps for long enough until the diesel pumps came online.

They’d run the test a year earlier but the turbines weren’t able to hold power long enough, so in the meantime new voltage regulators had been developed. With those installed, it was time to run the test again.

There happened to be planned maintenance that would involve shutting down the reactor anyway, so they were trying to take advantage of that to run the test at low power.

The plan was to start shutting it down on Wednesday, April 23^rd. But they pushed it back a day and decided to start shutting down the reactor beginning at 10:00 PM local time on Thursday, April 24^th, 1986. The power would be down enough by the following morning, around 10:00 AM on Friday the 25^th, to begin the test. That should only take a few hours, so everything should be done by 1:00 PM and Unit 4 would go into the weekend completely shutdown.

After Nikolai Fomin signed off on the plan, they started preparing for it. As it got closer to the time to start, they decided not to start at 10:00 PM after all because that would mean there’d be a shift change pretty much right as the test was getting started. So, instead, they decided to start it after the new shift came in around midnight.

Things were delayed a bit, but by the time 2:00 PM rolled around on Friday, the power had been dropped enough that they could finally start the test.

That’s when the call happened that we find out about in the series. A dispatcher at Kyiv’s electrical grid told them they couldn’t lower the power anymore. Since Chernobyl was providing power to Kyiv and it was Friday before a big holiday—May 1^st was the May Day holiday—there was a lot of last-minute work as people were trying to hit their productivity quotas to get bonuses before the holiday. They weren’t allowed to go offline and begin the test until after 9:00 PM on Friday.

If we go back into the series, after that bit where we find out about the delay in the test, we fast forward to March of 1987 where the KGB Chairman Charkov threatens Valery Legasov. During the conversation, we find out Volkov was fired for, as Legasov puts it, “the crime of knowing.” If you remember from a previous episode, he was the guy who wrote the article that Ulana Kyomyuk found about the void coefficient issue.

Charkov tells Legasov that he needs to perform his duty to the State for the upcoming trial which, basically, means not talking about how the other reactors could do the same thing if they’re not fixed.

I couldn’t find anything to suggest this conversation took place in March of 1987, but the date of March is significant because that’s when the trial was supposed to take place. It ended up getting postponed to July, though, after Nikolai Fomin attempted suicide in his cell by cutting his wrists with shards of broken glass from his own glasses. The prison guards saved him, and the trial was postponed while he recovered.

As for the mention of someone being fired for “the crime of knowing”, it wasn’t just one person who was let go because of the disaster.

While there are likely a lot of people we don’t know about being let go, but we do know over 60 people who were fired or demoted in the aftermath of the disaster. And there were some high-ranking people in that mix, too.

So, it wouldn’t surprise me if Legasov’s job was in jeopardy at this point although, as the series suggests, he was also more of a public figure than many of the other scientists at the time because of his report to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.

Back in the series, now it’s July of 1987. We’re in the city of Chernobyl where it’s time for the trial of the three men in charge that night: Viktor Bryukhanov, Nikolai Fomin and Anatoly Dyatlov.

As a quick little side note, three other men were also arrested but they don’t make an appearance in the series at all so it makes sense why they don’t show up in the trial. Those other three men arrested in August of 1986 along with Bryukhanov, Fomin and Dyatlov were Boris Rogozkhin, who was the Shift Supervisor on the night of the 26^th, as well as Yuri Laushkin, the safety inspector at Chernobyl, and Alexandr Kovalenko, who was the Manager of the Reactor Workshop and approved the test’s plans along with Bryukhanov and Fomin.

It is true, also, that the trial took place in the city of Chernobyl. The reason for that was because Soviet law required a trial take place near the crime. And the high radiation levels made a convenient excuse for why attendance had to be limited—which also meant they could control how much information got out. The last thing they wanted was for journalists and victims families to be there.

So, for the most part, the three-week trial was behind closed doors. Although, one impression I got from the series as I was watching it while we see Shcherbina and Legasov talking outside the building where the trial is being held is that the rest of the city is abandoned. While obviously many had been evacuated, the Chernobyl power plant was still in operation. So, many of the people working there at the time would sit in on the trial as their work schedule allowed.

Going back to the series now, we see the trial itself. Much of the trial ends up being Boris Shcherbina and then Valery Legasov explaining everything that happened.

And the HBO miniseries does a very good job of summarizing everything. We’ve talked a lot about what happened up until this point as we’ve seen things throughout this series, but before we dig into the timeline of what happened ourselves, the one key thing I want to point out about what we see in the trial is simply that we don’t really know everything that happened in the trial. The transcript of the trial has never been released.

There were people in attendance who took notes, but most of those were confiscated by the KGB. The most we’ve learned about the trial comes from Deputy Chief of the Nuclear Physics Laboratory at Chernobyl’s Nuclear Safety Department, a man named Nikolaii Karpan, who was allowed to keep his notes and published a book that included transcripts based on his notes. Others, such as Dyatlov himself, have talked about what happened after being released from prison. But, in both cases, the best we have is the recollection of people who were there and not any official transcripts.

From that, we know the trial was basically a show trial. The issue was entirely on the operators. The design wasn’t going to be at fault, because that would mean the Soviet system that allowed for lax safety standards was at fault, too.

With that said, as we are nearing the end of the overall series, now is a great time to do basically what the HBO miniseries does in the trial: Review everything that happened in the timeline it happened. But, of course, in the miniseries we only see things happening a little before, during and after the disaster.

The real history of the Chernobyl power plant starts in 1970.

That’s when a 35-year-old Viktor Bryukhanov visited the area for the first time. He had been appointed as Chernobyl’s Director and was tasked with building the power plant. The official name of the power plant, by the way, isn’t Chernobyl. That’s just what we know it by because it was located in the city of Chernobyl. The official name is the Vladimir I. Lenin Atomic Power Plant.

The nearby town of Pripyat was also built at the same time to house the 50,000 or so workers, support staff and their families.

The location was chosen primarily because it was not too far from Kyiv, where it would provide power. It was also close to a huge river where it could pull water for cooling and a pre-existing railway line.

There were already RBMK reactors in the Soviet Union, and they were chosen for Chernobyl as well because it was the cheapest to create the most amount of power while also being the safest—or so they thought.

Four reactors were built initially and in November of 1977, the first reactor was ready for operation. Unit 2 went online in 1978 while Unit 3 was ready in 1981.

In September of 1982, there was a partial meltdown in Unit 1 because of a faulty cooling valve. No one even noticed it happened until a few hours later and it was covered up for the public until 1985. They just fixed the reactor and put it back into operation about eight months later. Also in 1983, they focused on getting Unit 4 up and running. It went into operation on December 20^th, 1983. Everyone was excited about the news of all four reactors were running.

In 1984, there were “emergency situations” in both Unit 3 and Unit 4 that only came to light in 2021 when Ukraine declassified some KGB documents about it. We still don’t have all the details about the full extent of everything that happened.

And that brings us to April of 1986.

At 1:00 AM on April 25^th, they started reducing the power at Unit 4 in preparation for the safety test.

By 2:00 PM, the emergency cooling system for the core was disabled to keep it from interfering with the test. At this point, Unit 4 was operating at about 50% of its normal power.

About 15 minutes before they were to begin the actual shutdown of the reactor, the call came in from the grid controller at Kyiv. They were ordered not to lower the power anymore until after the peak hours were over. The operators at Chernobyl didn’t know it at the time, but the reason for this last-minute request was because of another nuclear power plant had a unit go offline unexpectedly. So, the power at Chernobyl was needed to keep Kyiv from losing power.

Without much to do, they waited. The emergency cooling system was already turned off and that was a process that took at least 45 minutes to turn it off or on, so they decided not to turn it back on again since they’d just be turning it back off again in a few hours. So, the reactor stayed at 50% power from 3,200 MWt (megawatt thermal) to 1,600 MWt for another nine hours while they waited for permission to continue.

They couldn’t perform the test until the reactor was down to 700 MWt.

Around 4:00 PM, there was a shift change. The evening shift leader, a man named Yurii Trehub who we don’t see in the series at all, wasn’t familiar with the test at all. He didn’t have to be, it was supposed to have been over by 1:00 PM before his shift even started. What could he do? He walked into his shift to find the reactor at half power with the core’s emergency cooling system turned off—that last bit came as a surprise to him. He also didn’t have permission to continue. The test had been postponed, not canceled, he was told. So, he made use of his time by studying up on the test plans.

At 8:00 PM, Trehub started to get worried that he hadn’t heard anything yet. So, he made a phone call and was told to wait until Anatoly Dyatlov came in. And Dyatlov, in turn, wasn’t planning on arriving at the plant until they’d received word from the dispatcher at Kyiv that they could proceed.

Around 9:00 PM, that call came. They could proceed with the shutdown starting at 10:00 PM. Trehub called Dyatlov to let him know, but found out from Dyatlov’s wife who answered that he was already on his way.

At 11:00 PM, Trehub started to get worried that Dyatlov hadn’t arrived yet. But without cell phones like we have today, there wasn’t a lot he could do. He got a call from someone in Unit 3 to let him know Dyatlov had stopped off there first.

By 11:10 PM, Dyatlov had arrived in Unit 4’s control room and Trehub began the next step: Reducing the reactor’s power levels even further.

At midnight, there was another shift change. Yurii Trehub, who didn’t expect to be involved in the test only to arrive to find out he was going to have to, was replaced at the controls by Alexandr Akimov. As part of the shift change, Leonid Toptunov also started his shift.

Just as had happened with Trehub, Akimov and Toptunov expected everything to already be done by the time they started their shift. They expected an easy shift with a reactor that had already been shut down. Instead, they arrived just in time to finish the program. With the shift change and others who wanted to monitor the test, there were 20 people in the control room at this point.

Like Trehub, Akimov wasn’t familiar with what he should be doing so he was furiously trying to read up on it and get advice from the others in the room like Trehub, who had spent most of his shift reading up on it. Trehub didn’t leave, he wanted to see how the test would go so he was there to answer questions. Although, he only had one shift of reading up on the test so he had plenty of his own questions about what should be done. In some ways it was the blind leading the blind.

Meanwhile, Dyatlov wasn’t interested in answering questions and was pushing Akimov to work faster instead of reading the instructions.

Toptunov continued adding control rods into the reactor, slowing down the nuclear reaction. The power continued to drop from 1,600 MWt to 520 MWt. All of a sudden, an emergency alarm went off. The supply of water had dropped below acceptable levels. Toptunov wasn’t sure what to do, but Trehub hopped in and started checking on the power levels. Then, Akimov noticed the power levels had dropped way too far and were continuing to drop. Toptunov had accidentally switched the control rods regulators out of order and that had caused a massive dropoff in the power levels.

Although they were wanting to shut down the reactor for its routine maintenance, the turbine test they were performing had to be done at 760 MWt power, so they’d let the power drop way too low.

At 12:28 AM on Saturday the 26^th, the computer indicated the reactor’s power level was at just 30 MWt.

Akimov and Toptunov began removing control rods to help increase the reaction and bring the power levels back up. By 12:32 AM, the power had increased to 160 MWt, then 200 MWt.

At this point, they had a decision to make.

Either they could abandon the test and continue shutting things down for the maintenance or they could raise the power for the turbine test. Some people in the control room that night would later say they saw Akimov and Dyatlov arguing over the decision. Ultimately, Dyatlov was the most senior person in the room and he insisted on moving forward with the test. Instead of raising the power, though, Dyatlov decided they’d keep the reactor stable at 200 MWt and do the test that way instead of trying to raise it to the planned 760 MWt.

At 12:43 AM, Dyatlov ordered the operators to turn off the emergency signal from the two turbines that would be involved in the test.

At 1:03 AM and then 1:07 AM, two reserve pumps were activated to increase the flow of water. This was just part of the test—but of course, the test was supposed to be run at 760 MWt and not 200 MWt. Because of the lower power, the reactor became more unstable. At 1:19 AM, another alarm sounded. This was for low steam pressure. Because they’d introduced more water, that slowed the reaction down even further. Water absorbs neutrons and slows the reaction more than steam does. They turned off that alarm as well as the pumps.

Meanwhile, what they didn’t know, was the reactor running at such low power meant there was a byproduct of nuclear fission accumulating in the fuel rods. Xenon-135 is an unstable isotope that can have a huge effect on the reactor. It’s called xenon poisoning for a reason because it’s basically poisoning the core.

That made it extremely difficult for them to maintain even 200 MWt. To counteract this, Toptunov kept removing the control rods to keep the power levels from falling further. By 1:22 AM, only nine of the 167 control rods were in the core.

At that time, the reaction started to pick up.

This wasn’t intentional but was a result of the pumps being shut down. That meant there was less water cooling the reactor, so as the water reached boiling it turned into steam. As we just learned a moment ago, steam doesn’t absorb neutrons as much as water does. So that means with an increased amount of steam and less water, the nuclear reaction was rising. And fast.

Toptunov reported this to Akimov, but he didn’t really pay attention to it. He was too focused on starting the turbine test. That was supposed to start in a few seconds.

At 1:23:04 AM, the command was given to start the oscillograph, marking the beginning of the turbine test. By 1:23:40 AM, things were out of control.

The steam wasn’t absorbing enough neutrons, there were too many voids in the steam—we learned what a positive void coefficient means in the last episode—and there simply weren’t enough control rods in the core to slow down the reaction. The power was rising way too fast. Uncontrollably fast.

Realizing things were spiraling, Akimov ordered Toptunov to press AZ-5, the emergency shutdown of the reactor. That would insert all the control rods to stop the nuclear reaction. Except, if you recall from previous episodes, we learned the control rods in RBMK reactors like those in Unit 4 were tipped with graphite. That meant before slowing the reaction, they actually accelerated it as the graphite tips hit the water that had been absorbing neutrons.

That quick rise in heat was enough to cause some of the fuel rods to fracture.

The fuel rods, in turn, caused the control rods to get jammed so they couldn’t be inserted fully. That basically meant the only part sticking into the core was the graphite tips. The neutron-absorbing boron that was supposed to slow the reaction was ineffective. Instead, the graphite tips were continuing to increase the reaction. The control rods were having the opposite effect that was intended.

Pushing the AZ-5 button wasn’t the end. Instead, it was basically like pushing a self-destruct button.

The amount of power that they’d struggled to keep at 200 MWt for the test shot up to more than 30,000 MWt within a few seconds. The fuel rods broke down entirely, feeding the reaction further. The temperature rose even more, boiling the cooling water and turning it into so much steam that the core simply wasn’t designed to contain.

At 1:23:44, the steam exploded. That explosion tore apart the lines running coolant into the core. This even further accelerated the reaction.

At 1:23:46, two seconds later, there was another explosion. That was the explosion that destroyed the core and threw the core’s radioactive graphite blocks all over the place.

Inside the control room, they didn’t know what had happened. But we learned about that more in-depth when we saw it take place in the first episode, so I won’t repeat that story here.

Around this time it’s assumed the explosion caused the first death: Valery Khodemchuk, who was working in the part of the building that collapsed. They never found his body.

At 1:26:03, the fire alarm went off, calling in the fire department to deal with the fire. Under ten minutes later, they were fighting the fires on the roof.

A lot of these things we learned about in earlier episodes, but I’ll give the recap for the sake of the timeline.

Dyatlov was trying to continue to feed cooling water into the reactor. He didn’t know it had exploded. He didn’t believe it could explode. Nothing in any of their training had suggested that could be the case. There were even some who said RBMK reactors were so safe they could be installed in Red Square in Moscow without any harm.

Bryukhanov was called at 2:00 AM to let him know about the accident.

By 2:15 AM, an emergency meeting was called by Pripyat city officials. They still didn’t know the extent of the damage, but they decided to block anyone from coming or going from the city. To do that, they’d need help so the call is put out for police and military assistance.

Around 3:00 AM, Bryukhanov calls his boss, Vladimir Marin, to report the situation. He reported the explosion was at 1:21 AM. Later, he’d report the firefighters had extinguished the flames by 3:30 AM.

In truth, more firefighters arrived around 4:00 AM to combat the flames. At this time, everyone still believed the reactor was intact and they were trying to extinguish the fires before they affected the core.

Meanwhile, in Moscow, news of the accident had reached Antanolii Maiorets, the Minister of Energy. He started trying to get updates on the situation to feed to his boss, Boris Shcherbina. The typical protocol for any accident would be for a commission to be formed to look into the cause. Shcherbina was in charge of that commission.

Around 5:00 AM, a deputy minister surprised others in the city meeting by saying he had already ordered 1,100 buses to come to Pripyat just in case of an evacuation. No one wanted to evacuate. That would admit something more serious and insight a panic.

Back in the reactor, they were continuing to try and feed water into the core. They thought perhaps the water wasn’t getting into the core because of blocked valves. So, they spent hours trying to fix that, manually turning valves and checking things.

Around this time is when the second victim was killed. Vladimir Sashenok was an Automatic Systems Adjuster who was found unconscious in ankle-deep radioactive water. He’d been pinned under a beam in Room 604 after the explosion and was now unconscious, radioactive burns all over his body. They managed to rescue him, at great cost to the two men who pulled him out, but Sashenok he died at the hospital around 6:00 AM.

He had just celebrated his 35^th birthday four days earlier.

By 6:35 AM, nearly all the fires had been extinguished. The only fires left were those inside Unit 4. There were 186 firefighters working on the flames now.

Around 9:00 AM, the first of the commission into the accident began to leave Moscow for Pripyat. Maiorets left around 4:00 PM. When he arrived in Pripyat, he went to look at the reactor and was in shock. This was worse than the reports indicated. Although they didn’t realize it at the time, that first-hand look at the damage caused Maiorets and those with him to absorb massive amounts of radiation.

Even though people were seeing graphite scattered about, some of them thought it came from Unit 5—they were planning on expanding the Chernobyl plant to go from four reactors to six. But when they checked on that graphite, it was still intact. So they were at a loss to know where the graphite came from, their minds simply not being able to comprehend Unit 4’s core exploded.

Then, Bryukhanov joined the city commission meeting around 11:00 AM. Time and time again, Bryukhanov was told not to panic. The commission from the government will be here soon and they’ll decide what to do.

Early in the afternoon, two other nuclear experts from Moscow arrived by the names of Boris Prushinsky and Konstantin Polushkin. Arguably, those two men had more experience on RBMK reactors than anyone else on the commission. The first thing they wanted to do was to see the damage with their own eyes from the air. So, they did just that—after lunch, of course.

When they saw the damage, they knew the reactor had exploded. No one could deny that anymore.  

That evening, Boris Shcherbina and Valery Legasov arrived in Pripyat a little after 8:00 PM. Maiorets and others were already meeting when they arrived. The news of the exploded reactor was a surprise, but it was undeniable. It also meant they were entering unknown territory. No one knew what to do. They had to come up with ideas.

Also in Pripyat around this time, townspeople were gathering on what’s now known as the bridge of death. They were watching all the flames and glow in the night sky over the plant. They didn’t know it was burning graphite they were looking at, or that the wind over them was blowing a lethal dose of radiation. No one on that bridge survived.

At about midnight on Sunday, April 27^th, buses began to arrive at Pripyat. Around this time, too, General Nikolai Antoshkin arrived in Pripyat. Like many who arrived soon after the explosion, he wasn’t entirely sure what he was walking into. When he got there, Shcherbina told him they needed helicopters.

An hour later, Unit 1 was shut down while Unit 2 stopped around 2:00 AM.

At 7:00 AM was when General Pikalov drove the truck to get a more accurate radiation reading. There was no doubt then…the graphite was still burning and radiation was still being given off.

One of the things they decided in the commission meeting was to try to stop the burning reactor by dropping sand and other things from helicopters. Shcherbina had already ordered the assistance of military helicopters from Antoshkin and those started to arrive on Sunday morning. There were about 80 of them so far, with more on the way.

Also on Sunday morning, Shcherbina made the decision to evacuate Pripyat. But he didn’t quite give the order yet, he wanted to see the damage at Unit 4 first-hand. Along with Legasov, General Pikalov, General Antoshkin and a few others, they flew a helicopter over the reactor to see the damage.

Although others had seen it in the daylight before, this was the first time many of those in the helicopter saw it from the air in the daylight and it quickly became apparent this was not a minor thing. This would have global implications.

The order to evacuate Pripyat came at 10:00 AM on Sunday morning. The buses rolled in and, at about 1:00 PM, the announcement was made to the people of Pripyat telling them to evacuate.

You can hear a bit of that when we learned about it in episode number two of this series.

A line of buses stretching 12 kilometers, or about 7.5 miles, along with the nearby trains and boats on the river were used to evacuate a majority of the 50,000 or so men, women and children living in Pripyat at the time. Some stayed behind to help with the emergency services.

About that same time on Sunday morning and continuing through May 1^st, the helicopters started dropping the mixture they’d hope would smother the fire and stop the nuclear reaction. Looking at this from a historical lens, we now know that almost none of the neutron-absorbing boron reached the core.

On Monday the 28^th, some other countries started detecting the dangerous radioactivity. The staff at a nuclear power plant in Sweden noticed increased radioactivity during a routine check of their shoes. Then in Denmark, the announcement was made of an accident at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor.

On Tuesday the 29^th, American satellites took photographs of Chernobyl and saw the roof was gone and it was still smoking. Something had obviously gone wrong.

On April 30^th, an official statement declares that two people died during the accident— Khodemchuk and Sashenok—and another 197 have been hospitalized. But, it’s okay, their radiation levels are under control and going down.

May 1^st was a holiday: May Day. As fate would have it, the wind changed direction and blew the radiation toward the largest town nearby, Kyiv. But still, the annual parades and celebrations continued in Kyiv and Minsk. Everything is normal. Meanwhile, at this point, any of the Soviet elite who had family in the area had already secretly told them to leave.

On May 2^nd is when the three men volunteered to turn the valves for the sluice gates that would avoid another potential explosion. We learned more about this in episodes two and three of the series.

The construction workers also started the project of digging under Unit 3 with the purpose of building a liquid nitrogen heat exchanger under Unit 4. We also learned about this in episode three.

On May 9^th, Vladimir Pravik became one of the first to die from acute radiation sickness. He was one of the first firefighters who arrived on the scene right after the explosion and was set to celebrate his 24^th birthday just a few days later.

On May 10^th, the senior reactor operator that night, Alexandr Akimov, succumbed to his radiation burns and died.

On May 14^th, Leonid Toptunov died. He was another operator that we see heavily featured in the HBO miniseries.

On May 27^th, the idea of a concrete structure to cover the exposed reactor is devised. It’s what we now know as the sarcophagus.

Another problem arose, though, because the power from the Chernobyl plant was still very much needed. So, on September 29^th, Unit 1 was started back up. Soon after that, on October 10^th, the construction resumed on Units 5 and 6. On November 9^th, Unit 2 restarted.

Restarting Unit 3 was delayed, however, because if you recall from earlier episodes we learned that Unit 3 and Unit 4 were connected.

Work on the sarcophagus began on December 14^th, 1986. They used 300,000 tons of concrete and 6,000 tons of metal to build an encasing structure over Unit 4. It was designed as a relatively short-term solution for the next two or three decades.

It wasn’t until April 21^st, 1987 that Unit 3 was powered back up. Three days later, they decided to stop construction on Units 5 and 6.

In 1991 there was another disaster, this time in Unit 2. A fire broke out because of a defective switch. That ignited some insulation that then led to a leak of hydrogen. The roof collapsed and Unit 2 was decommissioned.

Another major event happened in 1991: The fall of the Soviet Union.

Not to get too far ahead of our timeline here, but a 2006 interview with Mikhail Gorbachev is relevant to our story today when he quoted as saying: “The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl 20 years ago this month, even more than my launch of Perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later.”

In December of 2000, Unit 3 was shut down, marking the final reactor being shutdown at the Chernobyl power plant.

Then, in June of 2003, a replacement for the original sarcophagus was announced. Named the New Safe Confinement, the plan was to build something that would last a lot longer than the original structure. Construction didn’t begin until September of 2010, and it was completed in 2019.

The New Safe Confinement should contain the radioactivity in Unit 4 for at least the next hundred years…

…that is, if everything goes according to plan.

A soldier is trying to get a woman to evacuate the radiation area.

She refuses. She says she’s 82, and has lived here her whole life.

Why do I care if it’s safe or not?

She says she was 12 when the Revolution came. Czar’s men, then Bolsheviks. They told us to leave. Then there was Stalin and his famine, the Holodomor. My parents died and two of my sisters died. They told the rest of us to leave. No.

Then the Great War. German boys. Russian boys. More soldiers. More famine. More bodies.

So, I should leave now because of something I cannot see at all? No.

While I couldn’t find anything in my research to suggest this introductory sequence was based on a specific person, what it depicts was something that’s very real. For one, not everyone wanted to leave the area. That’s probably not too surprising, it’s still common for people to not want to leave their homes when natural disasters like hurricanes are bearing down on them.

Being 82 years old means she’s talking about a revolution 70 years before the time period of the series. Since that time period is 1986, 70 years earlier was 1916.

That’s close enough to the Russian Revolution in 1917, so I’m going to guess that’s the revolution she’s referring to. There’s way too much to cover in this episode about that, but in a nutshell, the Russian government wasn’t doing well during World War I—which was from 1914 to 1918. In February of 1917, there was a revolution in Russia that basically ended with Czar Nicholas II abdicating the throne. That ended about 300 years of the Romanov Dynasty ruling over Russia since 1613 with the first Czar, Ivan the Terrible.

So, the government changed from a monarchy to…well, kind of chaos for a while, until in September Russia was declared a democratic republic. That didn’t last long, though, because in October of 1917, there was another revolution that saw Vladimir Lenin’s Bolshevik Party take power.

So, that’s why the lady was talking about the Czar’s men and then the Bolsheviks.

She also mentioned Stalin’s famine, the Holodomor. We learned more about that when we learned about the movie Bitter Harvest back on episode #40 and again with insights from the screenwriter of the movie in episode #57 of Based on a True Story.

That was a man-made famine in 1932 and 1933 when the Soviet Union, led by Joseph Stalin, forced unrealistic grain quotas that led to the famine. Since Ukraine was one of the largest grain-producing states in the USSR, they were hit especially hard. We don’t know the exact amount of people who died, but estimations range between 3.5 and 10 million people, most of them in Ukraine. Today, Ukraine recognizes Holodomor as a genocide carried out by the Soviet regime.

The next thing mentioned by the woman is the Great War with German and Russian soldiers. Even though a lot of people referred to World War I as the Great War, I don’t think that’s what she was talking about. World War I was taking place at the same time as the revolution she mentioned at the very beginning. Then, she seems to go in order of historical events, so mentioning the Great War at the end would be after Holodomor in the early 1930s. That makes me think she’s talking about World War II.

During World War II, the Germans occupied much of Ukraine after Operation Barbarossa when the Germans invaded. While Chernobyl technically existed, it wasn’t until the 1970s when it was picked for the nuclear power plant. So there weren’t a lot of residents in the area during World War II. Most of the residents at that time were Jewish and with the Germans invading and occupying the area until 1943, sadly that means most of them were murdered in the Holocaust.

Perhaps the most well-known incident happened at Babi Yar, a ravine located just outside Kyiv and about 133 kilometers or 82 miles away from Chernobyl. It was there on September 29^th and 30^th in 1941 that the Nazis murdered 33,371 Jews in one of the first massacres of the war. Throughout the war, the location was used for continual murdering by the Nazis so much so that by the end of the war it’s estimated between 100,000 and 150,000 Jews, Roma, Soviet prisoners and others were murdered there.

For the purposes of our story today, I think it’s moving to hear how it’s possible for a single person, like the woman in the beginning of this episode, to have lived through so many horrors and atrocities. And after seeing so many horrible things, now she’s supposed to run away because of something she can’t even see? We can understand why some would be hesitant.

Back in the series, we see a time and place on the screen. It’s August of 1986 in Kyiv. That’s four months after the explosion. Lyudmilla Ignatenko enters a building with another lady. There’s not a lot of explanation here, but it looks like she’s moving into an apartment.

The impression I got from the series, though, was that people from Pripyat were relocated to Kyiv. Granted, we don’t see any of the other people from Pripyat relocating, we only see Lyudmilla entering a new, or at least an empty, apartment. But then again the series focused more on Lyudmilla and Vasily than it did other townspeople in Pripyat.

In either case, what we do know from history is that after the town of Pripyat was evacuated everyone was moved elsewhere. A city named Slavutych was built just for the evacuees of Pripyat. It’s located about 30 miles, or 45 kilometers, from Pripyat.

However, with that said, in the timeline of the series no one was living in Slavutych yet. Construction on that city started in October of 1986 and the first residents didn’t move in until 1988. And because the evacuation of Pripyat happened on April 27^th, 1986, a day after the explosion, the residents had to stay somewhere in the interim.

If we go back to the series, one of the most heart-wrenching sequences happens next. It’s when three soldiers, Pavel, Bacho and Garo, go around the now-abandoned city and shoot any animals they find. Most of them are loveable pets who were left behind in the evacuation and are just excited to see a human again. There’s one especially sad scene where Pavel comes across a dog with her puppies in a house. They’re so cute! But, they must be killed to avoid spreading radiation. They’ve been ordered to shoot the animals while others are digging up the ground and others still are cutting down trees.

This is all a part of the cleanup effort, trying to get rid of any radiation on the plants and the top of the ground, as well as killing any poisoned animals before they spread the radiation further or die horrific deaths themselves because of the radiation poisoning.

While I couldn’t find anything in my research to suggest things happened exactly like we see in the series with Pavel, Bacho and Garo, the essence of what we’re seeing here is true.

There were about forty men who took to the streets to hunt the pets. They weren’t keen on going to the radiation zone at first since they weren’t given anything to protect themselves against the radiation, but they did what they had to do.

At first, the pets did exactly like we see them doing in the series as they’d run up to the people. Then they’d scatter at the sound of the guns. Before long, many of the animals stopped trusting the humans and it got more difficult to find them.

That scene with the dog and puppies? It happened. More than once. In the bookVoices From Chernobyl, one of the hunters recounts the story of finding a dog with her puppies and how he shot them one-by-one. There’s a story of an older lady who had shut herself in her house instead of evacuating. She had three dogs and five cats, and the men forced most of them away from her despite her screams and protests. They left one cat and a dog.

All the animals were collected and buried in mass graves. The graves were supposed to be lined with plastic or protected in some way to keep the bodies from decomposing into the groundwater—kind of like what we heard happened to Vasily Ignatenko. But, that didn’t happen for the pets. They were put in the ground and covered with dirt. Most of the time they were already dead. One of the hunters recalled an instance where a dog was only injured, but they didn’t have any bullets to kill it. So they buried it alive.

Before the evacuation, everyone was told they’d be back within a few days. For two months, the hunters drove around the streets taking out the household pets. Horses were put down. But not necessarily all the animals were killed. One of the hunters recalls they left the pigs alive. Otters they let free so they could swim away in a nearby river.

It must have been devastating to have to do that.

While not as prominent in the series, we do see some of the other cleanup effort: Cutting down trees, digging up the earth, and so on.

All that happened, too, but of course there is more to the story than we see in the series.

For 30 kilometers, that’s about 18 miles, around the Chernobyl power plant the military was in charge of cleanup. Houses, cars, buildings, roads, trees, literally everything was deemed contaminated and needed to be cleaned.

To do this, they’d first spray things down. We saw some of that in the series, too. Something else we see is helicopters dropping something on the trees. While I was watching that, I wasn’t sure exactly what the liquid was for. There wasn’t a fire, so it’s not like when they drop water to put out wildfires. So, I thought perhaps it was to kill the trees to make them easier to chop down. After researching it more, I was wrong.

What they dropped from helicopters was a liquid solution they called “water soup.” The purpose of that wasn’t to decontaminate or kill or do anything other than to be a liquid that would make anything radioactive adhere to the surface.

Imagine you’re going down a dirt road, the dust gets kicked up and then settles somewhere else.

This process was similar. They wanted to avoid any radioactive or anything getting kicked up by the next phase of the cleanup.

That next phase involved spraying a special decontaminating agent on anything and everything: Grass, plants, cars, mechanical equipment, houses, any structures, pretty much everything. If something was beyond decontamination, it’d be destroyed or buried. Entire buildings and structures were buried to limit the continued contamination. And that last part, especially, would certainly kick up plenty of radioactive material and things you don’t want flying around as you’re trying to clean up in the area.

An entire forest was cut down, too. It was about 10 square kilometers, or a little under 4 square miles, so not a huge forest—but enough to be a big job. That was nicknamed the Red Forest because the trees were so affected by the radiation from explosion that they actually turned red.

If we go back into the series, Ulana Khomyuk is continuing her investigation into what happened. She pulls some documents from the KGB archive—it got redacted some before she was allowed access to it—and after Anatoly Dyatlov refused to talk to her in the last episode, this time he’s finally willing to talk. Khomyuk brings the document.

In their dialogue, we find out the document is from 1976 and it talks about RBMK reactors under extreme conditions. They forgot to redact the table of contents, though, so Khyomuk points out some of the pages they did redact are talking about a positive void coefficient and the AZ-5 button. That seems to be of interest because they pressed the AZ-5 button and then the reactor exploded.

Dyalov says void coefficients have nothing to do with AZ-5 and then tells her that she’s looking for answers, but even the right question won’t find the truth. There is no truth. You’ll only get lies in return for your questions and I’ll get the bullet.

As we’ve learned throughout this series, Khomyuk is a fictional character so of course the specifics of this scene are made up. But this brings up a great point, because even though we’ve learned what the AZ-5 button was already, there’s a new term the HBO miniseries talks about here that we haven’t explained in our own series yet: Void coefficients.

What are they and was Dyaltov correct in the series to talk about how they have nothing to do with the AZ-5 button?

To start, a void coefficient isn’t unique to the reactors at Chernobyl. A void coefficient is just a way of measuring how the reactor changes as voids are introduced. The voids are things like steam bubbles in the water. And the measurement is basically to know if the void coefficient is positive or negative. If it’s negative, that means it’ll be less reactive and if it’s positive it’ll be more reactive.

For an RBMK reactor type, the void coefficient is extremely positive. So that’s why it needed to be monitored closely.

How about the idea of the void coefficient having nothing to do with AZ-5?

That’s not entirely true, but that doesn’t mean the series is wrong when it suggests Dyatlov thought it was true at the time. If you’ve listened to the first few episodes in this series you’ll know there was nothing in the training on RBMK reactors in the Soviet Union at the time to suggest anything otherwise.

However, looking at this from a historical perspective, we know that’s not true. We talked about this before so I won’t go in-depth explaining what AZ-5 does again, but the reason it’s not true has to do with the design of the control rods because they’re tipped with graphite.

Going back to the series, there’s another date on the screen. It’s September of 1986, and they’re still trying to clear the roof of debris. Boris Shcherbina makes some calls and gets a police robot nicknamed “Joker” from West Germany.

After lowering the robot to the roof of the reactor by helicopter, we see Shcherbina and Valery Legasov in the control room with a bunch of monitors. They decide to start by testing the robot’s functions. Good signal. Motors are good. Move one meter forward, all good. Okay, now let’s go one meter backward, all goo—uh…wait a second. It just died. In the control room, all the buttons go from green to red. Is that the signal? No, the signal is fine. There’s so much radiation the robot itself died.

That’s all true, although there’s more to the story that we don’t see in the series.

The plan wasn’t one that Shcherbina or Legasov came up with themselves, but rather it came from technicians at the Ministry of Energy.

Joker was a real vehicle they bought from West Germany. It was specifically designed to handle radioactive material, and the plan was to use it alongside two other rovers that were developed for the Soviet lunar exploration program. They didn’t want to pick anything up and move it elsewhere since that’d just create another contaminated site they’d need to deal with. Instead, they wanted to do exactly like we see in the series: Push the radioactive debris off the roof and back into where the core of Unit 4 used to be. That way they could lower the radioactivity enough to build a roof over the whole thing to seal it off.

That was the plan.

Just like we see in the series, Joker and the other rovers weren’t up to the task. They all failed. It was back to the drawing board.

The date was September 16^th when the commission met in Shcherbina’s office to decide what to do next. They had to clean the rooftops if they ever wanted to build a huge metal and concrete roof—something they called a sarcophagus—over the whole thing to seal it off. It was just too dangerous to build if the rooftops weren’t cleared of radioactive materials first.

And their attempts at using remote vehicles failed miserably.

There was only one option left to clean up the radioactivity too dangerous for machines to do. Everyone in the room knew what that meant. Humans had to do it.

Back in the series, we see text on the screen saying it’s October, 1986. General Tarakanov gives a bunch of soldiers instructions for how they’re going to clean it up. Russia needs it done. You’ll have 90 seconds to solve the problem. Enter through the reactor building #3 and climb the stairs to the roof. When you get to the top, wait for a moment to catch your breath.

When you enter the work area, look for the graphite. Some of the blocks might be 40 to 50 kilograms—that’s about 90 to 110 pounds—and it all must be thrown over the edge in a specific spot. He points to a photo of the roof, showing where they’re to throw the graphite over so it lands in Unit 4.

After 90 seconds, a bell will ring and you’ll return immediately. Go back down the stairs for decontamination.

And not to get too far ahead of our story today, but at the end of the episode we see Tarakanov thanking what he says are “the last of 3,828 men.”

This recreation of how the cleanup process went is pretty accurate!

Although, it didn’t start in October like the series suggests. It also didn’t end after December like the series implies by showing that scene with Tarakanov at the end. That scene comes after we see text on the screen with the date of December, 1986 and a conversation between Shcherbina, Legasov and Khomyuk. We’ll get to that conversation in a minute.

In reality, the cleanup operation started just three days after the decision was made to use humans, or bio-robots as the planners called them. As we learned a moment ago, that decision was made on September 16^th.

We don’t see this at all in the series, but before anyone went onto the roof to clean things up someone had to go up there to do a test. To figure out the plan, basically. That was done by a radiologist in the Army Medical Corps who wore protective gear that included pieces made from hastily torn down lead from the walls of government offices in Chernobyl, along with ten different dosimeters to monitor the radiation levels. He sprinted across the roof of Unit 3 and threw five shovelfuls of graphite over the edge to the remains of Unit 4 before sprinting back.

He was on the roof for 73 seconds. In that time, he absorbed 15 rem, which is three times what the U.S. federal government considers to be safe to be absorbed in an entire year.

General Tarakanov was a real person, and he was in charge of the soldiers tasked with doing the cleanup. He gave each soldier the chance not to go. There were some who didn’t want to go, but they also recognized they were the last chance. If they didn’t do it, no one else would. In the end, no one refused to go.

On the afternoon of September 19^th, the first wave of soldiers began the bulk of the work. It was work that lasted for 12 hours a day and for 12 days, until October 1^st. They were armed with shovels, rakes, wooden stretchers to carry larger pieces of graphite and sledgehammers to break out pieces that had been melted into the bitumen.

The time of 90 seconds we see in the series is a simplification. They were trying to limit each person’s exposure to no more than 25 rem, but they did use a bell or a siren when the time was up. Each soldier’s contribution was meticulously logged.

One person threw down three pieces of graphite weighing up to 200 kilograms, or about 440 pounds. Another threw down seven pipes weigh up to 30 kilograms, or 67 pounds.

Each soldier was only supposed to go on the roof once, but some went again.

At the end of the cleanup operation on the roof of Unit 3, just like we see in the series, there were three men who climbed to the top of the chimney to raise a red flag. That was done to signal the cleanup was finished. There are photographs of the men attaching the flag to the top of the chimney of taken by war photographer Igor Kostin that I’ll include in the resources for this episode over on the show’s website.

As a quick little side note, Kostin was one of the few photographers to document the accident. His photographs are some of the only surviving images of Unit 4 just a few hours after the explosion. Many of his photos didn’t survive due to the radiation while others were so heavily affected by it that the radiation itself is visible in the film. I’d highly recommend you look at his photographs to get a good idea of what an absolute mess the whole area was after the explosion.

If we go back to the series, it’s December of 1986 now. There’s a brief mention in the dialogue between Shcherbina, Legasov and Khomyuk about Legasov going to Vienna to speak to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Before he does that, Khomyuk wants to tell him what she’s discovered about what happened. She shows him the document she also showed to Dyatlov earlier in the episode. That’s the heavily redacted document that talks about a tie between the AZ-5 button and the void coefficient in RBMK reactors.

To her surprise, Legasov already seems to know about this.

He tells Khomyuk about an RBMK reactor in Leningrad back in 1975 that had a fuel channel rupture. The operators pressed AZ-5 and the power went up first before it went down.

In the series, Legasov mentions a colleague named Volkov wrote the article Khomyuk found. Vladimir Volkov was a real person, he was the head of the Kurchatov Institute’s RBMK safety research group.

As you already know, since the composite character of Khomyuk is involved in this, that’s not what really happened. But the idea of something happening in Leningrad in 1975 is real. And it didn’t have to be found by someone from the commission in some KGB archive, because someone who was there for the Leningrad accident was also at Chernobyl.

He’s not in the series at all, but Vitalii Borets was one of the most experienced nuclear engineers in the Soviet Union at the time. In November of 1975, he was working at the Chernobyl power plant when he took a business trip to Leningrad for some training at an RBMK reactor some 50 kilometers, or about 30 miles, outside the city.

On November 30^th, he was stopping the reactor and shifting to another mode of operation when he noticed something was wrong. As the reactor slowed to a lower power level, inserting the control rods to slow the reaction didn’t slow the reaction like it was supposed to. In fact, it did the exact opposite: The nuclear reaction was increasing rapidly.

They managed to avoid an explosion by using the AZ-5 emergency shutdown, but not before one of the fuel channels melted releasing radiation into the air. We still don’t know exactly how that affected the people of Leningrad.

The issue had to do with the design of the control rods. They were six meters long, or just under 20 feet. Because of the graphite tips, when they were inserted into the core at a depth less than two meters, or about six and a half feet, they caused a spike in the reaction.

This issue as well as the incident at the Leningrad power plant was something the Soviet government kept under wraps. What they did do was to give orders to change the control rods in RBMK reactors in the Soviet Union to avoid the issue from happening again. Although they didn’t say why they were making the changes, so no one at Chernobyl really thought it was a big deal. It was just an order to make a change. And they did make the change in Unit 3 at Chernobyl, but they hadn’t gotten around to doing it yet in Unit 4.

However, because Borets happened to be there when it happened, he knew there could be an issue. Even he didn’t know the full extent of why it happened, only that it did. By the time 1986 rolled around, it was an incident that happened over ten years earlier so it wasn’t something that was on the top of his mind as he helped plan the test at Chernobyl.

After the explosion, of course, that was a different story.

Speaking of the story, there’s also more to the story of Legasov going to Vienna that we don’t see in the series. The timeline in the series is a bit off because it talks about Legasov going to Vienna during a conversation that supposedly happened in December of 1986. In truth, Legasov went to Vienna from August 25^th to the 29^th in 1986. He was the head of the Soviet Union’s delegation to explain to the International Atomic Energy Agency what had happened at Chernobyl.

While he was there, Legasov presented a report on the disaster and answered questions for over three hours from scientists of other countries. Of course, not all the details were included in the report. That report basically blamed operator error and left out the issues with the reactor design. Not only that, but the report was prohibited from being seen back in the Soviet Union. So, that meant there were people around the world who knew more about the disaster than those working on it.

Later, Legasov admitted to playing a part in the coverup of information when he said:

“I did not lie in Vienna, but I did not tell the full truth.”

Episode number three starts with a continuation of what we saw at the end of the last episode. We’re in darkness with the three men submerged in radioactive water trying to turn the valves that’ll avoid an even worse disaster.

Unfortunately, their flashlights went out at the end of the last episode. In this one, they manage to get the lights working again and continue on. They also manage to find the valves and get them turned. In the next scene, we’re back above ground where the men are received with cheers and claps—the three men were successful. Finally, some good news!

That’s true.

Setting up the terrible disaster they were trying to avoid by going into the water was something they showed in the last episode—so that’s when we learned about that as well.

The three men aren’t listed in the credits for the HBO series with first names—they only have their last names: Ananenko, Bezpalov and Baranov.

Those were really the men who volunteered to go, but of course there’s more to the story than we see in the series.

Alexei Ananenko knew where the valves were located because he was a senior reactor mechanical engineer. Valery Bezpalov was a turbine engineer who was going to turn the second valve. And then Boris Baranov was a shift supervisor. He decided to go along with the other two men to both carry a flashlight for the others so they could see what they were doing as they used both hands to turn the valves—but he was also there in case of emergencies. He would rescue the other men and/or be the backup to turn a valve in case something happened.

The whole ordeal losing their light like we see in the series actually happened, too. Although they weren’t able to get the light working again as fast as we see in the series. Instead, once their light failed they had to feel their way in the darkness using the pipes to guide them to the valves.

Of course, that wouldn’t look good on screen since…well, pitch darkness doesn’t create good visuals. So, I can see why they changed that in the series.

The three men were told their families would be taken care of. I couldn’t find any sort of proof in my research to know if that happened or not. While the men were expecting to sacrifice their lives for what they’d done—spending a lot of time in highly radioactive water will do that—they all seemed to survive the ordeal much better than others. In one of the excellent books that I used during my research for this episode, called 01:23:40, the author, Andrew Leatherbarrow, mentions that he actually spoke with Alexei Ananenko in March of 2016, just before the first edition of Leatherbarrow’s book was published. Valery Bezpalov was still alive in June of 2019 while Boris Baranov died of a heart attack in 2005 at age 65.

So, all in all, considering what they volunteered for in 1986 all three men seem to have lived rather normal lives afterward.

If we go back into the series, even though they successfully avoided the thermal explosion thanks to the three men turning the valves, they’re far from being safe. The next major plot point happens as they’re trying to solve the issue of the meltdown burning its way through the platform under the reactor and into the earth. If it does that, the radioactive material will leak into the drinking water and poison it for everyone around.

To avoid that, the plan is to install a liquid nitrogen heat exchanger underneath the concrete pad. To do that in time before it burns through the concrete pad, they need to bring in more men. According to the series, 100 coal miners from Tula in Russian SSR are brought in to do this.

Valery Legasov and Boris Shcherbina tell the miner’s crew chief, a man named Andrei Glukhov, what the situation is. They don’t beat around the bush—this job involves digging underneath a nuclear reactor that is actively melting down. But if we don’t do it, the nearby river feeds into the primary water supply for about 50 million people. They could all be poisoned and lead to untold scores of deaths.

There are elements of truth to this, although there is more to the story that we don’t see.

For one, the character of Andrei Glukhov was not a crew chief at a coal mine in Tula. You can read more about the real Glukhov in Adam Higginbotham’s book Midnight in Chernobyl. Glukhov actually worked in the reactor’s physics laboratory at the Chernobyl power plant. He was a friend of Leonid Toptunov and in the morning hours of April 26^th, just after the explosion, he called his friend to find out what happened. When he was finally able to get a hold of Toptunov, Glukhov asked about Unit 4. Toptunov told his friend that he had been told not to talk about it…but look out the window.

What of the miners we see in the series, then?

There was a plan to dig beneath the reactor in May. But it wasn’t the first plan after avoiding the threat of thermal explosion. The first idea the state commission had was to try and cool the melting reactor core from beneath. To do this, they’d pump in liquid hydrogen underneath the reactor.

But that didn’t work.

Not because the plan was a bad one necessarily, but the drilling crews couldn’t get close enough to Unit 4 because of the high levels of radiation. So that’s when they had the idea to drill horizontally from a safe area behind Unit 3.

That didn’t work either.

Again, it wasn’t because the plan was a terrible one, but this time it was an issue with the equipment. What they had available at the time couldn’t correctly build the entire frozen platform that would be needed to cool the reactor down. They could do parts here and there, but it wasn’t enough.

As a quick little side note here, one of the ways the HBO series oversimplifies things is by suggesting there were three people—Shcherbina, Legasov and Khomyuk—behind the ideas for how to solve a lot of the problems after the accident. We already learned there were hundreds of people involved and that’s especially relevant here as ideas for how to slow the meltdown were being bounced back and forth by scientists. It wasn’t just Valery Legasov coming up with ideas like the series suggests. In fact, many of the ideas that were proposed were ideas that Legasov didn’t like. For example, one of Legasov’s colleagues in the scientific community was a man named Yevgenii Velikhov, and he was the one to propose freezing the earth under the reactor and then building a concrete platform. Legasov wasn’t so sure of this idea.

But it is true there was an idea similar to what we see in the series: Build a concrete platform that could be cooled. To do that they needed to build a tunnel and then a chamber under the reactor for housing the freezing chamber that would be used to cool down the entire concrete platform.

As an added benefit, they planned on the platform being used to help support a structure over the entire reactor. They anticipated it would need to be built to keep radioactivity from escaping after the immediate threat of the continuing meltdown was solved.

To get this built, the series was correct to suggest there were people brought in from Tula. The series mentions in dialogue that there are 100 men who gather their equipment and get into trucks to head to Chernobyl…but that’s not the full story.

According to Serhii Plokhy’s Chernobyl book, over 230 miners came from the Donbas region as well as over 150 from Tula.

On top of that, because of the delicacy of the situation, the miners weren’t allowed to use heavy mechanical equipment they were accustomed to. The state committee didn’t want to risk the heavy equipment damaging the foundation in any way. That could lead to releasing radioactive elements into the ground.

What that meant for the workers was they basically had to dig things with shovels or in many cases, literally by hand. There was a lot of digging and pushing dirt with bare hands. The miners worked for three hours at a time and they did all this for free.

At least that’s what they thought. They did end up getting paid rather well for what they did, but they didn’t know about any special compensation at the time. That came later. At the time, all they knew was if they didn’t do it, no one would. They were doing a job they knew needed to be done to avoid poisoning the drinking water of millions of citizens.

Something else that sort of underscores the complexities of reality compared to the HBO miniseries—well, in the series, we see a bunch of miners arriving at Chernobyl on buses. In the true story, each miner was approved by the state committee before they could go to Chernobyl. But, of course, we can’t see everything in the series.

Speaking of which, if we go back to the series, we’re back at the hospital where some of the men at Chernobyl when the explosion happened are being treated. Men like Anatoly Dyatlov, Leonid Toptunov, and Alexandr Akimov.

Ulana Khomyuk visits the hospital to talk to get a picture of what happened in the control room that night.

At first Khomyuk tries to talk to Dyatlov, but he’s not in the mood to talk. So she goes to talk to Toptunov. During their conversation, Toptunov tells Khomyuk that the power level jumped from 200 to 400 megawatts super-fast. Khomyuk asks him why he didn’t press the AZ-5 button to initiate an emergency shutoff. Toptunov says he told Akimov about the increase and it was Akimov who pressed the AZ-5 button.

Then comes something that seems to shock Khomyuk.

Toptunov tells her that it was only after Akimov pressed the AZ-5 button that the reactor exploded.

That doesn’t make sense. Why would the reactor explode after the emergency shutoff button had been pressed? That’s the whole point of an emergency shutoff—to, you know, shut the reactor off in the event of an emergency. Haha!

Khomyuk verifies this and Toptunov repeats that’s what happened: The AZ-5 button was pushed by Akimov and then it exploded.

So, Khomyuk goes to talk to Akimov to get his side of things. He confirms it and tells Khomyuk that he pressed the AZ-5 button before the explosion. But he’s confused on why shutting it down didn’t work.

There are some elements of truth to that, but the specifics of what we’re seeing here are made up for the series. If you recall, the character of Ulana Khomyuk is a fictional one that’s intended to be an amalgamation of all the scientists who worked on the Chernobyl accident.

So, obviously, it wasn’t just one person who was talking to three of the men in the control room to figure out what happened. There were a lot of people trying to get to the bottom of what happened talking to a lot of the people who were working at the power plant that night.

With that said, though, as we learned earlier in this series the characters of Dyatlov, Toptunov and Akimov were real people. And the things we see Toptunov and Akimov tell Khomyuk in the series were also true: The AZ-5 button was pressed just before the explosion occurred.

That night, as they were running the test, Leonid Toptunov was looking at the computer data when he saw the power levels rising way too fast. Akimov was too busy focusing on the test they were running so he didn’t notice the levels until Toptunov shouted to Akimov that the levels were rising way too fast. Akimov must’ve realized how serious the situation was because he ordered Toptunov to push the AZ-5 button.

So, he did.

We already learned what that button does in the first episode of this series so I won’t repeat all of that now, but just as a quick refresher, when the operator pushes AZ-5, all the control rods are inserted into the reactor at once to stop the fission reaction.

It’s not a normal thing to push AZ-5, but think of it like the emergency brake in your car. If something is going wrong, you’re going to use it. At least, I would hope you do. Some cars these days have automated braking because they can sense a wreck—but you get the idea. It’s not something you use on a daily basis. That’s why it’s called an emergency haha!

And in the emergency, the AZ-5 button should’ve stopped everything and let them take a breather to figure out exactly what happened. According to Dyatlov’s recollection later, it was about 12 to 15 seconds after Toptunov pushed the AZ-5 button was pushed that the reactor exploded.

That’s another big reason why everyone was so confused in the moments immediately following the explosion. There are the obvious after-effects of what an explosion must be like…but then there’s the other part of it that just doesn’t make sense.

Imagine pulling the emergency brake in your car and instead of the car slowing to a stop as you’d expect, it just explodes.

Wait. What? Why? That’s not even anything close to what that is supposed to do!

So, you can imagine the pure confusion in the immediate aftermath of that!

If we go back to the series, as Khomyuk is leaving the hospital she happens to notice Lyudmilla Ignatenko in a room with her husband, Vasily. If you recall, he was one of the first firefighters to arrive on the scene. He’s not looking good now in the series, and Lyudmilla wants to be with her husband so he doesn’t die alone.

But when Khomyuk sees that Lyudmilla is holding Vasily’s hand, she scolds her and forces her out of the room. Lyudmilla is pregnant, she shouldn’t be touching Vasily’s hand! Khomyuk scolds the doctor in charge for letting it happen—something the doctor had told Lyudmilla not to do, but the doctor was so overwhelmed with other patients she didn’t keep an eye on Lyudmilla. Then, Khomyuk says something to the effect of how everyone is going to hear about this.

Just then, two KGB agents step out of the shadows. They heard everything and, as you can imagine, they don’t like the idea of Khomyuk telling anyone anything. So, they arrest her.

That’s made up, but mostly for reasons we’ve talked about already with Ulana Kyomyuk not being real. However, Lyudmilla and Vasily Ignatenko were real people.

A fantastic book to learn more about them is a book called Voices From Chernobyl from Svetlana Alexievich—she interviewed the real Lyudmilla and it’s so sad to read. It’s not a happy story at all, but I think you know that. I can’t replicate those words here, but if you want to dig into some of the stories of those who lost loved ones at Chernobyl, check out Svetlana’s book.

As for the idea of Khomyuk being arrested like we see in the series, that didn’t happen. How could it? Khomyuk wasn’t a real person. But it is true that the KGB tried to silence, detain and arrest people in an attempt to cover up what was happening at Chernobyl.

In all honesty, we’ll probably never know exactly how many people were arrested like we see happen to Khomyuk in the series. But I don’t think we need to. The series isn’t even trying to be accurate here, because we know this is a fictional character who is portraying the idea of something that happened.

On one hand, there was the state committee that was charged with figuring out what happened. On the other hand, the Soviet Union didn’t want too much information getting out—especially to other countries.

Going back to the series, at the end of the third episode we see Legasov tracking down the head of the KGB, a man named Charkov. In their conversation, Charkov lets Legasov know the KGB is a circle of accountability—just like the old Russian proverb, “Trust but verify.” And the Americans think Reagan came up with that, Charkov laughs.

Then, after Legasov tells Charkov he needs Khomyuk to continue his work, Charkov agrees to let her go on the condition that Legasov is held responsible for her from here on out.

All of this is made up, of course, because Khomyuk isn’t a real character so she couldn’t have gone to prison. What is real, though, is that the real KGB chairman, Viktor Chebrikov, was certainly involved in the Chernobyl situation. Something we don’t see much of in the series was just how much happened outside of the Chernobyl area. At Chebrikov’s command, the KGB was very involved in trying to keep anyone who might try to report on the situation to foreign nations—people like diplomats and news correspondents.

The accident itself was no secret. It couldn’t be since, as we learned, neighboring countries were detecting radiation. It was showing up in media across the world.

For example, there was a headline in London saying 2,000 people were killed while the official death toll at Chernobyl was two people, who they claimed were killed in the blast itself.

The number of 2,000 was an estimate, mostly because foreign nations like the United States had satellites that had taken photographs of the damage. Even though they couldn’t tell a lot of details from that, they knew at least 4,000 people worked at the power plant at any given time so the idea that only two people had perished from a blast that size seemed unbelievable. That number ended up being increased to 30, but almost everyone believes that list is only limited to the people in and around the explosion when it happened. Even to this day, it’s hard to know the exact number of people who were affected or killed because of the radiation…but it’s safe to say it was more than two and more than 30.

As for the “Trust but verify” line we hear Charkov say in the series—he is correct to say it was not President Ronald Reagan who came up with that.

But then again, most Americans at the time didn’t think he did come up with it, either. This was in the era of the Cold War, so tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union were high. Reagan found out about the phrase when he was preparing to meet with the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. That phrase was one Reagan liked best of the Russian proverbs and sayings, so he used it.

I don’t think Gorbachev liked that Reagan used it.

Since then, a number of American politicians have used the saying and attributed it to Reagan. But that wasn’t during the timeline of the series, and it was not Reagan who came up with it originally.

At the very end of the third episode, we see Vasily Ignatenko and other first responders being buried. There aren’t many people there, but one of the people watching is Vasily’s wife, Lyudmilla. Obviously she’s filled with emotion as she watches her husband be put into the ground in a metal coffin that’s then covered with cement. It’s hard to lose a loved one, and this was not a normal funeral.

That is true, although there is more to the story.

The amount of radiation absorbed by the first responders and others closest to the exploded core was so high that officials were afraid their bodies would decompose and release radioactive materials into the ground that could then poison the water and so on.

To avoid this, their bodies were put into plastic bags, then inside regular coffins, and those coffins were then sealed in welded zinc caskets. Once buried, they were covered with cement.

On top of that was the secrecy around it. The Soviet Army was in charge of the funerals wanted to keep everything a secret so no foreign correspondents would know what was going on, or the extent they were going to try to contain the radioactivity of the bodies.

They waited for hours before burying Vasily, as Lyudmilla recalled being driven around for hours before finally getting to the cemetery. It’s almost as if they were trying to lose a tail in case someone was following the car from the hospital to the cemetery. Finally, after everything she had been through watching her husband die a gruesome death at the hospital for 14 days, Lyudmilla had enough. She burst out in a flurry of emotion and the Soviet colonel finally gave the order to go to the cemetery.

When they got to the cemetery it was like they couldn’t get it done fast enough. A minute or two and it was done. The zinc caskets were lowered and covered with cement. Lyudmilla went back to the dormitory where she’d been staying while her husband was in the hospital. The whole time someone was there making sure she didn’t talk to anyone or anyone to her. The day after Vasily’s burial, she was given a plane ticket and escorted to the airport. As she recalled, when she got home she slept for three whole days.

If you want to hear this in Lyudmilla’s words, I would highly recommend picking up a copy of the book Voices From Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich. In that book, Lyudmilla recounts what happened. It’s so sad the terrible way Vasily died from radiation poisoning and what Lyudmilla had to go through—and all this as she was only 23 years old.

Episode number two starts with some text on the screen to let us know we’re now at the Byelorussian Institute for Nuclear Energy in Minsk. It’s 8:30 AM on Saturday, April 26^th, 1986. So, that’s seven hours after the explosion.

Ulana Khomyuk, who is played by Emily Watson, gets woken up by her colleague, Misha. They’re the only ones there because it’s a Saturday…but they’re both workaholics, so they’re at work anyway.

Misha remarks how hot it is in the room and goes to open a window. A second after he does, the dosimeter alarm starts going off to indicate high radiation levels. He immediately closes the window.

A leak? The Americans?

Ulana opens the window quickly to gather a sample from the outside of the glass. She takes it into the lab where she tests it. The printer spits out a piece of paper that she takes back to her colleague.

It’s uranium decay. U-235. Reactor fuel. They call the closest nuclear power plant. It’s not them. What’s the next-closest? Chernobyl—but there’s no way it’s them, they’re 400 kilometers away and that’s too far to be leaking that kind of radiation. They’d have to be completely split open.

But, maybe they know something anyway. Ulana gives them a call. It rings. And rings. And rings.

Now, they’re concerned.

This scene is made up for the series, although there are elements of truth to it.

For example, in the first few shots we see a mural just before the text on the screen setting up the location as being at in the Byelorussian Institute for Nuclear Energy in Minsk. But that mural isn’t in Minsk. It’s actually at the Institute for Nuclear Research in Kyiv, in Ukraine and not Belarus.

That’s 530 kilometers, or 330 miles, away from Minsk.

So, it is a real mural—a beautiful mural—and it is tied to nuclear energy, so I can see why they’d want to include it in the series.

But one of the biggest changes in that first sequence comes from probably one of the biggest fictional elements in the entire series: Emily Watson’s character, Ulana Khomyuk. She’s a composite character.

So, of course, there couldn’t have been a way where she noticed uranium-235 because, well, she’s not a real person. Although, as we learned in our last episode, uranium-235 really is what they used to enrich the uranium-238 that was in the fuel rods for the reactor at Chernobyl. 

So, elements of truth.

If you haven’t already, there’s a great series of podcasts released by HBO with the writer of the miniseries, Craig Mazin. In that series, he talks about how and why he created the composite character of Ulana Khomyuk. In a nutshell, there were just too many real people—hundreds of scientists—who were trying to figure out what happened at Chernobyl. It’d be impossible to have hundreds of characters in the series and be able to keep track of who is who.

So, that’s why they made up the character of Ulana Khomyuk who they could turn into someone doing many of the real things those hundreds of scientists did…just in a way that’s a lot easier to keep track of as viewers.

Something else that’s worth pointing out is even if the specifics of the sequence we see in the opening of episode two isn’t entirely accurate to what really happened—the basic gist is true.

First, to clarify, the place where this is happening in the series is in modern-day Belarus. That’s an independent country now, although in 1986 it was part of the Soviet Union as Byleorussian SSR. The SSR stands for Soviet Socialist Republics—the same thing as in USSR, or the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

What I mean by the opening sequence being basically true is it is true the radiation from Chernobyl drifted into the country we now know as Belarus. In fact, most of it did. Some experts say that about 70% of the radiation from Chernobyl drifted into Belarus.

Of course, not all of that happened in the first seven hours like we see in the opening sequence, but nevertheless the impact of the Chernobyl accident on Belarus is an important part of the story.

And the mention of iodine-131 is also true.

Iodine-131 is a byproduct of nuclear fission in reactors like the one at Chernobyl. When there’s too much of it in the atmosphere, it’ll get absorbed into your thyroid gland thereby increasing the risk of thyroid cancer.

There are still studies being done on residents of Belarus due to their exposure of Chernobyl’s fallout. One of the studies, which I’ll link to on this episode’s page over at basedonatruestorypodcast.com, concluded that childhood exposure to internal iodine-131 as a result of the Chernobyl accident is tied to increased risk of neoplastic thyroid nodules.

Without getting too sidetracked with the medical side, that’s a tumor that can be cancerous. So, basically, the study on people who were children in Belarus at the time of the Chernobyl accident has proven to be linked to an increased risk of cancer later in life.

Going back to the series, as the series shifts back to Valery Legasov and Boris Shcherbina being pulled into the story to figure out what’s going on…we’re faced with something we’ve seen a little bit in the first episode, too.

I’m speaking about how the series mentions the dosimeter reading of 3.6 roentgen.

In the first episode we see this reading, but in the second episode we see that Legasov isn’t happy with this reading. What bothers him about this is that he knows 3.6 roentgen is the maximum amount the lower quality dosimeters will go. So, that’s not necessarily an accurate reading—it’s just as high as they’ll go.

That whole concept is true—the dosimeters they were using at first maxed out at 3.6 roentgen. As I was watching this episode in particular, I was confused about why the number was 3.6. That just seems so random…but once I researched it more, it made a lot more sense.

To understand this more, we have to understand what that unit of measurement even means—a roentgen.

It’s named after a person named Wilhelm Roentgen. He won the very first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901 for his 1895 discovery of what we now know as X-rays. Then in 1928, his last name was adopted as the first international measurement for ionizing radiation like happens at a nuclear power plant. It’s worth pointing out that in 1998, after the timeline of our story today, that unit was redefined, so it’s not really used for ionizing radiation anymore.

Now if we do the math to figure out how many seconds there are per hour, that’d be 3,600. And that is why the dosimeters they used at first could only go up to 3.6 roentgen, because they were maxing out at 1,000 microroentgens per second. There are 1,000,000 microroentgen in one roentgen, so 3,600 seconds times 1,000 equals 3,600,000 microroentgen or…3.6 roentgen per hour.

So, what does that mean for safety though?

After all, radiation is something that occurs in nature and everywhere all around us to some degree, most of it coming from the sun. While there are a lot of different factors that can determine how safe levels are—not every person is the same, not all factors are the same—but generally speaking, 60 microroentgens per hour is safe.

That’s 0.00006 roentgen per hour.

120 microroentgens an hour starts to get into dangerous territory.

With that in mind, it makes sense that the dosimeters they had at Chernobyl were sensitive enough to detect up to 1,000 microroentgens per hour. After all, that’s way more than is safe!

That level is definitely not safe—and the readings they got, just like we see in the series, were maxing out the dosimeters.

A level 3.6 roentgens per hour is detecting levels that aren’t safe.

Of course, if we’re looking at what deadly means—it’d take about five hours of constant exposure to 500 roentgens per hour, or 500,000,000 microroentgen per hour, to prove fatal for a human.

So, no, 3.6 roentgens isn’t safe, but it’s also a far cry from a fatal amount of 500 roentgen.

And it kind of makes sense for that to be a maximum level when you think about 120 being considered a risk in everyday life—1,000 should be a big warning.

When they ran the dosimeter in the control room, it read 800 microroentgens per second. That’s a lot, but then they ran it in another part of the control room and it went past the maximum of 1,000 microroentgens that the dosimeter could read.

After the explosion on April 26, 1986, and after the dosimeters read 800 microroentgen in one part of the control room and then maxed out the dosimeter at 1,000 microroentgen in another part, Anatoly Dyatlov figured it might be about 5 roentgens per hour. That’s about 1,388 microroentgen per second.

If that was the case, it’d make sense why the dosimeter would max out. It’d also make sense why it wasn’t seen as an extreme emergency quite yet, because something the series doesn’t mention is that the operators at Chernobyl already had a documented plan for the maximum amount of radiation. That was 25 roentgen per hour, which is a little under 7,000 microroentgen per second. Even at that rate, they were technically allowed to be there—but just for a few hours, and only in an extreme emergency.

So maybe that’s why Anatoly Dyatlov didn’t consider it to be the emergency we now know it was. But that’s pure speculation on my part—it’s hard to know what goes on in someone’s mind.

If we go back to the series, we’re at the point where we see Valery Legasov and Boris Shcherbina arriving at Chernobyl. We don’t see the specific time they arrive via helicopter, but we do see that they’ve been ordered to go there by Gorbachev himself. The way we see it depicted in the series, Shcherbina is the political leader of the committee digging into the accident while Legasov is the nuclear scientist to explain how nuclear reactors work to Shcherbina.

As we mentioned in the last episode, both Valery Legasov and Boris Shcherbina were real people. And the series is correct to explain their roles in investigating the Chernobyl accident.

Boris Shcherbina was, as the series suggests, a political leader. His official role at the time was as deputy prime minister in charge of energy for the government. He had a background in oil and gas. Something else to keep in mind was that in 1986, oil and gas were still making a lot more money for the Russian government than nuclear power was. Those two things are why the series is correct to show why Shcherbina wasn’t up on the nuclear side of energy.

That’s where the other man we see with him comes in: Valery Legasov.

Legasov’s role at the time was as first deputy to the director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy.

In the morning hours of April 26^th, Shcherbina found out he was in charge of the commission to determine what happened at Chernobyl. After going back to Moscow—he had been in Siberia, which was part of his normal weekend routine to check on various construction sites he was overseeing—Shcherbina had a chat with his boss about the accident and rounded up some experts, one of them being Legasov, to fly to Pripyat.

Legasov found out he was a part of the committee, not from a phone call while he was at home like we see at the end of the first episode, but rather he was at a state meeting about atomic energy. In that meeting they mentioned the Chernobyl accident, but it didn’t seem to be a big deal. A little bit later, while the meeting was on break, Legasov found out he was being ordered to the airport as part of the state commission.

And it is true that Legasov and Shcherbina had a conversation on the flight to the accident zone. They talked about the nuclear industry as a whole as well as some other nuclear accidents—in particular the more recent partial meltdown of the reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in the United States. That was in March of 1979, so relatively recent in the minds of another nuclear accident now in 1986.

One difference from how we see things happening in the series to reality is the way Shcherbina and Legasov approached Chernobyl. In the series we can see them flying in helicopters near the power plant. They’re close enough to where Legasov can see the core is exposed right away, although Shcherbina isn’t quite sure how he can tell that from the position they’re in. Legasov points out the ionizing radiation in the air as being how he knows.

In truth, Legasov, Shcherbina, and the rest of the state committee flew into Kyiv. That’s about 130 miles, or 209 kilometers, away from Chernobyl. When they landed in Kyiv, they took cars to the nearby city of Pripyat where they’d basically set up their base of operations for the investigation.

Oh, and its daytime in the series, but in truth they arrived in Pripyat around 8:00 PM, about an hour or so after the sun had gone down. With that said, though, the series is correct to show Legasov and the others seeing something not right from afar. Even before they got there, Legasov later commented on what it was like when they drove up to Pripyat, saying the sky near the plant had a deep crimson glow to it.

Things were worse than they originally thought.

Going back to the series, it’s April 27^th now, or 30 hours after the explosion. One of the first things they do is to figure out the real readings. Legasov doesn’t trust the number they received being at 3.6 roentgen because he knows that’s the maximum of the dosimeters they had—and also what he’s seen with his own eyes makes him think things are a lot worse than 3.6 roentgen.

To get the reading, we see them using a lead-lined truck with a high-range dosimeter. General Pikalov offers to drive the truck so no one else takes the risk. When he arrives, he tells Legasov and Shcherbina that the reading is not 3 roentgen—it’s 15,000.

General Pikalov is based on a real person who was there. The real Pikalov was in charge of the chemical warfare divisions of the military, so he was there to try to measure the radioactivity. And he did drive a truck like we see in the series to get a more accurate reading. It’s still not entirely accurate, but it’s enough to let everyone know they’re dealing with a lot more than they had initially thought.

From that, they determined the reaction was still happening—the reactor was still heating up. It wasn’t stable, it wasn’t cooling down. It was going to get worse if they didn’t do something.

With that said, though, the reading we see in the series is true. As you’ve probably figured out by now, the reading of 3.6 roentgen per hour was way off. Things were a lot worse than that. And the series is correct to give the number of 15,000. Although, it’s not like that was the number universally around the entire power plant.

In the series, when Shcherbina asks for an explanation of what the 15,000 number means, Legasov says it means the fire they’re watching with their own eyes is giving off nearly twice the radiation released by the bomb in Hiroshima. That’s every hour. Hour after hour, and at that point they’re 20 hours since the explosion so 40 bombs worth by now.

This example is made up for the series as a better way of describing what happened. A huge way we know this is because, quite simply, in 1986 we still didn’t even know exactly how much radiation the bombs in Hiroshima gave off. After all, that wasn’t a nuclear power plant. We know how powerful the bomb itself was, but we’re talking about radiation here…and that bomb was a surprise to a civilian population. They didn’t have dosimeters at the ready to determine how much radiation people were hit with.

In 2018, though, there were some tests done on a jawbone from someone who was in the attack and they found it to have absorbed 9.46 grays of radiation.

And again we’re hit with yet another form of measurement for radiation. Think of it kind of like how liquid can be measured in volume or in gallons…two measurements for the same amount of liquid. Okay, that’s not exactly a 1-to-1 example because if you’re a nuclear engineer you’ll know grays are measuring absorbed radiation compared to roentgen which measures ionized radiation…but for our purposes today, my point is merely that there are different ways to measure radiation in different ways.

Using a converter, I found 9.46 grays of radiation converts to 1,078,667,351 microroentgen, or 1,079 roentgen.

So, as far as my research is concerned that number doesn’t necessarily equate to 40 Hiroshima bombs—but at that point it almost doesn’t even matter what the specific numbers are. It’s not the survivable 3.6 roentgen per hour. It’s a number so high that it simply means if you’re in the area you’re going to die. Humans can’t survive anywhere near that kind of radiation. It’s the kind of deadly that kills humans many times over, the only thing at that point is just a matter of when you die as a result of the radiation.

And that right there brings to light something we see throughout the series that is very true: Most of these people working on figuring out and dealing with the Chernobyl accident were doing that knowing they were giving their lives doing so.

One of the books I used as a resource for this entire series is called Chernobyl Notebook by Grigoriy Medvedev. His book offers some of the few first-hand accounts and have been used as a source for many people since then. In his book, Medvedev recounts someone who made that sacrifice.

Here’s a quote from his book:

“Making a preliminary assessment of the situation and the actions of the operating personnel after the explosion, we can say that the turbine operators in the turbine hall, the firemen on the roof, and the electricians headed by Aleksandr Grigoryevich Lelechenko, deputy chief of the electrical shop, displayed unconditional heroism and self-sacrifice. These people prevented development of the disaster both inside and outside the turbine hall and thus saved the entire plant.

“Aleksandr Grigoryevich Lelechenko, protecting the young electricians from going unnecessarily into the zone of high radiation, himself went into the electrolysis space three times in order to turn off the flow of hydrogen to the emergency generators. When we take into account that the electrolysis space was alongside the pile of debris, and fragments of fuel and reactor graphite were everywhere, and the radioactivity was between 5,000 and 15,000 roentgens per hour, one can get an idea of how highly moral and heroic this 50-year-old man was when he deliberately shielded young lives behind his own. And then in radioactive water up to his knees, he studied the condition of the switchboxes, trying to supply voltage to the feedwater pumps…

His total exposure dose was 2,500 rads, enough to kill him five times. But after he had received first aid (they injected physiological solution into his vein) at the medical station in Pripyat, Lelechenko rushed back to the unit and worked there several more hours.

He died a terrible painful death in Kiev.”

With that quote, we get an idea of just one person who sacrificed their own life to try and stop the damage from getting even worse. It’s worth pointing out, though, that while Medvedev said in his book they gave their lives to save the entire plant, if we were to look at the entire story through a lens of history we know that isn’t always the case. Not that it was on purpose, but sometimes the actions they took actually made things worse.

One example of this is something we don’t see in the series at all, even though it relates to things we’ve seen already in the series.

Remember back when Anatoly Dyatlov was in the control room soon after the explosion? Well, as the firefighters were working to extinguish the fire in the turbine hall, Dyaltov had the radiation measured. Of course, the dosimeter showed a value of 3.6 roentgen per hour. It maxed out.

A little later, Dyatlov then decided it’d be safer for any non-essential personnel to go to a different building. He didn’t think things were as bad as they were, but he wanted to be safe. It was Reactor #4 that had the emergency, after all, so he ordered everyone to go to the closest safe reactor nearby. They went to Reactor #3.

And to make it even safer for them, he ordered the ventilation in Reactor #4 to be turned off so they could crank the ventilation in Reactor #3 into high gear.

That wouldn’t be a bad idea if the situation was as Dyatlov thought—but the fact was that Reactor #4 had exploded. So, by turning up the ventilation in Reactor #3, they were basically pumping in the radioactive air from outside that Reactor #4 was spewing into the air.

And that is an example of how someone makes what they think is the best decision at the time, but in reality it ends up making things even worse.

If we go back to where we are in the timeline of the series, we see a lot happening on April 27^th, the day after the explosion. Since they know it’s a big deal, one of the first things we see them trying to do as a resolution is to dump a ton of…well…according to the series, it’s actually 5,000 tons of boron and sand.

We see the first helicopter trying to deliver its load of boron and sand over the exposed core simply fall apart in the sky.

The basic idea of dropping things on the reactor is true, although there is more to the story we don’t see in the series.

For example, in the series we see Legasov asking Shcherbina for the 5,000 tons of boron and sand. In truth, Shcherbina had the idea to use clay and boron. Legasov asked for 2,000 tons of lead, but he also was the first to admit that probably wouldn’t be enough—this was a bad situation to the level he’d never dealt with before.

So, in the end, Shcherbina ordered 6,000 tons of boron, sand, clay, and lead that they planned on dropping onto the open reactor from helicopters. And there was at least one helicopter that crashed in the process—although I couldn’t find anything in my research to suggest the helicopter just fell apart in the sky like we see in the series. In fact, there’s video footage of a helicopter crashing as it dropped its contents at Chernobyl—but that was because it got too close to a construction crane, it clipped it and went down. It’s not like it fell apart on its own because of the radiation. I’ll include a link to that in the resources for this episode if you want to watch that.

The purpose for dropping these items wasn’t random. Sand would suffocate the fire. Lead lowered the graphite from the exploded core that was still burning. And if you remember from the first episode, boron was in the control rods to absorb neutrons to slow the nuclear chain reaction—so dropping that with clay would help slow any continuing reaction from getting worse and worse.

Something else we don’t see in the series was that there were people who didn’t like this idea. For example, someone who isn’t in the series at all was Valentyn Fedulenko, who was considered an expert on RBMK reactors. Legasov was a nuclear expert, but not necessarily very experienced with RBMK reactors. In fact, he didn’t have any experience with them. When he found out he was on the committee for the Chernobyl accident, his first reaction was to grab any technical info on RBMK reactors and talk to people he knew that had worked with them to get a better idea of the specifics on how they worked.

While Legasov was a nuclear expert, Fedulenko was considered the top expert on RBMK reactors specifically. When he arrived in Pripyat on April 27^th, he didn’t like the idea of dropping sand, clay and lead on the reactor. A big reason for this was because he knew the reactor’s lid had been blown off—but the way it landed was to leave the core partially exposed. He didn’t think the helicopters could accurately drop their load onto the partially exposed reactor core.

But, it happened anyway. By the time April 28^th rolled around, 300 tons of materials had been dropped. Another 750 tons on April 29^th. Another 1,500 tons on April 30^th. Another 1,900 tons on May 1^st.

We’re getting a little ahead of the series timeline here, but with purpose because the amount of material dropped to smother the core ended up becoming an issue itself. They couldn’t just keep doing that because it was so much weight that they thought maybe the reactor would collapse on itself to lower levels of the unit. 

So, that’s why they stopped dumping material onto the reactor. But that didn’t fix the issue.

If we go back to the series, things get bad enough that radiation levels are detected as far as Sweden.

That happened, and a lot of people think the detection of the radiation by surrounding countries ultimately would become a big reason why the Soviet Union couldn’t hid everything.

Even though people like Shcherbina, Legasov and others knew about the accident soon after it happened, most of the world outside the Soviet Union didn’t know anything at all had happened until the morning of April 28^th. There was a sensor at Sweden’s Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant that detected higher than usual radiation.

At first, they thought it was a mistake. Maybe a broken detector. Maybe it was a leak on-site. They evacuated their 600 or so staff members as they tried to figure out what was going on. Soon they figured out it wasn’t internal.

But if it was external, what could it be? Maybe a nuclear bomb. Would that mean war had broken out? What could that mean!?

By the evening of April 28^th, it wasn’t just Sweden that had detected elevated radiation. Finland and Norway were also getting similar readings. Okay, so it’s not nuclear war. It’s something else. But everyone has done internal testing and it’s not them…these readings are coming from somewhere else. As that alerted them to there being an issue, ultimately that would lead to the Soviet Union being forced to admit there was an accident at Chernobyl.

If we go back to the series, one of the other major plot points we see happens when the entire city of Pripyat is evacuated. That happened, although there is more to the story than we see in the HBO miniseries.

Starting at midnight on April 27^th, buses started to arrive in the city of Pripyat with the idea they’d be evacuating civilians. Things were still in a bit of flux—no one knew it’d be a permanent evacuation.

On April 27^th, 1986 at about 1:00 PM, there was an announcement broadcast the city of Pripyat. Here’s an excerpt from that announcement:

[ PLAY 20 SECONDS OF THE CLIP ]

Now, I don’t speak Russian, so I’ll admit that I had to use a translator for this…but that announcement says something like:

“Attention! Attention! The City Council informs you that in connection with the accident at the Chernobyl atomic power station, unfavorable radiation conditions are developing in the city of Pripyat. The Communist Party, its officials and the armed forces are taking necessary steps to fight this. Nevertheless, in order to ensure complete safety for residents, children first and foremost, it has become necessary to carry out a temporary evacuation of the city’s residents to nearby settlements of Kyiv oblast. For that purpose, buses will be provided to every residence today, April 27, beginning at 14:00 hours, under the supervision of police officers and representatives of the city executive committee. It is recommended that people take documents, absolutely necessary items and food products to meet immediate needs. All houses will be guarded by the police during the evacuation period. Comrades, on leaving your dwellings temporarily, please do not forget to close windows, switch off electrical and gas appliances and turn off water taps. Please remain calm, organized and orderly of this short-term evacuation.”

We know from history this announcement was repeated multiple times to residents in the city right before they were to supposed to evacuate. Some sources I saw mentioned giving the residents two hours while others mentioned them having less than an hour. In ether case, there wasn’t much time.

Can you imagine? What would you do if there was an announcement like that where you live? This was a Saturday, so imagine you’re out on the town during the weekend and you hear that being broadcast.

What would you do? Would you believe it at first? Would the first thing you do be to rush home and pack all the belongings you’ll need for the rest of your life? I know I wouldn’t. I’d wonder what’s going on. Should we do what it’s saying? Why is that being said? What in the world is going on?

What we don’t know from history is just how much everyone understood the seriousness of what it meant. How could they know this was evacuating their homes forever? Nothing about this announcement suggested they’d be leaving Pripyat to never return—quite the opposite, actually.

For the most part, the series is correct to show there wasn’t a huge issue with the evacuation. Most people just did what they were told. Did they understand it? No, not necessarily. But they didn’t need to understand. They did what they were told and, looking at it from a historical lens, we know that worked out for their best to leave the radioactive area near and around Chernobyl.

If we go back into the series, at the end of the second episode we see the next attempt to slow the heat from continuing to rise. This comes in the form of trying to release water from tanks before the heated sand—basically a lava-like material at that point—hits the tanks. If they don’t, the lava hitting the tank will instantly heat it up so fast it’ll cause a thermal explosion that’ll destroy the remaining reactors at Chernobyl and release so much radioactive material that millions of people will probably die and entire regions like Byleorussia and Ukraine will be completely uninhabitable for at least 100 years.

To avoid this, they have to open the valves and release the water before the lava gets there. But the men who do that will be exposed to so much radiation they’ll likely die. According to the series, the three men who volunteer for this are Ananenko, Bezpalov and Baranov.

That whole scenario is true, even down to the names of the three men who were sent to try and avoid this disaster…but because the TV series shows more of this in the third episode, we’ll talk more about them in our next episode as well.

One thing we don’t see in the series at all is that the boron they dumped along with the sand didn’t make it to the core. The purpose was exactly what the series shows, to use a mixture of sand and boron. The sand to help smother the fires and boron to absorb the neutrons to halt the continuing heat generated by the ongoing fission reaction.

But next to none of that boron even made it to the core, so it was kind of pointless. The reason we don’t see that mentioned in the series, though, is because at the time they didn’t know that. We only know that now looking at the event through a historical lens.

That’s just another example of how they tried to do the right thing, but what they tried doing ended up only making things worse.

One thing they did know though, was the detection of ruthenium. That’s a chemical element that belongs to the platinum group on the periodic table, atomic number 44. The reason that’s important is because they found the ruthenium was melting. And because they knew the melting point for ruthenium is 2,250 degrees Celcius—or about 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit—that means the fires near the core were at least that hot.

There are actually pictures and footage of the molten lava-like substance they managed to get, and I’ll include links to those in the resources links for this series.

That basically meant they had a nuclear meltdown on their hands.

Now, I know a nuclear meltdown is something we’re all familiar with…by that, I mean it’s a term we’ve probably all heard. But if you’re like me and not a nuclear engineer, what exactly does that mean?

To understand that, we have to have some basic knowledge about how a nuclear reactor works. We talked about that in the last episode. So, in that episode we learned about parts like a control rod and the uranium used as nuclear fuel.

To build on that knowledge, a nuclear meltdown occurs when the core gets so hot that the uranium melts. When it does that, it can burn through any casing and fall to the bottom of the reactor. Then, as it continues to get hotter and hotter, it’ll turn into the molten lava-like material they talk about in the series. That’s what can burn through any of the protective layers in the reactor and, eventually, hit the ground itself.

Once it does that, the only thing left is the earth itself. Everything, including the water in the ground get contaminated by the radioactive molten uranium.

These days there’s usually a layer of metallic alloy beneath the reactor to catch things before they get to the earth below. That’s an safety feature added in the wake of the Chernobyl accident.

That means at Chernobyl, there was no extra safety feature in case of a meltdown. There was just a water reservoir that was used for the emergency cooling pumps. That water was what they were concerned about. The moment the meltdown hit that, it’d start a new chain reaction of destruction. The water would instantly heat up, turning it into steam in an explosion that would hit the other three reactors at Chernobyl. Doing that would mean the nuclear fuel in those reactors would vaporize.

That’s the explosion they were trying to avoid.

The series is correct to show that some of the Soviet scientists working on the Chernobyl accident gave estimates that the potential explosion would basically flatten 200 square kilometers—that’s about 77 square miles—poison all the water in the area, killing who knows how many of the 30 million people who used it as drinking water and render Byelorussia and Ukraine uninhabitable.

Of course, thankfully we can look back on this event through a historical lens to know that did not happen. So that means it’s all speculation on how terrible it could have been.

But that’s what they were afraid of happening.

To avoid that, they needed to release the water from that reservoir. The challenge to that is just what we see in the series: The valves for that have to be turned by hand. Those valves were in the basement. And that basement was flooded with what was now radioactive water.

That brings us back to the three men who volunteered to turn the valves: Alexei Ananenko, Valery Bezpalov and Alexandrovich Baranov.

And that story is something we learn more about in episode three of the miniseries, so we’ll do that as we pick up next time where we’re leaving off about the true story behind episode number three of HBO’s Chernobyl!

There’s some text on screen that gives us a time and place.

Moscow. April 26, 1988. And while it’s not included in the text, the camera shot behind the text is a clock giving us the exact time. It’s 1:10 and since it’s dark through the apartment window, we can assume that’s 1:10 AM.

The apartment belongs to Valery Legasov, who is played by Jared Harris. He’s just poured himself a drink and is listening to a cassette tape. On the recording, his own voice talks about how stories only want to know who is to blame. And, in this story, the best choice was Anatoly Dyatlov because he ran the room that night and he didn’t have friends—not important enough ones, at least. So, he’ll serve ten years in a prison labor camp.

Legasov stops the playback. Then, he hits the record button and continues the story where it left off. This time he’s speaking into the cassette tape.

He ends the recording by saying he’s given everything he knows. They’ll deny it, of course. They always do. He stops the tape and puts it with others—five others, for a total of six. Each tape is labeled with a number 1 through 6. He wraps them all in newspaper and then walks outside to hide the bundle in a grate nearby. He also takes out his cat’s litter so it seems like he’s just doing chores to the man in the car obviously watching his house from the street. We can assume it’s a KGB agent, although the series never really tells us for sure. It seems to work because the man stays in the car.

With that done, Legasov heads back inside.

A few minutes later, we find out why the episode has the title 1:23:45. It’s the time. Looking at his watch as the seconds tick closer to 1:23 AM and 45 seconds, that is exactly the moment when Legasov climbs up on furniture in his apartment and hangs himself.

Then, the next shot we see transports us back in time exactly two years and one minute earlier. Then, of course, we see the explosion—which we’ll get to in a moment, but before we do, we can tell from how the series sets up this opening sequence with the timing that it’s saying Valery Legasov committed suicide exactly two years to the second after the Chernobyl accident.

There’s a lot of what we saw in the opening sequence that is true, but the biggest inaccurate thing is the idea that Legasov committed suicide to coincide with the two-year anniversary of the explosion down to the second. That is simply not true.

It is true that Legasov committed suicide near the two-year anniversary of the explosion, but not necessarily down to the exact second of the explosion itself. In fact, as we’ll learn about in more depth later on, there was more than one explosion.

The truth is that Valery Legasov hung himself in his apartment on April 27^th, 1988—that’s two years and one day after the explosion.

Or, maybe he didn’t intend for it to be timed perfectly with the explosion itself, but maybe it was because the next day, on the 28^th of April, 1988, that’s when he was scheduled to release the outcomes of the investigation into the causes of the disaster.

There are also some discrepancies to exactly where Legasov hung himself. Some sources say it was in his Moscow apartment like we see in the series. Some say it was in the stairwell of his apartment complex.

He didn’t leave a note, so there’s a lot of speculation as to his reasons—and my own speculation is that it’s too close to the anniversary of the explosion to be a coincidence.

What he did leave were tapes of his memories that he’d been recording since he became involved in the Chernobyl disaster. Some also point to something we don’t see in the HBO miniseries at all: It’s not the first time he attempted suicide.

For that, we’d have to go back to the summer of 1987.

But, that attempt didn’t succeed and for a while Legasov threw himself back into his work. Meanwhile, his health continued to fail due to the radiation he was exposed to and on the two-year anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, a proposal he had to launch a new committee on chemical research was rejected. That same day, he gathered all his personal belongings from his office. The next day, he was found dead at his apartment.

While ostracized for his involvement during his life, in the aftermath of his apparent suicide, Legasov’s tapes couldn’t be denied. They were circulated in the scientific community and eventually extracts of them were published the following month, May of 1988. Nearly ten years later, on September 20^th, 1996, President Boris Yeltsin, posthumously gave Valery Legasov the title of Hero of the Russian Federation—Russia’s highest honorary title.

But, alas, even though the HBO miniseries starts at the end, we don’t want to get too far ahead ourselves in the story.

Let’s go back into the timeline of the first episode now. There’s text on the screen that tells us we’re two years and one minute before Valery Legasov’s suicide.

Of course, as we learned, the series wasn’t quite right with the timing of Legasov’s suicide, but if we were to follow their timeline then two years and one minute earlier would be April 26^th, 1986 at 1:22 AM. That timing is correct to set us up just before the explosion.

We’re in Pripyat, Ukrainian SSR.

A woman named Lyudmilla Ignatenko, who is played by Jessie Buckley, happens to be awake to use the restroom. Afterward, she goes to the kitchen to get a drink. She doesn’t even notice the bright light in the distance out the window of her apartment. Then, a moment after we see the blast, the sound hits, shaking the apartment.

That, she noticed. So did her husband, Vasily, who wakes up. Together, they look out the window at the glow in the distance. The explosion throws a pillar of blue light into the sky that looks like something we’d expect to see in a science fiction movie.

Before we go any further, I wanted to touch on how the explosion looked. What we see in the series is most likely pretty accurate, but I also think we should set some expectations. It’s not like it was caught on film, so no one really knows what it looked like for absolute certainty.

Remember, this was in 1986. There weren’t cell phones with cameras in everyone’s pocket. There weren’t security cameras in houses, businesses or even cars like we see today.

It was also 1:23 in the morning. And Chernobyl was specifically built to be away from the huge city it provided power to: Kiev. Of course, that’s now the city of Kyiv since Ukrainian independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The city of Pripyat mentioned in the series is a real city. It’s located about 62 miles, or 100 kilometers, away from Kyiv and was built in 1970 primarily as a home for people working in and around the Chernobyl power plant. By 1986, there were about 49,000 people who lived in Pripyat. For comparison, the city of Chernobyl itself where the power plant was had about 14,000 residents in 1986.

So, that’s another limitation of the eyewitnesses to the explosion. Not only was it in the middle of the night in the year 1986 where automated monitoring technology just wasn’t as common as it is today…but it’s not like there were millions of people around.

With all that said, it’s not like there was no one around either.

There were people who worked at the plant 24/7, many of whom were alerted by the explosion itself and rushed to see what happened.

To see the explosion itself, there were some people who just happened to be fishing nearby at that moment. And by nearby, I mean very nearby. You see, there was a pond near the power plant that held water used to cool the plant. That pond was also used to stock fish—something they used as a way of showing how safe everything was.

So, there were a couple of guys who happened to be fishing in that pond about 800 or 900 feet away—about 250 meters or so—away from reactor number four when it exploded.

According to these eyewitness accounts, there was a fireball that rose from Reactor #4—or, as they referred to it, Unit 4. Along with the fireball rose a mushroom cloud of smoke. A red column of light from the explosion turned blue as it rose into the sky, surrounded by the black cloud of smoke.

It’s probably not what you want to see coming from a nuclear reactor. But, of course, that’s also looking at things through a historical lens where we already have an idea of what happened at Chernobyl.

At the time, they had no idea just how bad it was.

Yes, there was an explosion—two of them actually, one right after the other.

Yes, there was a fire.

The fishermen kept on fishing, though. There was no way they could’ve known how serious things actually were.

Going back to the series, inside the control room right after the explosion we can see the man in charge is Anatoly Dyatlov. He’s played by Paul Ritter in the series.

“What just happened?” Dyatlov asks the others in the control room as dust falls from the ceiling as a result of the blast. No one seems to know the answer.

Then, someone named Perevozschenko bursts in the room exclaiming there’s a fire in the turbine hall.

After a moment’s pause, Dyatlov figures it out…the turbine hall. That’s the control system tank. Hydrogen. That would cause the explosion. He turns to two of the men working the controls, Akimov and Toptunov, and berates them. He blames them for blowing up the tank.

That is all a pretty good dramatization of what most likely happened in the control room that night.

The reason I say it’s “most likely” what happened is simply because we have to rely on the memories of people who were there that night to piece together the story. That’s not unique to our story today—there are lots of times in history where we can only rely on the memory of those who were there. But it’s important to know that because memory can often be an unreliable interpretation of what happened, especially when it comes down to specific things we see in the HBO series like who said what.

With that said, the men we see in the control room in the series were real people. Anatoly Dyatlov was the deputy chief engineer. Aleksandr Akimov was the chief of the unit’s shift and Leonid Toptunov was the reactor operator. And it is true that one of the mechanics came into the control room to let them know the turbine hall was on fire.

Not to skip too far ahead of where we are in the timeline of the first episode, but a little later in the first episode there is some dialogue where Dyatlov, Akimov and Toptunov are talking about the tank. Dyatlov mentions the tank on 71 is 100 cubic meters. Akimov corrects him, saying it’s 110 cubic meters.

While it’d make sense for people who work at the Chernobyl power plant to understand what all that means, for those of us who didn’t, what they’re talking about is the location of the control system tank.

It was 71 meters, or about 233 feet, directly above the control room. It also held 110,000 liters, or about 29,000 gallons, of hot water and steam. As a quick little side note, that doesn’t mean the series is wrong to mention hydrogen. Hydrogen can be created by the reaction between steam and the fuel used in a reactor, and since hydrogen is extremely combustible it’d make sense to assume the hydrogen was the cause of the explosion.

But, the location of the tank is important because something we don’t see mentioned in the series is that Dyatlov expected all that hot water start leaking through the roof of the control room they were in at any moment.

One of the orders we don’t see him giving in the series that he actually did give was for everyone to move to an emergency control room. But, the series probably just simplified this, because it is true they never moved. Everyone was too focused on the alarms and indicators in the control room giving readings they couldn’t make sense of to pay attention to Dyatlov’s order to relocate. And, since the ceiling hadn’t started leaking yet, he didn’t push the matter. After all, every second mattered, and he knew they had to keep the reactor cooled.

This is important to keep in mind, though, because the more time that passed without the water leaking through the control room ceiling the more that became an indicator to Dyatlov that the explosion was probably not the control system tank.

If we go back into the series, though, Paul Ritter’s version of Anatoly Dyatlov has just come to the conclusion that it must be the control system tank that exploded. He orders water be pumped through the core. All that matters now is to keep the core cool, so the fire doesn’t affect it.

The man who burst into the room stops Dyatlov and says, “There is no core! It’s exploded!”

Anatoly Dyatlov pauses for a moment at this, thinking it through…then he disregards it. He’s in shock. The man persists, saying he saw the lid is off! But Dyatlov won’t believe him. RBMK reactor cores don’t explode, Dyatlov replies. You’re confused.

This whole concept of refusing to believe an RBMK reactor could explode was true…but it wasn’t because of a lack of education. If anything, it was quite the opposite: Their training was one of the main reasons they couldn’t even fathom the reactor core was what had exploded.

It was one of those things where the eyes saw something so unbelievable that the mind couldn’t comprehend the reality of it. There were simply too many fail-safes. Too many safety systems in place for that to happen. It wasn’t possible.

Even some of the plant workers who saw the aftermath of the blast would later recall their minds didn’t want to believe what their eyes saw.

To put it another way, they were simply blinded by their belief that the reactor was so safe it could never explode. Whatever had happened must have been something else—it couldn’t be the reactor. At least, that was the mindset for most people at the Chernobyl power plant that night. Of course, they would find out just how wrong they were.

Going back into the series, we see Anatoly Dyatlov ordering the men in the control room to pump more water into the core to keep it cool. We talked about that briefly a little bit earlier.

Now, if you’re like me and not a nuclear engineer, right about this point in the story it’s very helpful to understand how nuclear reactors work. So, remember where we were in the series with Dyatlov wanting to pump water into the core because it will make sense on the other side of this explanation of how nuclear reactors work.

In a single sentence: Nuclear reactors heat up water until it becomes steam which spins a turbine to generate electricity.

Of course, that is an extremely simplified version.

There are different kinds of nuclear reactors, but the one we hear about in the series is an RBMK reactor. And it is true that the Chernobyl reactor was an RBMK reactor. RBMK stands for a High-Power Channel-Type Reactor. Obviously, that’s the English translation. The letters RBMK line up better with the actual Russian words, reaktor bolshoy moshchnosti kanalnyy.

But, as you can tell from my butchered pronunciation, I can’t speak Russian! So, we’ll stick with calling it a High-Power Channel-Type Reactor, or just stick to RBMK haha!

There are a few things about RBMK reactors that’s helpful to keep in mind as we continue to learn about what happened at Chernobyl.

One of those things is they’re unique to the Soviet Union, and now Russia since there are still RBMK reactors around today even though the Soviet Union is not. That means in 1986, no other country had engineers with experience with RBMK reactors or any other training for them outside the Soviet Union. And as we’ve learned so far—inside the Soviet Union, the training for RBMK reactors only ever implied they had so many fail-safes and safety systems that the idea of an RBMK reactor exploding was unfathomable.

Another thing to keep in mind about RBMK reactors was that…well, Chernobyl wasn’t originally supposed to be an RBMK reactor. It was supposed to be what’s known as VVER. The English translation for that is Water-Water Energy Reactors. That was the Soviet version of the same type of nuclear reactor that’s in the United States, which is called Pressurized Water Reactors or PWR.

However, they decided to build RBMK reactors in Chernobyl instead because RBMK reactors could output twice the amount of energy as a VVER reactor and RBMK reactors could be built by machine plants that didn’t have any sort of nuclear industry-specific high-precision equipment.

So, basically, RBMK reactors were cheaper and more powerful.

That’s a win-win…right? Well, if that were true then we probably wouldn’t be telling the story today.

The last key thing to keep in mind about an RBMK nuclear reactor that I wanted to mention at this point in the story is that RBMK reactors use a graphite moderator in the control rods. No other reactor types do that, and we see graphite mentioned quite a bit in the HBO miniseries.

What does that mean, exactly? To understand that we’ll have to dive back into how nuclear reactors work for a moment.

So, earlier, we learned a nuclear reactor heats water to the point of becoming steam to then generate electricity.

The part that we’re talking about here is how an RBMK reactor heats the water. It does that through something called a fission reaction. That’s what happens a neutron hits a larger atom, splitting into two smaller atoms. Energy is released as well as additional neutrons, which can then repeat the process. That’s the chain reaction.

To help ensure the chain reaction continues more, something called a moderator is added to slow down the neutrons. That way you’ll get a better chain reaction and, in the process, more energy released. That results in more heat which results in more steam which results in more electricity.

The fuel used for a nuclear reactor is uranium. The uranium is made into pellets that are stacked into a metal tube called a fuel rod. In an RBMK reactor, it’s uranium-238 that’s slightly enriched with uranium-235.

The fuel rods with enriched uranium are positioned vertically inside the core of the reactor.

The core of an RBMK reactor is graphite—the same thing used in pencils, although for a nuclear reactor we’re obviously talking about something much bigger. The graphite core is more like the size of a house, and the graphite is a lot more pure than what’s in a pencil.

In the core, there are 1,660 vertical holes. That’s where the fuel rods are inserted.

But, it’s not like there are 1,660 fuel rods inserted.

You don’t want the chain reaction to go on and on unchecked forever, so there are also what are called control rods. The control rods are made of a material called boron carbide and, in RBMK reactors, there are graphite tips on the control rods. That graphite tip will play a part in the story later, but the boron carbide is a material absorbs the neutrons which, in turn, slows the fission reaction down.

With all that explained, the basic process then is that cool water is pumped into the core. It cools the core down, but it also flows around the fuel rods where the fission reaction heats up the water. Since heat rises, the steam comes out the top of the reactor where the reactor design forces the steam to the turbine where the electricity is generated.

More cool water is pumped in, it cools the core, is heated and leaves as steam.

If things get too hot from the chain reaction generating too much heat than the water coolant can handle, then you insert more control rods to absorb the neutrons and slow down the chain reaction.

And so on and so on, the balance continues as electricity is generated.

Okay, so in a nutshell, that is how RBMK nuclear reactors work. And yes, all that is still an extremely simplified version.

But that will help us understand the rest of the miniseries a lot better because…well, it’s a lot easier to understand how things went wrong when we know what they were supposed to be doing in the first place!

So, remember where we were in the miniseries?

Anatoly Dyatlov gave the order to pump water into the core just before he left to go to the Administration Building to talk to Viktor Bryukhanov and Nikolai Fomin. He really did do that, but it wasn’t the only order he gave. That was just one of the orders Dyatlov made after the explosion that would end up making an already terrible situation even worse.

The order to pump water into the core was his primary focus though.

A big part of that has to do with what we talked about earlier—the disbelief that the core itself had exploded. But the indicators in the control room were also telling them that there wasn’t any water at all flowing into the core. If the fuel rods didn’t have any coolant, they’d melt. That would be bad.

So, he thought the huge graphite core was still there and since they’d pushed the AZ-5 button—we’ll hear more about that later in the series—but basically that button inserts all the control rods into the core at once to completely halt the fission reaction. Since they did that, Dyatlov believed that all he had to do to cool the reactor down was to keep pumping cool water in. Since the chain reaction had been stopped with the control rods, the cool water wouldn’t be heated anymore and any residual heat that was there would eventually cool off with more cool water added.

At least—that was the idea behind his order to keep pumping the water into the core.

He also believed the fission reaction had been shut down. But because the indicators were showing no water was being pumped into the core, that’s why Dyatlov’s order was to try and restart the emergency water pumps. Those had been shut off for the test, but now he ordered them to restart those pumps in an attempt to cool the reactor before the fuel rods melted.

Or, basically, get water into the core as fast as you can. That will save the reactor and the fire brigade can handle the fire before things get worse.

That was the plan, at first.

Something we don’t really see in the series, though, is that plan was more complex than it sounds because Dyatlov realized pretty quickly that the fission reaction had not been shut down like he thought at first. From the control room indicators, they could tell the control rods hadn’t descended all the way like they were supposed to when they shut down the reactor. Not only that, but the control rods had stopped about one-third of the way down.

That’s additionally bad because, as we learned earlier, the control rods in RBMK reactors have graphite tips. So, not only was the boron not slowing down the fission reaction, the partially-inserted control rods with graphite tips were basically acting just like the graphite core around it—increasing the fission reaction!

Thinking fast, Dyatlov thought if the button to insert the control rods all the way didn’t work, maybe they could be fully inserted manually. So, he ordered a couple of interns who had been in the control room to learn from the test to go try that. But then he immediately realized that was a bad idea because the control rods were huge—they can’t be inserted through manpower alone. Even the manual controls required a servo motor that was powered by electricity. Since there wasn’t power, the servo motor wouldn’t be able to help move the control rods so there’d be no way they could be lowered manually.

But, the two men had already left the control room. Dyatlov ran after them for a moment, but they were down the hall and out of sight.

They couldn’t have known it at the time, but they were trying to do an impossible task and running even closer toward the exploded core.

While he was in the hall outside the control room, Dyatlov noticed it was filled with dust and smoke from the fire in the turbine hall. That was a fire he already knew about, and one that we talked about briefly before when we found out about his decision to call the fire brigade to deal with the fires.

If we go back into the series now, there’s text on the screen to tell us it’s 2:30 AM.

There are two things we see happening that we’ll talk about. The first is what I just mentioned, the fire brigade coming—we’ll come back to that in a bit.

The other is when we see Viktor Bryukhanov getting the phone call that wakes him up about the accident. He meets Nikolai Fomin at the Administration Building where they both go into what looks like a bunker with a long conference table in it. Dyatlov is already there and he starts filling them in on what happened.

The basic concept of this is true, although it was around 2:00 AM when Bryukhanov got the call to wake him up about the accident. That’s kind of splitting hairs, though. What’s not splitting hairs is something we see Con O’Neill’s version of Viktor Bryukhanov tell Dyatlov that there’s no way they can blame him for the accident—he was asleep when it happened!

This whole conversation we see between Dyatlov, Bryukhanov and Fomin in the series is a simplified version of what happened. In truth, they talked on the phone first…they didn’t talk in person for a few hours after we see it happening in the series.

Something else we don’t see in the series is that even though Bryukhanov didn’t know the extent of the explosion he had gotten the call about, as the bus he was riding to the plant got closer, he noticed the top of Unit 4 was gone.

At that moment, he knew he would be blamed for it. He was in charge of the power plant, so it didn’t matter that he was asleep when things went wrong. It was a big enough of a deal that he’d take the fall for it. Anything that goes wrong, you’re the one in charge so you’re the one who takes the blame. That’s how things worked in the Soviet Union.

Talking to Anatoly Dyatlov also wasn’t the first thing Bryukhanov did when he arrived at the plant. He actually decided to investigate himself and went toward Unit 4. But, he stopped when he saw pieces of graphite on the ground and the building next to the reactor hall in complete ruins. He didn’t want to see more, so he went back to his office to make phone calls.

It was to the chief of the night shift, a man who isn’t in the series at all. His name was Boris Rogozhkin. He was the one who had gone to the control room to talk to Dyatlov, Akimov and Toptunov. So it was Rogozhkin who told Byrukhanov over the phone what Dyatlov had said: We pressed the AZ-5 button, and 12 to 15 seconds later there was an explosion.

The AZ-5 button is the emergency shutdown that lowers all the control rods into the core, stopping the fission reaction. It definitely was not supposed to cause an explosion!

Once Bryukhanov got off the phone with Rogozhkin, he turned around and started calling his superiors to let them know about the accident—at least, what they knew so far. After that, Bryukhanov called Dyatlov to tell him to come over to the underground bunker to talk to him directly. But that wasn’t until around 4:00 AM, not soon after 2:00 AM like we see in the series.

Speaking of which, if we go back into the series, we see the firefighters continuing to battle the flames.  According to the series, they first arrived on scene around 1:30 AM.

We see shots of them here and there between things we’ve seen in the reactor. Time passes until around 3:30 AM, and there’s some dialogue between the firefighters that lets us know they’ve done everything they can from the outside. They need to start making their way to the roof now. We also see some of the firefighters reacting to some of the debris—debris that’s molten hot in some cases, other debris that’s not hot to the touch but still causes burns after the firefighters pick it up.

The series has so many different angles to tell the story that we don’t see everything from every angle—and that makes sense.

But in the true story, by the time 2:00 AM rolled around, firefighters were starting to address the fire on the roof of Unit 3—it was connected to Unit 4. They quickly realized it was more than just fire. Less than half an hour later, the firefighters were starting to get sick. They didn’t know exactly what the cause was—but they knew enough about fighting fires to know there was something different this time.

Still, there was a fire to be extinguished.

We don’t see this character in the HBO miniseries, but the commander of the fire department that responded was the 35-year-old Major Leonid Teliantnikov.

By the time 2:30 rolled around, the fire on the roof of the reactor hall had mostly been extinguished, but Teliantnikov noticed his men weren’t right. They were sick. So, he ordered them to go in an ambulance to the Pripyat hospital. An hour or so later, around 3:30 AM, Teliantnikov and his men were battling the flames on the roof of Unit #3. Except, he’d been exposed too much himself. So, he went to the hospital himself, leaving the firefighters without their commander.

This is way beyond the scope of episode number one, but it was closer to 7:00 AM when the firefighters finally had the flames extinguished.

And since I mentioned episode number one, if we head back to the HBO miniseries we’re at the end of the first episode where a phone rings.

Tying into the beginning of the episode, Valery Legasov is the man who answers the phone. On the other end of the line is Boris Shcherbina. Through the conversation, Legasov finds out about the accident and that he’s been assigned to a committee to manage the accident.

Specifics of the conversation were surely made up for the series, but the basic concept here is true.

Boris Shcherbina was a real person. He really was in charge of the commission to get to the bottom of things…and to offer another bonus point to the accuracy of things, the creators of the series even found an excellent actor of the same age. The real Boris Shcherbina was 66 years old in 1986 when he was put in charge of the commission, while the actor playing Boris Shcherbina in the HBO miniseries, Stellan Skarsgård, was 68 years old in 2019 when the series was released…and probably a year or two younger when they filmed the series before being released.

So, that’s a minor thing, but something I think is worth pointing out to highlight the level of detail the creators went to in this series.­

Both Valery Legasov and Boris Shcherbina were very real people involved in the true story…

…and those are two names we’ll hear about a lot more in our upcoming episodes as we dig into the rest of HBO’s Chernobyl miniseries!