In last year's thrilling HBO miniseries Chernobyl, nuclear physicist Valeri Legasov faces down the corruption of the Soviet regime and its efforts to conceal its responsibility for the world's worst nuclear disaster. "Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth" says Legasov, before adding pointedly, "Sooner or later, that debt is paid." Over the course of the show's five episodes, Legasov uncovers not only the deadly flaws of the new RBMK reactor type used at Chernobyl, but also the measures taken by those in power to, in the words of one party apparatchik, "contain the spread of misinformation" and prevent the truth of the accident from ever seeing the light of day. What caused the reactor to explode, according to Legasov, was more than a combination of technological fault and human error. Rather. the scope of the disaster's impact was amplified by the actions of a government determined to use every tool at its disposal to hide the truth of both the initial dangers of its prized new reactor, and the resulting catastrophe, which many, including then-Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev, credit with exposing the weakness of the Soviet political system and accelerating the fall of the USSR. In the final episode, Legasov presents his discoveries about the disaster and the role of the Soviet government within it, concluding his scathing testimony thus: "That's how an RBMK reactor core explodes: lies."
Rather than simply being a face-value critique of nuclear power or communism, the series' writer, Craig Mazin, has stated that the main message carried by Chernobyl is that governments around the world have a duty to tell the truth, and when they fail in this obligation, innocent people always bear the brunt of the consequences. Mazin has also taken steps to point out that he began researching and writing the series prior to the 2016 presidential election. What inspired him to initially write the series was the "war on truth" (his words) being waged by governments around the world before concepts such as "fake news" had taken up their places in the Oxford Dictionary. Though it has always been the case that governments attempt to control the access of their constituents to the truth, what makes this latest front line of the war on truth so different is the advent of social media, a space in which our access to information is greater than at any point in human history, and where one can see for themselves the scepticism with which many view official government information disseminated over the internet. Even as our access to people, places and events across the world increases exponentially, so do the literal and figurative walls built by the world's most powerful figures as they attempt to control what we see, hear and think.
Nowhere has this sinister trend delivered more devastating results than in the southern Chinese province of Wuhan, and the outbreak of Covid-19, or the coronavirus. In November of last year, a doctor by the name of Li Wenliang tried to warn Chinese Communist Party officials of a deadly new illness festering in the province. In response, the CCP took steps to silence Li, including using the police to target him for "spreading rumours" and "sharing false information" after he posted about the virus on social media. What President Xi Jinping didn't account for was that the virus would spread beyond the control of his government, attracting the attention of the world's media early in the new year. Responding to international scrutiny, the CCP scrambled to conceal the true nature of the outbreak, claiming it was "preventable" and "controllable." Dr Li himself became infected and died on 7th February. His death sparked global condemnation of China's attempts to cover up the true severity of the outbreak, with former US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power paying tribute to a man who "risked his freedom to tell the truth and save his countrymen", before tweeting that "In Xi's culture of fear, local officials were terrified to bring bad news to the top so they silenced him, delaying the response and allowing the deadly virus to spread."
As the international community began to take notice of the new virus and official numbers of those afflicted and killed rose drastically, the response from the CCP authorities only served to increase international scepticism of not only the government's capacity to combat the outbreak, but also its willingness to do so in a transparent manner. Aerial footage showed workers building an emergency hospital in Wuhan to treat patients over the course of ten days, demonstrating an eerily Soviet-esque capacity to throw phenomenal levels of manpower at a problem. Yet, despite belatedly allowing inspections teams from the World Health Organisation into Wuhan over the last fortnight, teams from the United States Centre for Disease Control remain prohibited from visiting affected areas in China. In the view of Ron Klain, who served as the head of the Obama administration's Ebola response team from 2014 to 2015, "There's no question that the Chinese government has not been completely straight and has either been slow or unwilling to disclose things." In an interview with Pod Save the World's Tommy Vietor, Klain continued; "Some of that is the inevitable confusion and disorganisation that you have with a crisis like this in China, but some of it is unquestionably the Chinese government's tendency towards non-transparency and keeping secrets." Alarmingly for Xi, many Chinese citizens also believe that their government's failure to be honest about the virus constitutes a violation of the social contract between themselves and the Communist Party leadership. Speaking to The Guardian, Zhu Wenyi, a 21-year-old university student from Wuhan, said "People accuse the government of acting too slow. It's true, they did."
Meanwhile, with the WHO subject to pressure from countries like China, the need for mediation and coordination of an international response becomes all the greater. Any effort by the international community to contain the virus will depend on the leadership of the United States. However, it appears that people's faith in a comprehensive response by the Trump administration had also waned. Klain notes that Trump has already openly lied about the virus on three separate occasions: first, when he tweeted that "Everything is under control"; second, when he described travel from China to the United States as "airtight"; and third, when he stated that the virus would not survive warmer conditions and would disappear in the spring. Klein also notes that Trump's admiration for Xi appears to have made the president more reluctant to criticise China's role in exacerbating the outbreak. More recently, Trump labelled domestic criticism of his administration's handling of the virus as the Democrats' "new hoax", whilst administration officials bizarrely blamed political opponents for the virus' arrival in the United States in an attempt to crash the global financial market in an election year. This came after the vice-president Mike Pence was appointed overseer of the administration's response team, a man who, as governor of Indiana, opposed calls by doctors for a clean needle exchange programme among drug users, leading to a severe increase in Aids cases in the state. Pence has also written previously his view that "Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn't kill", and is a denier of climate change and evolutionary biology. In sum, the conduct of the Trump administration in response to the virus' arrival in the United States constitutes not only a sobering reminder of the disdain with which it views expertise, science and medicine, but also a sign of how the administration's politics, as opposed to knowledge, guides its approach to policymaking.
Although more than thirty years have passed since the explosion of Chernobyl's Reactor No.4, the lessons from the disaster remain ominously relevant. "When the truth offends", says Valeri Legasov in the finale of Chernobyl, "We lie and lie until we no longer remember that it is even there, but it is." As distrust of scientific expertise and an increasing unwillingness on the part of national executives to make politically difficult commitments become the norm, yet again the reluctance of our leaders to act with transparency threatens the wellbeing of their constituents. The lesson from Chernobyl, both the historical disaster and Craig Mazin's acclaimed series, is not that governments cannot be allowed to make mistakes. Rather, when crises occur, whether in the form of a nuclear explosion, virus outbreak or climate change, we must feel able to trust the information supplied by our leaderships. Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor during all eight of the Obama years, recalls how "At the height of the [Ebola] crisis, the only thing that we had to hold onto was the hope that the American people would trust the information coming from their own government." When that trust is taken for granted, or worse, abused by the powerful, we lose perhaps the only thing standing in the way of another Chernobyl. Only time will tell if the global leadership will earn it back.
Written by Ben Seymour
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