The liquidators
1986–1990 · Event
Some 600,000 soldiers, miners, pilots and engineers are rotated through the zone to bury the fallout — shovelling graphite off the roof in 90-second shifts where robots' circuits failed, tunnelling under the melting core, felling and interring an entire red-dead forest. The Soviet Union's last mass mobilisation is against its own reactor.
On these timelines: Chernobyl, Eastern Europe & the Balkans, Russia & the USSR, Master
More from Chernobyl
- Chernobyl disaster (1986)
- The safety test that destroyed Reactor 4 (1986)
- Pripyat is evacuated (1986)
- A Swedish alarm exposes the secret (1986)
- The first responders take fatal doses (1986)
- The sarcophagus seals Reactor 4 (1986)
- Gorbachev breaks the silence (1986)
- The Chernobyl exclusion zone (1986)
Around 1986
- Iranian Revolution (1978)
- Dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991)
- Yugoslav Wars (1991)
- Gulf War (1990)
- (Everything I Do) I Do It for You (Bryan Adams) (1991)
- Night Fever (Bee Gees) (1978)
- Invention of the World Wide Web (1989)
- Another Brick in the Wall (Part II) (Pink Floyd) (1979)
- That's The Way Love Goes (Janet Jackson) (1993)
- Pop music: the 1980s (1980)