Cold in Most of the US, Warm in the West

It's been in the news the past few days how most of the US is suffering under colder-than-normal temperatures, with high winds and chances of blizzards. I've seen & heard lurid headlines like "Once-in-a-generation storm!" repeated numerous times. Extreme weather in most of the country is not the same as all of the country, though. Where's the weather comparatively calm? Out in California, for one!



This morning I was looking for a good weather map to convey the differences in weather between West, Central, and East. I thought it would be a color-coded temperature map. I couldn't find a good one of those, but instead I found this map (above). It shows where the weather is warmer than normal and where it's colder. The data format and color gradient here make it really obvious who's having nice days, relatively speaking, and who's got a special form of misery to deal with.

It now seems fortuitous that Hawk and I decided not to travel/couldn't find reasonable bookings to travel over the holidays. Flights are likely to be snarled across much of the US, roads will be dicey, and the weather will be worse than usual. Oh, we are traveling; but instead of flying somewhere thousands of miles away we're driving to Southern California. I.e., we're going from the most orange area in the map above to the one-step-slightly-less-orange area.

The Cost of Lies, The Futility of Truth

It's been a few days since I wrote about the HBO miniseries Chernobyl. I was hoping to be done with it before we leave on a short holiday vacation tomorrow. It looks like that's not going to happen now. Anyway, I left off on Monday with Liquidators, Robots, and Bio-Robots, which was about the extended cleanup after stabilizing the still-highly radioactive exposed reactor core. That covered most of the way through episode 4 of the 5 episode series.

Episode 4 ends with an interesting private conversation between the three main characters Valery Legasov, Boris Shcherbina, and Ulana Khomyuk. It's part of a plot thread that's not resolved until early in episode 5, so I wanted to finish everything else from ep. 4 first.

The IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) convened a conference in Vienna, Austria, in August 1986 to discuss the Chernobyl disaster. Legasov would be the lead scientific representative from the USSR... and thus the person in the "hot seat" who'll have to answer— or conspicuously not answer— the world's concerns about the reactor explosion.



In this well-acted conversation Legasov wavers on how much of the truth to tell. Part of him totally wants to tell the truth, including the very inconvenient truth that there are design defects in the widely used reactor architecture the Soviets have known about for years and covered up. Another part of him frets that it'd be futile. If he exposes too much embarrassing information the state will deny it and discredit him and nothing will get fixed.

Shcherbina and Khomyuk play the demon and angel on Legasov's shoulders. Khomyuk appeals to his morality: if he allows the truth to remain secret, the USSR will keep running numerous existing reactors just like Chernobyl and building new ones, and operators won't know how to avoid the problems that caused the explosion. Shcherbina isn't opposed to telling the truth, per se, but warns of the risks. Not only will the state deny it and discredit Legasov if he goes public with the information in Austria, they'll punish him. He could get a bullet. Best case, prison. And his family and friends would be punished, too. Shcherbina recommends addressing the design problems through internal channels; Khomyuk points out that internal channels already failed.

Ultimately Legasov threads the needle at Vienna. He tells way more of the truth than the international community expects from the USSR. In particular he's frank about gross mistakes made by the operators. At the same time, he holds back enough to keep the Central Party satisfied and not embarrass the Soviet system as dysfunctional or dishonest. He doesn't talk about the design flaws or gaps in training and documentation. This leads the IAEA in its report to place the blame fully on terrible mistakes by plant operators and sets up dramatic tension for Legasov's character in the 5th episode as he grapples with knowing that the design flaws must be talked about more widely or they'll be swept back under the rug— allowing more accidents on the scale of Chernobyl to occur.

 

Chernobyl and Russian Disinformation

In my previous blog about the HBO series Chernobyl I wrote about "The Cost of Lies, The Futility of Truth". Scientist Valery Legasov led the Soviet delegation at a UN IAEA conference held in Vienna in August 1986. As I noted previously Legasov shaded the truth. He not only left out of his report the fact of design flaws in the design of the Soviet RBMK 1000 reactor, of which there were at least a dozen other copies still running, but denied it repeatedly when asked by international scientists and journalists. When the facts of this came out a few years later the IAEA rewrote its report, holding design flaws rather than operator error the chief cause of the explosion. Yet despite his dishonesty he was lauded as a hero at the time by the world.

How was it that he was praised so much while misleading the world?

Valery Legasov— the real Legasov, not the actor in the 2019 HBO miniseries— at the UN IAEA conference on Chernobyl in Austria in August 1986

Understand that expectations for honesty from the USSR were low. Remember, the Soviets weren't even going to admit the reactor blew up in the first place. It was spewing as much radiation as the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki every 12 hours, and they didn't want to tell anyone. They only admitted it 2½ days later after a nuclear power plant in Sweden over 600 miles away detected the radiation.

Interesting aside: As I understand it, an alarm at the Swedish Forsmark plant was triggered when radiation was detected on a plant employee's shoe. The employee was arriving at the plant, though; so authorities knew the radiation source was outside the plant.

And even once the Soviets admitted something happened at Chernobyl they downplayed it. They said only that "an accident occurred" that "damaged" one of the reactors. The rest of the world only understood how bad it was from measuring the radioactive fallout across Western and Northern Europe and from observing the site & activity around it through spy satellites and other forms of secret intelligence.

Plus, when the Soviets did acknowledge a problem at Chernobyl, they followed their brief & vague description with a whataboutism screed criticizing Three Mile Island and other nuclear accidents in Western countries. This approach of deny, distract, counterattack was a standard technique of Soviet propaganda. Back in the late '80s and early 90s books on communication styles referred to them as "Soviet-style negotiation". If these techniques seem familiar now it's because Donald Trump has used them publicly pretty much every day since he announced his first run for the presidency in 2015.

So yeah, Legasov was more forthcoming than expected at Vienna— but still didn't say anything other countries hadn't already figured out. Western European nations were measuring radiation in their own countries. Scientists could extrapolate from that how bad the situation must be. And spy satellites confirmed additional details. Legasov's presentation was remarkable primarily that he didn't deny the obvious facts. But still it made him unpopular with many of his peers & many government officials back home.

People who remember that era in Soviet relations might say, "Well, wasn't there Glasnost going on?" Although General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev mentioned glasnost (literally, "openness") when he became chief executive in 1985 it wasn't until 1986— specifically after August 1986— that he spoke of it as actual policy direction. It's believed that it was through seeing the handling of the Chernobyl cleanup and communication with the world community that Gorbachev recognized it was crucial to do to preserve the country's remaining power.