The Soviet Nuclear Disaster the West Covered Up. | Hacker News Reader

The Soviet Nuclear Disaster the West Covered Up.

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29 pointsTrisell6 comments

Most of this appears to be copied from the wikipedia article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster

Click-bait headline, it should be:

"Kyshtym – The Nuclear Disaster Both the Soviets & the U.S tried to hide"

The article asserts in one sentence that the CIA knew and covered it up. I'd love to hear what they actually knew; Give the level of soviet secrecy, it's possible they really didn't know enough information to make it worth talking about.

"According to Gyorgy, who invoked the Freedom of Information Act to gain access to the relevant Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) files, the CIA knew of the 1957 Mayak accident since 1959, but kept it secret to prevent adverse consequences for the fledgling American nuclear industry."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster

"Kept it secret" on Wikipedia and "cover-up" in the article title both imply malice, but it's not very clear to me that the CIA had an obvious obligation to report everything bad that happened in the Soviet Union which doesn't impact non-Soviet citizens. When they do publish something, it's for propaganda reasons, and, as stated, this incident wasn't really suitable for that.

There's also a very strong bias towards keeping what you learn secret by default because you don't want to let your adversary learn your means and methods, e.g. particular spies, "national technical means" like surveillance aircraft back then and satellites nowadays, how you do analysis, all the way up to the scope of your efforts.

I'd add that this disaster doesn't seem to implicate the US nuclear industry at all, sounds like it was part of their plutonium breeding effort, which is for weapons. Back then and for a very long time Oak Ridge would enrich natural uranium to, what, 5% U-235, and then it goes into a separate cycle which could and no doubt someday will include reprocessing (although not for weapons grade plutonium, too much Pu-238 and Pu-240 if you let it brew long enough), but didn't then nor does it today.

Any nuclear-related disaster plays into the hands of anti-nuclear campaigning, regardless of the finer details of the truth -- indeed Gyorgy's book for which the FOIA was invoked is titled "No Nukes: Everyone's Guide to Nuclear Power", so the assessment that it might have had adverse effects seemed correct.

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