I remember when I finished the HBO series Chernobyl, the impact I felt was not just about the physical horror of the radiation, the human/wildlife suffering and the countless number of deaths. Though those were surely very deeply disturbing outcomes, there was an even more disturbing matter underneath: the why behind the true cause of this disaster.

What I found most fascinating was the depiction of the control room during the immediate aftermath. We see the operators, and especially their superior Dyatlov, completely sure that the matter must not be such a big deal. We see repeated messages exchanged between various people like, “You must be mistaken, Comrade.. RBMK reactor cores don’t explode.” Which continues to go on, even as they are literally staring at the evidence of the open core and the destroyed building.

At first, it would seem like the total refusal to believe in the reality of the explosion was some kind of overconfidence or stupidity. But the show makes it clear that this repeated denial wasn’t just confusion or arrogance, but rather a systemic procedural failure, where their training, their manuals, and the entire Soviet state insisted RBMK reactors were so stable that the explosion was literally ‘impossible’ in their operational model.

We see two opposite types of responses in the aftermath:

1. The Plant Managers/Dyatlov: Faced with a reality that shatters the social script they chose to believe in, their first priority is blame avoidance and ego preservation. Dyatlov’s ongoing bullying and ridicule despite the visible suffering of the plant operators (“you’re panicking, you’re wrong”) wasn’t about not knowing the truth; it was more like an attempt to re-assert dominance in the chaos.

2. Legasov: Initially, he too starts by repeating the same line which has now become an online meme: “RBMK reactor cores cannot explode”. But what’s different about him is that his core motive isn’t denial. He is driven by a need for truth and factual coherence, not blame avoidance. He must make the effort both towards damage control and towards personally reconstructing the entire cause-and-effect chain, forcing him to eventually conclude: “It wasn’t just an unfortunate human error – it was the system.”

The sequence of events show that the initial ignorance or disbelief of the engineers wasn’t an accident. It was manufactured, because the RBMK design flaw was already known, documented, and buried. Buried, because the USSR needed the operators not to know the flaw; because anyone knowing and attempting to fix it would mean admitting that Soviet engineering, the symbol of their ideological perfection, was fundamentally flawed. But this admission was a shame-event they could not afford.

The system then chose the immediate and easy solution: Let’s suppress the truth and protect the story of our perfection.

The suffering of the miners, firefighters, animals, wildlife and the environment that followed is the direct, physical consequence of the system prioritising its fictional stability over the harsh reality. The possibility of an explosion, the radiation, several deaths and environmental ruin was preferable to the system than admitting a mistake. The fate of Legasov, the truth-seeker, becomes the final warning when he demonstrates and reveals the flaw to prevent future disasters, and is immediately sentenced to institutional denial and his reputational/social death, by the very system he served. His final recordings and suicide is the price he paid for demanding accountability in an environment built on blame avoidance.

Chernobyl is a powerful narrative for anyone who has experienced the damage caused by a controlling, blame-avoiding authority that insists on its own false story. It’s a reminder that the real catastrophe isn’t the disaster itself, but the chain reaction of the system’s ego-defense that follows.