WEBVTT

00:00:02.280 --> 00:00:05.160
The Chernobyl Atomic Power Station.

00:00:06.000 --> 00:00:10.880
The first power unit was launched in 1977.

00:00:12.080 --> 00:00:18.880
By 1986, it had become the most powerful
nuclear plant in the European USSR.

00:00:20.720 --> 00:00:22.960
On the night of April 26.

00:00:23.280 --> 00:00:27.720
What had been our pride
became the address of our calamity.

00:00:28.880 --> 00:00:35.440
You all know that disaster recently struck us:
the accident at the Chernobyl

00:00:35.520 --> 00:00:37.200
Atomic Power Station.

00:00:39.120 --> 00:00:42.200
It has painfully affected the Soviet people

00:00:43.760 --> 00:00:46.760
and stirred the international community.

00:00:48.280 --> 00:00:54.920
For the first time we have truly faced
such a fearsome force as nuclear

00:00:55.000 --> 00:00:58.000
energy that has gone out of control.

00:01:00.040 --> 00:01:06.440
Given the extraordinary and dangerous nature
of what happened at Chernobyl,

00:01:08.160 --> 00:01:13.600
the Politburo has taken into its own hands
the entire organization of work to contain

00:01:14.160 --> 00:01:17.320
the accident and limit its consequences.

00:01:17.400 --> 00:01:18.900
[Speech of Mikhail Gorbachev on Soviet
television, May 14, 1986]

00:01:19.080 --> 00:01:25.520
An enormous share of the work and
responsibility has been shouldered by the

00:01:25.960 --> 00:01:28.720
Party, Soviet, and economic organs
of Ukraine and Belorussia.

00:01:29.360 --> 00:01:33.320
As of today, 299 people have been
hospitalized with

00:01:33.400 --> 00:01:36.800
a diagnosis of radiation sickness
of varying degrees

00:01:36.880 --> 00:01:41.360
of severity; seven of them have died.

00:01:44.560 --> 00:01:48.280
On behalf of the Central Committee of the
CPSU and the Soviet government,

00:01:49.320 --> 00:01:54.760
I express my deep sympathy to the families
and relatives of the dead,

00:01:55.720 --> 00:01:59.240
to the labor collectives,
and to all who have suffered

00:01:59.320 --> 00:02:03.280
from this calamity, all whom
personal grief has struck.

00:02:04.180 --> 00:02:10.000
Chronicle of Difficult Weeks

00:02:16.680 --> 00:02:22.080
When the fire was beaten back from the
+70 mark on the roof of the reactor hall,

00:02:22.640 --> 00:02:29.000
medics from Medical Unit No. 126 carried
the burned and the doomed along this road

00:02:29.080 --> 00:02:31.480
to the clinics of Kiev and the planes
bound for Moscow.

00:02:32.000 --> 00:02:33.600
The whole battle still lay ahead.

00:02:38.080 --> 00:02:39.080
Special Zone.

00:02:40.600 --> 00:02:42.520
Beyond here, only with special passes.

00:02:44.600 --> 00:02:48.000
On the map, a red line around the plant —

00:02:48.440 --> 00:02:51.440
a circle with a thirty-kilometer radius.

00:02:58.720 --> 00:03:02.520
A government commission was created,
chaired by the Deputy Chairman of the

00:03:02.600 --> 00:03:05.480
USSR Council of Ministers,
Boris Yevdokimovich Shcherbina.

00:03:05.680 --> 00:03:11.440
An operational headquarters
with emergency authority.

00:03:12.960 --> 00:03:19.240
On its orders, equipment, materials, and
people are dispatched to Chernobyl from
everywhere.

00:03:27.760 --> 00:03:31.440
Farms emptied, enterprises shut down,

00:03:32.120 --> 00:03:36.040
schools closed, the population evacuated

00:03:36.120 --> 00:03:38.720
from the towns of Pripyat and Chernobyl.

00:03:39.640 --> 00:03:43.200
In all, more than 100,000 people.

00:03:44.240 --> 00:03:47.640
And in the simple, familiar farewell
by the roadside —

00:03:47.920 --> 00:03:51.680
since that April night,
the bitter taste of calamity.

00:04:00.320 --> 00:04:03.160
A deadly enemy that, even behind steel

00:04:03.240 --> 00:04:08.360
armor, sent dosimeter needles off the scale,
and, unseen, did its evil

00:04:08.440 --> 00:04:10.360
work in the human body.

00:04:11.760 --> 00:04:12.560
Radiation.

00:04:16.040 --> 00:04:20.320
It has neither smell nor color —
it has only a voice.

00:04:20.720 --> 00:04:21.400
Here it is.

00:04:26.600 --> 00:04:31.640
On the screen, one of the frames that the
studio's quality control first held back
as defective.

00:04:32.120 --> 00:04:35.160
But it is not a defect —
it is the visible face of radiation.

00:04:36.080 --> 00:04:36.960
Look closely.

00:04:50.040 --> 00:04:52.440
This very first brief shot was filmed

00:04:52.520 --> 00:04:56.240
when the cameraman was permitted to rise
from the hatch of an armored carrier

00:04:56.320 --> 00:04:59.240
with his camera for only thirty seconds.

00:05:03.040 --> 00:05:07.920
But here, on that April night,
the first ones had already gone in —
without armor,

00:05:08.880 --> 00:05:12.160
without protection, without a stopwatch,

00:05:12.920 --> 00:05:15.400
knowing the danger they could not escape,

00:05:16.880 --> 00:05:19.120
as if making a final lunge at an embrasure.

00:05:24.880 --> 00:05:28.240
Our second movie camera was loaded
with black-and-white film,

00:05:29.120 --> 00:05:32.720
and so the chronicle of the first weeks
in this film will be black and white —

00:05:33.760 --> 00:05:36.560
the colors of our alarm and our sorrow.

00:05:39.560 --> 00:05:45.960
And yes, this is it: the fourth reactor

00:05:46.040 --> 00:05:49.360
of the Chernobyl Atomic Power Station.

00:05:49.880 --> 00:05:56.360
Soon after the explosion: yesterday's pride,
become a disaster for years to come.

00:05:56.920 --> 00:06:02.960
The first contribution was made by the
firefighters, whose efforts had already
contained the powerful

00:06:03.040 --> 00:06:05.840
blaze that could have led to
very serious trouble.

00:06:05.960 --> 00:06:09.400
But the burning continued
in the reactor's graphite.

00:06:11.640 --> 00:06:16.920
Radioactive aerosols were being released,
and so the government commission, after

00:06:16.900 --> 00:06:17.300
Academician V. A. Legasov

00:06:17.000 --> 00:06:21.280
debate and argument, sensing that the
traditional methods

00:06:21.360 --> 00:06:25.760
on hand at the station could not
contain this accident,

00:06:26.560 --> 00:06:32.760
began making decisions on the fly to
solve this task of containment —

00:06:32.840 --> 00:06:38.240
to create the first protective barrier
against the spread of radioactivity.

00:06:38.640 --> 00:06:43.200
And so it was decided to attack the reactor
from above. Suitable

00:06:43.280 --> 00:06:48.400
mixtures were chosen that would
absorb the heat being released,

00:06:48.720 --> 00:06:54.320
that would form a powerful
filtering layer.

00:06:54.680 --> 00:06:59.000
For the first time, the word "sarcophagus"
entered the lexicon of headquarters.

00:07:00.000 --> 00:07:03.560
Coming to us swiftly in the days
and nights of our anxiety

00:07:04.320 --> 00:07:07.240
out of the depths of the centuries,
it took on a different,

00:07:08.320 --> 00:07:12.320
saving meaning: within a mass
of reinforced concrete,

00:07:13.120 --> 00:07:16.840
to seal away the nuclear kitchen
of the wrecked reactor.

00:07:17.160 --> 00:07:20.800
Filled in for permanent burial.
Not bonded —

00:07:20.880 --> 00:07:22.000
that's the same as nothing.

00:07:24.000 --> 00:07:26.680
There will be no matrix,
there will be none.

00:07:27.120 --> 00:07:31.560
That is why we now need to anticipate,
along with the possibility of reheating…