Although tens of thousands of people in the Urals were aware of what had happened, news of the Kyshtym explosion was hushed up in the Soviet Union due to "national security." In the United States the Central Intelligence Agency learned about the inci- dent but it kept as mum as the Soviets bout it for two decades. The disaster was revealed to the world only in 1976 when Zhores Medvedev, an exiled Russian scientist, published a detailed account in the British journal New Scientist. Even then, many nuclear experts dismissed the report as a dissident's exaggeration. Within a matter of weeks, however, newspaper reports had confirmed Medvedev's account, which he later expanded in the book Nuclear Disaster in the Urals.

The Double-Whammy of Nuclear Submarine Disasters

When the Russian submarine Kursk sank on August 12, 2000,with the loss...