Totskoye nuclear exercise

1954 Soviet nuclear test with soldiers

The Totskoye nuclear exercise 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" (Снежок), 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. under the command of Marshal Georgy Zhukov to the north of Totskoye village in Orenburg Oblast, Russia, in the South Ural Military District. The epicenter of the detonation is marked with a memorial.

In mid September 1954, nuclear bombing tests were performed at the Totskoye proving ground during the training exercise Snezhok (Снежок, Snowball or Light Snow) with some 45,000 people, all Soviet soldiers and officers, A delegation of high ranking government officials and senior military officers arrived to the region on the eve of the exercise, which included First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev and Marshals of the Soviet Union Nikolai Bulganin, Aleksandr Vasilevsky, Konstantin Rokossovsky, Ivan Konev and Rodion Malinovsky. At 9:33 a. m. on 14 September 1954, a Soviet Tu 4 bomber dropped a —from The bomb exploded above Totskoye range, from Totskoye. 320 planes, 600 tanks and self propelled guns, 600 armoured personnel carriers, 500 artillery pieces and mortars and 6,000 automobiles. Following the explosion, a Li 2 airplane was put to use on a reconnaissance mission to report the movement of a radioactive cloud produced by the blast, After the reconnaissance was complete and the Soviet command gained enough information on the level of radiation, the army moved in. The soldiers wore gas masks, protective suits and respirators, and moved around the territory in armoured personnel carriers, holding a distance of 400–600 metres from the hypocenter and avoiding the most dangerous areas of the explosion site. Sergey Zelentsov (1927–2017), a military officer who was the first to reach the middle of the hypocenter, described his experience in the following words: "Not reaching the area of strong radioactive contamination, we crossed the road which the columns of advancing troops had passed before us. It was empty and quiet around, only the radiometers were clicking, noting us of the increased level of radiation. The troops proceeded past the hypocenter, outside of the area of severe radioactive contamination. Directly in the zone adjacent to the hypocenter of the explosion, the ground was covered with a thin glassy crust of melted sand, crunchy and breaking underfoot, like a thin ice on spring puddles after a night frost. And there were no footprints on it, except for my own. I walked quietly along this crust, since the radiometer registered a level of radioactivity not exceeding 1 R/h." The residents of villages (Bogdanovka, Fyodorovka and others) that were situated around from the hypocenter of the future explosion were offered temporary evacuation outside the radius. The nearest villages were generally not affected by the blast, The results of the exercise were discussed at a scientific conference at the Kuybyshev Military Academy in Moscow and served as the basis for the Soviet program of defense against nuclear warfare.