Review of Chernobyl

The stuff of nightmares! This past week marked the 42nd anniversary of the Three Mile Island disaster (in a quirk of timing, the movie The China Syndrome was released during the same week) in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. As with most Philadelphians, I remember watching this disaster play out in real time, so this weekend I spent a few hours re-watching Chernobyl. Comparing the two, TMI was a minor hiccup in the reactor!

For those of a certain age, especially in Western European and North America, the Chernobyl disaster played out in a shroud of typical Iron Curtain secrecy.

Oh, what little we knew, or even suspected back then!!

"Chernobyl" the mini-series encapsulated, in exquisite detail, not only how bad it truly was (and worse, what it could've been), but to what extents the Soviet government went to hide it from the world community at large and how little the Soviets valued human lives.

In the closing credits, Soviet leader Michael Gorbachev cited Chernobyl as "the beginning of the end of the USSR." So many lies, so many deaths unaccounted for, so many nightmares.