In 1986, while the rest of Europe scrambled to shield its citizens from the invisible poison drifting west from reactor four, Bulgarian authorities did something remarkable in its cruelty: they pretended the cloud wasn’t there. The result, documented in newly unearthed archives and assembled in Dimitar Vatsov’s investigation The Bulgarian Chernobyl , is a record no country would want. Bulgarians ended up carrying a heavier internal radiation dose than the populations of Ukraine, Belarus, or