Semipalatinsk Test Site closed
Kazakhstan shuts the site of 456 nuclear explosions
From 1949 to 1989 the USSR carried out 456 nuclear tests here, over a hundred of them above ground, exposing hundreds of thousands of nearby villagers to radiation. In 1989 the poet Olzhas Suleimenov founded the Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement, and on 29 August 1991 Nazarbayev decreed the site closed. 29 August is now the UN International Day against Nuclear Tests.
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Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty — 23 years earlier
- 1980 Smallpox declared eradicated — 11 years earlier
- 1981 AIDS first described — 10 years earlier
- 1997 Kyoto Protocol — 6 years later
- 2008 Global financial crisis — 17 years later
Europe
- 1989 Invention of the World Wide Web — 2 years earlier
- 1989 Fall of the Berlin Wall — 2 years earlier
- 1990 German reunification — 1 year earlier
- 1991–2001 Yugoslav Wars — same year
- 1992 Maastricht Treaty — 1 year later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1985–1991 Perestroika — 6 years earlier
- 1986 Chernobyl disaster — 5 years earlier
- 1989 Revolutions of 1989 — 2 years earlier
- 1991 Dissolution of the Soviet Union — same year
- 1994–1996 First Chechen War — 3 years later
Middle East
- 1989 9 April tragedy in Tbilisi — 2 years earlier
- 1990–1991 Gulf War — 1 year earlier
- 1990 Black January in Baku — 1 year earlier
- 1992–1993 War in Abkhazia — 1 year later
- 1993 Oslo Accords — 2 years later
Africa
- 1974 Lucy is discovered — 17 years earlier
- 1983–1985 The Ethiopian famine — 8 years earlier
- 1994 End of apartheid in South Africa — 3 years later
- 1998–2003 Second Congo War — 7 years later
- 2011 Independence of South Sudan — 20 years later
Americas
- 1969 Moon landing — 22 years earlier
- c. 1970 Mass deforestation of the Amazon begins — 21 years earlier
- 1983 ARPANET adopts TCP/IP — 8 years earlier
- 1990 Launch of the Hubble Space Telescope — 1 year earlier
- 2001 September 11 attacks — 10 years later
Oceania
- 1992 The Mabo decision — 1 year later
Alive at the time
- Nelson Mandela (aged 73)
- Neil Armstrong (aged 61)
- Mother Teresa (aged 81)
- Ronald Reagan (aged 80)
- Richard Nixon (aged 78)
- Edmund Hillary (aged 72)
- Jimmy Carter (aged 67)
- Fidel Castro (aged 65)
- Elizabeth II (aged 65)
- Gabriel García Márquez (aged 64)