Original subtitles

A Soviet dream that became a nightmare.

A disaster officials tried to cover up

as a brave few battled to stop

radiation spreading across the globe.

Using top secret Soviet documents...

...and hearing from those who risked everything...

...this is the story of

one of the world's worst nuclear accidents.

Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant —

Reactor Number 4 is on fire.

That was a picture worthy of Dante Inferno.

There had never been a fire like this before.

A long-overdue safety test on Reactor Number 4

has gone disastrously wrong.

What had once been a 17—storey building wasn't there any more.

It's clear the reactor's finished.

It's gone. It's in flames.

The firefighters' hoses are actually melting under the intense heat.

The asphalt under their feet was melting to...

...sucking their boots off.

The severe heat is the least of the firefighters' problems.

The firefighters who were first on scene reported tasting

a metallic taste in the air.

And this was essentially particles

of the nuclear fuel itself.

As firefighters contend with the radioactive inferno,

the man in charge inside the reactor's control room

is deputy chief engineer Anatoly Dyatlov.

Dyatlov and his colleagues in the control room are trying

to make sense of what's just happened.

The control panel is telling Dyatlov

there's no water in the reactor system.

That would be amazingly terrifying.

I can't imagine what that must have been like.

You have to have constant supply of very large amounts of water

to keep the reactor cool, or it will melt down.

Imagine losing water in your radiator in your car.

The engine overheats, the parts would...

...distort, it would seize.

The same thing happens within a nuclear power plant.

Dyatlov thinks his main priority at this stage is to protect

the reactor.

Dyatlov orders the gates of the coolant pipe valve to be opened

to get more water into the reactor.

One of the operatives from outside comes running in and he's got

what's called a nuclear tan —

his face is red and burned from exposure to radiation —

and he tells Dyatlov that the Unit 4 reactor has exploded.

It's up in flames, it's not there any more.

Dyatlov flat-out refuses to believe him.

He just... He can't acknowledge the possibility that something

so terrible has happened.

He was in a state of denial.

Just imagine you can be responsible for what happened.

And Dyatlov just carries on.

Even though the reactor he's trying to save no longer exists.

25 minutes after the explosion,

making his way to Chernobyl is the power plant's director,

Viktor Brukhanov.

Brukhanov receives a phone call at home and he's told there's

been an accident at the plant.

He's not told how serious it is,

so he doesn't really have a huge sense of urgency.

He actually takes the bus to the plant.

Engineer Nikolai Steinberg worked at Chernobyl under Brukhanov.

Brukhanov has been plant director here since construction started

in 1970, and he's been looking forward to the day Chernobyl

is completed and he will preside over the largest nuclear power plant

in the Soviet Union.

But now he sees the wreckage of the Unit 4 reactor glowing red.

One of his first thoughts that went through his mind was,

"This is prison."

He would be kept responsible,

and that sooner or later he would end in prison.

Part of the rules of the game within the Soviet managerial system

since Stalin's times, that the director would be always

certainly kept responsible for...

...for what happened.

He retreats to what's known as the bunker, a safe room,

as it were, underground.

Built at the height of the Cold War

as a shelter in case of nuclear attack by the West,

now it will act as a crisis centre

for the worst nuclear disaster in history.

Here, Brukhanov is soon joined by the power plant's

resident officer from the security services, the KGB.

They were the government watchdog, really, performing the role

of the nuclear regulator.

Serious questions need to be answered.

On the other side of the site,

the fire around Reactor 4 is still raging.

Fighting the fire was a constant danger but, of course,

the radiation was a much worse danger for them.

This huge fire would spray extremely radioactive material into the air.

The fuel itself, the uranium fuel, was getting blasted up onto the bits

of the roof that survived.

It's estimated that on parts of the destroyed roof,

radiation is 16 times stronger than a fatal dose.

The problem with radioactivity is that you can't see it.

You don't know you're being exposed to it until much later.

The firefighters are realising this is no normal fire.

Many are starting to vomit.

They can't go on any more. More firemen come in,

more firemen go on the roof. Same thing.

So there's a conveyor belt of people going up there

and exposing themselves.

In the bunker, Brukhanov is told

radiation readings at the plant are off the scale.

He refused to accept the high levels of radiation that were given to him.

Everyone describes Brukhanov to be really depressed at that time.

High levels meant...

actually, high level of responsibility for what happened.

Brukhanov had a very difficult phone call to make to Moscow.

It was convenient for him to believe that

"Maybe it's not as bad as we think it is."

Brukhanov orders water to be put into the system to save the reactor.

There was nothing to save any more.

Senior reactor control engineer Leonid Toptunov is the man

trying to fulfil this order.

Leonid Toptunov was a young engineer,

he was 25 years old and relatively inexperienced.

It's one of the reasons why he was on the night shift,

because that's where you gained your spurs, as it were.

It was only the third month that he was on that job.

It came with prestige,

it came with his high salary,

and so he was living... living his life dream.

Toptunov heads deep into the smouldering plant.

Radiation levels here are now 100,000 times higher than normal.

It could kill a person in just four minutes.

Five hours after an explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

In the daylight, it becomes clear this accident is catastrophic.

The reactor's nuclear core is exposed,

and sending smoke into the air.

Inside the smoke from the fire were particles

of nuclear fuel itself.

So the actual very radioactive material

inside of the reactor core

was emitted as smoke.

Toxic radiation thousands of times higher than normal background levels

is spreading far beyond the plant.

The town of Pripyat, two miles from the power plant.

It's a normal, normal day, a spring day with lots of people being about.

Among them was electrical engineer Vladimir Kagan.

There are lots of children about, weddings taking place.

And they, of course, are absolutely unaware of the catastrophe

that has already happened and of the danger that they're in.

At the power plant,

senior reactor control engineer Leonid Toptunov and his foremen

are on a doomed mission.

They're following orders to get water into the reactor system

to prevent nuclear meltdown.

If there's no reactor left, there is no point in actually

adding water to that area.

But the electrics have failed,

so they're doing the job manually.

That's where they got really hit by radiation.

Being very sick, already vomiting.

Despite this, the men refused to give up.

Their conduct after the explosion

is really, truly heroic.

That they are prepared to sacrifice

everything they've got, including their lives.

They turn on the valves, allow more water to flow into the reactor.

But, of course, it's all to no avail.

The reactor's not there any more.

But in the process, what they are doing is they're exposing themselves

to what turn out to be fatal levels of radiation.

In less than three weeks,

Toptunov would be dead.

At Pripyat Hospital,

the steady flow of plant workers and firefighters arriving

from Chernobyl is increasing.

They now had around 90 patients, all suffering from something

the doctors had never encountered before —

radiation sickness.

If you get a big dose of radiation,

it's got enough energy to damage DNA.

The reason it's called radiation sickness is because

one of the first symptoms is vomiting,

because the cells of this lining of your digestive system

replicate rapidly and they're vulnerable to radiation.

After the initial vomiting, other symptoms develop,

like hair loss, fever and radiation burns.

For some of them, it probably would have been palliative care,

because there wasn't much else you could do.

But even those patients who weren't beyond help

didn't get the treatment they needed.

Civilian hospitals in the Soviet Union are not prepared for the kind

of disaster that the Chernobyl explosion produces.

This is not just because they haven't got the resources

or they're underfunded.

They're not permitted to even accept the possibility that a disaster

like this could happen.

Nearly 10 hours after the accident.

Tanker trucks start spraying the streets of Pripyat.

This detergent is supposed to absorb the radioactive material

from Chernobyl that's already reached the town.

But the people of Pripyat, going about their Saturday morning,

have been told nothing about the accident.

The Soviet Union wanted to keep a lid on this.

They didn't want to tell anybody about that.

And that applied both to the West, but also to their own citizens.

They couldn't control radiation, so they were trying

to control the information.

There was a ring of steel imposed around Pripyat.

If anyone tried to leave the city, they wouldn't have had much joy.

They cut down almost immediately the telephone communication

between the city of Pripyat and the outside world.

The Soviet Union didn't do bad news.

Catastrophes, accidents,

nuclear disasters didn't happen in the Soviet Union.

They may happen abroad,

they may happen in capitalist countries,

but not in the Soviet Union.

To keep their totalitarian grip, the Soviet Communist government

need to maintain their apparent invincibility.

But word is starting to spread around Pripyat

about an accident at the plant.

The operators who worked there,

they were coming back and they were talking to their families.

Some people already knew that something bad happened.

The security services need to take action.

Secret documents reveal how they ensured silence.

The KGB reports that measures have been taken to prevent

the spread of information about the accident,

and dissemination of panic-causing rumours.

Panic is a euphemism for people learning the truth.

KGB was considered to be all-powerful organisation,

with ears and eyes everywhere.

It didn't take much to convince the population

that they had to be really very careful.

No-one is to find out what happened earlier that night at Chernobyl.

Moscow, more than 400 miles away

from the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

A report about the accident arrives for the leader

of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev.

When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in March of 1985,

he was quite different.

He was talking the talk of change and reform and opening up.

The introduction of glasnost —

or openness, as it is sometimes translated into English.

The state invited citizens' participation

in voicing their concern about problems in the economy,

in society, and how to overcome them.

Gorbachev really looked like a Western leader.

He talked and behaved like a Western leader.

And he was the man that Margaret Thatcher said

that she could do business with.

Despite Gorbachev's calls for honesty and openness,

when the report from Chernobyl arrives, it tells him virtually

nothing of what actually happened.

If you read that document, it looks like, yes, something bad happened,

but all the bad, mostly, was in the past, that the radiation

levels were low, manageable,

the fire extinguished.

Those who were reporting to him

were hoping that they could localise the incident.

This is a very famous Soviet euphemism

for not telling the whole truth.

We can deal with this without it getting to the very top,

and therefore all of us getting into a lot of trouble.

But the Chernobyl disaster is so huge

it would prove impossible to hide.

200 miles north of Chernobyl.

On the day that the Chernobyl disaster happened,

I was in Minsk, in Belarus.

I was in school.

I was only nine years old, but I remember that day well

because an extraordinary thing happened.

When I was sitting with the rest of my classmates in the classroom,

the door opened and my mum asked if she could take me home.

My father happened to work at the Institute of Nuclear Research

near Minsk.

The institute detected some extraordinary levels of radiation,

and my father telephoned my mum and asked her to bring me home,

close windows and clean our shoes.

With radiation continuing to pour out of the reactor, the government

in Moscow will be forced to act...

...but in Pripyat, life carries on as usual.

Then, a day and a half after the accident...

The residents of Pripyat were told the city was being evacuated.

They were given one hour to collect together some belongings,

a couple of clays' worth of clothing, their identity papers,

and told to assemble at various points throughout the city

where buses had been laid on to take them away.

In just four hours, the entire population of Pripyat

would be evacuated.

This was much too late.

People had already been exposed to very large amounts of radiation.

Nobody knows how many people died as a result of that delay.

As Pripyat began to empty,

a helicopter is taking off on a special mission.

It was pretty quickly clear that spraying water into the reactor

was not going to put out these fires.

So they decided that they would have to smother the fire.

And the only way to do that was to bring in helicopters.

Each helicopter has to lift a small portion of the 50,000 bags

of sand it's estimated will be needed to drop them

into the reactor core.

These were military trained helicopter pilots,

so they knew what they were doing.

They were very skilled.

And, of course, they were very brave.

Captain Alexander Maruhin flew alongside other helicopter pilots

who were trying to put out the fire.

It was a very risky undertaking.

They had to fly low because they were dropping material

into a space something like five metres wide.

So the lower they were, the better chance they had of success.

But, of course, the lower they were,

the more radiation they're exposed to.

And they were allowed to fly over just for a few seconds

so that hopefully they didn't get too much radiation.

But they had to do it again and again and again.

Workers at a nuclear power plant north of Stockholm in Sweden

went into work.

On their way, walking to work, there was some rain.

They had to pass through the testing area designed to make sure

they didn't take any radiation out after they'd been at work.

They were setting off the alarm bells as they walked in.

The Swedes didn't know to start with.

Why should workers coming in to work

in a nuclear power plant in the morning set off the alarm?

The radioactivity that was emitted into the atmosphere at Chernobyl,

it didn't form a single cloud that sat over the countryside

and just poured radioactivity down,

it was spread out across a vast part of Europe.

And so any time that it did rain, there was a chance

that radioactivity would come from the sky

and fall onto the ground.

In Sweden, engineers check the power plant for a radiation leak.

They find no problems.

They knew it wasn't from their reactor.

They worked out where the wind had come from,

and they realised it came from the south.

And it very quickly became clear that something had happened

in the Soviet Union.

Despite the Soviets' best efforts to hide Chernobyl,

the accident is impossible to conceal any longer.

Three days after the toxic nuclear smoke started to be released

by Reactor 4 at Chernobyl,

Radio Moscow broadcast this statement.

There's sort of a 20—second report that something has happened

at the Chernobyl power plant,

but there's no... There's nothing concrete that's telling people

anything that they really need to know.

Despite the danger, life in the Soviet Union

carries on as normal.

The May Day parades were coming up very soon in Ukraine

and across the rest of the Soviet Union.

There's tens of thousands of people on the street celebrating,

and exposing themselves to potentially deadly radiation.

Risking the lives and risking the health

of populations, including children,

was considered to be acceptable.

Five days after the catastrophic accident

at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant,

it's May Day.

1st of May was a major holiday in the Soviet Union.

It was the Labour Day, as it is in this country,

but, of course, in the Soviet Union, it had enormous political

significance because the Soviet Union is the state of the workers,

the state of the labourers.

It was a day off, no matter which day of the week it was.

It was the day when you celebrated socialism.

So there were military parades,

people's parades. Everybody was out on the street.

And this is generally a happy occasion.

May Day parades are also taking place throughout the USSR,

including the towns and cities much closer to Chernobyl.

There was a very strong argument for cancelling the May Day parade

in Kyiv in particular.

Kyiv is 100 kilometres from Chernobyl.

It was experiencing very high levels of radiation.

Secret KGB documents reveal how little concern the authorities had

about the danger of holding the celebrations.

You probably would assume that the report,

especially three clays after the accident,

would deal exclusively with Chernobyl,

that that would be the main preoccupation.

Well, in reality, the report is about something else.

The major Soviet holiday was coming up, and they were there to assure

that there would be no sign of dissent.

That was one of the tasks of the KGB.

They just didn't change their mode of operation,

Chernobyl or no Chernobyl, radiation or no radiation.

It does have a slightly unfortunate choice of words where it leads

by saying that the preparations for the celebrations

are taking place in an exceptionally healthy

political situation in the republic, which may be so,

but "healthy" is not something that applies to the area

at this particular moment.

Cancelling the May Day celebrations, it would have sent a clear message

that something was clearly up, both at home and abroad.

Gorbachev couldn't allow that to happen.

It's one of the more controversial decisions of his career.

But as the celebrations continued, the wind direction changed.

Prevailing winds and the weather systems

were moving the radiation cloud away from Ukraine,

across Belarus...

...and into Russia.

Within the Soviet Union,

all states are supposed to be equal, but clearly

some were more equal than others.

And at the top of the tree was always Russia.

It was the seat of government.

It was where many of the leaders came from.

It was the most powerful, the richest state

within the Soviet Union, and it needed to be protected.

Reportedly, a top secret operation named Cyclone begins.

It sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie, or...

It sounds ridiculous, but it actually happened.

Military airplanes loaded with silver iodide took to the skies

and chased those clouds moving from Ukraine in the direction

of the Russian Republic

and shot the clouds — literally shot the clouds —

with silver iodide capsules to make it rain.

It rained over Belarus and the rain brought down the radioactive fallout

matter onto the ground and onto the people who lived there,

several hundred thousands of people.

They became victims of the radioactive rain.

In many respects, Belarus is a forgotten victim of Chernobyl.

It suffered extensive damage,

its economy was ruined for many years.

And a large part of this, or a contributory part of this,

is the fact that huge areas of its productive farmland,

forests, became irradiated.

One of the main areas of contamination I've worked in

in the east of Belarus

has levels of radioactive caesium

that is almost the same as what you see in Chernobyl.

The Soviet Union needed help, and it would arrive

through back channels.

Over 6,000 miles from Chernobyl,

at the University of California,

a bone marrow transplant specialist, Dr Robert Gale, was getting ready

to fly to Moscow.

And I got a call in the middle of the night from

Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin,

who said that Mr Gorbachev had asked him to ask me

to come to Moscow.

I grabbed my toothbrush and hopped on the next flight.

The flight was empty.

I mean, there was me and the pilot and two stewardesses.

You know, most people with any common sense

were headed the other way.

We have to remember that in April 1986,

the Cold War is still very much on.

The fact that the Soviets accepted help from the Americans does suggest

that by that point they realised that the situation was serious.

I was spirited off the plane and into a limousine

and taken directly to the hospital.

Dr Gale arrives at Hospital Number Six in Moscow.

Here, the Chernobyl firefighters and workers who received the highest

doses of radiation are being treated.

Their bone marrow —

stuff in our bones that produces the red blood cells

and white blood cells and platelets —

has been irreversibly destroyed,

so they're going to die of infection or bleeding.

Dr Gale had a pioneering solution to help these patients.

Well, there are hormones that stimulate your bone marrow.

And my colleagues and I at UCLA

had molecularly cloned those hormones.

Drug companies were in the process of developing this as a treatment.

So you would give this hormone to some cancer patient

who got chemotherapy,

and this would make their bone marrow recover.

Now, we had given these hormones to mice and dogs

and even monkeys,

but we haven't given it to humans before.

Of course, the Politburo said no.

They said, "Well, we don't want Soviet citizens to be guinea pigs."

I came up with an idea, which was,

"Why don't you inject this into me

"so these firefighters won't be the first?"

Dr Gale and his Russian counterpart at Hospital Six

both took doses of the untested hormones.

Our blood counts went up the next morning.

We were the guinea pigs and we got permission.

We had about 204 people in the hospital

with radiation sickness.

29 of them died.

So we were able to rescue more than 90%.

Six days after the accident, an exclusion zone is set up

around the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

The higher-ups decided that maybe, after all, they ought to evacuate

people from 100 or so other villages in the surrounding areas.

So they created this 20—mile exclusion zone around the reactor,

and that remains in place to this day.

But the exclusion zone is not the only area

that has suffered radioactive fallout.

The radioactive cloud from the Chernobyl nuclear reactor

has now spread across the whole of Britain,

according to official readings.

In the UK, the May bank holiday weekend is getting under way.

Radiation spread with the winds.

Any parcel of air that had gone over Chernobyl during the ten clays

when it was burning was radioactive.

And some of it just spread across the North Sea

and started raining out over Scotland and Wales.

People started to be told that they shouldn't go out in the rain.

People wouldn't harvest vegetables from their allotments

because they were frightened.

This is in the UK, not just around the corner from the reactor.

So people were very worried.

The authorities were very worried.

It was, I remember, a really scary time when it was going on.

CHILDREN LAUGH

The whole of Europe was frightened by what might happen.

A deadly clean-up operation begins.

The rule really was that the job had to be done.

The liquidators were really the heroes of the story of Chernobyl.

A shocking tragedy adds to the death toll.

And war threatens the safety of Chernobyl once more.

The unthinkable of attacking nuclear power stations has happened.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media