All language subtitles for The.Chernobyl.Disaster.S01E02.Firestorm.1080p.HDTV.H264-DARKFLiX

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