Soviets Hushed Up Worse Nuclear Fallout Than Chernobyl, According To Unsealed Documents

It's a testament to the paranoid nature of the old guard Soviets that even now, almost 30 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, new secrets they tried to hush up are still being uncovered. Worse, it's entirely possible that many of their most heinous secrets will never be revealed, the documents having been destroyed long ago. But then, destruction was always one of their strengths, right up there with keeping secrets. Mind you, with the latest revelations, it's a wonder how they managed to hide so much destruction for so long.

Just as the U.S. had Alamogordo and the Bikini Atoll testing grounds for nuclear weapons, the Soviets had the Semipalatinsk site.

At its height, the Polygon was a city closed off from the rest of the world, accessible only to high-ranking officials. It didn't even show up on maps at the time. The Polygon was the only test site anywhere near a populated area, but that didn't stop the Soviets from making it their busiest site.

Between 1949 and 1989, the Soviets conducted 456 nuclear tests at the Polygon – 340 underground and 116 atmospheric tests before above-ground testing was banned in 1963.

They subjected the area to more explosive power than 2,5000 Hiroshima bombs over the years, leaving the landscape a mess of large craters. They also left the people in the area with a horrifying amount of fallout to deal with.

As awful as the Chernobyl disaster was, only 134 confirmed cases of radiation sickness came from it. Just one test in 1956 at the Polygon sickened 638 people when a cloud of fallout blanketed a city almost 250 miles away from the blast.

Before 1956, the Soviets didn't even track the effects of the weapons on people near the test sites. After the 1956 disaster, the authorities realized they needed to change that. A newly uncovered report shows just how bad that fallout cloud was. 

The report shows that even a month after the test, radiation levels were still a hundred times over the "permissible rate." In outlying villages, radiation levels were even worse. People had to stop eating local grain, too.

And yet the tests at the Polygon continued. Now, according to Kazbek Apsalikov, the director of the Institute of Radiation Medicine and Ecology in Kazakhstan, "some areas will never return to nature... Much of the area presents no danger, but some parts need to be safeguarded indefinitely."

h/t New Scientist

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