> Chernobyl and Fukushima were also both created by a culture of deference to higher-ups

Chernobyl suffered from compounding of reactor and test design flaws and human error. Fukushima suffered from (retrospectively) insufficient risk assessments, which resulted in a design meeting a rare event beyond it design limit sooner than expected.*

I'm unaware of a human society, in fact any animal society, where politeness does not involve some degree of deference. So saying these accidents were caused by a culture of deference is essentially meaningless without some more "who, what, why, how" and importantly 'how much' and 'compared to what'.

From the IAEA report: "This common mode failure reached a scale considerably beyond that usually addressed in the assessment of BDBAs. [ed: beyond design basis accident]". https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/AdditionalVol...

https://www.coursera.org/lecture/intercultural-communication...

I presently work at Defense Innovation Unit where pretty much all we do is test and evaluate prototypes on behalf of the services and agencies. We spend hundreds of thousands to millions testing each thing. Because hundreds of millions of dollars may be spent based on what we find. We probably get 80 pitch decks for every area of interest we announce. That usually gets winnowed down to 5-10 that actually have technical merit and are responsive. We get a few shysters with every batch, but the vast majority are simply too optimistic about what they've done or what they can accomplish.