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Russia Profile – A Waste of a Land

 A Waste of a Land
By Dmitry Babich Russia Profile October 1, 2008

The Fate of Former Soviet Nuclear Test Sites in the Far North Is Uncertain

To this day, the Russian state denies that any radiation-related problems plague the Novaya Zemlya archipelago, while research in the area is virtually nonexistent……………….

The king of all bombs

The news came around noon. At 11:32 p.m. the so-called “Tsar Bomb,” whose yield was equivalent to 50 megatons of trotyl, was exploded at a height of 4,000 meters over Novaya Zemlya. This hydrogen bomb, the biggest nuclear weapon in the world, named the Big Ivan by its developers, was eight meters long and 2.1 meters wide–it did not even fit into the biggest Soviet TU-95 bomber that carried it. The bomb stuck out of the plane’s hull until it was dropped on a parachute from a height of 10,500 meters………….The flash of light produced by the Big Ivan was seen at a distance of 1,000 kilometers. The smoke over the explosion’s epicenter grew to a height of 67 kilometers. The log cabins in an abandoned village 400 kilometers away from the explosion site were swept from the face of the Earth. The seismic wave produced by the explosion was reported to have crossed the Earth three times………………………………even though new nuclear tests are no longer conducted on Novaya Zemlya, the old ones are more than enough to complicate matters.

“Even military people acknowledge that traces of contamination can be detected in the southern part of the archipelago,” said Yelena Kvasnikova from the Institute of Global Climate and Ecology. “Tests in the atmosphere were conducted there before the Soviet Union joined the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963. This treaty banned all nuclear tests in the atmosphere, underwater and in space.”…………………….. Novaya Zemlya remains closed to radiation specialists…………………..Novaya Zemlya has remained a closed area.

Russia Profile – A Waste of a Land

Tags: nuclear, antinuclear, uranium, radiation

October 2, 2008 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | environment