The Failure of Soviet Bureaucracy
That this book exposes the inherent danger of nuclear power resides less in the science than in the human management goes without saying. What the author narrows down from that broadly encompassing theme to focus on is specifically how human management within the bureaucratic hierarchy of the communist state in Russia made the disaster at Chernobyl predictable if not entirely inevitable. The one thing above all else that one would seem to demand in the face of such potentially devastating machinery as that existing within a nuclear power plant is efficiency of communication, precise understanding of chain of command, and rigidly enforced emergency protocol. The slippery state of all three of those elements is revealed to be due entirely to the inefficiency of the government-wide bureaucratic system.
The Perils of the Cult of Personality
As difficult as it may be to believe or understand for those raised outside the Iron Curtain or who came of age in the post-Cold War era, the nuclear scientists who worked to establish the Soviet Union’s dependence upon nuclear power plants enjoyed a superstar status. Know by name and recognized by appearance, these men were manufactured heroes not terribly unlike the way the Mercury astronauts were manufactured in America. The myth was created that nuclear power posed no real danger because, after all, it had never produced any real danger. As a result, this cult of personality moved beyond mere celebrity into the realm of worship. The sense had been created that if the architects of the Soviet system said something was true or false, then it could be accepted that the thing was either true or false. That this myth of infallibility was doomed to end in disaster was not just mere predictable, it was inevitable.
Foreshadowing the Collapse
The disaster at Chernobyl serves eventually to emerge as a microcosm of the Soviet Union itself. The bureaucratic failures, the dependence upon mythmaking to cement confidence in the system, and, for the first time, the inability of the Soviet machine to cover up such an embarrassing and monumental failure all foreshadow how the collapse of communist dominance of Eastern Europe took hold so fast, spread so efficiently, and ended so quickly and comprehensively.
