Travel to Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site

On 29 August 1949, a 22-kiloton plutonium device codenamed First Lightning detonated from a tower on the Kazakh steppe, ending the American nuclear monopoly and dividing the world into two armed camps. The blast was modeled on the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki, its design informed by Soviet espionage within the Manhattan Project and the work of physicist Igor Kurchatov, who had vowed not to shave until the test succeeded and wore his iconic beard for the rest of his life. The site had been selected in 1947 by Lavrentiy Beria, head of the NKVD and overseer of the nuclear program, who declared the 18,000-square-kilometer steppe uninhabited. He was wrong: an estimated 500,000 people lived within fallout range, and the city of Semipalatinsk with 150,000 residents sat just 150 kilometers to the east.

Over the next four decades, 456 nuclear explosions were conducted at the Semipalatinsk Test Site, releasing combined energy equivalent to 2,500 Hiroshima bombs. Of these, 116 were atmospheric detonations at the Opytnoe Pole, the Experimental Field where the first test took place, conducted from towers, ground level, or dropped from aircraft between 1949 and 1963. After the Limited Test Ban Treaty prohibited atmospheric testing, 340 underground detonations continued in boreholes and tunnel systems at the Degelen mountain complex and the Balapan area until the final explosion on 19 October 1989. The Polygon was the Soviet equivalent of Nevada, but unlike its American counterpart, it operated with deliberate disregard for civilian populations downwind of the blasts.