How the USSR tested the atomic bomb on its soldiers and officers

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

65 years ago, on September 17, 1954, a TASS report was published in Pravda, which stated: “In accordance with the plan of research and experimental work, in the last days in the Soviet Union, a test of one of the types of atomic weapons was carried out. The purpose of the test was to study the effects of an atomic explosion. During the test, valuable results were obtained that will help Soviet scientists and engineers successfully solve the problems of protecting against an atomic attack. " The troops have fulfilled their task: the country's nuclear shield has been created."

Everything is smooth, streamlined, without details. For a long time, no one knew how the test of the lethal charge went. Therefore, they recognized and shuddered - it turned out that it was carried out in the presence of people, More precisely, it was tested on people …

Marshal Zhukov is the personification of courage and ingenuity. He was not afraid of the enemy, did not tremble before Stalin. A brave commander, an excellent strategist. About Zhukov - cast lines by Joseph Brodsky: "A warrior, before whom many fell / the walls, even though the sword was the enemy's dullness, / the brilliance of the maneuver about Hannibal / reminiscent of the Volga steppes …"

But he did not hesitate to throw thousands of soldiers into battle - not necessarily in the interests of the cause, but simply because such was a lethal strategy, and the Supreme ordered. Vladimir Karpov, the author of the novel "Marshal Zhukov", wrote that the soldiers nicknamed him "The Butcher" - for not putting a penny on the life of the servicemen

In the epic film "Liberation" there is an episode in which Stalin asks the military when the Soviet army will take Kiev away from the Germans. The generals responded - they say, on the twentieth of November forty-third, Comrade Stalin. And he looked at them wisely, filled his pipe and edifyingly said: "Kiiv must be taken by November 7, the anniversary of the Great October Revolution …" The main thing is that the rest - bloody, crippled - limped to Khreshchatyk. And a red flag was raised over some ruin …

“How much he shed the blood of a soldier in a foreign land! Well, grieved? Brodsky asked. Doubtful. So it's a war. Give sacrifices to the war.

In 1954, Stalin was gone. But Zhukov remained. And his habit remained the same: not to spare people. And the ambition that it was, remained the same, and the old ambitions. The marshal slashed a steel gaze of the generals, stretched out in a string, ordered. Namely: to prepare hitherto unseen maneuvers under the affectionate name "Snowball". Their goal was defined as "a breakthrough of the prepared tactical defense of the enemy with the use of atomic weapons." Zhukov was at that time the first deputy minister of defense - Nikolai Bulganin. He approved the idea. Nikita Khrushchev, the first secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, also nodded graciously.

Hitherto unseen maneuvers took place in September 1954 at the Totsk training ground in the Orenburg region. They were attended by 212 combat units, 45 thousand soldiers and officers. 600 tanks and self-propelled artillery installations, 600 armored personnel carriers of various types, 500 guns and mortars, more than 300 aircraft

Preparations for the exercises lasted three months. For the "little war" - a rehearsal of the Third World War - an enormous field was prepared with trenches, trenches and anti-tank ditches, pillboxes, bunkers, and dugouts. But these were still flowers. Ahead was a "mushroom" - a nuclear one.

On the eve of the exercise, the officers were shown a secret film about the operation of nuclear weapons. The special cinema pavilion was admitted only on the basis of a list and an identity card in the presence of the regiment commander and a KGB representative. The "spectators" were admonished as follows: "You have had a great honor - for the first time in the world, to act in real conditions of using a nuclear bomb." The honor, of course, was dubious, but you couldn't argue with the authorities. However, then no one really knew what a nuclear charge was …

As usual, during the maneuvers, some attacked, others defended. On that day, September 14, more shells and bombs were fired and dropped than during the storming of Berlin. Those that attacked were already walking through the contaminated area. Because before the offensive, an atomic bomb with the affectionate name "Tatyanka" with a capacity of 44 kilotons was dropped from a Tu-4 bomber from a height of 8 thousand meters. It was several times more powerful than the one that the Americans blew up over Hiroshima.

Young, healthy guys in tunics in gas masks and cloaks (that's all protection!), Having passed through the "leg" of a nuclear mushroom, became suicide bombers. And so did the pilots of the winged machines that swept through the radioactive cloud.

The command of the Soviet army checked the interaction of troops in conditions not just close to future combat conditions, but in the most combat conditions. And wonder how it will affect people. You wonder, shuddering, just one thought: was it really not a pity to the solid comrades in the gold epaulettes and the glitter of the orders of these young guys ?!

By the way, the marshals and generals themselves were not located near the maneuvers, but 15 kilometers from the explosion site - on a special platform where observation devices were installed. They watched the soldiers and officers accept death!

Here is the testimony of those who were at the epicenter of the explosion.

“When the explosion struck, I was lying in a gas mask at the bottom of the trench,” said the former head of the operational department of the compound, Grigory Yakimenko. - The earth sank, trembled. It took 12-15 seconds between the flash and the blast wave. They seemed like eternity to me. Then I felt as if someone was pressing me firmly with a soft pillow to the ground. Having risen, I saw an atomic mushroom soaring into the sky for half a kilometer. Then I felt chills more than once, remembering what I saw"

“When the explosion rang out, the ground moved about half a meter and rose half a meter, then returned to its place, sank,” recalled the military driver Yevgeny Bylov. - It was like an iron rolling on my back, a hot iron"

“I was lying in a trench two and a half meters deep at a distance of six kilometers from the explosion,” said Leonid Pogrebnoy, a participant in the exercises. - At first there was a bright flash, then there was such a loud sound that for a minute or two everyone went deaf. In a moment they felt a wild heat, became wet, it was hard to breathe. The walls of our trench closed over us. We were buried alive. They were saved only thanks to the fact that a friend sat down to fix something a second before the explosion - so he was able to get out and dug us out. We survived thanks to gas masks when the trench was filled up"

The grass was smoking, the forest was burning. The corpses of animals were scattered everywhere, and birds that had received burns rushed about like insane. The surface of the earth became glassy, crumbling underfoot. Around was a high black shroud of stinking burning. Soviet Hiroshima …

The wind carried the radioactive cloud not to the deserted steppe, as expected, but directly to Orenburg and further, towards Krasnoyarsk. And how many people suffered from those maneuvers, only God knows. Everything was shrouded in a thick veil of secrecy, nevertheless, it is known that half of the participants in the maneuvers were recognized as invalids in the first and second. And this, despite the fact that after the end of the "Snowball" exercises, personnel were sanitized, military equipment, weapons, uniforms and equipment were decontaminated. But at that time, too little was known about the insidiousness of radiation, its monstrous ability to penetrate the human body, infect its vital organs.

For many years, no one remembered the maneuvers at the Totsk training ground. It was a mystery shrouded in an ominous darkness. The results of the atomic exercises were carefully hidden, the documents were destroyed, and their participants were advised to forget about what they saw and knew.

In the region where the maneuvers took place, ordinary life continued - people came here for firewood, drank water from the rivers, grazed cattle. And no one knew that it was deadly …

Zhukov expressed his impressions of what he saw succinctly, without emotion: “When I saw an atomic explosion, examined the area after the explosion and watched several times a film that captured to the smallest detail everything that happened as a result of the explosion of an atomic bomb, I came to the firm conviction, that a war with the use of atomic weapons should under no circumstances be waged …"

Only. The marshal did not say a word about the soldiers and officers who had the misfortune to participate in this monstrous experiment. He only noted that "ground troops can operate despite the atomic explosion."

Did the marshal ask what happened to these young guys? Did he dream about them at night? Doubtful …

In 1994, at the site of the explosion at the Totsk test site, a memorial sign was erected - a stele with bells ringing for all victims of radiation. And how many there were - God knows

The Soviet military is said to have followed the example of the Americans and the French, who conducted several military exercises using nuclear weapons. But didn't the maneuvers of the Soviet army at the Totsk training ground cease to be barbaric and inhuman from this?

PS. In September 1956, during an exercise at the Semipalatinsk test site, an atomic bomb with a capacity of 38 kilotons was dropped from a Tu-16 bomber. Then an assault force was sent into the zone of the nuclear explosion. He had to hold positions until the approach of the advancing troops.

The airborne battalion entered the designated zone and, entrenched in it, repelled the attack of the alleged enemy. Two hours after the explosion, a “retreat” command was announced, and all personnel with military equipment were taken to the place of sanitization for decontamination.

What happened to these people later is not known.