In 1977 , Medvedev published '' Hazards of Nuclear Power '' , which mentioned the Kyshtym nuclear disaster in passing . At the time , the disaster was essentially unknown , and his work was dismissed as baseless propaganda even by his Western colleagues . Medvedev responded by publishing '' Soviet Science '' in 1978 , which assembled evidence from Soviet publications that taken together comprised conclusive evidence of the disaster 's occurrence . He followed this with the book '' The Nuclear Disaster in the Urals '' in 1979 , and a further critique '' The Legacy of Chernobyl '' ( 1990 ) , which connected the two disasters as being a product of the same attitudes toward science and engineering in the USSR
Kyshtym nuclear disaster
Kyshtym disaster
Zhores Medvedev