Vichnaya Pamyat

Chernobyl 1×5

State Prosecutor: The Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. has determined that justice be carried out on behalf of the People in accordance with the general goal of our Party as determined by its 20th, 21st, and 22nd Congresses, which is a Leninist goal. It was, is, and will be the only immutable goal in the Soviet state. The path of Leninist principles shall be consistently and undeviatingly followed as it expresses the vital interests of the Soviet People, its hopes and aspirations as we guide the life of the Party and the State. This session of court is now open...

Boris Shcherbina: The science is strong, but a test is only as good as the men carrying it out. Now, the first time they tried, they failed. The second time they tried, they failed. The third time they tried, they failed. The fourth time they tried was April 26th, 1986...

Valery Legasov: You don't need to be a nuclear scientist to understand what happened at Chernobyl. You only need to know this: there are essentially two things that happen inside a nuclear reactor. The reactivity which generates power either goes up, or it goes down. That's it. All the operators do is maintain balance.

Boris Shcherbina: I'm an inconsequential man, Valera. That's all I've ever been. I hoped that one day I would matter, but I didn't. I just stood next to people who did.
Valery Legasov: There are other scientists like me. Any one of them could have done what I did. But you... Everything we asked for, everything we needed. Men, material, lunar rovers... Who else could have done these things? They heard me, but they listened to you. Of all the ministers and all the deputies... entire congregation of obedient fools... they mistakenly sent the one good man. For God's sake, Boris, you were the one who mattered most.

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Valery Legasov: We do not know how high the power went. We only know the final reading. Reactor 4, designed to operate at 3200 megawatts, went beyond 33,000.

Valery Legasov: Why? For the same reason our reactors do not have containment buildings around them, like those in the West. For the same reason we don't use properly enriched fuel in our cores. For the same reason we are the only nation that builds water-cooled, graphite-moderated reactors with a positive void coefficient. It's cheaper.

Valery Legasov: I've already trod on dangerous ground. We're on dangerous ground right now, because of our secrets and our lies. They're practically what define us. When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there. But it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid. That is how an RBMK reactor core explodes. Lies.

KGB Chairman Charkov: Scientists... and your idiot obsessions with reasons. When the bullet hits your skull, what will it matter why?

Valery Legasov: To be a scientist is to be naive. We are so focused on our search for truth, we fail to consider how few actually want us to find it. But it is always there, whether we see it or not, whether we choose to or not. The truth doesn't care about our needs or wants. It doesn't care about our governments, our ideologies, our religions. It will lie in wait for all time. And this, at last, is the gift of Chernobyl.
    Where I once would fear the cost of truth, now I only ask: What is the cost of lies?

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The Happiness of All Mankind

Chernobyl 1×4

Valery Legasov: You can see the roof is in three levels. We've named them— the small one here is Katya. One thousand roentgen per hour. Presume two hours of exposure is fatal. The one on the side— Nina. Two thousand roentgen. One hour, fatal.

Boris Shcherbina: We couldn't put a man on the moon. At least we can keep a man off a roof.

General Tarakanov: What about this large section here?
Boris Shcherbina: Masha.
Valery Legasov: Twelve thousand roentgen. If you were to stand there in full protective gear head-to-toe for two minutes, your life expectancy would be cut in half. By three minutes, you're dead within months. Even our lunar rovers won't work on Masha. That amount of gamma radiation penetrates everything. The particles literally shred the circuits in microchips apart. If it's more complicated than a light switch, Masha will destroy it.
Boris Shcherbina: It would be fair to say that that piece of roof is the most dangerous place on Earth.

Bacho: I thought, "Well, that's it, Bacho. You put a bullet in someone. You're not you anymore. You'll never be you again." But then you wake up the next morning, and you're still you. And you realize. that was you all along. You just didn't know...
Garo: The happiness of all mankind.
Bacho: What?!
Garo: "Our goal is the happiness of all mankind."

Boris Shcherbina: The official position of the State is that a global nuclear catastrophe is not possible in the Soviet Union. They told the Germans that the highest detected level of radiation was 2,000 roentgen. They gave them the propaganda number. That robot was never going to work...

Boris Shcherbina: The Americans?
General Tarakanov: If the Americans had that kind of technology, do you really think they'd give it to us? And even if they would, the Central Committee will never stoop to ask. You know it, I know it. There are no robots.
Valery Legasov: ... Biorobots.
Boris Shcherbina: What was that?
Valery Legasov: We use biorobots... Men.

Boris Shcherbina: I've know braver souls than you, Khomyuk. Men who had their moment and did nothing. Because when it's your life and the lives of everyone you love, your moral conviction doesn't mean anything. It leaves you. And all you want at that moment is not to be shot.

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Open Wide, O Earth

Chernobyl 1×3

Valery Legasov: Forgive me. Maybe I've just spent too much time in my lab. Or maybe I'm just stupid. Is this really the way it all works? An uninformed, arbitrary decision that will cost who knows how many lives made by some apparatchik, some career party man?
Boris Shcherbina: I'm a career party man.

Pikalov: But the temperature is rising. And, uh... There's a spike in zirconium-95.
Valery Legasov: It's from the cladding on the fuel rods.
Boris Shcherbina: Meaning what?
Valery Legasov: The meltdown has begun.

Boris Shcherbina: And in order to do that, I'm told that we will need... all of the liquid nitrogen in the Soviet Union.
Michail Gorbatchev: Oh... All right.
Boris Shcherbina: Yeah, and of course, we'll also need--
Michail Gorbatchev: Whatever you need, you have it. That should be clear by now.

Valery Legasov: General Secretary. Um, Premier Ryzhkov has determined that--
Michail Gorbatchev: If he determined, then he determined. Look, Professor Legasov, you are there for one reason only. Do you understand? To make this stop. I don't want questions. I want to know when this will be over.
Valery Legasov: If you mean when will Chernobyl be completely safe, the half-life of plutonium-239 is 24,000 years. So perhaps we should just say, "Not within our lifetimes."

Ulana Khomyuk: I've worked the numbers over and over, presuming the worst possible conditions in an RBMK reactor. And I always get the same answer.
Valery Legasov: Which is?
Ulana Khomyuk: It's not possible.
Valery Legasov: And yet...

Valery Legasov: I'm not good at this, Boris. The lying.
Boris Shcherbina: Have you ever spent time with miners?
Valery Legasov: No.
Boris Shcherbina: My advice: tell the truth. These men work in the dark. They see everything.

Valery Legasov: Are they all like that?
Boris Shcherbina: They're all like that.

Boris Shcherbina: No, that went surprisingly well. You came off like a naive idiot. And naive idiots are not a threat.

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Please Remain Calm

Chernobyl 1×2

Ulana Khomyuk: Iodine 131... It's not military. It's uranium decay, U-235.

Ulana Khomyuk: Who's the next closest?
Vasily Ignatenko: It's Chernobyl, but that's not possible. They're 400 kilometers away.
Ulana Khomyuk: That's too far for eight milliroentgen. They'd have to be split open.

Boris Shcherbina: And as for the radiation—
Valery Legasov: Yes, 3.6 roentgen, which, by the way, is not the equivalent of one chest X-ray, but rather 400 chest X-rays. That number's been bothering me for a different reason, though. It's also the maximum reading on low-limit dosimeters. They gave us the number they had. I think the true number is much, much higher. If I'm right, this fireman was holding the equivalent of four million chest X-rays in his hand.

Valery Legasov: Um... An RBMK reactor uses uranium 235 as fuel. Every atom of U-235 is like a bullet traveling at nearly the speed of light, penetrating everything in its path: woods, metal, concrete, flesh. Every gram of U-235 holds over a billion trillion of these bullets. That's in one gram. Now, Chernobyl holds over three million grams, and right now, it is on fire.

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Valery Legasov: That's three million billion trillion bullets in the... in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat. Most of these bullets will not stop firing for 100 years. Some of them, not for 50,000 years.

Boris Shcherbina: How does a nuclear reactor work?
Valery Legasov: What?
Boris Shcherbina: It's a simple question.
Valery Legasov: It's hardly a simple answer.
Boris Shcherbina: Of course, you presume I'm too stupid to understand. So I'll restate: Tell me how a nuclear reactor works, or I'll have one of these soldiers throw you out of the helicopter.

General Pikalov: It's not three roentgen. It's 15,000. ...
Boris Shcherbina: What does that number mean?
Valery Legasov: It means the core is open. It means the fire we're watching with our own eyes is giving off nearly twice the radiation released by the bomb in Hiroshima. And that's every single hour. Hour after hour, 20 hours since the explosion, so 40 bombs worth by now. Forty-eight more tomorrow. And it will not stop. Not in a week, not in a month. It will burn and spread its poison until the entire continent is dead.

Boris Shcherbina: How do we put it out?
Valery Legasov: ... You are dealing with something that has never occurred on this planet before.

Michail Gorbatchev: I have ten minutes, then I'm back on the phone apologizing to our friends, apologizing to our enemies... Our power comes from the perception of our power. Do you understand the damage this has done? Do you understand what's at stake?!

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1:23:45

Chernobyl 1×1

Valery Legasov: What is the cost of lies? It's not that we'll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What else is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories? In these stories, it doesn't matter who the heroes are. All we want to know is: who is to blame?

Bryukhanov: What about radiation?
Anatoly Dyatlov: Obviously, down here it's nothing. But in the reactor building, I'm being told, 3.6 roentgen per hour.
Fomin: Well, that's not great, but it's not horrifying. Not at all. From the feedwater, I assume?
Anatoly Dyatlov: Mm-hmm.
Fomin: We'll have to limit shifts to six hours at a time, but otherwise...

Zharkov: I wonder how many of you know the name of this place... We all call it "Chernobyl," of course. What is its real name?
Bryukhanov: The Vladimir I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station.
Zharkov: Exactly. Vladimir I. Lenin. And how proud he would be of you all tonight. Especially you, young man, and the passion you have for the people. For is that not the sole purpose of the apparatus of the State? Sometimes, we forget. Sometimes, we fall prey to fear. But our faith in Soviet socialism will always be rewarded.

Zharkov: Now, the State tells us the situation here is not dangerous. Have faith, comrades. The State tells us it wants to prevent a panic. Listen well. It's true, when the people see the police, they will be afraid. But it is my experience that when the people ask questions that are not in their own best interest, they should simply be told to keep their minds on their labor and leave matters of the State to the State.

Zharkov: We seal off the city. No one leaves. And cut the phone lines. Contain the spread of misinformation. That is how we keep the people from undermining the fruits of their own labor.

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Sitnikov: I sent my dosimetrists into the reactor building. The large dosimeter from the safe, the one with the 1,000-roentgen capacity--
Anatoly Dyatlov: What was the number?
Sitnikov: There was none.

Sitnikov: We found another dosimeter from the military fire department. It only goes to 200 roentgen, but it's better than the small ones.
Fomin: And?
Sitnikov: It maxed out. Two hundred roentgen.
Fomin: ... What game are you playing?

Anatoly Dyatlov: What's wrong with you? How'd you get that number from feedwater leaking from a blown tank?
Sitnikov: ... You don't.
Anatoly Dyatlov: Then what the fuck are you talking about?!

Sitnikov: I walked around the exterior of Building 4. I think there's graphite on the ground in the rubble.
Anatoly Dyatlov: You didn't see graphite.
Sitnikov: I did.
Anatoly Dyatlov: You didn't! You didn't!! Because it's not there!
Fomin: What? Are you suggesting the core... what? Exploded?
Sitnikov: Yes.

Fomin: Sitnikov... You're a nuclear engineer, so am I. Please tell me how an RBMK reactor core explodes. Not a meltdown, an explosion. I'd love to know.
Sitnikov: I can't.
Fomin: Are you stupid?
Sitnikov: No.
Fomin: Then why can't you?
Sitnikov: I... I don't see how it could explode. But it did.

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