How many people do you think died at Chernobyl? 10,000? 50,000? 300,000? The correct answer, according to the never knowingly understated World Health Organisation — in a thorough report released nearly 20 years after the 1986 explosion — was ‘fewer than 50’.
Ah, but what about all the mutant babies who ended up with two heads and webbed feet? What about the inevitable epidemic of cancers? Well, yes, it’s true that 4,000 more cases of thyroid cancer were loosely attributable to Chernobyl, mainly in children and adolescents. But the survival rate was 99 per cent.
Because I’ve long been familiar with these facts — mainly as an antidote to all those lefties, like the late historian Tony Judt, who fell for the green anti-nuclear propaganda that many people still believe — I was initially very wary of Chernobyl (Sky Atlantic/HBO, Tuesdays). How could any fictionalised version resist the temptation to go with the scary myth rather than the more nuanced truth?
But scriptwriter Craig Mazin has found a cunning line between the two, at once conjuring up all the apocalyptic horror of a nuclear-reactor explosion and its aftermath, while yet largely accepting that the facts of the story are so strange and horrible and disturbing that they really need little embellishment.
A good example of this is the Spartacus moment at the end of episode two, where the Soviet bosses demand that three volunteers undertake a suicide mission for the salvation of the Motherland: they must enter the melting reactor and drain the water in order to avert a second explosion that will surely kill millions. But the radiation to which they will be exposed will be so great that they will never survive.
It makes for a powerful scene: a roomful of bolshie, more-than-my-job’s-worth workers not daring to meet one another’s eyes as the request goes out.
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