Difficult Truths versus Expedient Lies: HBO’s Chernobyl and Climate Change Denial

Abstract

In May-June last year, HBO aired its best drama series ever on the world’s worst nuclear disaster that took place at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Soviet Union on April 26, 1986. HBO’s Chernobyl, written and created by Craig Mazin is an engrossing eco- disaster docudrama that retells the catastrophic Chernobyl accident in a horrifying yet hauntingly accurate manner. However, Chernobyl is not a polemic against nuclear power or against the powerful Soviet bureaucracy. At its heart, it is all about un-burying the truth in the face of the crude censorship of an all-controlling state. The ingeniously woven five- episode miniseries explores how the interplay of totalitarian power structure, government censorship and suppression of scientific truth was countered by thousands of individual acts of patience and courage during and after the disaster. And the politics of denial, lies and suppression of scientific facts that led to the Chernobyl disaster are uncannily similar to today’s political climate where the climate change deniers disregard the reality of anthropocentric climate change. The suppression of inconvenient truths that led to the Chernobyl disaster has also been done by the conservative politicians who ignore the terrifyingly escalating problem of environmental catastrophe and imminent geopolitical threat. This paper attempts a critical reading of the HBO miniseries with special focus on its exploration of inconvenient truths in the face of lies designed to preserve a Stalinist system of governance. Relating the suppression of scientific truth about nuclear science to climate change denial today it further looks into how the show serves as a metaphor for understanding the science about and politics around global climate change in the Anthropocene.