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Blast wakes ghosts of nuclear past (1995)

AN unexploded relic of the Cold War was blasted to pieces last week in an underground tunnel at Semipalatinsk, the former Soviet nuclear test site in Kazakhstan. The Russian nuclear ministry, Minatom, says that a bomb, which contained about a kilogram of plutonium, was "completely demolished" and that radiation levels at the site are "normal" …

But at the same time, a new study by Russian and Kazakh government scientists reveals that half of the 348 nuclear bombs exploded underground at Semipalatinsk between 1961 and 1989 leaked radioactivity into the atmosphere – in 39 cases on a large scale. According to Vladimir Iakimets from the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, it was placed 126 metres underground in a tunnel bored into the granite rocks of the Degelen mountains in the southern part of the site. But the bomb, which had an expected yield of 0.3 kilotons and was meant to test the effect of radiation on military equipment, was never exploded as planned because of the disintegration of the Soviet Union and large antinuclear demonstrations by the Kazakh people.

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