My home: Nuclear Base. Episode 02: "Main Testing Field"
The site was selected in 1947 by Lavrentiy Beria.
Prisoners were used to construct a city, with houses, along with a bridge, a simulated subway in the vicinity of the test site, an airport, a rail-station, hospitals, schools. Armor hardware, and approximately 50 aircraft were brought to the testing grounds, as well as over 1,500 animals to test the bomb's effects on life.
It was falsely claimed that surrounding vast 18,000 km steppe was "uninhabited".
The first Soviet bomb, Operation First Lightning, was conducted in on August 29, 1949, scattering fallout on nearby villages of Kazakh nomads, which Lavrentii Beria, had neglected to evacuate.
The yield was 22 kilotons of TNT, similar to the United States' "Fat Man" bomb. Its development was years ahead of American military-intelligence projections, and came as quite a shock to the West.
Later on, this area was used for more than 100 subsequent ...
