[CPEO-MEF] Soviet nuke site

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

SEMIPALATINSK JOURNAL
It Was Once Ground Zero. Now Little but Danger Is Left.

By C. J. CHIVERS
New York Times
March 3, 2005

SEMIPALATINSK TEST SITE, Kazakhstan - The road is an aged dirt track 
running in a line across the Central Asian steppe, past grazing cattle 
and horses, arriving at a hillock overlooking a parched basin.

There are no warning signs. There is no gate beside the abandoned guard 
shack at the remains of the fence. Only the climbing numbers on the 
radiation detector suggest that perhaps it would be best to turn around.

In the basin below, before much of it was vaporized, there once had been 
one of the more awful open-air laboratories a nation has ever made, and 
one of the darker secrets never kept.

Here, briefly, stood a metal tower roughly 100 feet high, ringed by 
sturdy objects: brick buildings, a bridge, bunkers of reinforced 
concrete and a park of idled tanks and aircraft, some with live animals 
tethered inside, set at various distances to see how they weathered what 
came next. Concrete observation towers were arranged at fixed distances 
in several directions, their instruments connected by subterranean cable 
to a distant command post where the experiment's masters could assess 
their work.

...


For the entire article, see
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/03/international/asia/03bomb.html

--
Lenny Siegel
Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
c/o PSC, 278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
http://www.cpeo.org

_______________________________________________
Military mailing list
Military@list.cpeo.org
http://www.cpeo.org/mailman/listinfo/military