Until I watched the first part of the HBO miniseries Chernobyl, I had a surface level understanding of the events  that took place during the tragedy. I knew there was a malfunction, an enormous amount of radioactive material released, and a subsequent evacuation. It wasn’t until watching the initial events dramatized that I began to consider Chernobyl’s location inside of the USSR and how that impacted the event as a whole. I was filled with morbid fascination watching USSR leadership downplay the severity of Chernobyl, all while continuing to deny the first-hand reports of workers who practically sacrificed their lives to see what had really happened. It was eerie to see a major tragedy politicized as it could hurt the image of the USSR, but eerier still were the parallels to today. Despite a difference in values between many western countries and the USSR, there is still a shared apprehensiveness towards the findings of experts and scientists, with denial being a common default for leadership. While Chernobyl was a more acute issue that was mishandled, there are certainly plenty of chronic, contemporary challenges we face that are themselves being mishandled still. It certainly begs the question of what the world really learned, if anything, from the tragedy that was Chernobyl.