By Matt Purple, The American Conservative

Everyone understands the Soviet Union tried to cover up the Chernobyl disaster, but what’s less known is that they’d already pulled it off once before. In 1957, an accident at a plutonium production site near the remote city of Kyshtym in the Ural Mountains saw the spread of radioactive particles for tens of thousands of square miles across the USSR. Nearby population centers were evacuated (slowly) but it wasn’t until the late 1970s that a defector began to reveal the true scope of the incident.

The Soviets, as should be apparent, were not the first people you’d want watching over your nuclear reactor (or fixing your car or…). Still, you have to hand it to the commies: at least when they lied they were acting in the interests of their own glorious motherland. It never would have occurred to them to cover up the truth about a deadly emergency on behalf of a rival power. Yet somehow that’s the corner our elite media have backed themselves into. By scoffing for months at the possibility that the coronavirus originated in a Chinese facility, by continuing to paper over that possibility now, they’ve effectively relegated themselves to water carriers for Beijing.

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