As one of the twelve founding members of the International Atomic Energy Agency, since 1957 the USSR had been obliged to report any nuclear accident that took place within its borders. But of the dozens of dangerous incidents that occurred inside Soviet nuclear facilities over the decades that followed, not one was ever mentioned to the IAEA. For almost thirty years, both the Soviet public and the world at large were encouraged to believe that the USSR operated the safest nuclear industry in the world. The cost of maintaining this illusion had been high.
