Valery Legasov

Legasov was Anatoly Aleksandrov’s deputy at the Kurchatov Institute, and head of the Communist Party Committee there. He was smart and came from a privileged background, so he easily rose through the ranks of both the party and his career as a physicist. He was part of the original government committee investigating the Chernobyl explosion. He helped come up with the plan to drop fire-smothering materials from helicopters from Unit 4.

He published an article in the 1970s insisting that what happened at Three Mile Island could never happen in the Soviet Union, where operators were better trained and safety standards higher, even as other physicists were analyzing the chances that it would and updating safety regulations (updates that would not be implemented). He also delivered the Party line about the Chernobyl nuclear reactor being relatively safe and exploding because of human error to the IAEA...