Songfacts®:

• "Dogs Of Chernobyl" is about the end of a relationship; one minute the couple are together, then the girl suddenly ups sticks and walks out of her lover's life. Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine uses the dogs left behind at the infamous 1986 Chernobyl nuclear meltdown in Ukraine as a metaphor for the man's feeling of abandonment.
• Mustaine started writing the song after watching a horror movie about four children that visit the Chernobyl site who came across some canines. "The part that bothered me was that the dogs were just left," he told Rolling Stone. "I don't know that if I went anywhere, that I could leave my dog or our horses."
  
  Mustaine wrote down, "You left me like the dogs of Chernobyl," and the song developed from there.
• As the song progresses, the abandoned man finds himself in Chernobyl feeling the effects of radiation. Mustaine wrote "Dogs Of Chernobyl" before the Russians invaded Ukraine and the ensuing horrific events. "I'm not trying to take any kind of advantage of people in an unfortunate situation," he told Kerrang. "I think that'd be very vulture-like. That's just not me: I never prey on other people's misfortune."
• When Mustaine was diagnosed with throat cancer in June 2019, Anthony Cmelak, a professor of radiation oncology, treated him. Once Mustaine had beaten the disease later in the year, he asked Cmelak to help him write this song; in particular he needed some information about the radiation poisoning when everyone got sick at Chernobyl. Cmelak sent lyrics a couple of days later and the band cut the track two days after that.
  
  "I think he wanted descriptive terminology on how your bodily functions would change after exposure to massive doses of radiation," Cmelak told Nashville Tennessean. "He also wanted a flair of someone being left behind... I geared toward that and it came around very quickly."