My point is that engineers have no recourse to complaining about being 'overridden'. Politicians don't act; they don't build space shuttles, they don't design nuclear reactors. They give a high level set of orders which engineers either fulfill safely, or not at all. As an example:
In the case of Chernobyl, the problem was actually inexperienced plant operators running an experiment about disaster recovery on a reactor with a positive void coefficient and poorly designed control rods. The positive void coefficient was a limitation of our nuclear design capabilities at the time, the control rods were just poorly designed by some engineer. Either of those factors could have prevented the disaster, and neither of them can be attributed to any politician.
In the case of Chernobyl, the problem was actually inexperienced plant operators running an experiment about disaster recovery on a reactor with a positive void coefficient and poorly designed control rods. The positive void coefficient was a limitation of our nuclear design capabilities at the time, the control rods were just poorly designed by some engineer. Either of those factors could have prevented the disaster, and neither of them can be attributed to any politician.