Symposium director and the director for the peace and war center. At the universities and Global Resilience Center for global insecurities and the peace and war center and in the initiative for the university. The 2020 military writers award. We would like to mention a couple of details before i introduced hiintroducing and wet the award. For those of you that are not familiar with the award we created a special video that provides context and background to the award from the previous recipients and we ask that you go to the website. The link to the website has been put out on chat and take a couple of minutes after the presentation to watch the video we would also like to ask you go to the page in the military writers symposium website. You will see theyve given an introduction to the symposium this is why we are doing some of the things we are doing right now in this particular theme. As you can imagine this is the inaugural event virtually we bring the guests and authors here to the campus this is also the first time that weve partnered if we go to the writers symposium website you will see that there is an icon that you can select the certificate for the cold war industry this year. So if you are interested in engaging the topic even further, sign up and you will get to interact with worldclass scholars and other peers that are interested in this particular subject. There are no fees other than just an expectation and its also on the webpage so please take time to look at these other features because this year they are part of the symposium but what we are bringing to you. What has been brought to you through video and design. Its such a pleasure to have you here with us at the Norwich University and we are thrilled that you are this years 2020 award winner recipient. Your book has reviews and i will read some of them here in a second but i want to provide a little bit of context and background for those that may not be familiar. There is a narrative nonfiction appeared in magazines which include the new yorker, wired, the smithsonian, the New York Times magazine and many historians developed for film i would also like to suggest united t a chernobyl is a candidate for that as well in the future. The untold story of the worlds greatest Nuclear Disaster was published in the United States by simon and schuster in 2019 and is an international bestseller. Its been translated into 21 different languages. Its named one of New York Times ten best books of the year and awarded the 2020 Andrew Carnegie medal for excellence and i want to read a couple of quotes by some of adams peers and other authors that, quote, midnight in chernobyl is a masterpiece of reporting and storytelling. It opens up a world nearly impossible to penetrate and finds truth inside that we were not supposed to discover. Another quote from the New York Times, superb, enthralling and necessarily tough and terrifying. Its with a horrible inevitability with so much reporting and scrupulous analysis and themes emerge. Hes currently working on the book about the disaster of the Space Shuttle in 1986 challenger disaster and we look forward to that being released. Its my pleasure and honor to award we would be in front of an audience with a large dinner and bring you to the stage and all of the administrators and president s would be here, but we would like to just award you the 2020 award winner recipient for this excellent publication the unique nexus of the environment, a difficult story to tell. It is our pleasure to congratulate you and thank you once again for this excellent work and illuminating such an important topic there is a broad appeal and that is what this symposium is also about is discussing subjects of international and global importance and we are thrilled that you are this years award recipient. So congratulations. Thank you. Im grateful for the others on the prize journalist and historians work ive long admired and sought to anybody this means a great deal to me but now id like to give a presentation about the book. Working exclusively on a project the research disaster that undertook the chernobyl plant in 86 and stretched back much further. I traveled more than 14 years ago partly because of the confusion and propaganda at the beginning. And i wanted to find what happened while providing enough witnesses that told the story. In trying to reconstruct, i would first conspire by reading an agenda with the same thing of the titanic. The official inquiry and interviews for the survivors of the thinking. The reconstruction the second half of the 20th century in as best a way as i could and also the grouping narratives and to explore what happened the night of the accident and beyond and to appreciate what their world looked like and what was lost in the disaster. When i first began meeting i would begin to realize it had been caught up in the western propaganda and ussr. Before the accident, the chernobyl plant was one of the jewels in the crown of the soviet union period history. This is how this presented in 1978. From across the ussr they were among the best in the field. Part was the [inaudibl it was filled and surrounded by open country sides and white nd beaches on the banks of the river. They made sure that it applied in much larger cities than the ussr. Stocked with hard to find amidst [inaudible] there was a beauty parlor, club and culture in the live music weekend. They were fild with abstract sculptures a science and technology. The 45,000 citizens were overwhelmingly young the population of 26 asserted them and a Nuclear Engineer who did work on the night of the accident. The couple had met as schoolchildren and married when they were studying at the university. This picture was taken on the night of the 24th birthday six months before the accident. This is their son in 1986. This on the far left and in the middle his friend photographed when they were both students studying Nuclear Engineering in moscow. The senior reactive controller on duty in the control room. The more i learned about the ussr there was the world that i had only seen through the lens and the more i became fascinated by the scale and contradictions of the soviet experiment. Now that i have the opportunity to revisit for the recollection of those in the business, it began to recreate not as the committee had functioned about how it really was. This was of 280 Million People in this totalitarian system but also the subject in the same way as uniways and desires as people anywhere else. They juggled the responsibilities seen against their rivals network and cheated on. The story populated soldiers antibiotics and bus drivers, teachers, construction workers and newspaper reporters. They also worked on a miniseries and dramas on tv. They also listened to soviet rock music and drank [inaudible] the city permitted spread across 12 time zones encompassing the nationalities and languages from western ukraine to the coast of the soviet far east. One of the most fascinating characters was this one in the center born in china and after her fathers addiction was brought back across the ussr where her mother raised her alone. Graduated from Technical School and eventually was appointed the chief architect in the city. By the time of the accident she was overseeing an expansion of the city to accommodate the population of 200,000 people and what was planned as the largest in the world. This in the center with his son gathering in the woods in 1980. He was just 34 when hed gone to the chernobyl station and arrived at the site when it was nothing more than a snowcovered field in western ukraine. He celebrated his 50th birthday and spent his entire professional life in the Energy Industry and the service of the party. They were deliberately constructed close to one another and was 3 kilometers away. This picture was taken from a rooftop in the early 1980s. The western end of the plant you can see the most sophisticated unit. By this time the industry had become a space run with secrecy and dominated [inaudible] the most important areas of the uk power industry. The head of the soviet institute of atomic energy, anatoly, took credit for the use of the general station. They both knew that it had dangerous faults but they covered them up and failed to inform them and that operated the reactors of the scaling significance. It finally came online at the end of 1983. By then plans were already underway to build another 12,00. They intended to be some part of the network of these massive parks spread across the western part of the ussr by the end of the century. The upper theaters in the control room discovered for themselves it wasnt the triumph of the cutting edg cuttingedgey but they sent military reactors and it was inherently unstable to build an economic [inaudible] in the design it was long and torturous for those to the implementation and most chilling under certain circumstances the assertions of the reactive power for the increase instead as it was intended to. And the unlikely event that the operated themselves and took a series of decisions acquired to lay off every single one of them in the disastrous and then make a final step by attempting to shut the reactors down using the emergency control. This is exactly what happened in the reactor early in the morning of april 206th, 1986. During the safety test the Chain Reaction began to run out of control and they prompted the emergency shutdown button and totally destroyed the reactor. It was to the scale of the disaster unfolding them around them even as their colleagues elsewhere were engulfed in chaos. What follows now i would like to read what that was like. Upstairs inside of the windowless engineering room on level 1245, then he was engulfed in darkness. From beyond the doorway there was a terrible hissing sound. He was on the control room floor florida the line was dead. Then someone from the control room number three at stretched immediately. He ran downstairs but before he could reach the control room he was stopped yuvchenko realized it was his friend and said he had come from the nearby station and there were others still there who needed help. Still able to stand [inaudible] he was quivering with shock. Im all right, he said. Yuvchenko saw his friend in the gloom. The incident from control room number four to the emergency highpressure cooling system. He told the operator were to go to get help. They went to the things flights of stairs and found themselves immediately in water. Through a narrow gap the men glimpsed inside. Everything had been ruined. The steel water tanks had been torn apart and other wreckage. It was an empty space. The bowels of the station was a cement moonlight. They turned to the corridor door standing 15 feet from the reactor, they were among the first to comprehend what had happened to unit four. It was a terrifying apocalyptic site. The righthand wall had been completely demolished by the force of the explosion. The circuit simply disappeared and on the left the water tanks that have circulation pumps dangled in mid air. Yuvchenko knew at that moment that his friends were certainly dead. There was a steaming pile of rubble [inaudible] swaying showering the wreckage with sparks. Somewhere in the heart of the tangled mess on the shattered concrete were the ruins of unit four where the reactor was supposed to be. Yuvchenko could see something still. The shimmering blue white light reaching straight up into the night sky disappearing into infinity. Strange and encircled by spectrums of colors with flames within the burning buildings and heated chunks of metal machine machinery. It was created by the radioactive air and an unshielded Nuclear Reactor to the atmosphere. Yuvchenko described the scenes in 2006 and at first i was astounded someone that witnessed a spectacle was alive to talk about it 20 years later. By then, he no longer liked to report what had happened and agreed to leave even those in the Apartment Building knew nothing of his involvement in the accident and he remained anxious to make sure they didnt find out about it which is where this photograph was taken in his living room instead of outside. Others over the years felt bad about the steps that they had taken that had long since seemed to exist. Objective hours of bullying and investigating about the terms of the conversation until finally agreeing to talk with restriction. For many including the officer, scientists they were happy to discuss the experience. But having remained silent for years with the consequences of spillinspelling dark secrets thy arise in the meetings bringing photographs notebooks and metals. This is a first image taken from the helicopter over. There was the toxic radiation going high into the atmosphere and the remaining had become a radioactive volcano, a fire no one in the world would want to put out. The situation was under control and at a High Altitude even as they begin to realize it was far worse than they had been led to believe and they were determined to keep the catastrophe secret from the world. They had taken control but refused to the sanction and for fear of revealing what had happened and there was no official information about the accident. But instead, the interior ministry they cut off their telephones. Meanwhile, the soviet air force helicopter pilots had clay and led to put out the graphite fire and the field that remained inside of it. [inaudible] and soviet war in afghanistan. Years after the accident he was reading his poetry and by then hhedhe had surgery for cataracd beg exposed to radiation exposure he had written his memoirs the age of 79. Over t Radio Network at 1 10 on sunday afternoon almost6 hours hadassed and more than 1200 buses were seeking escape. The operation was coordinated by e architect that helped oversee the construction. On the bridgeith a map in his hand like is one and instructed the bus drivers on where to make the pkup. It took three hours to remove 27,500 peoe from the city to bring the documents and they would be gone for three days to soon return. By april 208th it was already clear they were facing a catastrophe on a global scale. They ordered an emergency meeting. He was faced with a an unexpected test [inaudible] it had been nothing more than a slogan. He was in a position he had takepower and was vulnerable for being unseated by the overwhelminglyonservative operation if they thout he was too much of a reformer. He says he insisted on the full openness about the accidentut there was a lack of adequate information to release to the public even if this were true the decisions faced that morning didnt have any wish to come clean about what happened so the authorits continue to deny any knowledgof an accident until late that night and wld do nothing to stop this burning radiation and by then the world had already known something terrible happened. The invisible plume that begin rising in the early hours on the saturday morning had gone west across continental europe. By sunday it had arrived in denmark by a monitoring station but because it was a weekend, it went unnoticed. That afternoon an increase in radiation was reported but no further action was taken. It began to concentrate. When it finally fell around two hours north with almost 800 miles north of chernobyl it had become heavily radioactive. After 7 00 on that monday morning, manage feared a leak. If wasooly hours later, nuclearl was exposed in the air. The wind was blowing. By the beginning of june. Roughly two months of the explosion, the fire in reactor number 4 was extinguished. Thousands of miles of territory, area populate by 5 Million People were blan blanketed with fallout. Microscopic pieces of fuel and graphite fell on thousands of pine trees. Changing the color o the needles and creating what became known as the red forest. Combat zone, tens of thousands of soviet to try to decontaminated air. Reactor itself remained open to the air. Covering up wreckage. Described as a sarcophagus. Of concrete and steel. Before i could do that, hundreds of pounds of radio active from the wreck. Had to be cleared. Some of which, like this one. Developed. In the wreckage and radiation field from the roof of the plant, Government Commission took decision to send in more than 3 thousand men to do this job by hand. The ruins of the rac reactor building remained too reactive. And photographs from helicopters, and by flying over the ruins, in a small. This was nicknamed. The sarcophagus, using cranes. Shifts of tens of thousands of men who worked around the clock, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. November 1986. Attempt t to decontaminate. It was surroundded by a fence. And sealed off from the outside world. The vehicle and aircraft used in firefighting and clean up effort became too badly contaminated to be used again. And were abandoned. Or buried with the radio active furniture. In pits like this one. 1997, losses ope estimated 128 8 billion dollars. City lies in heart of ther which chernobyl excluse zone. Checkpoints manned by guards. The Ukrainian Government opened the area up to tourism. And a destination for sightseers on guided bus trips from kiev, 100 thousand people made the journey last year. Ukrainian media reported new clean up of the city is now necessary. To remove the trash. Once a year. On the anniversary of the disaster, the controls of checkpointing removed for a day, and former residents are allowed to return to visit their old homes. On the eve of 30 anniversary, in 2016. I climbed to same rooftop from which this panoramic view was taken. This is what was city of the future looks like today. Er whicchernobyl disaster took e lives of many people, and changed the lives of tens of thousands more. Proved a pivotal event in the collapse of the sovie union, i ho you read this book. Now, the men and women are still struggling to understand what it meant. Thank you. Adam thank you for a very engaging and riff o on rivetting presentation, and the images you included where suburb. First question to do with leadership. You think back the series of decisions that were made immediately after the explosion, can you unpack from your perspective, some of the large leadership failures that could have either changed ora oral te altered or should have been done . I think that in who were there on the ground. There was an enormous announcemenaim ofconfusion aboud and true nature of the accident. Who were you know held responsible. It has been a long time insisting that it was all pretty okay. There was a fire. It was taken care of. But, he did not accept that could be destroyed. And easy to suppose that this was because he wanted to keep his job. Job. I think that there you know people they are engulfed in cat catta catastrophe like this one, they cant process what is going on. You know. So many failures im not not sue was trying to coverup what happened consciously. Leadership failures. Comcomplicated handling after wt happened. Managers ended up by the time of this point in which came to be the era of stagnation. Became accustom to lying to superiors, and concealing problem at work, and over stating goal they would state, and the achievement of the goals. You know. Lying was the stock and trade of the soviet union. And i think that is really the major overarching leadership failure that caused and complicated this cattatal of k you, adam, next question to do more with about journalism and writing process. And gaining access to some very difficult information. Your presentation, you identified people you interviewed and you traveled to locations. Just for hos those interested in process of writing and craft of writing a story, could you highlight how you gained access to your sources, and complexities and you wove together the interviews and materials and secondary sources and primary sources. A very good question. Short answer is that first of all, you have to understand, that this is years after the break up of soar ye soviet unio. There were restrictions talking to these people initially. Secondly, i had a lot of help. It was hard to find these people. And so i worked with a fixer in kiev who now i know i work with for god knows how long, since 2006. My friend. Who you know himself has done a lot of work on researching ther which numbe chernobyl accidet before we met, we worked closely together to identify the people that i wanted to speak to, and try to track them down. Then. You know, a lot o of persuasionn his part before i showed up, i would sometimes for my research, send a list of people that i wanted to speak, to between us. Who was dead and who was alive and who was reachable and who was not. He would on some occasions, he would try to charm the people, charm the people in to cooperating. By convincing them to work on our project, that was no more true than in the case of the times. Who has cureiated this vast archive of original documents and handwritten memoirs and contacts for a lot of the people who were correctly directly involved in the accident, over the course of several months at begin of book protection we met with her, anders an persuaded hf our sincerity. Initially, she told us it was impossible to produce an objective. We talked her into idea that this idiotic enterprise is something we would keep on in, she proved helpful. Then in terms of answers question about how i wove together the material. You know what i i was compelled to write the story by you know testament of individual witness, you deal with peoples memories of things that happened 20 years ago, at the time of reporting 30. I would use. Original documents and memoirs and letters and also video and audio recordings to cross reference peoples testimony. And to cross reference one mans testimony to another, to arrive at what i think call the best available version of the truth. I hope that answered that question. That is the com complex ques. I am also expecting you could give an entire seminar on this subject. Adam. Thanthank you for condensing tht for us. Well take a different route, this question with an assumption, i classify this question pop culture media, on those lines. Assumption that you have seen the hbo series on chernobyl. The question, what did you like or dislike about that particular series . I have seen it. Yep. And i am i like about it. Production design and the photography, i thought was extraordinary. It really recreated that period of life in the soviet union with fantastic rhapsody, it looked amazing. But you know, as someone who engaged on this project in great part to try to address a lot of the myths and exag exaggerationi was disappointed by the way it misrepresented and sensationalized events that really in my opinion did not need exaggerating or sensationalizing the truth is really quite asto astonishing e. Thank you very much. To classify the next question, culpability. The question, what you spoke to people on the ground, people are reflecting back years later, did you fine there was a sense of them blaming the ussr . Since chernobyl is now part of a different country, or did you feel that current lets looked at as human error . Or as just a repercussion of a former regime. Cullbility from your perspective . I think that it that to generalize, i would say that people view it as ukraine. I should say, people in ukraine view it as part of a larger lare patent of exploitation and incompetence that came down from moscow. They view this as something that was the result of the nature of the soviet state. You know, and in this speech, that then president of ukraine gave, in his dedication ceremony at the site, in april 2016, you know, he made it clear that he viewed chernobyl as part of a whole series of events for which moscow could be held responsible. When victimized ukrainian people, in respect of who individual hold responsible . It depends on whom you talked to. There was a in ukraine, there was a of blaming soviet state. If you talk to you know, people who come down from moscow, or worked, in Nuclear Engineering and russians, they would sometimes try to hold the incompetent ukrainian operators responsible. That is a perfectly predictable part of the long propaganda narrative in the minds of those people. Every time we talk about catastrophe, not just this i assume you get a cullbility question, who is to blame, and the dimensions. My next question, is three. About Nuclear Power. You give a presentation. People want to ask you project showns and having spent such a tremendous amount of time thinking about interviews and researching this. What are your views on continuus of Nuclear Power . And while read from one of the questions, is it worth the risk in our continued efforts as it relates to Climate Change . So two part. Your thoughts about use of Nuclear Power. And then the next part, situating that with Climate Change. Well, right, i think that to put it simply, this accident, this catastrophe on the level was a result of something circumstances that were unique to time place in the soviet union. You know even bearing in mind, the accident in fuk fukushima nothing on this scale is possible to happen, this volume of Radio Nuclear released. Could never happen. Because modern reactor. Is 1940s technology. And had all sorts of problems with it. And the reactors that sort of you know, on the table today, are nothing like this. And i believe that safer in principle and Technology Developed to generate electricity. All reactors built in this time, originated with military technology that was developed to create plutonium to use in number nuclear weapons, there is the Technology Available to is safer. I would say this is worth of risk from a point of view. And usually say when people ask, i would rather live if i had to be forced into a choice, i would rather live next to a Nuclear Power plant than a coal powered power plant. In context of global warming, you know no matter how quickly the generating electricity from renewable forces is dropped, as i know it. There understand it, there is no way we could both eliminate use of fossil fuel to generate electricity and meet the rising need for electrically generation in the third world over the next 40 years, without having some finds of bridging that gap. Ether energy seems to be only source of that electricity that approaching carbon neutral. From that stand point, i would endorse the use of Nuclear Power. Above all, i would endorse the you know, taking a scientist irk rathescientificrather an emotioo go about how analysing generating electricity. Thank you, we have 7 minutes left, one more question. Central premise is, about content but writing process. And being a writer, was there anything that done make it into the didnt make if to the book that you really wanted it to be there but you could not get it to fit within the narrative. I am glad you asked. No one asks me. Yes, a huge amount. I interviewed i started reporting on this in 2006, over those years between 06 and 18, i interviewed about 85 people. Among those that i interviewed in ukraine and russia, there some people, almost everyone has an amazing story, many of these people i interviewed for hours at a time. Over periods of weeks or months. One thing, put together, you know a lot of those people made it as main characters on to the page. They told me, you know informed wider narrative. They end up buried in food notes. There were several characters whose storiesy would love to report. And in a more so mercenary. Narrative sense, their stories overlapped or duplicated too were stories that others told. There was a massive amount of material they had to to lea leae out. So, adam, we wan to thank you for rivets presentation. And also le to congratulate you on winner, well get this you in the mail. Immediately after this symposium and mention for you joining us, if you are interested in receiving a signed copy of adds adams book, tomorrow on web site, you can reach out to us, let us know. And well make sureou get a signed copy of adams book. And again. Adam it has been a pasure, we look toward to some time hosting you physically in vermont, and having you engage with our faculty staff and students. And again, congratulations to the award thank you. I wh you could hear the resounding applause of all of the peak people. For everyone else this still on the call for us. We have more sessions look a the schedule. If you have not already, watch the award video. Just provides some context and also showcases one of our own faculty. Who won the award two years ago. And ao just stay tuned for the panel, that wil will reased tomorrow at noon, until we meet again, for those who join us, you have an hour to eat lunch, and reengagement cheers adam, thank you. And thank you. Thank y. Take care. See you soon. Here are top selling books according to wrapping up our look at best selling books. Some appeared on book tv, you can watch online. During a virtual event. New york times columnist, interviewed author terra burton about her new book, strange rights, and describes how views on rereligion are changing in america. Not necessarily talking about people who arinking atheist. We talking about people who for whatever reason are alienated by institutional relin rereligion,o feel has nothing to offer them. Actually still have some form of faith. But unwilling to identify with, participate in it as a religion. We are talking about spiritual, and a broader category. In my book. Not just spiritual but not religious. But people who identify tick the box, with a particular tradition. But whose personal practices. And i like to bring up here to give a sense of how widespread this is about 30 of self identified christians believe in reincarnation, not something one would associate with christian are oorthodoxy, were living inn age i would argue where religious life, components, meaning purpose, community, ritual are relating to them in a different way, mixing and matching, unbundling to use a term used and a sense in which were all making our own religion, not just elements of traditional but things like wellness culture. Political activism. And sort of vast array of witchcraft and wicka among fastest growing
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