But have you heard of Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan? The former Soviet Union secretly conducted 343 nuclear tests there from 1949 to 1989, but instead of a desert in the middle of nowhere, it's a steppe where 700,000 Kazakhs have always lived.
The "dead house" is the size of France
Semipalatinsk, the capital of the French-sized Ruling region, is located south of Siberia, and in the 19th century was a trading post for furs in the Russian Empire. The Russian writer Dostoevsky, who was exiled there, wrote his novel The Dead House Handbook based on his time there. Today, Semipalatinsk is indeed like a big "dead house": its inhabitants lack immunity, age before their time, and suffer from cancers; babies are born without limbs or bones; children are born with dementia; and there are many cases of malignant genetic mutations ... ...The poor, frightened and aggrieved Semipalatinskers have gone on like this for decades, and their future is just as heavy to bear. "We were just experiments" In 1947, the former Soviet army set aside and put under heavy military guard a 18,500-square-kilometer steppe southwest of the city.
The "Semipalatinsk Polygon," the command center for Soviet nuclear weapons testing, was secretly established in the nuclear testing area under the code name Semipalatinsk-21. It was codenamed "Semipalatinsk-21" in the nuclear test area. The polygon is not marked on the map, but it has left its mark on the local population, which can never be removed. Shaym Bamukhanov, a Soviet bioscientist in his 80s, led a team of scientific researchers who investigated the dangers of nuclear weapons from 1957 to 1962. In more than 20 reports to Moscow, the team described the devastation caused by early nuclear tests: soil saturated with radioactive particles, surviving livestock deformed. In addition, the reports described a number of "human diseases." However, the staff of the test center attributed the quadrupling of the local cancer rate and the number of disabilities and deformities to the fact that "the Kazakhs do not eat well". The army "blocked" the team's findings, accusing the "troublemakers" of being unpatriotic, and disbanded the scientific team in 1962.
How many explosions were there?
Nearly 200 underground experiments were conducted at the test center at Dahlgren Hill, deep in the "polygon. To this day, large quantities of radioactive nuclear elements - plutonium, strontium and palladium - lie buried beneath the mountain. The mountain, which was battered with many craters, was greatly damaged during the tests. The International Atomic Energy Agency recognizes that the cracked mountain has long since lost its integrity, and that nuclear-contaminated rainwater is running down the mountain's crevices. However, the scope of the nuclear tests goes far beyond that. For more than a decade, nuclear explosions were detonated in the atmosphere and in the air, and on August 28, 1949, the Soviet Union exploded its first experimental atomic bomb in the "polygon", just 30 meters above the ground. The village of Doron, 50 kilometers from the blast site, was left unprotected, and the 800 local villagers were exposed to deadly radiation. High winds that night carried the atomic dust another 500 kilometers. This particularly harmful form of nuclear testing was not banned until 1963. As of "October 19, 1989, the Soviet Union had conducted at least 670 nuclear explosions in the region, exposing 700,000 residents of the Shemeh area to fatal or disabling doses of radiation. The International Atomic Energy Agency estimates the number at 86, and states that at least 86 more nuclear explosions have been detonated in the atmosphere.After 1963, the Soviet Union nominally shifted all testing underground. However, the vertical depths of the 88 underground silos were simply not deep enough to prevent "contamination of human living space with radioactive material", and nuclear waste was still "splashed" into the air during blasting. In order to test the feasibility of dispersing nuclear waste for use as a weapon of mass destruction, bombs containing radioactive waste were dropped by pilots in the area. In addition, there were other types of nuclear explosions in which chemical equipment was applied.
However, the exact number of nuclear explosions is only an estimate, and the relevant data from the tests remain a top military secret to this day.
Even babies get cancer
Borat, a villager, was a child in 1949 and, like many children, ran out to see the first nuclear explosion. The day before every (nuclear) test, the soldiers came and told us to put the china away and not to turn on the oven," Borat said. Because the explosion would blow the oven door off and set the house on fire. But they never told us that it was even less safe to work in the fields, or that the milk and meat that came out of this would make us sick if we ate it." That's not bad enough; some of the soldiers told the locals to stand outdoors during the blast so they wouldn't be crushed. They don't seem to realize that radiation kills faster than rocks. "They also didn't say that many people would go blind, and that many people couldn't be cured of pain all over their bodies. The daughters who married in our village got divorced because they couldn't have children. So many of the children are stupid, and many of the young men have committed suicide." The local population was not the only one who suffered. Only about 100 of the more than 30,000 Kazakh soldiers who served at the various sites of Soviet nuclear testing at the time are still alive, and in 1991, what was then the 4th Prevention and Control Station for Prucellosis was renamed the Institute of Radiation Medicine and Ecology. Last year we treated 3,200 patients, which is 18.5% more than the year before," says Prof. Boris Gusev of the Institute. Decades from now, after those who were directly exposed to radiation have died, there will still be people here who have been affected by radiation, some of whom are not even born yet. It is clear that those who were exposed to radiation from above-ground and airborne nuclear explosions between 1949 and 1963 suffered the most. The people born after the tests went underground were healthier and got sick in a different way than before." Prof. Gusev said, "The effects seem to have popped right into the next generation. In the 9-15 years after the first trials, many people died of cancer, 60% of which were abnormal.
Over the next 10 years, the prevalence dropped to near normal. But by 1985, we found another abnormal rise in various cancers - blood, breast, skin suit and brain. But direct radiation has been minimized. Some Kazakhs are also suffering from skin cancers such as melanoma, a condition that is not easy for Kazakhs to develop, but which even babies now contract."