Out on the vast plains of the Kazakh steppe lies a place with an eerie secret.
Covering an 18,500 square km stretch of wilderness, it looks to all intents and purposes like
just another swathe of endless grassland.
Yet this quiet exterior hides a sinister past.
During the years of the Soviet Union, this area was strictly off-limits.Those who could
get close enough witnessed blinding flashes, watched in awe as mushroom clouds expanded
across the sky.
This place’s name was the Semipalatinsk test site, also known as the Polygon.
Today, we know it as the most-nuked place on Earth.
Selected in 1947 by notorious NKVD head Lavrentiy Beria, the Polygon saw the detonation of the
first Soviet atom bomb, and the first air-tested hydrogen bomb.
Over the course of 40 years, a quarter of all nuclear tests in history took place here,
irradiating the empty landscape.
In today’s video, we’re peeking inside the shadowy world of Soviet nuclear testing…
and meeting the people still living with its consequences.
Building a Bomb On August 12, 1953, residents in the Kazakh
city of Semipalatinsk were going about their business when they saw a burning flash of
light.
At the time, this wasn’t that unusual.
Atomic tests had been taking place out on the plains 150km west of their city for the
best part of four years.
Although Soviet radio broadcasts always tried to pass off the shaking as earthquakes, locals
had long suspected something more dramatic was happening.
So an unexpected flash of light in the sky wasn’t news.
What was new was what came next.
A loud bom, like a thunderclap magnified, swept across the city.
In its wake came a shockwave that shattered windows, lifted people off their feet.
As the entire city shook, panicked locals struggled to figure out what the hell had
just happened.
They had no way of knowing it, but over at the Polygon, Soviet scientists had just detonated
their first thermonuclear device.
In the hours to come, thick, black dust would fall across Semipalatinsk, drifting on the
winds from the test site.
No-one would tell the city’s hundreds of thousands of residents, but that black dust
was going to doom them all.
The Soviet atomic project had begun in earnest nearly 8 years earlier, on August 6, 1945.
That day, the world had watched in awe as the United States detonated its new superweapon
over the Japanese city of Hiroshima, turning 70,000 human beings to ash in the blink of
an eye.
In the aftermath, Stalin had ordered his right hand man, the sadistic NKVD head Lavrentiy
Beria, to force Soviet scientists on a crash course in nuclear physics.
By 1947, Beria’s team were well on their way to building a functioning atom bomb.
They just needed somewhere to test it.
It’s at this point that Semipalatinsk’s fate was sealed.
A remote city in a remote republic, Semipalatinsk had been drawn into the Soviet Union along
with the rest of Kazakhstan following a brief period of independence after the Revolution.
Hugely underpopulated, the steppe surrounding Semipalatinsk was perfect for secret weapons
testing.
Lavrentiy Beria confidently informed Stalin not a single soul lived there.
There was just one little problem with this.
Beria was lying.
Although the Kazakh steppe beyond Semipalatinsk was devoid of cities, it wasn’t empty.
There were villages, like Znamenka.
Nomadic peoples who wandered the plain, grazing animals.
In short, there was life out there, life that would suffer if Moscow just started exploding
atom bombs.
No-one knows for sure if Beria was misinformed, or if he knew about these people and simply
didn’t care.
If you’ve watched our video on Beria at our sister channel, Biographics, you’ll
probably guess the most-likely answer.
Over the next year, the Polygon was constructed using slave labor from Kazakhstan’s vast
network of gulags.
The prisoners built not just the site itself, but also fake buildings so the effect of a
nuclear blast could be measured.
By fall of 1948, Beria’s scientists had their first production reactor online and
ready.
Before a year had passed, they would have a working bomb.
On August 29, 1949, people in Semipalatinsk saw the first distant flash, heard the first
distant rumble.
Don’t worry about it, the local Party told them, it’s just an earthquake.
But it wasn’t “just an earthquake”.
It was an atomic explosion, the Soviet’s first successful test of a 22 kiloton bomb.
Little did Semipalatinsk’s residents know it, but there would be hundreds more to come.
When the Wind Blows The detonation of the first Soviet atom bomb
was revealed to the world thanks to radiation.
A US weather monitoring craft crossing between Japan and Alaska detected high levels in the
atmosphere that could have only come from a bomb.
On September 23, 1949, US President Harry Truman informed the world of the test.
It was shocking news, news that would spark a global nuclear arms race.
For the oblivious civilians living near the Polygon, though, it only meant one thing.
Yet more tests.
Over the next few years, loud booms, bright flashes of light, and mysterious mushroom
clouds became a regular fixture of life in Semipalatinsk.
While those in the city itself were 150km away from these tests, those who lived out
on the plain were both closer and less educated.
They would stand outdoors in their villages, wondering at the lights.
When gray dust fell, they thought nothing of breathing it in.
Yet even those who were living relatively far away weren’t safe.
Whether through accident or design, and you can probably guess our opinion, Beria had
selected a test site that was swept all year round by powerful winds.
Those winds carried radiation not just across Kazakhstan, but into Russia, too.
All in all, it’s estimated around 1.5 million people in the Soviet Union were repeatedly
exposed to radiation from the Polygon.
Sometimes, the effects were dramatic.
Take the blast we opened our story with, the thermonuclear explosion of August, 1953.
Although not the biggest detonation conducted at the Polygon - that would come two years
later, when the USSR tested its first hydrogen bomb - it was likely the most dangerous.
That day, the prevailing winds sent all the unleashed radiation sweeping over Semipalatinsk.
While the damage is hard to quantify, the huge uptick in cancers and children born with
deformities that happened not long after is thought attributable to this bomb.
But the detonation with the most immediate consequences came in August, 1956.
That month, the Polygon tested a dirty bomb with a small yield, but designed to spread
radiation far and wide.
On the day the bomb detonated, the winds were extremely high.
Over 400km away, 600 people in the industrial city of Ust-Kamenogorsk came down with acute
radiation sickness.
All 600 were spirited away into Party-run hospitals.
No records remain to indicate if any of them survived.
That same year, the Soviets set up their first secret lab to monitor the effects of radiation
around Semipalatinsk.
This being the USSR, they did it in utmost secrecy.
The lab was named Anti-Brucellosis Dispensary Number 4, after a disease that infects cattle.
While people were treated for their radiation exposure there, they were never told what
was wrong with them.
By 1963, when the ban on above ground nuclear testing came in, over 110 devices had been
detonated at the Polygon.
Already, at least 10,000 people had shown signs of being affected by radiation.
But testing at the Polygon didn’t end with the ban in ‘63.
It simply moved underground.
In the Shadow of the Mushroom Cloud OK, so it’s time to take a little detour
away from Semipalatinsk and tackle a question you may have.
One that likely runs along the lines of: “Gee, this sure sounds bad.
But, on the other hand, didn’t the US also test above ground nukes near civilians?”
The short answer is, yes, they did.
But there was a qualitative difference, as we’re hopefully about to see.
If the bombs going off at the Polygon were the epitome of Soviet-style secrecy and denial,
those the US tested were a parody of the capitalist dream.
The detonations took place at the Nevada Test Site, far out in the desert.
Just as residents of Semipalatinsk got used to seeing distant mushroom clouds, so too
were the American tests visible from Las Vegas.
But while the powers in Semipalatinsk tried to pretend nothing was going on, the elite
in Las Vegas responded with ker-ching!
Throughout the 1950s, hotels in Sin City held atomic parties, where you could drive out
into the desert and watch as a mushroom cloud rose above the horizon.
Hotels advertized rooms with windows facing the blasts.
Events were held where holidaymakers drank ‘atomic cocktails’ and cheered the detonations.
It was big business.
And, best of all, it was safe!
Unlike the Soviets, who didn’t care which way the wind blew, the Americans had top meteorologists
who could tell them with 100 percent accuracy where any radiation might fall.
Or so they thought.
While the atomic parties were held in Las Vegas, it was residents of places like St.
George, Utah, who were typically closer to the tests.
For residents of this rural Mormon town, watching the bombs go off was something you did to
unwind on a Friday evening; a big, patriotic spectacle that doubled as a cheap night out.
Unfortunately, it was also something that could leave you very sick.
In 1953, a series of 11 detonations took place at the Nevada Test Site.
In the aftermath, a film of gray dust blew into St George.
The government assured citizens that it was perfectly safe, that they should quit worrying.
So people went to work in it.
Sent their children out to play.
It wasn’t until the early 1960s that people noticed the spike in cancer rates in St George.
Today, those that suffered the effects of American nuclear testing are known as the
Downwinders.
Although it was their illnesses that led to the 1963 ban on above ground testing, the
US government refused to accept responsibility.
So far, you might be thinking, so Soviet.
But there is a difference.
The Downwinders were able to speak out about their experiences, to campaign for recognition
without worrying about getting carted off to the gulag.
In 1990, their pressure ultimately led to Congress passing the Radiation Exposure Compensation
Act, establishing a fund for sick Downwinders.
By 2015, it had distributed over $2 billion.
What happened to the Downwinders is undoubtedly shameful.
But there’s a reason Semipalatinsk test site is notorious today, why it’s more worthy
of a video than the Nevada Test Site.
And that’s the poisonous mix of secrecy, denial, and desire of the Soviet Union to
test radiation on its own citizens.
Oh, and regarding compensation.
Those living today with the effects of the Polygon’s tests do get money from the Kazakh
government.
It amounts to 12 dollars a month.
A Land of Death In 1965, a great rumble announced the USSR’s
latest, short-lived testing phase at the Polygon.
Way, way out in the remotest reaches of the site, an underground detonation had diverted
the course of a river.
But this wasn’t just some accidental by-product of an atomic test.
The Soviets were experimenting with the idea of using nuclear weapons in construction projects.
Right, so you know how some firms involved with mining or whatever will use explosive
devices to move earth?
The USSR planned to do that with nuclear weapons.
The 1965 test was a proof of concept, designed to show how one well-placed nuke could divert
a river and create a whole new lake.
Luckily, the rest of the world quickly found out about this harebrained scheme and were
all like: “Uh, no.”
But the traces of that 1965 test still remain, out on the endless plains of Kazakhstan.
Today it’s called Atomic Lake.
Stretching over 500m, with a maximum depth of 80m, Atomic Lake - real name Lake Chagan
- looks almost inviting from the outside, with its pristine blue water.
In fact, you probably could swim in it without coming to any harm.
The water itself is not especially dangerous.
It’s the shoreline you have to watch out for, where pockets of radiation still remain
from that long ago blast.
Impressive as it is, though, Atomic Lake is just one sight in the remains of the Semipalatinsk
test site.
Why don’t we have a look at some of the others?
If you were to travel to the Polygon - and Kazakhstan does intermittently allow tours
- the surviving areas would be divided into “stuff you can see without your flesh melting
off” and “everything else.”
Into this latter category would fall Test Site 4A, where dirty bombs were tested.
Radiation there is still between 100 and 400 times normal, so visiting isn’t a great
idea.
The former category, though, would contain some of Semipalatinsk’s most haunting areas.
Take the Geese.
Sadly not actual, radioactive geese, but a series of concrete walls jutting out the ground.
Looking like gigantic shark fins, they were deigned to measure the effects of atomic bombs
on buildings, but now look like the half-buried ruins of some ancient civilization.
Other areas on the “I want to visit, plus it won’t kill me” list might be a fake
underground metro station the Soviets supposedly built.
We say “supposedly” because, in our research for this video, we didn’t come across anyone
who’d actually visited it, but plenty of people did assure us it’s really there.
The last thing you might do as a hypothetical visitor to the Semipalatinsk test site is
simply wander around with a geiger counter, looking for radiation.
Lots of websites like to claim that the Polygon is doused in radiation, that the ground there
has radiation levels 100 times normal.
But radiation doesn’t work like that.
Rather than lying in an even blanket across the earth, it tends to wind up in a series
of dangerous hotspots, surrounded by tracts of land where the radiation levels are normal.
If you’ve ever been to Chernobyl, you may have seen something similar, with certain
areas being absolutely fine, while others are absolutely no-go.
Speaking of Chernobyl, it’s time we got back to the history of Semipalatinsk.
Because this one-time Soviet test site is a nuclear test site no longer, and there’s
a good reason for this.
It’s time for us to witness the collapse of the USSR’s entire nuclear program.
The Meltdown In terms of juicy historical irony, you’d
be hard pressed to find a statement more dripping with juice than that made by Vitaliy Sklyarov
in February, 1986.
The Minister for Power in Soviet-ruled Ukraine, Sklyarov used a speech that month to declare:
“The odds of a meltdown (at a Soviet nuclear plant) are one in 10,000 years.”
Exactly two months later, the Chernobyl reactor exploded in a haze of radiation and finely-tuned
irony.
The Chernobyl disaster is worthy of a video all on its own - and we’ve actually got
one, again over at our sister channel Biographics - but its effect across the USSR was like
a whole additional explosion.
Thanks to new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, or openness, word of the
Chernobyl disaster actually made it to ordinary people.
Faced with the horrors Soviet nuclear policy could unleash, they began to protest.
In Semipalatinsk, those protests would detonate like a hydrogen bomb.
On February 12, 1989, a botched underground test at the Polygon accidentally released
a huge amount of radioactive gas into the atmosphere.
Two weeks later, the Kzakh poet, Olzhas Suleimenov, was meant to do a reading on live TV, but
instead called for mass anti-nuclear demonstrations.
By spring, a huge protest movement had formed in Kazakhstan.
It called itself Nevada-Semipalatinsk, an attempt to show solidarity with the Downwinders
in America.
Before long, Nevada-Semipalatinsk was a mass Kazakh movement.
It even gained the backing of the newly-installed local leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev.
Then, on October 19, the Soviets detonated a double test device at the Polygon.
It would be the last nuclear test ever conducted in Kazakhstan.
News of the test caused tens of thousands of protestors to flood the republic’s streets.
One million signed a petition demanding an end to nuclear testing.
Sensing rebellion on the winds, Moscow caved.
On October 21, 1989, all testing was halted at Semipalatinsk test site.
By August, 1991, the Polygon had been officially closed down.
Not four months later, Kazakhstan declared independence from the Soviet Union.
At the time of its final test, the Polygon had detonated 456 nuclear weapons, more than
any other site on Earth.
Over 25 percent of all nukes ever detonated had gone off within its confines.
But where things like nuclear weapons are concerned, the story never ends simply with
the dispersal of the mushroom clouds.
For the residents of Semipalatinsk, the final act is yet to come.
Sacrificed for What?
In late 1991, when it became clear that Kazakhstan was on the verge of joining all the other
republics leaving the USSR, Moscow sent officials to the recently-closed Polygon.
There, the men collected all the documents they could find and destroyed them.
They even took the decades of medical records from Anti-Brucellosis Dispensary Number 4.
Then they got on a train back to Russia and vanished into history.
With them went any hope of the world ever understanding what really happened at Semipalatinsk
test site.
Fast forward to today, and what was in those missing records remains a live topic in Kazakhstan.
The towns and villages surrounding the Polygon are rife with cancers, congenital diseases,
and birth defects.
In Semipalatinsk, one in twenty children are said to be born with deformities.
On the ground, people are angry.
They blame the vanished Soviets for condemning them to a life in Hell.
But without those documents, they can never be sure.
While researching this video, we came across articles in science journals like Nature which
suggest the tests must have had some impact on local health, but caution against blaming
radiation for every problem afflicting Semipalatinsk - since 2007 now known as Semey.
It’s worth remembering that a large number of those who died after working on the Chernobyl
cleanup became sick not because of radiation exposure, but because they were so sure they
would get sick that they simply stopped taking care of themselves.
It’s possible something similar happened in Semey.
Then again, it’s also possible that we simply don’t know the extent of Soviet weapons
testing, or what other ghoulish surprises the long-dead Lavrentiy Beria cooked up for
the locals.
Whatever the truth, life around Semey is grim for those worst affected.
With little government support and not much of a social safety net, they cling on at the
margins of society, the victims of a policy decided decades ago in a country they’re
no longer a part of.
As for the Polygon itself, it’s mostly returned to nature.
Seeing it today, you’d be hard pressed to differentiate it from the rest of the endless,
undulating steppe that surrounds it.
But there is a difference.
It’s sometimes said that places where horrifying events happen retain their own special atmosphere,
an invisible layer of horror that can never be scrubbed off.
Usually, people are talking about places like Auschwitz or Ground Zero, places of great
cruelty.
At the Semipalatinsk test site, though, that invisible layer is very much real.
The pockets of radiation that soak the earth across the gigantic site can’t be seen,
touched, or tasted by visitors.
Yet they remain, hidden evidence of the atrocities carried out here.
For better or for worse, the Polygon will always carry these traces of its past.
Invisible reminders of the time when the Soviet Union tested its deadliest weapons on its
own people.