Chernobyl: The Problem Of Technocracy (video)

Concluding my two parter on Chernobyl by looking at the intersection of Power and Science in the tragedy.

Read the first post in this two-part series here

{Video Script}

I’ve been reading two books side by side recently. Bertrand De Jouvenel’s On Power and Chernobyl; History of a Tragedy by Serghii Plokhy. I didn’t have any sort of plan from the beginning to do a compare and contrast, but the more I read about the disaster of Chernobyl the more of De Jouvenel’s ideas I saw jumping out at me.

How did it come to pass that most of Eastern Europe and a sizeable portion of Western Europe became bathed in radiation in 1986? How and why did Reactor 4 at Chernobyl explode? I mean, where were the experts and scientists? The USSR was not lacking either, in fact, they could claim to have some of the best experts on earth, yet the reactor blew up regardless. It wasn’t just the events that led up to the disaster, either, it was also the response that proved disastrous.

The question that was on my mind throughout was, could we in the west today have a catastrophe on the scale of Chernobyl? What is it that we have to look out for, what are the clues that the fail-safes have been compromised and that we’re heading towards disaster?

Reactor 4 at Chernobyl exploded because it was poorly designed and the operators who were conducting a test made mistakes. There was no concrete casing around the reactor itself because the chances of it ever being needed were viewed as extremely remote, so when the reactor exploded there was nothing to contain it. The graphite rods which were used as brakes disintegrated, and the water coolant system boiled, turning to steam. This steam was now trapped within the cooling system looking for a way out, and eventually, it exploded. The explosion blew the 200-tonne lid off the top of the reactor, allowing radiation to belch out into the atmosphere.

And that was just the start of the nightmare.

The USSR has often been described as a Technocracy, and it isn’t difficult to see why. A system that functioned via top-down central planning, quotas, and schedules worked out and calculated by engineers and scientists. The men who worked at the Chernobyl power plant were under enormous amounts of pressure to increase the energy output, reduce downtime and limit wasting time on repairs and mechanical problems. But to go a little further back, the men who designed and built the power station itself were also under these huge pressures, and oftentimes corners were cut, safety compromised and difficult decisions made.

In his book, Serghii Plokhy points out that in Leningrad the same RBMK reactor design had malfunctioned again and again before Chernobyl happened, and people had died, radiation had leaked into the water supply, but that was simply covered up by the Party or written off as ‘‘misinformation’’.

There’s a paradox here, on the one hand, we have a technocratic system that is ostensibly run by experts and scientists, yet again, and again we see failures and accidents which are covered up, especially when people die or are put in danger.

The media and information people were allowed to consume were carefully curated and filtered. Dissidents spied upon or shut down, silenced. The Soviet Union was an empire of secrets.

The issue is Power. De Jouvenel in On Power; The Natural History of its growth, has very little time for ideology. Ideology is mainly just a post hoc rationalization or mask worn by Power. The central thesis of On Power is that regardless of religion or ideology, Power will always seek to expand itself and bring all other institutions and centres of Power under its own dominion.

His description of Power is often as an amorphous force, probing and expanding and sliding into all areas not yet under its dominance.

The Soviet Union is a nigh-on perfect example of a centralized bureaucracy and top-down system of control. As De Jouvenel points out, the Russian Revolution was in theory a means by which to liberate the masses from the yoke of the Tsar and capitalism but resulted in an unimaginable expansion of state power over the lives of the citizens. The liquidation of the Kulaks was simply the destruction of a potential rival power bloc.

By the time we arrive at the USSR’s later stage in the 1970s and 80s, nothing remains outside itself, no institution exists for anyone to appeal to and all experts are aligned with Power.

Let us then take a second to think about ‘‘The Experts’’ that technocratic systems hold in such high regard. Plokhy writes that scientists within the USSR argued against placing RBMK nuclear reactors inside what geographically constitutes the European continent, Ukraine in this case. Instead, such a power station should be placed in the far north of the USSR on a remote steppe in Siberia. That way if something went wrong the damage would be limited to uninhabited areas.

This was ruled out because of the logistics of laying power cables over such vast distances, but also because by the time the arguments had been made, Chernobyl was well under construction. Power overruled the scientists.

These scientists were telling Power something Power didn’t want to hear.

And this is probably the defining feature of the tragedy of Chernobyl.

In theory, Power would do the bidding of the experts, in practice, experts would do the bidding of Power. In fact, what exactly is an ‘‘expert’’? Who or what adorns this or that scientist or engineer or doctor with the crown of ‘‘expert’’? Is it based on purely rational and objective metrics? Would Power, which has its own priorities and interests, be willing to cede those interests because an expert had brought forth a truth it didn’t like?

Or, is it more likely that Power will select people who are aligned with its own interests and goals and crown them as ‘‘experts’’ while marginalizing heretics as spreaders of misinformation? The Soviet Union did not have objective science, it had political science.

Political science is a science that works in accordance with political power, not truth.

Valery Legasov, who people who’ve seen the excellent HBO Chernobyl drama might remember, stated that (quote):

...the information I had convinced me that not everything was well in the development of nuclear energy, as it seemed to me... Science organizations began to weaken, not strengthen. Slowly, once the most powerful in the country, they began to lose the standard of modern equipment. The staff began to age. Fewer young people joined. New approaches were not welcomed. Gradually, imperceptibly, but it was happening... I witnessed all this, but it was hard for me to intervene in the process purely professionally while general declarations on this subject were received with hostility. Because an attempt by a non-professional to bring some kind of insight into their work could hardly be acceptable... the scientific spirit and the scientific atmosphere in reactor engineering gradually began to submit to the engineering will, as it were, to the ministerial will... All conceptual talks, all attempts at adopting a scientific, consistent approach towards this problem, they did not accept at all.

Excessive hierarchy has always been contraindicated for science, it stifles it. Science, like art, does not tolerate intermediate links. It is necessary to get rid of people who interfere with work. Scribbling and formalism have reached such a scale that it is already difficult for science to bear this cross

End quote.

Legasov’s description of how the power of the state was steadily eroding the freedom and independence of science could have been written by De Jouvenel himself.

But let us now move to after Reactor 4 had actually exploded, surely now the technicians would be allowed a free hand to deal with the catastrophe. To begin with, the operators and the managers did not know how serious the problem was. It could have simply been a malfunctioning cooling system or fire. When the firemen arrived, they began to report that they were being burned and injured by lumps of graphite all over the area.

The only place graphite existed within the power plant was wrapped around the core of the reactor, therefore, if people were being burned by graphite it meant the core was ruptured and exposed and thus pumping out radiation. This was met with flat-out denial by the managers and local Party bureaucrats, who tried to play down the scale of the situation. This was not so much a scientific response but a very human one. In the meantime, radiation continued to be released into the air. One of the operators, Uskov, wrote in his dairy ‘‘The mind refuses to believe that the worst that could happen has actually happened’’.

I do feel like I have to add some words of caution for myself to those reading or listening to this essay. The men at Chernobyl on the 26th April 1986 faced degrees of stress and pressure very few men in history have ever faced. It’s very easy to watch a drama depiction, or to sit comfortably reading a book on the subject and judge the decisions made or how these men reacted.

Nevertheless, to accept and take ownership of the severity of the situation would mean telling power something it did not want to hear, as well as likely costing them their jobs or worse.

In the supposed technocracy of the Soviet Union, State Power was sovereign, not science or the experts. It was only after finally acknowledging the scale of the problem that Power allowed scientists such as Legasov to take centre stage. But even here there’s something to be said.

Serghii Plokhy’s book is more sympathetic to the plant managers such as Bryukanov and Diatlov than the HBO series was. Yet, nevertheless, there was more than just an air of disbelief at what happened, more than shock, there was denial. To begin with, the power structure was happy to hear the more comforting news that they reported, but once it became impossible for the true scale to be denied any longer, those lower-level managers and technicians suddenly found the rug pulled from under them, and the priorities of Power changed.

This is particularly cruel, the reason for the inertia, to begin with, was that nobody wanted to take responsibility, once more, a system had been created which ran on conforming to the whims of Power. As Plokhy puts it ‘‘They were all company men, and that company was the USSR’’.

When Swedish scientists detected radiation in Sweden they asked around in order to find out where it was coming from, when they asked the USSR they were given the runaround and then eventually informed there’d been a minor problem. Later American satellites detected the billowing plume of radiation coming from Chernobyl and the fact that Pripyat, the nearby town, was being evacuated.

In other words, rival power blocs had cottoned on to the very dirty little secret in the USSR. The Chernobyl situation was undermining Soviet status and Power, it would have to be dealt with as a matter of urgency.

It isn’t the case that the USSR was entirely indifferent towards its people, nobody wanted the disaster to happen, and when it was eventually acknowledged they threw 100,000s of men and endless supplies of material to solve it. Fundamentally, the issue is the nature of the system, which operated as a closed loop.

To return to De Jouvenel, then, in the USSR power had extended itself into everything, all institutions, media, science and engineering, planning, and research were subservient to Power. Nothing lay outside of it, and so when looking for a critical voice or independent view, non were left, it was one giant echo chamber.

The Israeli intelligence agencies operate what is known as ‘‘The Tenth Man Rule’’. A policy or plan will be tabled, and it is the role of one man to formulate a counterargument to whatever it happens to be. Technocratic systems, which operate superficially on the premise that experts are in charge are flawed on two counts.

1. The experts or scientists will likely have been put in those positions in the first place by Power, whether financial or military, or political.

2. A top-down consensus is created, which disincentivizes critical thinking or breaks with what has become a closed-loop system. The opinion which falls outside the consensus will be regarded with contempt, if not censored entirely.

In a 2006 interview, Mikhail Gorbachev said: “The nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl 20 years ago this month, even more than my launch of Perestroika, was perhaps the real cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union five years later.”

The problem created by Chernobyl was that the entire system was revealed to be flawed. When the blame game began, plant manager Diatlov took the fall. But the reality is, it’s difficult to place blame for a disaster on one individual when the whole system is culpable to one degree or another.

What Gorbechov was alluding to in his remarks on Chernobyl, was that the people’s faith in the system had evaporated and nobody believed in anything they were being told, or that their safety and well-being even mattered. What’s more, even the elites were vulnerable to radiation, so the collapse in trust became systemic and comprehensive.

Yet Gorbechov’s immediate reaction to hearing about the explosion was to repeat that the scientists had assured The Party that such a thing couldn’t happen. After all, the USSR was run by scientists and technicians wasn’t it? It wasn’t of course, there was a reason that politicians in Moscow were being woken up early on the following the explosion.

So what, in the end, can we in the modern west learn from Chernobyl or De Jouvenel’s On Power for that matter? Is it possible that we could be facing a closed-loop system, in which science is used by Power like a mask? Do we see the denial of a problem? Do we see ‘‘experts’’ aligned with Power and heretics being silenced?

De Jouvenel is valuable because he’s not so much interested in ideology as he is in Power and how Power functions and grows, extending its tentacles. He likens Power to a bear, and an uncaptured institution to a honeycomb waiting to be broken open and eaten.

These honeycombs in the West, are institutions, governmental bodies, NGOs, and media, and the bear is money-power.

To live in the west in the 2020s and to be at least to some degree awake, is to come to the realization that there are no external authorities to appeal to. There is no counter-narrative permitted. As I write these words, bureaucrats and politicians are drafting legislation and policy which will ‘‘clamp down on misinformation’’ which questions ‘‘The Science’’ and ‘‘The Experts’’.

It wasn’t always like this and we know it. In fact, when the USSR actually opened up about the situation at Chernobyl it was Hans Blix, the Swedish head of the International Atomic Energy Agency who became the voice of authority and trust. Here finally an uncaptured institution had arrived to make an objective assessment.

Years later Blix would reappear to disprove the narrative that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He was alleged to have been spied on by the CIA, but it’s an example of how objective science often runs counter to and against the will of Power.

This is not to suggest that we’re living under communism, quite the opposite, but that the logic of Power means that eventually, it will become all-encompassing and totalitarian regardless of the ideology professed. The story of the last few years is to witness that institutions that we thought were neutral, are in fact simply tentacles of power.

The Science always seems to be aligned with Power for a reason. We have a vast network of mutually reinforcing bodies and regulations, NGOs, and politicians. There is no longer an independent factor or moderating voice, it is totalizing and all-encompassing. It is one giant, self-contained mechanism with nothing outside of itself it can refer to, and we’re trapped within it, and increasingly, we don’t believe what we’re being told or that our well-being is at its core.

The similarities should be worrying us all. Are we waiting for our own Chernobyl?

Will this video be removed for suggesting we might be?