forensics of nuclear landscape

Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site Kazakhstan

Andrey Chernykh

We arrived at a gas station at the edge of the small town of Karkaralinsk in north-eastern Kazakhstan, as the sun was approaching its zenith. We stopped to stock up on extra fuel before the long journey to the Polygon, the former nuclear weapons testing zone officially known as Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site. This is my first ever trip as an atomic tourist. Tour guides Dmitriy and Vladimir pack up the last of the fuel canisters in the back of an old Toyota Prado and we are ready to go. We pass by the sign warning to be mindful about the proximity to the Polygon of a list of prohibited industrial operations there without a permit. Looking at the drawing of the nuclear site boundary, I had not realised that it would be the last time I would see anything resembling a border.

View from the top of the crater into the vast steppe of the Polygon

Andrey Chernykh

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We drive through the rolling planes of the Kazakh steppe. The landscape is boundless and stretches endlessly into the distance with fewer and fewer hills, fading away in the blue hues of the sky. After a while the paved road starts to narrow and eventually altogether disappears to make way for gravel and dirt. Relying solely on a satellite signal, Dmitriy navigated the map on his laptop with sharp precision.

At Mrzhik, a village walking distance from the nuclear site’s border, an elderly Kazakh woman was drying her clothes outside. She was kind enough to let us use the well but felt reluctant to stay and chat longer. Mrzhik, a small village of around 500 people nestled in the middle of three hill ridges that stretch further south, is one of the villages narrowly missed by the radioactive fallout from the first surface nuclear tests in the early 1950s. After detonation, wind picked up the smoke and dust rising to form a mushroom cloud, and carried it for 100 km south, depositing radionuclides onto the plants and soil. One of the radionuclides is Plutonium 239 with a halflife of 24,110 years.

Stopover at village Mrzhik

Despite this, the landscape looks tranquil and abundantly biodiverse. A light breeze was gently swaying the grasses in the little creek nearby; village geese waddled in to drink. As we pulled up the last bucket of water, Dmitriy mentioned,’Did you know that the Polygon is the only nuclear test site in the world where people live? Even here in this little village, they don’t know where exactly the testing site is. To this day I am still amazed that this is their reality’. He chuckled and grabbed a full water container to take to the car. The sun has already began to descend, the wind was slowing down and it was time to make camp in the middle of vast rolling hills of grass. There was no sound or animal in sight as we watched the sunset, chatting, drinking beer and eating traditional Russian camp food of dry smoked fish, hard-boiled eggs and cold cut sandwiches. The sun set, silence came and the night sky was peppered with millions of stars. In my tent, I thought of the Field and the Ground Zero. How contaminated is it? Will the radiation affect us in some way? The site accumulated such a negative stigma over the years that I couldn’t help but feel eerie about the possibility of some terrifying unknown that might await us tomorrow.

Wandering cows near the Field site

‘...That’s the Zone. It may even seem capricious. But it is what we’ve made it with our condition. It happened that people had to stop halfway and go back. Some of them even died on the very threshold of the room. But everything that is going on here depends not on the Zone, but on us!’

— Stalker

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Our crossover drove over the hill, bobbled a bit and steadied itself as we descended down towards a more levelled plane. Dmitriy pored over his laptop to find the ever elusive accessible path as he gave directions to Vladimir out loud. Suddenly, a bend around the hill gave us a hint of car wheel tracks and we took our chances that would be the path that would lead us to a more defined road. Surely the path started to become more treaded. Dmitry pointed to a cluster of low mountains in the far distance. Our destination should be just beyond.

Revving the engine Vladimir pushed ahead. It was half an hour before our Toyota started climbing and the road started to zig-zag around much bigger hills. We reached the valley where the road stretched between two hills and around the bend we started our descent.

The turn revealed a wide, open landscape the horizon as a straight line and the sky a vast soft blue. The scene was interrupted by small structures poking out of the ground; assessing the distance, they appeared quite far from each other. As we approached, they were coming closer together, and I realised that they were forming a line leading to the centre. Dmitry said, ‘There! You can really see them now, those are the ‘geese’ measuring towers, they kind of look like geese in profile.’ As soon as the towers aligned, a sharp turn revealed a path running along them. Vladimir steered the car into it. Exhilarated, I rolled down the window, took out my DSLR mounted on a tripod and held it tight against the door of the car to minimise the turbulence. It filmed the approaching tower and the impression that one was flying over the blades of grass. Closer and closer, the road started to meander and at times the camera revealed the towers tightly lining up along a single vanishing point. The tower was really close now, and at about three stories tall seemed monumental in a vast open steppe. We parked the car in its shade and got out to take a closer look.

Approaching and examining the geese towers

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Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site was the main location of the Soviet Nuclear Testing Program 1949 – 1989, home to a total of 456 nuclear explosions. In the arms race with the United States, the Soviet Union developed the program quickly following the Trinity Test by the United States in 1945. The 18,000 sq. km area in northeastern Kazakhstan, previously a natural reserve, was selected in 1947 based on a quick aerial survey of the area, without taking into account thousands of settlers located within the region. It was swiftly developed into a military test base for nuclear weapons technology. Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site became a vast landscape of experiments of surface, aerial and underground tests. It was at one of the test areas, Opytnoe Pole (Experimental Field), that Soviet Union entered the nuclear age with a detonation of nuclear device RDS-01 ‘First Lightning’ on August 29, 1949 at 7:00 a.m. (GMT +6).

The communications infrastructure at the Field was a sophisticated network of underground cables that ran for kilometres connecting the towers that measured the magnitude of the explosions. Before the first test the Soviets were closely following the set up of the Trinity Test in Nevada – a steel tower with a nuclear charge hoisted up at the top. Key replicas of potential targets like buildings, infrastructure, machinery, military targets as well as animals were positioned around at various distances in order to test the impact of the explosion. A set of facilities built about 10 km from the ground zero monitored the measuring equipment in the towers and the explosion itself.

Semipalatinsk nuclear testing site remained active for 40 years. During that time Soviet propaganda convinced the residents of the Polygon that nuclear weapons were a worthy investment that would make their nation stronger in the event of a nuclear war. However, local residents including nuclear scientists, military personnel and independent animal farmers have not been properly safeguarded from the tests. After numerous surface and aerial experiments in the 1950s and early 1960s people began to report illnesses, majority of them being various types of cancers, however the authorities denied these having any connection to nuclear tests. By the late 1980’s along with policies of Perestroika by the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, people had become vocal critics of the nuclear program, calling on authorities to close the site and end the tests once and for all.

fMap of the Field site showing concrete structures, radiation levels and the path of the journey travelled

Archival image of the Field just after the nuclear test. ‘Experimental Field after RDS-1 explosion, 1949’ Nuclear Weapons Complex. The XXICentury Encyclopaedia, Russia’s Arms and Technologies; Volume 14, 2013. p262

The total power of 116 nuclear tests (86 atmospheric and 30 surface) performed at the Field left the landscape ravaged with craters and ruins. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Semipalatinsk site was closed in 1991 by the president of newly independent Kazakhstan. Without a proper demilitarisation plan a lot of infrastructure and equipment was left intact. An economic recession followed, which resulted in years of looting on site by local villagers and unsuccessful attempts to secure the site. There is a severe shortage of warning signs or any kind of proper safeguarding from the radiation. A shepherd from a local village can easily walk into an irradiated area and graze his livestock without any knowledge of presence of radiation. Scrap metal scavenging continues to this day; the site suffers from neglect but most importantly a lack of proper rehabilitation planning. It stands as an impressive collection of artifacts and landforms, a testament to a bygone nuclear era.

Radioactive craters at the Field

all images: Andrey Chernykh, except archival material noted in the captions

Archival image of the detonation of a first Soviet nuclear bomb RDS-1 (Joe 1) from: Kuran, P. (Director). (1995). Trinity and Beyond: TheAtomic Bomb Movie (Motion Picture on DVD). USA: Visual ConceptEntertainment (VCE)

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My feet touched the ground and I felt a bit like an astronaut on a different planet, donning heavy rubber boots, latex gloves and a respirator. We were in the vicinity of the ground zero and our Geiger counter indicated a higher level of background radiation. ‘Try not to pick up anything without your gloves’ said Dmitriy, as three of us approached the tower. The structure was well advanced into the process of decay. Its chipped concrete revealed steel armature underneath. Each floor featured a wide window looking into the distance. The steel frame of the window originally held a perforated metal panel that protected the measuring equipment during the explosion. Most of the steel elements were gone, taken by the scavengers, including the metal stairs leading to the next floor, metal hardware for the doors, sometimes entire doors themselves. Standing in one of the rooms, the tower was perfectly aligned with the next tower about a kilometre away. ‘Radionuclides are all over the grassland here, about 10-15 centimetres deep into the soil, that’s why no one knows how to manage such a vast territory of contamination’, said Dmitriy looking out the window. Outside I took my time examining the tower’s walls. Time and time again this structure had experienced total destruction, and yet it withstood it all. Cracks, bullet holes, fractures, shrapnel, gouges, every violent imprint imaginable, it was all in the walls.

Dmitry waved me back to the car to head further. The next tower was similar to the first one, battered concrete construction with grasses growing taller around it as if the landscape was slowly swallowing it. The next tower was different. Gone were the rooms with wide windows and doors, this time it was much more slender and longer with a massive wedge back support disappearing into the earth. It was also black with cracks running along the surface stretching all the way back and around. ‘You might want to close the window right about now, the dust is radioactive’, said Dmitriy, as I was trying to get the perfect shot. We drove a bit further when Dmitriy abruptly said to Vladimir, ‘Stop the car, we’re going to have to walk from here.’

above: View towards the centre of the Field

Andrey Chernykh

Dmitry examining the inside of one of the concrete bunkers

below: Various concrete ruins scattered around the Field site

Andrey Chernykh

Slender monolithic towers of concrete construction with wide chamfered edges looked more decorative than structural. Nonetheless, they were oriented towards something invisible in the centre, resembling giants standing strong, frozen in time. We walked over to one of them and noticed a melted surface texture. If the concrete could melt, this would be the place for it, at 500 metres to the epicentre of a nuclear fireball. At the base of the tower, we saw a large piece of what looked like a melted rock mound. ‘Melted soil’, said Dmitriy, ‘there are a lot of these around because the explosion often displaced large volumes of soil, scattering it across the field.’ Looking in the direction of the towers I imagined chunks of earth flying like fireballs in the sky and dropping all around in a field of raging fire. ‘During the tests, this place must have been hell on earth’, I said looking around me. ‘That is a good way of putting it’, smiled Dmitriy. Vladimir turned on the Geiger counter and brought it closer to the melted chunk. The numbers oscillated between 2.1 to 3.8 millisievert per hour (mSv/h), which is above the 1.0 millisievert per hour normal background radiation levels.

Directly east there was another line of identical towers stretching into the distance, the two closest of them toppled to the ground, presumably by one of the tests. However, there were no towers north or west of the centre of where I was standing. Instead, the landscape featured more low lying structures of bunkers, shafts, walls, columns and other concrete chunks at least partially submerged in the landscape. We examined one of the bunkers north of the Ground Zero. The concrete framing the entrance was completely blown off by what must have been an incredibly powerful shockwave, as all that was left were rebars flung back and frozen like hair blowing in the wind. The objects did not conform to any alignment and seemed to be scattered all across the field. The orientation of the structures and the dugout trenches towards the centre, suggested a loose circular orientation, which slowly allowed me to trace a rough mental plan of the site.

We explored numerous other structures whose purpose at times was a challenge to decipher. One thing was clear; the Field has become an outdoor museum for one of the most horrific weapons ever invented and the consequences of nuclear tests on the country’s iconic landscape.

above: Melted earth and the damage inflicted from a nuclear test on one of the structures of the site

Andrey Chernykh

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The cloud of dust was rising behind us as our car sped up in the south direction from the Field to find a camp ground for the night. We drove along the defined diagonal path that circled the ground zero in the middle of the two converging trajectories of the measuring towers. Around the centre I managed to trace a low mound, heavily grown in, bending around the centre akin to the defining brush stroke on the canvas that completed the image of the Field for me. The Cartesian alignment, long distances, scattered cryptic structures, all reinforced a sinister intent. Media’s portrayal of the nuclear era and its images of mushroom clouds left a lasting impression on our collective imagination. The Ground Zero felt like a black hole pulling you in, commanding you to pay attention even if testing infrastructure was no longer there. During an opportunity to visit a site such as this, one couldn’t help but project those images onto the site. That precise relationship created the sublime feeling of the landscape. The Field, albeit utilitarian in its form, was designed with an approach straight from an authoritarian playbook, by establishing visual centre of gravity, via view corridors among built form is a universal language of attention, power and command.

The degree to which the nuclear site is preserved is a sign that today’s Kazakhstan still grapples with the dark Soviet past, as locals look towards the future trying to reconcile their relationship with the monuments of communist regime. The structures are products of the people and a specific time period in history. Their scale and purpose serve as important reminders of the past leaders’ recklessness in the pursuit of power. What is remarkable is that the structures proved to be able to vividly record the surrounding biophysical processes and military operations on their concrete surfaces. What the site awaits now is a thoughtful preservation and re-purposing of its artifacts in their natural setting. This next step will be an important chapter in this young country’s history – an act reinforcing a local commitment to reconciliation with a turbulent history and creation of a new economic and cultural asset for the region.

Concrete blocks with various angles of inclination used to measure the intensity of the force of the blast

Andrey Chernykh

Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Range, Ground Zero. ‘Photographic Images of the Results of Nuclear Detonation on August 29, 1949’. Appendix to the Report, by Beria and Kurchatov to Stalin, on the preliminary data obtained during the test of the atomic bomb

below: Looking back from the centre of the Field site, towards the vanishing geese towers in the distance

Andrey Chernykh

Andrey Chernykh is a landscape architect and urbanist based in Toronto, Canada. He strives to strengthen connections between people and landscapes they inhabit, through design thinking and the nurturing of ecological systems that support us all. andrey-chernykh.squarespace.com/