Tag
#1986
2 articles
Chernobyl
At 1:23:40 a.m. local time on Saturday, April 26, 1986, reactor 4 at the V. I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant near Pripyat, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, exploded. A planned low-power safety test, run by night-shift personnel who had been ordered to proceed despite warnings, drove the RBMK-1000 reactor into a state its designers had specifically marked as forbidden. The graphite-tipped control rods, lowered to scram the reactor, briefly added reactivity before shutting it down. The core's thermal output spiked to approximately 30,000 megawatts — ten times rated capacity — in four seconds. Two steam explosions ripped the 1,000-tonne upper biological shield off the reactor and exposed the burning graphite core to the atmosphere. Two workers died at the moment of explosion. Twenty-nine more — firefighters, control-room operators, plant electricians — died from acute radiation syndrome within four months. Forty-eight hours passed before the city of Pripyat (population 49,360) was evacuated. The Soviet government did not publicly acknowledge the accident until April 28, after Swedish nuclear technicians at Forsmark detected the airborne plume 1,200 kilometres to the northwest. The cover-up was, by Mikhail Gorbachev's own subsequent assessment, the moment Soviet glasnost became unavoidable.
The Olof Palme Assassination
At 11:21 p.m. on Friday, February 28, 1986, the Prime Minister of Sweden, Olof Palme, was shot in the back at point-blank range on Sveavägen, Stockholm, while walking home from a cinema with his wife Lisbet. Lisbet Palme was grazed by a second shot. Olof Palme was 59 years old. He had been the Prime Minister of Sweden from 1969 to 1976 and again from 1982. He had no bodyguards that night. The killer ran east up Tunnelgatan and disappeared. He has never been positively identified. Sweden's Palme Commission and its successor police investigation ran for 34 years. On June 10, 2020, Chief Prosecutor Krister Petersson publicly named the most likely perpetrator — a Swedish graphic designer named Stig Engström, the so-called "Skandiamannen" — and simultaneously closed the case because Engström had died in 2000 and could not be tried. The 40-year-old investigation produced 22 binders of investigative material, dozens of failed theories, one wrongful conviction, and no court ruling. It is the largest unsolved political assassination in modern European history.
2 files · end of the line