A Nuclear Jet at Chernobyl Around 21:23:45 UTC on April 25, 1986
It was interesting that there were firm denials at the time, yet everyone was used to propaganda (yes, fake news) so it wasn&#x27;t at first clear if there was a coverup or the claim of a problem was western misdirection!<p>But reports from neighboring countries pretty quickly put that to rest, and then the narrative switched to the heroics of the emergency workers (who were indeed heroic and, sadly, literally self-sacrificing.<p>The plume traveled over northern Western Europe, but West Germany, at least, didn&#x27;t take any immediate action.  15-20 years later there appeared to be a slew of unusual cancers (e.g. my mother in law&#x27;s tear duct; my friend&#x27;s mother salivary gland...unusual ones in accretive tissue.  But I don&#x27;t know if there&#x27;s been any systematic survey to see if there was an assignable increase in the death rate, or if I am just divining a signal from what&#x27;s actually small-n noise.