Mushroom cloud caused by the Tsar Bomba explosion. Tsar Bomba - The Largest Nuclear Weapon Ever Tested NOVAYA ZEMLYA, RUSSIA Nevertheless, even today people continue to live in the Polygon area. An area of more than 18,000 square kilometers is heavily contaminated and over a million people have been diagnosed with health problems.
Residents noticed health terrible problems soon after the first tests, and though the site was finally closed in 1989, the legacy of the nuclear tests lingers on. The military conducted these nuclear tests without regard to the health effects on the 200,000 residents of the Semipalatinsk area, who weren’t evacuated or warned during the actual explosions. Located relatively close to a major settlements, this is also the site of one of the most horrible legacies of the Cold War era: where the Soviet Union tested nuclear bombs on civilians. A huge number of craters, partly filled with water, testify to these experiments. Altogether, the number of nuclear explosions at Semipalatinsk equals more than 2,500 Hiroshima bombs. In total, 456 nuclear tests were conducted here between 19, including 340 underground and 116 atmospheric explosions. The Polygon in the former Soviet closed city Semipalatinsk (known today as Semey) was the primary nuclear test site of the Soviet Union. Semipalatinsk - The Soviet Union’s Main Test Site SEMEY, KAZAKHSTANĬraters and boreholes dot the former Soviet Union nuclear test site Semipalatinsk. Despite signs warning off visitors, it is still possible to make landfall on Runit and stomp across the Cactus Dome. In the late 1970s, in an effort to clean up the radioactive debris left by those explosions, the government dug up 111,000 cubic yards of soil and deposited it in a 350-foot-wide crater on Runit Island that was created by a nuclear test code-named “Cactus.” Three years a a quarter billion dollars later, a an enormous, foot-and-a-half-thick, 100,000-square-foot concrete dome was built over the nuclear crater. Islands and atolls in the South Pacific were used in over a hundred atmospheric nuclear tests by the U.S. (Photo: US Defense Special Weapons Agency/Public Domain) The dome is visible from the air-a perfect circle concealing something darker. Nuclear Crater Concrete Dome MARSHALL ISLANDS Normally off limits to civilians, the desolate scene of Trinity’s detonation is open to the public on the first Saturday of April every year.
TSAR BOMBA TEST WINDOWS
The 600-foot-wide fireball obliterated trees, turned sand into glass, and blew out windows 120 miles away. military may not have had to foresight to grasp the horrific long-term destruction of a 13-pound plutonium device, they knew what it could do on initial contact, because Trinity gave them a good show.
TSAR BOMBA TEST CODE
“Trinity” was code for the first detonation of “The Gadget”, a nuclear device conceptually similar to its devastating cousin, “Fat Man,” the latter of which was infamously detonated over Nagasaki three weeks later. On July 16, 1945, deep in the deserts of New Mexico, the Atomic Age was born. Trinity - The Birthplace of the Atomic Age SOCORRO, NEW MEXICO
Below are seven nuclear test sites in the Atlas that you can still visit today, vestiges of this sobering turning point in the evolution of warfare. From then up until the signing of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1996, over 2,000 nuclear test explosions have detonated on remote islands, atolls and stretches of desert around the world-the vast majority in the United States and Soviet Union-to prepare for the possibility of nuclear war.Īlthough, mercifully, the Cold War never turned hot, remnants of this charged chapter of history can still be found today throughout the U.S. Less than a month later, atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The atomic age began on July 16, 1945, when the Manhattan Project detonated its first successful nuclear weapon test in the New Mexico desert. (Photo: National Nuclear Security Administration/Public Domain) Atom bomb test at the Enewetak atoll in the Marshall Islands.