Well, it's a series, not a movie, but...
I'm watching Chernobyl on HBO. I hate to say it, but I have to force myself to keep watching it. I find it confusing and terrifying/depressing in equal measure.
That's it; I can't keep watching this thing. If I took my blood pressure last night, the gauge would probably have exploded like the freaking core of the reactor. Incompetence and cowardice married to total blind adherence to ideology leading to the eventual death of all those innocents practically set my hair on fire. I wanted to reach back in time and haul all of the scientists, all the way up the chain and all the stupid party bureaucrats and put them in front of a firing squad!
Well, after a full, HONEST, trial, of course.
A hospital a mile from a nuclear reactor doesn’t stock iodine pills? The nurse knew they should have had them. Firemen going to put out a fire at a reactor don’t have protective gear? Their instruments for measuring true radiation are locked in a safe to which they’ve lost the key? Why, anyway, wouldn't all their gauges measure the TRUE radiation?Townspeople so ignorant they let their children play in nuclear dust? Oh, and a manager who is told repeatedly there is no more core and it has totally blown up refuses to believe it, and spends the rest of the time in shock meekly doing what he is told. Then, to cap it all off, the Party people say it’s not dangerous; we can’t evacuate the people in surrounding villages because it not only would start a panic but would put Soviet Socialism in disrepute. What’s the reaction? Absolute submission. Ideology beats everything.
Incredible. It’s like the Three Stooges running a nuclear reactor. This was a country with hundreds of nuclear weapons? Thank God they’ve been decommissioned. They had no idea what they were doing.
What was that report which said most of their technology just flat out didn't work, but they were so afraid of the party bosses that they just falsified the reports?
I’m not saying accidents couldn’t happen anywhere, because they do, but they really were astoundingly inept. I can’t imagine that the French reactors are run so incompetently. As for our cock ups with this kind of technology, what I used to think was horrific doesn't hold a candle to this.