Re: Liquidators
I wouldn't disagree they deserve more recognition, although as to the "volunteering" many of them didn't know what radiation levels were because the detectors had literally been cooked, they apparently assumed, for unknown reasons, that when a detector runs to its end stop, it means it is still measuring.
No one ever seems to mention the divers either that drained out the water pools, dead men walking before they got out of the water (think K19 with attitude).
It's also not often mentioned that the Chernobyl style reactors are still being used with safety improvements (built from dead Lancias instead of Wartburgs).
As to not being born, you might be alot closer to the mark than is comfortable - many women terminated perfectly healthy pregnancies because of radiation panics. Abortions immediately after Chernobyl were much higher as a population percentage in several countries.
All in all it reflected badly on all of humanity then, and it still does.. with bits of the sarcophagus rusting away and the rest welded together by YTS trainees it still isn't safe and never will be.
I'm not entirely sure that they "saved Europe", dumping bits of reactor back inside was truly a brave and/or borderline suicidal thing to do, but this would have had a more local effect - the European saviours were the poor sods in the helicopters dropping sand and Boron to dampen the core, a further runaway reaction would have produced another more dangerous plume, probably nastier and highly likely to be in a different direction and possibly a higher plume height - imagine if the fallout cloud climbed into the jet stream or high level high speed winds, as it was, it got to the UK.