This reel of historic Soviet atomic bomb explosions starts with tests at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in the early 1950s, including shockwave effects tests on buildings, trenches and vehicles. The Semipalatinsk Test Site, also known as “The Polygon”, was the primary testing venue for the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons. It is located on the steppe in northeast Kazakhstan (then the Kazakh SSR), south of the valley of the Irtysh River. The Soviet Union conducted 456 nuclear tests at Semipalatinsk from 1949 until 1989 with little regard for their effect on the local people or environment. The full impact of radiation exposure was hidden for many years by Soviet authorities and has only come to light since the test site closed in 1991.

The test shown at 1:08 is the third atomic bomb developed by the Soviet Union. On October 18, 1951, this device known as RDS-3 (RDS codeword stands for Reaktivnyi Dvigatel Specialnyi or ‘Special Jet Engine’) became the first air dropped test of a nuclear device by the Soviets. The test was known as Joe-3 in the West. It was detonated at an altitude of four hundred meters.

At 1:50 the first Soviet H-Bomb test is shown, from August 12, 1953. Work on this so-called super-bomb or hydrogen bomb had begun in 1946, three years before the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb. In the West this was known as the Joe 4 or in the Soviet Union RDS-6s. It detonated with a force equivalent to 400 kilotons of TNT. Scholars dispute the authenticity of RDS-6 as a thermonuclear device as it did not manage to produce a yield consistent with a true hydrogen bomb.

The test at 2:50 is from November 22, 1955, RDS-37, the Soviet Union’s first two-stage hydrogen bomb. The weapon had a nominal yield of approximately 3 megatons. It was scaled down to 1.6 megatons for the live test. More of this test is shown at 7:27, namely the loading of the bomb on the drop aircraft.

At 3:35 are images from the Urtabulak gas field. In 1966, a nuclear explosive was detonated at this location in Southern Uzbekistan in order to extinguish a gas well fire that had been burning for almost three years and had resisted numerous attempts at control. The gas fountain, which formed at pressures of almost 300 atmospheres, resulted in the loss of over 12 million cubic meters of gas per day through a 200 mm casing – enough to supply a city the size of St. Petersburg. Two 445 mm holes were drilled that aimed to come as close as possible to the well at a depth of about 1500 meters in the middle of a 200 meter thick clay zone. One of these came to within about 35 m of the well and was used to emplace the special 30-kiloton charge which had been developed by the Arzamas Weapons Laboratory. Immediately after the explosion the fire went out and the well was sealed. This was the first of five PNEs used for this purpose, and all but one was completely successful in extinguishing the fire and sealing the well. No radioactivity above background levels was detected in subsequent surveys of any of the sites.

At 5:13 Project Chagan, an “atoms for peace” underground nuclear test is shown. This was conducted at the Semipalatinsk Test Site on January 15, 1965. Chagan was the first and largest of the 124 detonations in the Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy program, designed to produce peaceful nuclear explosions (PNEs) for earth-moving purposes. The concept of using PNEs to create artificial lakes, harbors and canals was modeled after the U.S. program, Project Plowshare. Lake Chagan or Lake Balapan, Kazakhstan, a lake created by the Chagan nuclear test roughly 10,000,000 m3 (8,100 acre⋅ft) in size, is still radioactive, and has been called the “Atomic Lake”.

Described as a “near clone” of the Sedan shot, Chagan’s yield was the equivalent of 140 kilotons of TNT and sought to produce a large conical crater suitable for a lake.

At 7:43, a Soviet nuclear missile is test launched. At 8:00, the first successful test of a Soviet atomic torpedo is shown.

At 8:14 the Totskoye Nuclear Test is shown. This was a military exercise undertaken by the Soviet Army to explore defensive and offensive warfare during nuclear war. The exercise, under the code name “Snowball”, involved an aerial detonation of a 40 kt RDS-4 nuclear bomb. The stated goal of the operation was military training for breaking through heavily fortified defensive lines of a military opponent using nuclear weapons.An army of 45,000 soldiers marched through the area around the epicenter soon after the nuclear blast.

This film is part of the Periscope Film LLC archive, one of the largest historic military, transportation, and aviation stock footage collections in the USA. Entirely film backed, this material is available for licensing in 24p HD, 2k and 4k. For more information visit http://www.PeriscopeFilm.com