"Gifts" for descendants. How nuclear bombs were lost and never found. How to take shelter during a nuclear disaster Where is the bomb

So, let's say a low-yield nuclear bomb explodes in your city. How long will you have to hide and where to do it to avoid consequences in the form of radioactive fallout?

Michael Dillon, a scientist at Livermore National Laboratory, spoke about radioactive fallout and survival techniques. After much research, analysis of many factors and possible developments, he developed a plan of action in the event of a disaster.

At the same time, Dillon's plan is aimed at ordinary citizens who have no way to determine which way the wind will blow and what the magnitude of the explosion was.

Little bombs

Dillon's method of protection against has so far been developed only in theory. The fact is that it is designed for small nuclear bombs from 1 to 10 kilotons.

Dillon argues that nuclear bombs are now associated with the incredible power and destruction that would have occurred during the Cold War. However, such a threat seems less likely than terrorist attacks using small nuclear bombs, several times less than those that fell on Hiroshima, and simply incomparably less than those that could destroy everything if they happened. global war between countries.

Dillon's plan is based on the assumption that after a small nuclear bomb the city survived and now its residents need to escape from the radioactive fallout.

The diagram below shows the difference between the radius of a bomb in the situation Dillon examines and the radius of a bomb from a Cold War arsenal. The most dangerous area is indicated in dark blue (psi is the pound/in² standard used to measure the force of an explosion; 1 psi = 720 kg/m²).

People located a kilometer from this zone risk receiving a dose of radiation and burns. Range radiation hazard after the explosion of a small nuclear bomb is much less than from a thermo nuclear weapons cold war.

For example, a 10 kiloton warhead will create a radiation threat 1 kilometer from the epicenter, and fallout can go another 10-20 miles. So it turns out that nuclear attack today is not instant death for all living things. Maybe your city will even recover from it.

What to do if a bomb exploded

If you see a bright flash, do not go near the window: you could get hurt while looking back. As with thunder and lightning, the blast wave travels much slower than the explosion.

Now you will have to take care of protection from radioactive fallout, but in the event of a small explosion, you do not need to look for a special isolated shelter. For protection, you can take refuge in an ordinary building, you just need to know which one.

30 minutes after the explosion you should find a suitable shelter. In half an hour, all the initial radiation from the explosion will disappear and the main danger will be radioactive particles the size of a grain of sand that will settle around you.

Dillon explains:

If, during a disaster, you are in a precarious shelter that cannot provide reasonable protection, and you know that there is no such building nearby, within 15 minutes, you will have to wait half an hour and then go look for it. Before you enter the shelter, make sure that there are no radioactive substances the size of sand particles on you.

But what buildings can become a normal shelter? Dillon says the following:

There should be as many obstacles and distance as possible between you and the consequences of the explosion. Buildings with thick concrete walls and the roof a large number of earth - for example, when you are sitting in a basement surrounded on all sides by earth. You can also go deep into large buildings to be as far away from open air with the consequences of the disaster.

Think about where you can find such a building in your city and how far from you it is.

Maybe it's the basement of your house or a building with big amount interior spaces and walls, with bookshelves and concrete walls or something else. Just choose buildings that you can reach within half an hour and don't rely on transport: many will flee the city and the roads will be completely clogged.

Let's say you got to your shelter, and now the question arises: how long to sit in it until the threat passes? The films show different paths of events, ranging from a few minutes in a shelter to several generations in a bunker. Dillon claims that they are all very far from the truth.

It is best to stay in the shelter until help arrives.

Given that we are talking about a small bomb with a blast radius of less than a mile, rescuers must react quickly and begin evacuation. In the event that no one comes to the rescue, you need to spend at least a day in the shelter, but it’s still better to wait until the rescuers arrive - they will indicate the necessary evacuation route so that you don’t jump out into places with high level radiation.

The principle of operation of radioactive fallout

It may seem strange to be allowed to leave the shelter after 24 hours, but Dillon explains that the biggest danger after an explosion comes from the early radioactive fallout, which is heavy enough to settle within a few hours after the explosion. Typically, they cover the area in the immediate vicinity of the explosion, depending on the wind direction.

These large particles are the most dangerous due to the high level of radiation, which will ensure the immediate onset of radiation sickness. This differs from the lower doses of radiation that can be caused many years after the event.

Taking refuge in a shelter will not save you from the prospect of cancer in the future, but it will prevent you from dying quickly from radiation sickness.

It is also worth remembering that radioactive contamination is not a magical substance that flies everywhere and penetrates into every place. There will be a limited region with high levels of radiation, and after you leave the shelter, you will need to get out of it as soon as possible.

This is where you need rescuers who will tell you where the border of the danger zone is and how far you need to go. Of course, in addition to the most dangerous large particles in the air, many lighter ones will remain, but they are not capable of causing immediate radiation sickness- what you are trying to avoid after the explosion.

Dillon also noted that radioactive particles decay very quickly, so being outside the shelter 24 hours after the explosion is much safer than immediately after it.

Our pop culture continues to savor the theme of nuclear, which will leave only a few survivors on the planet, taking refuge in underground bunkers, but a nuclear attack may not be so destructive and large-scale.

So you should think about your city and figure out where to run if something happens. Maybe some ugly concrete building that you always thought was an architectural miscarriage will one day save your life.

It is no longer a secret information that in the years Cold War about 50 were lost nuclear warheads, and not all of them remained lying in deserted areas.

In 1980, the US Department of Defense published a report in which there were already 32 cases of loss of nuclear bombs. At the same time, the same documents were issued and navy under the Freedom of Information Act, which listed 381 nuclear weapons incidents in the United States between 1965 and 1977. We have already read about 13 cases related to and one of them, which concerns the tragedy over the Spanish village of Palomares, is simply shocking.

Let's find out more about this case.

On January 21, 1968, a US Air Force B-52 strategic bomber crashed near the American base at North Star Bay. There were four such bombs on board the plane that crashed. The plane broke through the ice and ended up on the seabed. Officially, the US authorities stated that everything atomic bombs raised from sea ​​day. However, in reality, only three bombs were discovered and recovered from the Arctic Ocean. But the fourth charge was never found.

So how it was...

The plane crash over the Thule base occurred on January 21, 1968, when, after a fire broke out on board the B-52 strategic bomber, the crew was forced to urgently abandon the plane over the Thule US Air Force base in Greenland and the out-of-control plane crashed 12 km from the base. The bomber was on combat patrol as part of Operation Chrome Dome and carried four B28FI thermonuclear bombs. As a result of the crash of the plane, abandoned by the crew, the thermonuclear ammunition collapsed, causing radiation contamination of the area. Subsequently, reports appeared in the press based on declassified documents that during search work Fragments of only three of the four bombs on board were found, and the fate of the fourth remains unknown.

1. Flight mission

Since 1960 Strategic Command The US Air Force conducted Operation Chrome Dome, which consisted of a constant combat patrol in the air of strategic bombers with thermonuclear weapons on board, in readiness to strike targets on Soviet territory. Since 1961, as part of the operation, tasks began to be carried out under the code names “Hard Head” for visual observation of radar station at Thule Air Base, which served as a key component of the BMEWS missile attack early warning system. The goal of Hard Head was to obtain a quick assessment of the situation in the event of a communication failure with the station. The aircraft operating as part of this mission also carried thermonuclear bombs.

Set of four thermonuclear bombs B28

2. Disaster

On January 21, 1968, a B-52G bomber belonging to the 380th Bomb Wing took off from Plattsburgh Air Force Base, located in Plattsburgh, New York, for another patrol according to the Hard Head plan. strategic aviation USA. The ship's commander was Captain John Hogue. On board, in addition to the five full-time crew members, were a replacement navigator, Captain Chris Curtis, and a reserve (third) pilot, Major Alfred D'Mario.

Before departure, D'Mario placed three foam rubber cushions covered with fabric on the heating vent, under the navigator-instructor's seat in the aft part of the lower deck, and soon after departure - another one. The flight was uneventful, with the exception of mid-air refueling from a tanker KC-135, which had to be carried out manually due to problems with the autopilot.

About an hour after refueling, the commander ordered the co-pilot, Captain Leonard Svitenko, to take a break for rest, and Major D'Mario to take his place. Since it was cold in the cockpit, D'Mario opened the air intake valve from the engine air tract into the heating system. Due to a technical malfunction, the hot air from the turbine was practically not cooled when entering the heating system, and soon the cabin became very hot, and the foam cushions folded under the seat ignited. There was a smell of burning rubber. The crew began searching for the source of the smell, and the navigator, after inspecting the lower deck twice, discovered a source of fire. Attempts to extinguish the flames using two fire extinguishers were unsuccessful, and at 15:22 EST, when the aircraft was 140 kilometers from Thule Air Force Base, Captain Hogue transmitted a mayday signal and requested permission for an emergency landing. Within five minutes, all fire extinguishers on board were expended, the power supply was cut off, and the cockpit filled with smoke to such an extent that the pilots could not read the instruments. The ship's commander, realizing that it would not be possible to land the car, ordered the crew to leave the plane. Four crew members ejected as soon as D'Mario confirmed that the plane was directly above the base. They were followed by the pilots - Hog himself and D'Mario. Co-pilot Svitenko, left without an ejection seat, tried to leave the car through the lower hatch, but received a fatal head injury.

The out-of-control aircraft flew north for some time, then turned 180° and crashed onto the ice of North Star Bay at 15:39 EST. The impact exploded the conventional fuses in all four bombs, and although there was no nuclear explosion, radioactive components were scattered over a large area. The ignited aviation fuel melted the ice and the wreckage sank to the bottom of the ocean.

Hog and D'Mario landed directly on the airbase within ten minutes of each other and immediately informed the base commander that at least six crew members had managed to eject and that there were hydrogen bombs on board the crashed B-52. Rescuers were able to locate the remaining survivors crew members. The longest search took for Captain Curtis, who left the plane first and landed at a distance of 9.7 km from the base. He was found only 21 hours later and suffered greatly from hypothermia (the air temperature reached -31 °), but managed to survive, wrapped in parachute.

An aerial reconnaissance of the crash site, carried out almost immediately, was able to detect only six engines, a tire and small debris on the ice. The incident was classified as a "Broken Arrow", a code designating a nuclear weapons incident that did not pose a threat of war.

Loading contaminated ice into tanks

3. Crested Ice Project

Explosions and fire destroyed most debris scattered over an area approximately 4.8 km long and 1.6 km wide. Parts of the bomb bay were found 3.2 km away north of the place fall, indicating that the plane began to collapse while still in the air. The ice at the crash site was broken, creating a hole with a diameter of about 50 m. South of the point The fall of the burning jet fuel left a blackened spot 670 by 120 m, this area was most contaminated with spilled JP-4 fuel and radioactive elements, including plutonium, uranium, americium and tritium, the concentration of plutonium reached 380 mg/m².

American and Danish services immediately began work to clean up and decontaminate the area. The project received the official code name "Crested Ice", and (unofficially among the participants) - "Doctor Frizzle". The goal of the project was to complete the work before the spring thaw in order to prevent radioactive contamination of the ocean.

US Air Force General Richard Overton Hunziker was appointed head of the operation. To ensure round-the-clock operation in the immediate vicinity of the crash site, “Camp Hunziker” was created, consisting of residential igloos, a power plant, a communications center and a helicopter port. Two ice roads were built for communication with the air base. Several prefabricated huts, a trailer with decontamination equipment, and a public restroom were later installed.

To monitor the decontamination of people and equipment, on January 25, a “zero line” was established - the boundary of a contamination zone measuring 1.6 by 4.8 km (1 by 2 miles), within which alpha decay was recorded. The operation was carried out in extreme weather conditions, average temperature the air was about −40° Celsius, periodically dropping to −60°, the wind speed reached 40 m/s. Since the accident occurred during polar night, I had to work under artificial light, the first sunrise took place only on February 14th.

Using graders, contaminated snow and ice from the accident site were loaded into wooden containers. The containers were stored at a site near the air base and then reloaded to steel tanks, which were sent by sea to the USA. The hydrogen bomb debris was sent to the Pantex plant in Texas for examination, and the tanks for disposal were sent to the Savannah River nuclear repository in South Carolina.

The Air Force monitored airborne contamination levels through respirator testing. Alpha decay was detected on 335 of the 9837 respirators collected, but within acceptable standards. The level of plutonium contamination was checked through urine tests, and no traces of plutonium were found in any of the 756 samples taken.

The operation ended on September 13, 1968, when last tank was loaded onto a ship bound for the USA. A total of 2,100 m3 (55,000 gallons) of radioactive liquid and 30 tanks of radioactive liquid were collected. various materials, some of which were also infected. By the end of the project, 700 American and Danish specialists, as well as more than 70 US government agencies, had participated. The costs of the operation are estimated at $9.4 million ($58.8 million in 2010 prices).

Star III submersible

4. Search for bombs

In August 1968, an underwater search for the remains of hydrogen bombs, especially the uranium shells of the second stages, was organized using the Star III underwater vehicle. The real goals of the operation were classified; the instructions prescribed that in discussions with the Danes the operation should be referred to as “exploration of the ocean floor at the crash site.” Underwater work involved significant technical difficulties and were terminated early. As a result of the search, one practically complete uranium shell and fragments, together corresponding to two more, and some minor details were discovered. The fourth shell was not found. An Atomic Energy Commission document dated September 1968 stated that the fourth shell was believed to be in "a pile of massive debris found at the bottom."

Operation Chrome Dome

Operation Chrome Dome was significantly scaled back after the Palomares disaster, and was finally abandoned after the Thule incident as the costs and risks associated with the operation were reassessed as unacceptable. Intercontinental ballistic missiles ground and sea-based became the main means for the United States to ensure nuclear parity.

After the disasters over Palomares and Thule, in which a conventional explosion led to the dispersion nuclear materials, the researchers concluded that the explosive used in the bombs was not stable enough and could not withstand the conditions of a plane crash. It was also found that the electrical circuits of the safety devices are not reliable enough, and in the event of a fire there is a danger short circuit. These conclusions served as the impetus for the beginning of a new stage of research and design work to improve the safety of nuclear weapons.

Livermore National Laboratory developed the so-called “Susan Test” to test explosives for sustainability. The test involved firing a special projectile at a sample of explosive placed on a hard metal surface. By 1979, Los Alamos National Laboratory had developed a new "low-sensitivity" high explosive for use in nuclear devices. Ray Kidder, an American physicist and nuclear weapons designer, argued that if the bombs had been equipped with new explosives during the Palomares and Tula disasters, the explosions would not have occurred.

40 years have passed...

Bomber pilot John Hogue, almost half a century after the incident, spoke about what happened: “The situation got out of control. A fire started in the cockpit, and after five minutes we practically had no control over the plane. For the first time in my life, I was forced to send an SOS signal.” Another pilot of the crashed B-52, Joe Di-Amario, testifies: “We only had a few minutes to reach the military base in Thule [Greenland], we even saw the landing lights, but the situation was rapidly deteriorating. The car could not be saved.” .

For local residents, the incident came as a shock. Detonated when the plane crashed fuel tanks. A witness to the disaster, who watched the plane fall from the shore, said: “I saw an explosion. At first I didn’t hear anything, but I saw a monstrous explosion.” Another witness to the B-52 crash shared his memories of what he saw: “We were sitting in a bar. It was an ordinary Sunday morning when news came that a plane with nuclear bombs had fallen into the ocean, breaking through the ice. People were shocked.”

Immediately after the air disaster, search teams were equipped. Hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of radioactive snow and ice were removed from the disaster site. They searched for a long time; a submarine even came to the crash site of the bomber. Three nuclear charges were found and successfully neutralized, but the fourth bomb could not be found, although it was officially announced that all the consequences of the plane crash had been eliminated, the bombs had been found and raised from the seabed.

An eyewitness to the incident, a local resident, recalls: “We were young and were happy to help the American military. They collected the remains of the aircraft and equipment, loaded everything into containers and took them to the base. They didn’t really tell us how things really were.”

Everyone who took part in the rescue operation was thanked, and the case was closed, put into the archives under the heading “secret” for many 40 years. Now the secrecy period established by US law has expired, and it has become clear that Greenland has been living on a nuclear bomb for the last 40 years.

In fact, only three bombs were discovered and recovered from the Arctic Ocean. But the fourth charge was never found. This is evidenced by a declassified US government video obtained by the BBC.

According to documents, by the end of January one of the blackened sections of ice in the area of ​​the accident was visible. The ice there re-froze, and through it the outlines of the weapon's parachute could be seen. By April, it was decided to send the Star III submarine to the incident area to search for lost bomb under registration number 78252. The real purpose of the submarine’s arrival was deliberately hidden from the Danish authorities, the BBC notes.

"The fact that this operation involves searching for an object or missing part of a weapon should be treated as confidential NOFORN (which means not to be revealed to any foreign country),” says one of the documents, dated July.

Meanwhile, the underwater search was unsuccessful. At first this was hindered by various technical problems and then winter came. It was decided to stop the search operation, the documents say. They also say that the missing part of the weapon contained radioactive elements such as uranium and plutonium.

And now, as the BBC notes, local residents are concerned that the bomb has rusted under the influence of salt water and poses a huge threat to the environment.

sources

In 1961, the Soviet Union tested a nuclear bomb so powerful it would have been too large for military use. And this event had far-reaching consequences of various kinds. That same morning, October 30, 1961, the Soviet Tu-95 bomber took off from Olenya airbase to Kola Peninsula, in the far north of Russia.

This Tu-95 was a specially improved version of an aircraft that had entered service a few years earlier; a large, sprawling, four-engine monster that was supposed to transport the USSR's arsenal of nuclear bombs.

During that decade, huge breakthroughs occurred in Soviet nuclear research. Second World War placed the USA and the USSR in the same camp, but the post-war period gave way to coldness in relations, and then their freezing. And the Soviet Union, which was faced with the fact of rivalry with one of the world's largest superpowers, had only one choice: to join the race, and quickly.

On August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear device, known as "Joe-1" in the West - in the distant steppes of Kazakhstan, assembled as a result of the work of spies who penetrated the American atomic bomb program. During the years of intervention, the testing program quickly took off and began, and during its course some 80 devices were detonated; In 1958 alone, the USSR tested 36 nuclear bombs.

But nothing compared to this test.

The Tu-95 carried a huge bomb under its belly. It was too large to fit inside the aircraft's bomb bay, where such munitions were typically carried. The bomb was 8 meters long, about 2.6 meters in diameter and weighed more than 27 tons. Physically, it was very similar in shape to the "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki fifteen years earlier. In the USSR she was called both “Kuzka’s Mother” and “Tsar Bomba”, and the latter name has been well preserved for her.

The Tsar Bomba was not your average nuclear bomb. It was the result of a feverish attempt by Soviet scientists to create the most powerful nuclear weapons and thereby support Nikita Khrushchev's desire to make the world tremble with power. Soviet technology. It was more than a metal monstrosity, too large to fit into even the largest aircraft. It was a city destroyer, the ultimate weapon.

This Tupolev, painted bright white to reduce the effect of the bomb's flash, reached its destination. New Earth, a sparsely populated archipelago in the Barents Sea, above the frozen northern edges of the USSR. The Tupolev pilot, Major Andrei Durnovtsev, took the plane to the Soviet training ground at Mityushikha at an altitude of about 10 kilometers. A small advanced Tu-16 bomber was flying nearby, ready to film the impending explosion and take air samples from the explosion zone for further analysis.

In order for the two aircraft to have a chance of survival - and there was no more than 50% of them - the Tsar Bomba was equipped with a giant parachute weighing about a ton. The bomb was supposed to slowly descend to a predetermined height - 3940 meters - and then explode. And then, two bombers will already be 50 kilometers away from her. This should have been enough to survive the explosion.

The Tsar Bomba was detonated at 11:32 Moscow time. At the site of the explosion a fire ball almost 10 kilometers wide. The fireball rose higher under the influence of its own shock wave. The flash was visible from a distance of 1000 kilometers from everywhere.

The mushroom cloud at the explosion site grew 64 kilometers in height, and its cap expanded until it spread 100 kilometers from end to end. Surely the sight was indescribable.

For Novaya Zemlya the consequences were catastrophic. In the village of Severny, 55 kilometers from the epicenter of the explosion, all houses were completely destroyed. It was reported that in Soviet areas hundreds of kilometers from the explosion zone there was damage of all kinds - houses collapsed, roofs sank, glass flew out, doors broke. Radio communication did not work for an hour.

“Tupolev” Durnovtsev was lucky; the blast wave from the Tsar Bomba caused the giant bomber to fall 1,000 meters before the pilot could regain control of it.

One Soviet operator who witnessed the detonation reported the following:

“The clouds under the plane and at a distance from it were illuminated by a powerful flash. A sea of ​​light spread under the hatch and even the clouds began to glow and became transparent. At that moment, our plane found itself between two layers of clouds and below, in a crevice, a huge, bright, orange ball blossomed. The ball was powerful and majestic, like... Slowly and quietly he crept upward. Having broken through a thick layer of clouds, it continued to grow. It seemed as if he had sucked in the entire Earth. The spectacle was fantastic, unreal, supernatural.”

The Tsar Bomba released incredible energy - it is now estimated at 57 megatons, or 57 million tons of TNT equivalent. This is 1,500 times more powerful than both the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and 10 times more powerful than all the munitions expended during World War II. The sensors registered the blast wave of the bomb, which circled the Earth not once, not twice, but three times.

Such an explosion cannot be kept secret. The US had a spy plane several tens of kilometers from the explosion. It contained a special optical device, a bhangemeter, useful for calculating the strength of remote nuclear explosions. Data from this aircraft - codenamed Speedlight - was used by the Foreign Weapons Assessment Group to calculate the results of this secret test.

International condemnation was not long in coming, not only from the USA and Great Britain, but also from the Scandinavian neighbors of the USSR, such as Sweden. The only bright spot in this mushroom cloud was that since the fireball did not make contact with the Earth, there was amazingly little radiation.

Everything could have been different. Initially, the Tsar Bomba was intended to be twice as powerful.

One of the architects of this formidable device was the Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov, a man who would later become world famous for his efforts to rid the world of the very weapons he helped create. He was a veteran of the Soviet atomic bomb program from the very beginning and became part of the team that created the first atomic bombs for the USSR.

Sakharov began work on a multilayer fission-fusion-fission device, a bomb that creates additional energy from nuclear processes at its core. This involved wrapping deuterium - a stable isotope of hydrogen - in a layer of unenriched uranium. The uranium was supposed to capture neutrons from the burning deuterium and also start the reaction. Sakharov called it “puff pastry”. This breakthrough allowed the USSR to create the first hydrogen bomb, a device much more powerful than atomic bombs had been a few years earlier.

Khrushchev instructed Sakharov to come up with a bomb that was more powerful than all the others already tested at that time.

The Soviet Union needed to show that it could beat the United States in the race nuclear weapons, according to Philip Coyle, former leader nuclear weapons testing in the United States under President Bill Clinton. He spent 30 years helping to create and test atomic weapons. “The US was far ahead because of the work it did in preparing the bombs for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And then they did a lot of atmospheric testing before the Russians even did their first.”

“We were ahead and the Soviets were trying to do something to tell the world that they were a force to be reckoned with. The Tsar Bomba was primarily intended to make the world stop and recognize the Soviet Union as an equal, says Coyle.

The original design—a three-layer bomb with uranium layers separating each stage—would have had a yield of 100 megatons. 3000 times more than the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Soviet Union had already been tested by that time large devices in the atmosphere, equivalent to several megatons, but this bomb would be simply gigantic compared to those. Some scientists began to believe that it was too big.

With such enormous power, there would be no guarantee that a giant bomb would not fall into a swamp in the northern USSR, leaving behind a huge cloud of radioactive fallout.

This is partly what Sakharov feared, says Frank von Hippel, a physicist and head of the department of public and international affairs at Princeton University.

"He was really worried about the amount of radioactivity the bomb might create," he says. “And about the genetic consequences for future generations.”

“And that was the beginning of the journey from bomb designer to dissident.”

Before the tests began, layers of uranium, which were supposed to accelerate the bomb to incredible power, were replaced by layers of lead, which reduced the intensity of the nuclear reaction.

The Soviet Union created this powerful weapon, that scientists did not want to test it at full power. And the problems with this destructive device did not stop there.

Tu-95 bombers designed to carry nuclear weapons Soviet Union, were designed to carry much lighter weapons. The Tsar Bomba was so large that it could not be carried on a rocket, and so heavy that the planes carrying it could not carry it to its target and stay with it. the right amount fuel for return. And in general, if the bomb had been as powerful as it was intended, the planes might not have returned.

Even nuclear weapons can be too many, says Coyle, now a senior fellow at the Arms Control Center in Washington. "It's hard to find a use for it unless you want to destroy very large cities," he says. "It's just too big to use."

Von Hippel agrees. “These things (large free-falling nuclear bombs) were designed so that you could destroy a target from a kilometer away. The direction of movement has changed - towards increasing the accuracy of missiles and the number of warheads."

The Tsar Bomba also led to other consequences. It generated so much concern—five times more than any other test before it—that it led to a taboo on atmospheric nuclear weapons testing in 1963. Von Hippel says Sakharov was particularly concerned about the amount of radioactive carbon-14 that was being released into the atmosphere, an isotope with a particularly long half-life. It was mitigated in part by carbon from fossil fuels in the atmosphere.

Sakharov was worried that the bomb, which was no longer tested, would not be repelled by its own blast wave - like the Tsar Bomba - and would cause global radioactive fallout, spreading toxic dirt throughout the planet.

Sakharov became an outspoken supporter of the 1963 partial test ban and an outspoken critic of nuclear proliferation. And at the end of the 1960s - and missile defense, which he rightly believed would spur a new nuclear arms race. He was increasingly ostracized by the state and subsequently became a dissident, sentenced to Nobel Prize world and was called “the conscience of humanity,” says von Hippel.

It seems that the Tsar Bomba caused precipitation of a completely different kind.

Based on materials from the BBC

Koh Kambaran. My first tests nuclear charges Pakistan decided to hold in Balochistan province. The charges were placed in a tunnel dug in Mount Koh Kambaran and detonated in May 1998. Local residents hardly visit this area, with the exception of a few nomads and herbalists.

Maralinga. A site in southern Australia where atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons took place was once believed to be local residents sacred. As a result, twenty years after the end of the tests, it was organized reoperation on cleaning Maralinga. The first was carried out after the final test in 1963.

Reserved On May 18, 1974, an 8-kiloton bomb was tested in the Indian desert of Rajasthan. In May 1998, charges were exploded at the Pokhran test site - five of them, including a thermonuclear charge of 43 kilotons.

Bikini Atoll. In the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean there is Bikini Atoll, where the United States actively conducted nuclear tests. Other explosions were rarely caught on film, but these were filmed quite often. Of course - 67 tests between 1946 and 1958.

Christmas Island. Christmas Island, also known as Kiritimati, stands out for the fact that tests were carried out on it atomic weapons both Britain and the USA. In 1957, the first British hydrogen bomb was detonated there, and in 1962, as part of Project Dominic, the United States tested 22 charges there.

Lop Nor. In place of the dried salt lake In western China, about 45 warheads were detonated, both in the atmosphere and underground. Testing was stopped in 1996.

Mururoa. Atoll in the south Pacific Ocean survived a lot - or rather, 181 French nuclear weapons tests from 1966 to 1986. The last charge got stuck in an underground mine and when it exploded, it created a crack several kilometers long. After this, the tests were stopped.

New Earth. Archipelago in North Arctic Ocean chosen for nuclear tests September 17, 1954. Since then, 132 nuclear explosions have been carried out there, including a test of the most powerful hydrogen bomb in the world - “Tsar Bombs” of 58 megatons.

Semipalatinsk From 1949 to 1989, at least 468 nuclear tests were carried out at the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site. So much plutonium accumulated there that from 1996 to 2012, Kazakhstan, Russia and the United States conducted secret operation on search and collection and disposal of radioactive materials. It was possible to collect about 200 kg of plutonium.

Nevada. The Nevada Test Site, which has existed since 1951, breaks all records - 928 nuclear explosions, 800 of them underground. Considering that the test site is located only 100 kilometers from Las Vegas, nuclear mushrooms half a century ago were considered a completely normal part of entertainment for tourists.