Posted on 06/06/2019 8:57:54 AM PDT by Cecily
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union, once said that Chernobyl was ‘perhaps the real cause’ of the state’s collapse.
The attempted cover-up of the world’s worst nuclear disaster, the endless lies and obfuscation, and the risk to the lives of millions laid bare the failings of the communist regime as never before.
It proved to the Soviet people that the time had come for radical change and that Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost — openness — was the only option.
At the very least, the explosion in Reactor 4 on the night of April 26, 1986, hastened the end of the ‘Evil Empire’.
The blast emitted more than 400 times the amount of radiation into the atmosphere than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Not naked.
That gigantic hairy russian miner was wearing a small hat.
True. As were the other dozen or so men.
Still...some discrete pixilation would have gone a long way to making the scene a lot less disgusting.
Agreed, didn’t enjoy that.
Nice first scene with the miners, with the “now you look like a minister of coal”.
4 or 5 episodes. Yes it is done. Well worth wasting a rainy day on. The miners nudity (HBO after all) is historically accurate (It was so hot that the miners digging under the molten pile went in nude) but blech on full frontal male nudity. They could have just shown ass, but no... had to go full monty.
Hideous wallpaper and all~!
The reason they went nude is that your clothing would get so hot it would burn you
The explanation of the accident in the article is very poor. It was better explained in Episode 5. I didn’t really understand the accident until Episode 4.
I enjoyed the series. I have been to Ukraine about a half-dozen times, going to other nuclear power plants (not RMBK reactors) and found that the show had a very good “atmosphere”, for lack of a better word.
Some of the technical details are wrong (Ligasov in an earlier episode says that uranium atoms are moving at nearly the speed of light, for instance - not even close - light in a vacuum moves at about 30 million meters/second, while the average speed of a uranium atom is about 10000 times slower) but are incidental.
IIRC, American Doctors went to Russia to help.
Five episodes The third is the most graphic. It ain’t an easy death.
Anyone who thinks commies or socialist ‘care’ about ‘the people’ is a fool. Communism is an easy path to absolute power for people who are evil. The ‘care’ they speak of is made up...
In the epilogue of the last episode,they claim all three survived. I believe they claim they are still alive.
https://twitter.com/LarrySchweikart/status/1136352873053220865
This is a thread I did not so much on the show as it is on the writer’s claim that Chernobyl was somehow related to Trump.
Any idiot watching this show knows that this was 100% about the failures of Soviet communism in specific and totalitarian socialist societies in general. The obvious problems were that the system did NOT permit individual autonomy or quality control from the bottom. The workers in the reactor, KNOWING the test was unsafe, were forced to go forward anyway.
The second issue was, once the explosion happened, it all became about avoiding responsibility, not fixing the problem. All the way to the end, when the scientists were trying to explain that while there was clearly human error, there was also a massive structural flaw in the system involving the boron control rods, which were tipped with graphite. When trying to do an emergency shutdown, they did an override where they put in all the control rods at once . . . only the graphite immediately caused the fission reacion to accelerate, instantly melting the graphite and sticking the boron rods where they were so that they could not be all the way inserted.
So, there was a fundamental design flaw in the emergency shut down system. The Soviet Party Bosses did not want to hear that. Why did they use graphite? It was much cheaper than other alternatives. But as the chief scientist pointed out, it wasn’t JUST the graphite-—it was corner-cutting all along the way that led to lack of safety.
Anyway, back to communism and the notion that Gorby said Chenobyl was the beginning of the end. No. That’s a Hollywood way to conveniently ignore Ronald Reagan’s contributions. The USSR was finished BEFORE Chernobyl and didn’t know it. That is all explained in the thread.
Absolutely correct and good catch. There was true un selfishness.
Toured a Russian Sub w/ a US Navy Submariner as a guide. He said - “When you have more people than you can feed, you get a different view on human life. So one should not assume that a different society/culture shares your values.”
The Soviets thru people at a lot of problems
My recollection from watching the end of the show was that only ONE is still alive. One died rather quickly, the other lived for twenty years and the third is still alive.
In April of 2018, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko presented state awards to Alexey Ananenko and Valery Bespalov for their bravery, and posthumously to Boris Baranov (who had died in 2005). The fact that the three survived does not detract from the heroism they displayed back in 1986.
According to what I “the Google” says
There was no nuclear explosion at Chernobyl. It was a steam explosion, that was the result of a nuclear core meltdown. The meltdown occurred during a safety drill gone bad. Moral of the story? Always build a high pressure reactor inside a robust containment vessel.
Hanoi Jane and so many other Hollyweirdos who have advocated for socialism and communism = fools and useful idiots.
It was excellent. Very well done. Filmed in Latvia where they have a lot of old Soviet-style apartment blocks and a decommissioned twin of the Chernobyl reactor.
Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union, once said that Chernobyl was ‘perhaps the real cause’ of the state’s collapse.
That and Afghanistan. The entire society had been built on a foundation of lies. These two events triggered a cascading implosion of faith in the state on any issue which could not be overcome by propaganda.
Once that happened, the USSR was toast.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.