NEW YORK, April 25 (Reuters) - The deadly flu-like disease SARS could be "China's Chernobyl," a disaster leading to more political openness in the Communist country, two former U.S. ambassadors to China said on Friday.

Former envoys Winston Lord and J. Stapleton Roy, speaking at the annual meeting of the prominent Chinese-American group "Committee of 100," compared the ongoing SARS crisis to that faced by the Soviet Union almost exactly 17 years earlier, on April 26, 1986, the date of the world's worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl in Ukraine.

"I hope it will be China's Chernobyl," Lord said, referring to some analysts' views that the nuclear accident led to reforms in the secretive Communist system and contributed to the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union.

Soviet era documents released this week before the 17th anniversary of the catastrophe showed the Soviet secret police knew the plant was dangerous long before the disaster.

"SARS showed that the Chinese political system has got to catch up with the technology," Lord said. "In the age of the Internet and cell phones that it could keep this sickness secret from the Chinese people and ultimately the world ... the Chinese ought to get on top of this and change that system.

"It's going to cost them diplomatically and economically. I say this as a friend of China who continues to work for good relations but I believe in being candid," said Lord, who was ambassador to Beijing just before the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre of students demonstrating for political reforms.

"I agree with Win Lord's comment that he hopes it is China's Chernobyl in the sense that it sends a very clear message that they have to be more transparent," Roy said.

The World Health Organization and other groups have accused China of concealing the severity of the SARS outbreak, robbing them of the opportunity to investigate it early and prevent it spreading across China and to other countries.

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, a respiratory infection with a mortality rate of about six percent, has killed at least 276 people and infected about 4,800 in 25 countries, hitting Asia particularly hard.

Some five million people were exposed to radiation or otherwise affected when a nuclear reactor at Chernobyl burst into flames, killing more than 4,000 people involved in the cleanup and sickening or disabling another 40,000.

The Chinese health minister and mayor of Beijing were fired on Sunday over the cover-up of the SARS epidemic.

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