In 1976 the exiled Russian scientist Zhores Medvedev revealed to the West the nightmarish truth about a nuclear accident in the Urals two decades earlier. Writing in a British magazine, he described how there had been an explosion at a nuclear weapons factory in Kyshtym that had killed hundreds of people and left a vast radioactive wasteland. Medvedev called it “the biggest nuclear tragedy in peacetime the world has known”. Evidence of the disaster, a thousand miles east of Moscow, had been ruthlessly suppressed by the Soviet authorities, and they continued to deny the story.
Times 17th Dec 2018 read more »