led to an explosion and a molten core thathad now started to burn its way through the foundations of the reactor. Atunnel was frantically dug directly under the plant by hundreds of volunteers.Liquid nitrogen was poured in to freeze the ground underneath. By luck,the nitrogen gas also beganto stifle the graphite fire. And then, on the fifth day, for reasons that stillno-one understands, the core beganto cool.Despite this, [Legasov remained a staunchdefender of nuclear power] [throughout thedisaster and the terrible dangers].[From TV footage of Valeri Legasov and ?volunteers; translation provided byvoiceover]Valeri Legasov, Deputy Director, Atomic Power Institute "...The maximum dose was 0.7 rontgens per hour; over the reactor, we got 0.3 and0.5 rontgens..." [Someone:] "Do you think we'll be able to have children?" [Legasov:] "Yes; don't worry." [Someone:] "Are you sure?" [Legasov, laughing:] "I've been working with radioactivity since1964 and I've got kids don't worry!"In the months that followed,Legasov changed his mind. In a long taped interview with the then-Soviet MPYurii Scherbak, he gave a damning criticism of the whole nuclear powerprogramme. The problem, he said, was the demand that was made of thetechnology.[Yurii Scherbak (subtitled)] I had an amazing conversation with Legasov. Suddenlyhe began telling me, very openly, about the agony he'd been through at Chernobyl.Extracts [translated] from Scherbak's interview with Valerii [sic] Legasov [Voiceover:] "It's easy to think or imagine that theenemy is the nuclear reactor. But the enemy isn't technology. Ihave come to the paradoxical conclusion that technology must be protected from man. In thepast the time that included the old reactors; the time that ended withGagarin's flight intospace the technology was created by people who stood on the shoulders ofTolstoy andDostoyevsky. They were educated in this period of the great humanitarian ideas;in this period of abeautiful and correct moral sense. They had a clear political idea of the newsociety they weretrying to create; one that would be the most advanced in the world. But alreadyin the generationsthat succeeded them, there were engineers who stood on their shoulders and saw only thetechnical side of things. But if someone is educated only in technical ideas,they cannot createanything new, anything for which they are responsible. "The operators of the reactor that night [thought] they were doing everythingwell and correctly and they werebreaking the rules for the sake of doing it [trying to do it?] even better. But they had lost sight ofthe purpose; [of] what they weredoing it for."Then, two years to the dayafter the accident and for unknown [unconfirmed?] reasons Valeri Legasov committed suicide.[An extract from theBuchanan Brothers' 1946 country-music hit "Atomic Power" plays asfootage from the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster continues]Joseph Morone, nuclear [science] historian In the golden age of science at the time whensociety had its most optimistic view of science it basically had a wrong-headed view of science. It hadthe view that... this form of the technology [he is gesturing toward the reactor containmentbuilding behind him] was the inevitable form that it had to take; and that if that was the form it took, thenit must be the right form. Forty years later, we have a