A small table

1. A writing pad comprised of paper that is fastened along one edge: Each student was instructed to have a pencil, or a pen, and a tablet with lined paper.
2. A thin metal plaque placed on a monument to indicate that it is a memorial: The statue had a bronze tablet listing the town's war heroes.
3. Small pills or pellets of something, frequently for medication: The doctor told Lenora to take two aspirin tablets, go to bed and then she would get relief from her pain and fever.

Tablets' tale of Russia's nuclear victims

The tablets were simple, and understated, so much so that some residents and many regular visitors had never noticed them.

The top tablet bore the alpha-beta-gamma symbol of radiation. The bottom one said: "To the victims of radioactive catastrophes, their courage and devotion to duty."

The tablets are among 40 or so memorials across Russia that commemorate not only Chernobyl, but also earlier disasters, or nuclear tests, that were kept secret for decades; near Chelyabinsk in 1957, at Semipalatinsk in 1949, and all who died or suffered by joining the hundreds of thousands of people who were drafted or who volunteered to clean up and encase the reactor or the "liquidation" of the Chernobyl accident, as the Soviet authorities called it.