2005 CPEO Military List Archive

From: Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>
Date: 3 Mar 2005 22:20:08 -0000
Reply: cpeo-military
Subject: [CPEO-MEF] Soviet nuke site
 
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

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