Original subtitles

Why worry about something that isn't going to happen?

Oh, that's perfect.

They should put that on our money.

STELLAN SKARSGARD: What's really interesting is how the ideology

of the Soviet Union,

the idea of a system that was infallible,

and the fear of people to point out any flaws or mistakes.

Everything had to be perfect, you had to pretend it was perfect.

Any system with too strong an ideology,

whether it's the idea of a perfect nation

or a perfect belief,

leads to exclusion of facts.

(EXPLOSION)

CHARKOV: The West is now satisfied

that Chernobyl was solely the result of operator error,

which it essentially was.

JARED HARRIS: When you start to look at all the different causes

of this accident to happen,

it's the sort of accumulation of that kind of a mentality,

which is, it's more convenient to believe comfortable truths

and comfortable facts

than it is to have to face difficult choices

and difficult realities.

How much time?

SHCHERBINA: Maybe a year.

HARRIS: Shcherbina, he is confronted with his sense of mortality.

And he is presented with that idea of,

what was his life worth and did it mean anything.

Did he have an impact on this situation?

Because he was a party man, because he was an insider,

he knew how to get the machinery of the state to work.

For God's sakes, Boris,

you were the one who mattered most.

Dyatlov, who's been this very stubborn recalcitrant person

who refuses to accept any responsibility for what happened.

I wasn't in the room when they raised the power.

CRAIG MAZIN: Anatoly Dyatlov made decisions

no rational person should have ever made.

He made crazy choices.

I haven't reviewed. We only just found out really...

There, review it.

MAZIN: In the trial, Dyatlov historically

does say the following thing,

"I will not say that I am guilty,

"but I cannot say that I am not."

And I thought that was a remarkable

expression of, at least, the potential of guilt.

It was very Soviet in its own way, the statement,

to have it both ways.

SKARSGARD: The trial is, as always, we want to find who's guilty.

The people's lust for revenge,

which is something really, really dangerous,

it makes it very attractive to find scapegoats and throw

as meat to the dogs.

Once it's over, we will have our villains,

we will have our hero, we will have our truth.

SKARSGARD: We established, pretty early on, what mistakes

did those people do in the control room.

But the thing is that the system was guilty.

Professor Legasov, if you mean to suggest the Soviet state

is somehow responsible for what happened,

then I must warn you, you are treading on dangerous ground.

LEGASOV: That is how an RBMK reactor core explodes.

Lies.