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nuclear test; the photo is sometimes confused with Joe 1 in the literature.]] One of the better-known tests was '' Chagan '' of January 15 , 1965 . Radioactivity from the Chagan test was detected over Japan by both the U.S. and Japan in apparent violation of the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT). The United States complained to the Soviets, but the matter was dropped. HISTORY In November 1949 , shortly after the test of their first nuclear device on September 23, 1949, Andrey Vyshinsky , the Soviet representative to the U.N. , delivered a statement justifying their efforts to develop their own nuclear weapons capability. In the overblown rhetoric of the times, he said: “The representative of the USSR stated that although the Soviet Union would have as many atom bombs as it would need in the unhappy event of war, it was using its atomic energy for purposes of its own domestic economy; blowing up mountains, changing the course of rivers, irrigating deserts, charting new paths of life in regions untrodden by human foot. . . . The Ukrainian SSR representative pointed out that, despite the fact that the USSR had come into possession of the secrets of atomic energy production, it had not swerved from its insistence upon the prohibition of atomic weapons.” However the U.S.S.R. did not immediately follow the U.S. lead in 1958 in establishing a program, Presumably, their position in support of a comprehensive Nuclear Test ban, stalled any efforts to establish such a program until the mid- 1960s. But at some point they formally established Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy with Alexander D. Zakharenkov, a chief weapons designer was named to head the program. Initially, the Soviet program was focused on two applications, nuclear Excavation and Oil stimulation, as the U.S. Program had been. However, interest in other applications quickly developed, and within 5 years the Soviet program was actively exploring six or seven applications involving participation by some 10 govenment departments. Once underway the Soviets conducted a much more vigorous program than the Americans' ''Operation Plowshare'', of some 156 nuclear tests, some with multiple devices, between 1965 and 1989 . Similar in aims to the American effort, with the exception that six of the shots were considered of an applied nature, that is they were not tests per se, but were used to put out runaway gas well fires and a methane blow out. There were in fact two programs:
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The "Program" numbers comes from the U.S.S.R.'s classification system of nuclear explosions, the first five programs designating various phases of Nuclear Weapon development. All together, the Program-7 (best known part of the Soviet Peaceful Nuclear Explosion program) conducted 115 nuclear explosions. Among them {Link without Title} :
51 explosion were financed by the Ministry for Geology, 26 explosions were financed by the Ministry for Natural Gas, 13 explosions were financed by the Ministry for Oil, 19 explosions were financed by the MinSredMash itself (the predessosor of Ministry For Atomic Energy (Russian Federation) ). There were two large explosions of (140 kilotons and 105 kilotons), all others were relatively small with the average yield of 12.5 kilotons. The last nuclear explosion by the Program-7, codenamed Rubin-1 was performed in Arkhangelsk Oblast on September 6 1988 . The explosion was a part of a seismic program for the geological exploration. The Soviet s agreed to stop their PNE program in the end of 1988 as a result of then president Mikhail S. Gorbachev 's disarmament initiative. There are proponents for continuing the PNE programs in modern Russia . They (e.g. A. Koldobsky) state that the program already payed by itself and saved the USSR billions of roubles and can save even more if it would continue. They also allege that the PNE is the only feasible way to put out large fountains and fires on natural gas deposits and the safest and economically viable way to destroy the Chemical Weapon s. Their opponents (include the academician A.V. Yablokov) {Link without Title} state that all PNE technologies have non-nuclear alternatives and that many PNEs actually caused nuclear disasters. PROBLEMS Among the most cited catastrophes was the Kraton-3 explosion in Vilyuy , Yakutia in 1978 , that was supposed to unearth a large amount of Diamond -rich ores. Instead the amount of diamonds was insignificant but the Plutonium pollution of the water sources was much higher than predicted. According to Yablokov the level of plutonium in the drinking water of Vilyuy region twenty years after the explosion is ten thousand times higher than the maximal sanitary norm. Another catastrophe became the Globus-1 explosion near village Galkino, 40 kilomiters from , river Shacha, changed its location and threatens to flood the very hole of the explosion. Potentially it can lead to the Nuclear Pollution of the entire Volga region. Some engineers propose building a Sarcophagus (similar to the Chernobyl one) over the place of the explosions and digging a 12 km channel to shift the Shacha river away from the place of the explosion. The plans appear to be prohibitively expensive. The experiments continued past the disolution of the U.S.S.R., and came to an end with the adoption by Russia of a unilateral moratorium on the testing of nuclear weapons at Soviet test sites in 1989. Although it primarily was designed to support Mikhail S. Gorbachev 's call for a world-wide ban on nuclear weapons tests, the Russians apparently also applied the moratorium to peaceful nuclear explosions as well. CONCLUSION As noted, the Soviet PNE Program was many times larger than the U.S. Plowshare Program in terms of both the number of applications explored with field experiments and the extent to which they were introduced into industrial use. Several PNE applications, such as deep seismic sounding and oil stimulation, were explored in depth and appeared to have had a positive cost benefit at minimal public risk. Several others, such as deep void storage, developed significant technical problems that cast a shadow on their general applicability. Some, such as closure of runaway gas wells, demonstrated a unique technology that may yet find application as a last resort. Still others were the subject of one or two tests but were not explored further for reasons that have never been explained. Overall, the program represented a significant technical effort to explore, what was seen at the time, to be a promising new technology, and it generated a large body of data, although only a small fraction of it has been made public. SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS AND REFERENCES |
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