Soviet Nuclear Testing in the Arctic
During the Cold War, 224 nuclear weapons were denotated at Novaya Zemlya in the Soviet Union’s remote Arctic north. Only with the collapse of the USSR in 1989 did the true scale become known.
In July 1945, at a military testing site in the New Mexico desert, American scientists exploded the world’s first nuclear bomb, codenamed ‘Trinity.’ A month later, US Air Force B-29 Superfortress bombers dropped two atom bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 1949, after the Soviets exploded their first atomic device, it became clear that a race to develop and test these weapons had begun and Britain, France, China, India and Pakistan all detonated their own test bombs. Israel is thought to have tested a device in the sea near Antarctica in 1979 and North Korea has also trialled its own nuclear bomb.
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