![]() 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. 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. ![]() “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) Richly illustrated with authentic photographs and custom-drawn color profiles, Tsar Bomba is the story of the aircrews involved and their aircraft, all of which were carefully hidden not only by the Iron Curtain, but by a thick veil of secrecy for more than half a century.Atom bomb test at the Enewetak atoll in the Marshall Islands. Frequently operating at the edge of the envelope of their specially modified machines while test-releasing weapons with unimaginable destructive potential, several of them only narrowly avoided catastrophe. Equipped with the full range of bombers - from the Tupolev Tu-4, Tupolev Tu-16, to the gigantic Tu-95 - the units in question were staffed by men colloquially known as the 'deaf-and-dumb' people sworn to utmost secrecy, living and serving in isolation from the rest of the world. Dozens of these were released from aircraft operated by specialized test units. And still, this was just one of 45 tests of nuclear weapons conducted in the USSR in October 1961 alone.īetween 19, the Soviets set off 214 nuclear bombs in the open air. The shockwave created by the RDS-202 eradicated a village 55 kilometers (34 miles) from ground zero, caused widespread damage to nature to a radius of dozens of kilometers further away, and created a heat wave felt as far as 270 kilometers (170 miles) distant. The Tsar Bomba unleashed about 58 megatons of TNT, creating an 8-kilometer/5-mile-wide fireball and then a mushroom that peaked at an altitude of 95 kilometers (59 miles). Codenamed 'Ivan', and known in the West as the 'Tsar Bomba', the RDS-202 hydrogen bomb was detonated at the Sukhoy Nos cape of Severny Island, Novaya Zemla archipelago, in the Barents Sea. On 30 October 1961, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR/Soviet Union) conducted a live test of the most powerful nuclear weapon ever created.
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