The Soviet Union was the kind of place that hundreds could die because a maintenance worker could take the clogged filters out of the exhaust system of a bioweapons plant, write "replace the filters!" on a post-it and have his supervisor release anthrax into a city because he wasn't looking for post-its. I remember Chernobyl, too. Every kid in town had parents who could explain at length why Chernobyl happened there and couldn't happen here. My dad was the only one on standby to hop on a cargo jet if the Soviets accepted our help. They didn't, because they were Soviets. There's a lot of duty and honor and stoicism in HBO's Chernobyl. There isn't a lot of hubris. Chernobyl happened because the Soviets were poor and didn’t want the world to know they were punching above their weight. Keep bargain-basement nuclear reactors out of the control of command economies run by nepotism and the odds of a meltdown go way down.