Children are still being born today with defects resulting from the fallout from a Soviet nuclear weapons test in Kazakhstan
A newly unearthed secret report claims Russia covered up a nuclear disaster four times worse than Chernobyl, it has been reported.
During the 1950s, one detonation in Kazakhstan resulted in four times the number of cases of acute radiation sickness than those from the Chernobyl disaster, it is said.
More than 600 people ended up in hospital and at least 100,000 people are believed to have been affected by the explosion.
Children are still being born today with defects resulting from the fallout, according to the report by New Scientist .
In August 1956, fallout from a Soviet nuclear weapons test at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan engulfed the industrial city of Ust-Kamenogorsk over 100 miles away.
Semipalatinsk, which is now called Semey, was the primary testing ground for the Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons.
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It uncovered widespread radioactive contamination and radiation sickness across the Kazakh Steppe, a vast area of open grasslands in the north of the country.
The scientists then tracked the ongoing consequences as Soviet nuclear bomb tests continued – without telling the people affected or the outside world.
The report into the effects of those tests has remained a secret – until now.
In September 1956, a month after the fallout cloud hit, dose rates in Ust-Kamenogorsk were still 100 times what is recommended as safe by the International Commission on Radiological Protection.
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But the newly revealed report, which is marked ‘top secret’, shows for the first time how much Soviet scientists knew about the disaster and the extent of the cover-up.
“For many years, this has been a secret,” says the institute’s director Kazbek Apsalikov who found the report and passed it on to New Scientist magazine.
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