Totskoye nuclear exercise

The Totskoye nuclear exercise was a military exercise undertaken by the Soviet army to explore defensive and offensive warfare during nuclear war. The exercise, under the code name "Snowball", involved an aerial detonation of a nuclear bomb as powerful as the two bombs used in the American nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. The stated goal of the operation was military training for breaking through heavily fortified defensive lines of a military opponent using nuclear weapons. An army of 45,000 soldiers marched through the area around the epicenter soon after the nuclear blast. The exercise was conducted on September 14, 1954, under the command of Marshal Georgy Zhukov to the north of Totskoye village in Orenburg Oblast, Russia, in the South Ural Military District.

History
In mid-September 1954, nuclear bombing tests were performed in Totskoye range during the training exercise Snezhok (Snowball or Light Snow) with some 45,000 people, all Soviet soldiers and officers who were exposed to radiation from a bomb twice as powerful as the one dropped on Hiroshima nine years earlier. The exercise was commanded by the Marshal of the Soviet Union, Georgy Zhukov. At 9:33 a.m. on 14 September 1954, a Soviet Tu-4 bomber dropped a 40 kt(TNT) atomic weapon from 8,000 m. The bomb exploded 350 m above Totskoye range, 13 km from Totskoye.

During the exercise more than 45,000 were deliberately exposed to radiation. It involved the 270th Rifle Division, 320 planes, 600 tanks and 600 armored personnel carriers. The soldiers were told that there would be a regular military exercise featuring a mock nuclear explosion and that it would be filmed. The military personnel were not issued any protective gear. Deputy Defense Minister Georgy Zhukov witnessed the blast from an underground nuclear bunker. The planes were ordered to bomb the explosion site five minutes after the blast, and three hours later (after the demarcation of the radioactive zone) the armored vehicles were ordered to practice the taking of a hostile area after a nuclear attack.

The residents of selected villages (Bogdanovka and Fedorovka) that were situated around 6 km from the epicenter of the future explosion were offered temporary evacuation outside the 50 km radius. Most of the local population was never warned, however.

Consequences
Thousands who are believed to have sought help in local hospitals would later be surprised to find that their medical cards, containing their histories of sickness, had disappeared from the regional hospital. That fact was confirmed by a former soldier who participated in the exercise, Alexey Petrovich Vavilov, in his interview with the television news broadcasting program Podrobnosti (Telechannel INTER) more than 50 years later.

Over half a century later, this matter is still under strict control of the federal government. The local law enforcement personnel continue to harass the journalists who try to obtain footage from the range. The exercise became widely known only in 1993. Even the soldiers who participated in the exercise did not know that they had taken part. The government congratulated the local population for their heroism in providing the nuclear shield for their Motherland.

September 14 is considered in Russia a day of creation of the state's nuclear shield.