The Bureaucracy of Denial: Chernobyl and the System That Couldn't Say Stop
The Mind of the Maker: Psychology of Engineering Failure 1 The Illusion of Invulnerability: How the Titanic's Designers Dismissed the Iceberg Threat 2 The Certainty Trap: Challenger and the Deadly Cost of Overconfidence 3 The Bureaucracy of Denial: Chernobyl and the System That Couldn't Say Stop 4 The Sunk Cost Bridge: Tacoma Narrows and the Engineering Gambler's Fallacy 5 The Automation Paradox: How Boeing's MCAS System Exploited Pilot Trust ← Series Home The Test That Nobody Could Stop On April 26, 1986, Reactor 4 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station exploded, releasing 400 times more radioactive material than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The immediate death toll was 31. The long-term casualties—cancer, thyroid disease, genetic damage—have never been fully counted, though estimates exceed 4,000 deaths. The exclusion zone encompasses 2,600 square kilometers of permanently contaminated land. ...