Soviet Union. By order of Nikita Khrushchev, then First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and Georgy Malenkov, Chairman of the Council of Ministers, a test was ordered that was then kept secret until 1993. During a military exercise held at the testing site, at an altitude of approximately 350 meters, a bomb with a yield of 40 kilotons was detonated after being dropped from an altitude of 8,000 meters by a Tupolev Tu-4 strategic bomber. Soldiers on the ground were led to believe that the device merely simulated a real atomic bomb and that there would be no radioactive fallout. The approximately 45,000 soldiers were positioned in trenches located between 2.5 and 5 kilometers from ground zero, the blast’s location. Marshal Georgy Zhukov himself, the hero of World War II, wanted to take an active part in the exercise, remaining inside the command bunker at the time of the explosion to test the effects of the shock wave. About forty minutes later, the soldiers, supported by 320 aircraft and 600 ground vehicles, were ordered to advance into the test area, simultaneously conducting military exercises, reconnaissance, and artillery bombardments, which brought them to within just over 500 meters of the blast site. Only in 1993 did the entire exercise become public knowledge, thanks to the interest of Tamara Zlotnikova, a former member of the Russian State Duma: it was her investigations that first breached the Iron Curtain of Totskoye: even today, more than half a century later, no one knows how many of the soldiers who took part in the exercise fell ill and died in the following days, months, and years from the devastating effects of radiation.
