The claim as I drew it from “Midnight in Chernobyl” by Adam Higginbotham (I don’t know if a popular non-fiction book meets your evidentiary standard, I just hap

The claim as I drew it from “Midnight in Chernobyl” by Adam Higginbotham (I don’t know if a popular non-fiction book meets your evidentiary standard, I just happen to have finished reading it) is that the public damage and cost from Chernobyl was so unprecedented and spectacular in scope that it was impossible for the Soviet government to cover it up. And that what makes this remarkable is how this incident compared to other past incidents (not to mention purposeful engineering efforts) that the Soviet government had successfully managed to cover up and keep from the population. In other words, “exposed the dysfunction of the system” is accurate, but also incomplete. It omits the reason why this particular disaster, and not other disasters, was the trigger that caused this reckoning. And the book makes a compelling case for why Chernobyl was so important and so different. I will leave it to experts to tell me whether it’s wrong.