We live in the place with the most nuclear weapons on earth… it’s a wasteland full of craters, abandoned bunkers and an ‘Atomic Lake’
HIDDEN within the icy planes of Kazakhstan lies nuclear hell on Earth – a wasteland full of craters, abandoned bunkers and even an ‘atomic lake’.
Kurchatov is the most nuclear weapons in the world, where there are more than 400 atomic bombs were detonated but kept completely secret because it was erased from the maps for decades.
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Named after prominent scientist Igor Kurchatov, who led the Soviet nuclear project, the city is where Soviets would play Oppenheimer during the arms race America.
They invented, tested and detonated 456 of their nuclear and hydrogen bombs in the area, similar to the US region of Los Alamos.
And the unaware locals would later have to bear the consequences for the rest of their lives.
In the 1950s it was reported that a single explosion in the region caused four times as many cases of severe radiation poisoning as the Chernobyl disaster.
The worst explosion occurred on January 15, 1965, when the USSR tested a hydrogen bomb that was eleven times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb the US dropped in 1945. Japan.
The 140-kiloton device was buried nearly 600 feet into the ground and upon detonation, the blast created a crater 1,500 feet wide and 350 feet deep, throwing soil nearly a mile into the air.
The impact was so powerful that it took almost fifty days for the dust to settle, creating the existing mounds surrounding the crater.
Shortly after the test, a nearby river was diverted to fill the crater, creating what locals now call Atomic Lake.
Named after prominent Soviet scientist Igor Kurchatov, the city is now frozen in time and houses an eerie collection Cold War relics.
When the nuclear program ran from 1949 to 1989, well over a million people were believed to have lived in and around the distant community.
But today only a few thousand people remain, and many of the buildings are now barren and abandoned.
Giant craters and abandoned bunkers form the terrifying backdrop to the testimonies of four survivors.
For the first time on camera, residents of the top-secret Soviet-era city recalled the horrors they experienced, with explosions taking place on their doorstep.
They also revealed the devastating impact the explosions had on their country health while radiation left “everyone” with cancer.
But some admitted they had no idea what was going on at the time as authorities managed to keep people in the dark.
Their houses occasionally violently, and they witnessed plumes of dust exploding in the distance, but these impacts were dismissed as ‘extreme’. weather conditions”.
Filmmakers Thomas Brag and Staffan Taylor, who ventured to Kurchatov for their film YouTube documentaryspoke to a woman named Nadezhda Golovina.
She unknowingly witnessed hundreds of atomic bombs going off in her youth and said, “We didn’t know it was that bad.
“Now everyone writes and talks about it. And what did we know then? We knew nothing. Just what the teacher taught at school.
‘They always told us to leave the house in case it collapsed, a window or the stove door opened and ash would fall out. [Even] the chandeliers swayed.”
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A local fellow Uncle Serikpay said that he had moved to Kurchatov as a miner and would help build passages to “prepare everything for the war.” [nuclear] to test.”
Unlike Golovina, he was fully aware of what was happening at the Semipalatinsk test site, less than 100 miles from Kurchatov.
He said he had to sign a non-disclosure agreement, and that anyone who dared to speak about the work being done suddenly disappeared and “we never saw him again.”
Serikpay added that he was only allowed to work 30-minute shifts in places with high radiation levels to limit health risks.
“If there was a low level of radiation, we could work longer,” he explained.
At almost 73 years old, Uncle Serikpay said he still “feels good” because he was not heavily exposed to high levels of radiation.
But some weren’t so lucky.
Another local woman, a woman named Lyubov Filina, explained in the documentary: “Of course it has affected people’s health. People have cancer. Cancer, cancer, cancer, cancer…
‘There was radiation and people got sick. There are the books from the hospital where only cases of radiation and anemia are written.
“We were children then and didn’t understand anything. Even adults didn’t know that the mushroom cloud was more dangerous than vibrations or broken windows.”
In 1989, Filina was expecting her son, who was born with congenital cataract of 16 diopters.
“I believe it was caused by radiation exposure. I read about it in the medical encyclopedia,” she said.
“We saw helicopters measuring something above the city and now we understood that radiation was being released at that moment.
“Some children were born with disabilities. Our parents covered us, but they didn’t.”
A third local, named Uncle Khamit, lost both his parents to cancer.
After moving to Kurchatov in 1976, he said the atomic bomb explosions were a “frightening experience.”
Uncle Khamit said, ‘First there is a big firecracker and then there is the mushroom that comes out. We were children, but there was a feeling inside that something bad was being done.
“Older people, everyone was scared because everything there became dark, everything was covered in dust, the feeling was terrible.
“We were taken outside the village. A ravine had been dug there and we lay down there.
“They used to cover us with blankets, and the whole village would lie there. Soldiers ran to see if we were covered or not.
“I remember one time when a soldier was swept away.”
It was not until 1989 that knowledge about radioactivity became available pollution at the Semipalatinsk testing site became public, and the results caused widespread outrage.
For two years, the Kazakh government waged an anti-nuclear campaign, asking Moscow to stop nuclear testing.
Ultimately, the activists prevailed and the Semipalatinsk nuclear testing facility was officially closed on August 29, 1991, with all testing banned in the region.
This was the same year Kazakhstan became independent from the former Soviet Union.
Uncle Serikpay said most people left Kurchatov when the testing site was closed.
“In 1991, when the test site was closed and Kazakhstan declared a moratorium, everything fell apart. People moved away and the Soviet Union collapsed,” he told the filmmakers.
Uncle Serikpay continued to work at the nuclear test site after it closed, and America helped dismantle it from 1996 to 1999.
He also helped unearth an unexploded bomb, which was safely destroyed in an underground tube in 1995.
“It was an atomic bomb that had to explode. It was a real bomb that we could have installed, but we didn’t have time to use it,” he said.
Lyubov Filina said the mass exodus of people was strange, but her family chose to stay.
‘They just left. The army was transferred to other places and went there,” she said.
‘People left, but we continued to live and work here. Everyone had families and children to feed
“The army left and our family had no army, so we stayed here.”
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