I have particularly strong feelings about the test site on the islands of Novaya Zemlya, where I first landed in 1966. The Arctic is wary of newcomers at first but then it lures them back forever. No, this is not a nocturnal kingdom of death as it was portrayed in paintings by the Russian artist Borisov on Matochkin Shar, but the majesty of nature itself, where you get a sense of the unity of space and time.

    Each year millions of birds fly to Novaya Zemlya to produce their offspring, which will automatically return to this land to repeat the whole process from the beginning. In the same way, this land gave many of us our wings and taught us to fly into the bright future.

    I made several night crossings from the settlement of Belushye to the strait of Matochkin Shar. Sailors are a special breed. The traditions that were established by Peter the Great are still cherished by the sailors in the North. I was always excited by the sight of the steep precipices and flocks of birds on the island shores. And then there was the Barents Sea! I crossed it for the first time in December 1945, when we sailed from Murmansk to the port of Petsamo during our move to Nikel. A force-eight storm was raging. The sheets of water rising high above the deck looked like a gigantic demon against the night sky, illuminated by the Northern Lights. In calm weather, the smooth dark-blue surface of the Barents Sea was easy on the eye, but suggested that only the strong could make the crossing. At those times I always thought about our forebears, the men from Arkhangelsk who fished for a living there in homemade craft.

Winter on the Northern Test Site
Full size photo

    Now, when I sit in my office in Moscow, I have the most nostalgic memories of the people I will probably never see again, and especially the people I certainly will never see again. They were wonderful comrades. I flew with them many times from the Astafyevo airport near Moscow to Novaya Zemlya in a cramped rest area for the crew on a naval AN-12 plane. There was usually a stopover in Lakhta. We took pleasant walks around the lakes and woods of that charming comer of our northern zone near Arkhangelsk - it was the last stop before the crossing to the island where the real Arctic began and where nature always greeted us with harsh surprises. The first time I really smelled the flora of the 'mainland' was when my plane made its first stop in Lakhta on the way to Moscow after I had spent three months on the Arctic islands. Moscow in fall always seemed to be a bit of heaven on earth every time I returned from Novaya Zemlya and saw the woods around the city entwined with gold after looking at the 'bare' archipelago for so long.

    Sometimes our life was graced by the Tatariya and Bukovina ships of the Arkhangelsk Steamship Line, which were charted by the Navy as housing for the test personnel. The crews of the ships and boats shared all of the hardships of Arctic life with the testers and stayed in the strait of Matochkin Shar till late autumn, when the fields of ice began to furrow the strait. When that happened, the boats had to return to Arkhangelsk. We would move back sadly into the dilapidated barracks on shore and watch for a long time as the ships sailed away to the 'mainland', each of us pining for his own. Even today I remember them with love in my heart and I am certain that I will until the day I die.

At the Bukovina in the strait of Matochkin Shar, 1981
Full size photo

    The days we spent waiting for a cyclone were particularly tedious and difficult. Not everyone could endure this kind of stress for a month. The state commission in charge of the planning and organization of the tests kept a close watch on weather conditions along with the Hydrometeorological Center in Moscow.

    The gigantic vortices of an atmospheric cyclone were supposed to pick up the improbable but possible emissions of radioactive gases after the nuclear explosion, trap them, and carry them away at full speed in the direction of the Kara Sea, dispersing the radioactivity throughout the vast expanses of the north. That was the last stage of the defence-indepth against the environmental effects of radioactive gases after an underground explosion. When we were waiting for such conditions, we were in contact with Moscow by telegraph through a satellite link-up almost every day. We had to wait for a cyclone. Its arrival was always accompanied by howling winds and low, fast-moving clouds. Sometimes when we went to the adit before a nuclear test to complete the final operations on the installation of diagnostic systems and equipment for the detonation of the nuclear devices, we had to ride there in total darkness and gale-force winds - the cold bora winds of Novaya Zemlya.

    Let me tell you about the adits on Novaya Zemlya. The entrance to them always reminded me of the realm of permafrost - the layer of dazzling-white crystals of water and snow on the surface of earth looked like the entrance to an enchanted kingdom. I must have walked hundreds of kilometers along the cross ties of the horizontal tunnels in the mountains along the shore of Matochkin Shar. Nuclear devices were installed at the end, and there were diagnostic instruments set up throughout the adit. Have you ever been in absolute darkness? I experienced it when the lights suddenly went out far inside the adit. All I could do was to sit on the rails and all I could see was the glow of my own cigarette.

    This is where I had the pleasure of meeting extraordinary strong and friendly miners from the city of Zheltiye Vody in the Ukraine. The labour of the men who worked in the tunnels, especially when they had to be filled in and blocked after all the nuclear and diagnostic devices were in place, to localize the products of the nuclear blast in the depths of the mountains, was something for which I will always tip my hat and bow to these people. Furthermore, they did that work under the formidable conditions of the Arctic. I always wore a hat when I went into the adit. It became a tradition for me, and I also just wanted to show that the conventions on the nuclear test site were the same as in normal human life anywhere else. It was, however, a flagrant violation of mining safety regulations.

    The most crucial operations, of course, were those related to the installation of the devices to be tested and diagnostic sensors.

    I need to say something about the stemming of the tunnels. This, just as earlier stages of the work, was a strenuous operation, conducted around the clock, and it was particularly difficult at night. October and November were the worst months for this kind of work. Operations in the concrete-mixing plant which was on Matochkin Shar around ten kilometers away from the adit had to be continuous, like clockwork. Otherwise, the cold and the winter roads would stop the work, and that would be unacceptable in a tunnel filled with explosive devices and diagnostic systems. Suitable weather conditions - the necessary cyclone, to put it more precisely - were extremely rare on the Arctic islands during that season. A monument should be set up to that warped wooden structure which hardly deserved the name 'plant' because it looked more like one of the slum dwellings in old St Petersburg.

    When I was checking on the progress of the stemming on one of those cold winter nights, I saw three dump trucks with liquid concrete standing on the crossing over a portion of the mountain where one of the underground explosions had caused a slide of several million cubic meters of frozen soil. It was extremely difficult to make up for interruptions in the work schedule, and there was no time to let suitable weather go by. We quickly rode up to the dump trucks. All six military drivers - there were supposed to be two in each truck - had crowded into one of the vehicles and told us that they could not drive any further. They said that a red-haired girl had landed on the bonnet of the lead vehicle and was dancing by the light of the stars. All of them 'saw' her. The dirty-faced hungry young men were trembling with fear and confusion. With some difficulty we managed to drive around the trucks on the icy road, and then they followed our vehicle to the adit. The quick pace of the work had exhausted the young drivers, and they needed rest. Having returned to the settlement, I woke up their commanding officer and asked him to relieve the drivers and give them something to eat. The stemming was hard on everyone, and it usually took the last of everyone's strength. It was such a colossal responsibility, and there would be such a colossal price to pay for any mistake.

    There was another incident I will never forget. We made the usual preparations for an underground test. It was 1981. The radiation environment was normal after the explosion, and we recorded all diagnostic results of the recording of the processes during the explosion. After we had conducted our analysis, we found out that around half of the information was missing. What a surprise! It was an extraordinary incident because such losses were usually negligible. When we looked into the situation, another theorist, a colleague and friend of mine, said that it looked as if someone with an axe had cut through the cables of the information system leading from the adit to the monitoring facilities located in a trailer 100 metres from the entrance to the tunnel. I replied that I had made the last inspection myself and had walked along the metallic ducts which usually housed the cables leading from the adit to the trailers. After that I was the last to leave the trailer pad. There had been no sign of trouble.

Several minutes left before an underground explosion, August 1977
Full size photo

    What a keen mind the theorist had! After a careful examination of all the groups of measurements, we were inclined to agree with his theory. It turned out that the 'underground marines', which is what we jokingly called the naval personnel of the test site who always worked with us, had decided to install hundreds of naval smokepots between the two airtight concrete walls in the adit, so that the smoke would serve as a counter-pressure to the flow of radioactive products from the explosion, in an experiment to find methods of localising the products of a blast. By mistake, however, the smokepots had been lit by remote control too early, and the hot gaseous smoke from the pots began to melt our cables before the explosion. Later we checked this in a micro-experiment with just one smokepot, and our suspicions were confirmed.

    All of us had walked hundreds of times past the locked wooden doors in the adit where hundreds of those smokepots were placed in auxiliary holes. I had never paid any attention to the doors because that was how the miners usually enclosed their equipment storage closets and lavatories. Everything in the adit has to be treated with care and caution. There is nothing of minor importance there.

Summer on Matochkin Shar
Full size photo

    Every time I took a short break, I would close my eyes and go over all the stages and diagnostic circuits in my head, including the stemming operations and the data of geological assays, wondering whether everything had been done correctly and whether everything had been checked. It was only after all of this that I could finally take a nap in peace.

    Sometimes we had extra days off, especially when we were waiting for the right weather conditions. We used to take trips up the strait of Matochkin Shar to the Kara Sea. The light-blue glaciers swept down to the surface of the water like a bridal veil. There were sharp bends and powerful whirlpools created by abrupt differences in the depth of water. Only an experienced captain could negotiate the strait. Halfway through our journey, we could see the vestiges of an abandoned rock-crystal mine at an altitude of several hundred metres. The old-timers told us that the mine had been worked by convicts, and that no one had even tried to escape. There was nowhere to run, and any attempt meant certain death. Then we would see the inquisitive seals. From the deck we frequently saw their big, beautiful, dark-brown eyes, full of wonder and curiosity. Cape Vykhodnoy, at the outlet of the Kara Sea, was a particularly impressive sight. It looked like a passageway to the Infinite of the Universe - the blue-black sea, blanketed with fog at the horizon. This is what eternity must look like!

    Once we tried to get close to a polar bear swimming far from the shore. He gave us a menacing look, showing his jaws, and let us know that he was the boss. We decided not to interrupt his hunting.

    The tundra of Novaya Zemlya was a Persian rug of delicate grasses and flowers in July and August, which climbed up the mountains for several hundred meters but beyond that there was the moonscape and the glaciers, which looked like the turquoise tears of the mountains after an underground blast.

    If you were standing at the command post a few kilometers from the mountain at the time of an underground explosion, you would first see the mountain, take a deep breath, and then suddenly it would be as if you had jumped into a boat from the shore, and you were standing on something firm, which was being rocked back and forth. As an experienced test-theorist, and this not something that comes to one right away, I took that as sufficient evidence that the human mind had fathomed another of nature's mysteries. There were also some failures, when Mother Nature did not want to share her secrets and did not forgive human errors.

    In general, physics is an experimental science. It is a bridge between two experiments. It was not always possible to build a perfect bridge, which could be used with complete confidence to cross from one experiment to another, and further into the depths of nature's inexhaustible supply of mysteries. On some occasions - they were rare, but they did occur - the mountain would take a deep breath and then exhale a sinister cloud of lethal radiation along the adit. In this case, the correct choice of weather conditions was supposed to guarantee the safety of the personnel at the command post and the inhabitants of the islands, separated from the blast site by hundreds of kilometers. In any case, the team in charge of recording the diagnostic information about the processes of the nuclear explosion was supposed to return to the diagnostic lab trailers on the site. Sometimes this had to be done a day after the blast, but it was usually done within a few hours, and radiation environment on the trailer site was always normal by that time.

    After one of such tests I stayed at the command post too long and watched the spreading of the radiation flow over the terrain with the heads of the radiation monitoring service. The movement usually occurred in the top layer of earth in gullies and along rivers and valleys. Radiation was slowly approaching the command post. The dosimeters installed in the tundra were precisely tracking the movement of this front. The people at the command post caught the smell of hydrogen sulphide - it meant that pyrite crystals, and the rocks around contained them in abundance, were decomposing under the impact of the explosion. Three of 'us left the trailer. The command post was deserted, although before there had been several hundred men. Far off we saw a field bus rushing at full speed towards the road leading to the moorage where a patrol-ship was awaiting.

    Unfortunately, the commanders were not equal to the situation. Having forgotten us and having forsaken everything, including personal belongings on the helicopter site, everyone ran away in panic - to the helicopters, to the moorage where a navy patrol-ship lay at anchor - though the radiation level at the command post was rather low for professionals. We walked up to our jeep (GAZ-69) and started for the moorage. And there I saw the dog and puppies who lived under the building of the command post running towards us. The little ones were shaggy and nice and their mother was ahead of them. Nice dogs live in the North: they selflessly love people; they move to a new place and leave the place together with the people. The dogs are very sensitive to any extraordinary situation. Generally speaking, one can say many kind words about the dogs from Novaya Zemlya, especially from the nuclear test site - these faithful and reliable companions in our nomad life. We stopped and I found the entire shaggy family at my feet. Their faithful eyes were watching me with love. There is a love for you!

    I cannot but tell you about my favourite dog, Belka (squirrel), a crossbreed of an Eskimo dog and a mongrel. She had a small fox-like muzzle and was of a brown-white colour. We became friends and often went to the tundra together; many times she demonstrated her skills in catching lemmings - polar field-mice which so much resemble our young hamsters. These are very funny and unfrightened tundra animals with luxuriant hair. In bad weather they used to get into our rooms and very often spent the entire night standing on their hind legs, eyes closed, somewhere in the corner of the room. A wonderful idyll of a night rendezvous! In the tundra Belka used to fill in adroitly the lemming's emergency exits and to open the main entrance with her dazzling white teeth. And here she would be proud and happy, with a lemming in her teeth, looking at me with love and dignity. 'Look how smart I am,' her shining eyes were saying.

    Once we climbed together rather high in the mountains to a pile of soil ejected after one of the underground nuclear explosions in 1969. The diameter of the crater was around 40 metres, the depth about one hundred meters. Belka, a dozen meters just before the edge of the crater, sat down on her hind legs and began to howl like a hungry wolf. I was frightened. I came closer to the crater's brink - the crater was wailing sinisterly, sucking in the air from the adjacent shaft of the emergency adit. Yes, animals have a much stronger instinct of self-preservation than we do. Next year she did not come to meet me at the pier - the polar tundra had devoured her, without leaving a trace. Short is the life of homeless dogs, as everywhere.

    Only one day after that memorable panic did we return to the command post. The mooring of the patrol-ship was laboured. A strong wind was blowing; occasionally came a whining snow-storm. It was snowing so heavily that even the light of a flare could not penetrate the snow mass. A marine jumped down adroitly from a high board of the patrol-ship on the ice-covered pier and took a mooring rope. In the snowstorm it reminded me of a fairy tale about a Russian stalwart fellow. Everything turned out all right. We returned to the command post and to the adit to take the readings of the instruments. All the information was received owing to the application of special systems of long-term recorded data storage.

    My 'inauguration' at an underground nuclear explosion is dated back to the mid-sixties. The exit of the first adit showed to the strait of Matochkin Shar, and the diagnostic devices for the registration of measurement data were placed in solid iron constructions installed in holes in the granite-massif near the exit of the adit. Steep rocks hung over the entrance at an altitude of some five or six hundred metres, and the tunnel itself led one kilometer into the interior of the rock-formation practically perpendicular to the strait.

    Every day we walked with our theorist-colleagues along the rocky shore from the settlement to the adit and on the railroad sleepers inside the adit, where we attentively observed all the operations, particularly the installation of nuclear charges.

    I liked these promenades along the shore, where one could always watch new nuances of the water and land frontier, sometimes calm like a framed mirror and sometimes representing an element of greenish blue foam waves constantly crashing upon the granite cliffs. From such cliffs it was possible to reach for a long leaf of seaweed, one or two meters in length, some thirty or forty centimeters in width and two or three millimeters thick. It was excellent in taste, by the way, even being simply salted and thus ready for consumption.

    The installation of nuclear charges in the end-compartment of the adit has always been a very responsible operation, not to mention its complexity and wearying qualities. One had to stay at the spot for practically twenty-four hours, while the device was installed and while final operations for its equipment were fulfilled. The developer of a nuclear device constantly observed every operation with a special view to the strict adherence to all the instructions. No, it was no controlling observation. It would be more correct to speak about an escort by the author, when a theorist was always ready to render assistance with his calculations right during the operational process.

    Fatigued and feeling cold to the bones we returned in the morning to a small house provided for us. Its Finnish construction consisted of panel-blocks and it had been erected by Russians. One part of that small house was occupied by the commander of the settlement (usually this post was held by a lieutenant commander) or by the chief of the 'Sevemy' settlement (as they called our base at the strait), and we three theorists, lived in the other part of the house. There was a small one-room flat without any sewage or water pipe and with an open toilet in the corridor. There were beds with metallic nets and standard bedside tables for each of us and a wooden table in the middle of the room with no tablecloth on it. Every morning an ordinary marine brought fresh water and filled a barrel - and everything was OK.

    In the settlement we had a sauna, a canteen, a liquid lubricant tank for mobile generators, barracks for the marines and the military construction workers, and a small drill ground, where every morning one could watch the ritual of military formations. Most important in the settlement was the Marine club - a long wooden structure with wooden benches for the visitors to sit on during the movie-shows, which were the only amusement in the evenings. The seamen, these young and sound guys, used to sigh, seeing a female on the screen, because there were no women in the settlement at that time. Only afterwards, some ten years later, did senior officers begin to bring their wives with them.

    There was one night in this club that got somehow specially stuck in my memory. It wasn't on my first visit to Matochkin Shar. It happened some time later. Sasha Khiebnikov, a scientific staff member from the Ural nuclear center, got transferred to our Arzamas-16. His private life was quite complicated, but despite all his personal tragedies and hardships he remained a joyful and communicative person and was a wonderful piano player in our understanding, although we possessed neither good ears for music nor artistic spirits. Once, Sasha got onto the scene of this club, which still was full of the marines right after a movie-show. He opened the cover of the grand piano that usually stood in the corner of the scene (I can't remember anybody using it before) and started to play. The live sound of the grand piano halted those who were about to run for the exit after the film was over, and the whole hall stopped and remained in absolute silence while they listened to the music. He played classical music for more than an hour. Afterwards there was a lasting and stormy ovation that any musician from the capital could only dream of.

    Oh no, the soul of the Russian people hadn't become callous in these wide arctic spaces, under these terrible conditions of life. The beautiful sounds of the Muse raised them for a moment up to the height of the world of human beings in the most elevated sense. This was the soul of the Russian people, this was the enigmatic Russian muzhik (peasant), his limitless good soul in its striving towards the beautiful and his perception of it.

    How much we lack such 'music' and goodness now that could awaken all of us. Yes, that's it - it would awaken us and raise us over the surrounding reality, over lies and slander, over the thirsty striving for instant profit and destruction. And there is nobody to understand that in the name of his ideals this muzhik will squash everything standing on the way of his aspirations of beauty and harmony of life.

    Not far from the settlement there was a helicopter landing place with a small wooden house assigned to the meteorological service and to the air controllers. How many eyes were always looking o hopefully in the direction of this small place covered with metal panels for the helicopters to land on and to take off from, while waiting for the helicopter to arrive from the Belushya Guba settlement. lying some three hundred kilometers to the south. Everybody was expecting letters, newspapers and new movies. And in winter-time this place became a plot of land of hope and life for the Sevemy settlement. There was always somebody to notice the helicopter first. And what a joy seized all of us, when we heard that almost compulsory shout: There, it's flying, there it's flying!' How much everybody was waiting for this iron bird of luck!

    Having returned from the installation of the nuclear device we naturally followed the already established tradition and marked by celebration the conclusion of this important stage of the preparation of the experiment. That dinner we also ate a wonderful fish - the loach of Novaya Zemlya. It deserves a special reference.

    Coming back to Moscow or to Arzamas-16 I always brought a 'fish-tail' - that was a cosy name for the fresh salted loach about one or two kilograms in weight; and then everybody ate these soft and tasty slices cut from the back of the fish with a sharp knife.

    And, speaking of fishing on the lakes of Novaya Zemlya, I wonder whether there might be something more fascinating. The lake Nechvatovo on the Southern Island of Novaya Zemlya possessed a particular beauty. The beauty of the lake was simply of a unique character. The colour of the water was fine blue and the lake was surrounded by smaller hills and had a narrow channel connection to the Barents Sea across the rocky coast. The hills were covered with a dense layer of lichen and moss, where the feet sank as if it were goose down. Lying on that green down of moss and lichen one might spend hours watching the dog the seamen always took with them to fishing occasions playing with a brisk lake sandpiper that stayed at the place for the short summer. Standing on its long thin legs and jumping it would tease the dog, dancing its dance right beneath the dog at the lake-side. The dog would rush at him, but the sandpiper would rapidly fly some ten or fifteen yards away, and so they moved along the lake-side. And sometimes the sandpiper would fly away over the flat water surface of the lake, make a circle to get behind the dog, land near the dog and produce loud noises on the sand. The dog would turn around and an expression of astonishment would appear on its face and its eyes would shine intensely with excitement. One could watch this game for hours and feel surprised at the idea that in nature not everything turned out to be as simple as we sometimes imagined. Most important was the fact that these two arctic inhabitants understood each other quite well and that they were fascinated by their game, enjoying the sun, the fresh air and the crystal-clear water. And the air was always of quite unique clarity - even far mountains appeared to be right here near the spectator.

    In the valleys of smaller rivers and in swamp-places there were bushes of dwarf willow and birch. The bushes weren't high -some ten to thirty centimeters - but their root-systems spread over dozens of square meters, displaying the strength of live nature even under severe arctic conditions. The permafrost didn't let the roots grow deep and thus they entangled into lace ornaments, finding themselves room right at the surface of the soil, which naturally becomes warm in summer. These fantastic root formations might have been used to decorate any living room. It would be enough to take them out of the soil and fulfil a few operations cleaning them of soil and smaller shoots. Man has always been striving towards the beauty and the harmony of nature.

    I loved to spend an hour or two of rest at the lake Nechvatovo while other enthusiastic fishermen were already smartly handling their spinning rods over the flat water surface. Fishing has always been good there. The biggest loach I've seen there weighed nine kilograms and struck me by his length of some one meter and a half. And once a family of polar bears, two bear-babies and their mother, sensed the smell of fresh fish and of loaches' blood, which had a soft red color, and they appeared at the pass of the nearest hill. How beautiful and nice they were, these children of the severe snowy and icy Arctic region. The babies moved swiftly and rolled towards us. For a second or two we were caught by surprise, but then we rushed to the helicopter we had come in, took several signal rockets and shot these brightly shining munitions in the direction of the small bears. They stopped, having felt something evil, and left the scene very very quickly. They did not reappear that day. But we still looked around for a long time and kept together because an encounter with the mother of the babies didn't bode well.

    I'm not a very enthusiastic fisherman and usually they would give me simply a fishing-line with a spoon-bait. I had to twist it with a hand over my head and throw it into the channel, and then haul that fishing-line with both hands. It occurred seldom, but sometimes I still managed to get a loach that way. And there was such a feeling of rivalry when I would pull a strong resisting species of loach. It was according to the principle: who will get whom?

    For a long time loaches have come to these sweet-water lakes of Novaya Zemlya in October or November to give life to a new generation which will grow up in two or three years and leave for the sea in July-September to mature in the spaces of the ocean and then come back again to this very lake to continue the life of its genus. Loaches also live in close isolated lakes, but those are rather small. Yes, restricted space always leads to degeneration of any kind of life.

    And what about mankind? Will it ever break free from the embrace of the solar system? If not, it surely will degenerate sooner or later. But what will happen to us? - That's something beyond our consciousness.

    But now I get back to the past, to the time when we celebrated the installation of the nuclear device in the end-compartment. After that we went for a walk in the settlement and for the first time we came to the dump with garbage and remains of food from our canteen and saw a pack of polar foxes, these smaller arctic foxes, there. They were white and fluffy in winter and they turned abruptly in our direction, when we reached three or four meters from them. Their sharp white teeth and their grinning mouths showed us that the place at the dump belonged to them.

    By the way, beautiful big cormorants and polar seagulls, these constant companions of the sea and ocean spaces, also appeased their hunger at the dump, although they would give way to approaching polar foxes - the strict order eternally remains observed in nature. The dump provided such excessive amounts of food that the predatory animal by land and bird by sea managed to live there quite peacefully.

    I never again managed to see so many polar foxes so near, although in summer one could frequently watch running greyish-red polar foxes hunting small birds or lemmings. The mineworkers, the drift miners from Zheltiye Vody, once presented me a wonderfully dressed pelt of a polar fox - there were feet, a tail, a nose and small eyes as if the fox were alive, but that gift in white and blue didn't decorate my flat in Moscow for long. One year later my wife Lyudmila sewed a fur-cap of it. I was so distressed, and now we've got neither the fur-cap nor the beautiful skin.

    Not only did I have my 'inauguration' at the test site of Novaya Zemlya, but it was the first time too that I understood what it meant to wait for weather, for the cyclone that was necessary to conduct the test. We had been sitting at the strait for almost one month, and so we had to repeat the general rehearsal, during which the operations of all the groups of testers were controlled in practical work, and among other things the operation of all registration devices was controlled by dummy recordings or by recordings of imitated signals to be expected at the test. There was only one thing missing - the explosion of nuclear charges.

    Usually a general rehearsal was held a day or two before the conduct of the test. But when a test was postponed, it was advisable to repeat the rehearsal to verify the good operational condition of the whole very sophisticated complex designed for the explosion and the diagnosis of the experiment.

    It was November; the soil was already long covered with snow, daytime became much shorter, and bitter frosts and stormy winds visited us frequently from the Arctic Ocean. The diesel-electric ship Baikal arrived to provide for the evacuation of all the inhabitants of the 'Sevemey' settlement for the duration of the experiment. Once a frightening wind whistled there coming down the coastal mountains like an avalanche and pulling big stones along its way. The steel ropes holding the ship at the pier tightened like strings and immediately began to burst one after another with clanging sounds. We were driven out to the middle of the strait. Storm alarms had been declared on board the ship and the commander led the vessel to the open sea - it was safer there. And that's how I learned about the bora of Novaya Zemlya when a mass of cold air gathers in narrow gullies among the mountains and then rapidly falls down the mountains into the valley and to the strait, seizing everything on its way. The arctic region made us feel its character.

    Before the November holidays we were allowed to get home to the 'mainland', i.e. to the continent, because suitable weather conditions for the conduct of the experiment were not expected for the next two or three weeks.

    I had just managed to get to Moscow, from where I had to take a flight to Arzamas-16, when a messenger arrived in the flat of my mother-in-law (I had intended to stop there for the night - it was at the Losinoostrovskaya railway station which was so near and dear to my heart - at the beloved Lossinka) and he told me that the explosion had been conducted, but something happened there in the North and that I had to return immediately to the nuclear test site. I was taken by a car to the Astafjevo station, then I flew in a military aircraft to Novaya Zemlya, and there everything became crystal clear to me.

Novaya Zemlya - Radioactive gases breaking through an adit after a nuclear explosion
Full size photo

    The explosion had been followed by a huge avalanche of stones and gravel which came down the mountains and buried the iron constructions with the diagnostic devices at the entrance of the adit. Although we were in the possession of remote transfer of basic data on a safe distance to the command post, there was the question of whether to excavate the diagnostic devices. The chief of the State commission requested me and two officers from the test site personnel to undertake an on-the-spot investigation if practicable to evaluate real conditions with a view to a possible extraction of the devices.

    We neared the place by helicopter, and the radiation level was almost normal there. We three got out of the helicopter and went slowly towards the avalanche. At the place where we had left cur diagnostic devices we could see huge stones that would weigh some ten to fifty tons and small gravel among them. Mound ng these giants we reached laboriously the top of the avalanche at the height of about ten metres and began to get down cautiously. The look of the surroundings took us so much by surprise that we didn't control our radiometers for a long time. We came down from the top of the avalanche without a word, but the deep silence, the dark bodies of the rocks created the sense of a hidden and latent threat. We were quite right with our feelings. All three of us at once saw the soft blue glow of a transparent gas getting out of a crevice. That was a glow of radiation, the so called Tcheren-kov-radiation produced by particles of the products of the nuclear explosion penetrating the air. Without any consultation we came down at once, then we hurried to our helicopter and to our ship.

V. N. Mikhaylov at the rock burst after a nuclear explosion in 1974
Full size photo

    At that time the State Commission occupied the diesel-electric ship Baikal. I might write many a good word about this vessel which secured the preparation and the conduct of the first underground nuclear tests in the strait of Matochkin Shar, because more than once its crew rescued us after experiments under difficult radiation conditions in the strait when big fields of ice furrowed the strait between the Kara Sea to the Barents Sea. The ship could navigate in ice that was less than one metre thick and it cut beautifully the appearing ice blocks. Nevertheless, its end was quite tragic: after a routine overhaul it ran onto underwater reefs at the entrance to Kola Bay while being tested at sea and remains 'sitting' on them now, reminding all the seamen of the rough character of the sea.

    The marines from the Northern Fleet treated us with respect and would let us use their best cabins and the wardroom of the ship for the operative sessions of the State Commission during the sea-transfers from the strait to the 'Belushya Guba' settlement or from the Belushka to Severomorsk.

    It was the same this time too: we returned from the avalanche and reported that it was inexpedient to conduct excavations and to try to get the diagnostic devices back, reminding us of the history of the exploration of the technology of nuclear explosions. After short consultations the Commission decided to get back to Belushka by the Baikal. At the exit to the Barents Sea one could see on the right the wooden ruins of the Lagemoye settlement which was founded in the nineteenth century by the pomors (coast-dwellers at the White Sea), and further on, at the exit to the sea on the left, there were the remains of the wooden house of A. A. Borisov, a famous painter of the North. Yes, history had been cruel to these places where the first pomors lived, and as everywhere in Russia, ancient ruins of the history were crossed with our present.

Belushiya - a base settlement of the Northern Test Site
Full size photo

    Later on there were many such sea-transfers, but that very first sea-transfer in the middle of November stuck in my memory for its beauty and the majestic night view of the dark blue sky that was cut by the Northern Lights making ornaments of different colours up to the very horizon merging with the sky, and by the view of the glowing balls of the jellyfish that got activated by the movement of the ship, and this strip of glowing spheres remained behind the vessel, light gradually changing from bright white to a soft blue gleam already very far behind us. The waves whispered softly while striking the board of the ship and sometimes they departed from the ship noisily as the vessel changed the direction of its course. All that idyll of the nature of the North had nothing to remind us of the powerful underground nuclear test recently conducted almost here, close to us, and that inspired the thought that the giant powers of nature lay beyond our understanding. It was Nature!

    The nights passed very quickly during, the sea-transfer, and I stood all the time at the commander's bridge, admiring the night view and the dark outlines of the rocky shore. Our ship was brought alongside the pier in a marvellous way. The operation was conducted by the crew in full accord and there we already reached the shore of Belushka. Man is still a being of the land, and it was so nice to walk on the solid shore covered with snow with a light frost. Yes, man needs a solid feeling in his legs as well as in his striving to fulfill his dearest desire too.

On the road along the Shumilikha river leading to an emplacement adit, 1980
Full size photo

    And here, in the Belushya Guba settlement which we called simply 'Belushka', there was a two-storey hotel for the leadership of the commission. The commanders of the nuclear test site also lived there. There was one main street leading from north to south. Now there are two and four-storey buildings of brickstones, though once the settlement was the quarters of the pomors and had wooden houses. The house of the officers, where mothers brought their growing daughters to dance at balls with young officers, has always been a place of rest and comfort. There was a wonderful school and, naturally, a sports complex with a large indoor swimming-pool and a small Finnish sauna. That was our favourite place after we returned having stayed at the strait for several months, after a nuclear explosion was carried out. Oh no, there was no more comfortable place than this small sauna with the swimming-pool. Body and soul merged there and relaxed together for long hours, sometimes all through the night.

    The two or three days in Belushka passed quickly, and after we wrote our working reports and after the State commission held its final meeting with the participation of all the services of the test site, which was always dedicated to a thorough analysis of all stages of the preparation and of all results of the conducted experiment, home we went!

    And there was always the parting from our colleagues: the marines, the geologists, the drift-miners and the construction workers, who stayed to pass the winter under the conditions of the Arctic. Severe days and weeks were yet to come for them, thirty-degree frosts and destructive hurricane-winds still had to arrive as well as snow burying houses to their second storey. And in spring there would be another meeting with us, with the testers. Till our next meeting, dear and beloved friends!

    The complicated and hard preparation of an underground nuclear test in the womb of the Tchemaya mountain (it was called so owing to the dark-blue colour it became in bright sunlight) engraved itself into my mind in some special way. The mountain lay up the river Shumilikha ten kilometres from the Sevemy settlement. The geologists told us that the mountain would consist of frozen alumina containing a great number of pyrites-crystals. The entrance of the adit led to the Shumilikha river, carrying its waters from the mountain glaciers to the strait of Matochkin Shar. It was usually calm and rather shallow so it could be crossed by our GAZ-vehicles, i.e. jeeps, but after heavy rainfall and during the melting period of the glaciers one wouldn't recognize the character of that river. A torrent several meters deep crushed everything on its way with roaring sounds and splashes. There was no possibility of crossing its whole width of some one or two hundred meters. At these periods the Shumilikha always made much trouble for us: sometimes it would tear a cable line laid from the adit to the command post or sometimes it would fully block up deliveries of concrete, breaking the timetable of the stemming operations in the adit before the test. Much time passed before at last they built bridges and fixed the road along the river, but it happened only in the middle of the eighties. Before that there were only difficulties and hardships.

    Once Kolya Logunov and I returned to the settlement, even after the torrent in the Shumilikha river had deceased, and despite our good knowledge of fords we got stuck in a deep hole in the ground of the river. It was so deep we had to get onto the tarpaulin top of our GAZ-vehicle. The torrent of ice-cold water had washed out a hole on the ground of the river and only the top of our car stuck out of the water. We sat on it looking anxiously around. At that time cars seldom went along that road and we got seriously worried. The torrent washed away the ground from below our GAZ-vehicle and it bent towards the water-flood direction, and it was quite near to the strait. A bath in ice-cold water and in such a stream didn't promise us any good. But this time our fate once again showed us its generosity - soon we were noticed by the driver of a 'Craz' which went by in our vicinity. It was a powerful truck with all three driving axles - even a sea would seem a small puddle to it.

    But that wasn't our last trial at that test. The dark name of the mountain proved to be right. During the preparation of the experiment a helicopter usually flew around the mountain and landed there when the top profile allowed setting out sensors for the registration of eventual emissions of radioactive gases from the mountain top. Suddenly it fell down onto this mountain while landing, from an altitude of some twenty meters - it fell onto the low ground of the flat mountain top. Later the pilots explained that they discovered a strong stream of air along the surface of the mountain top at the altitude of the latter and that it was too late for them then to get the helicopter higher. It was lucky that they got just a few bruises, and many of us watched how the helicopter crew laboriously descended from the height of six hundred meters. We couldn't see the crash of the helicopter and we were very much astonished at the tourists who descended to us from steep rocks. Only when they got nearer and we saw that they were bloodstained did we understand the tragedy that had happened there in the heights. I gave my GAZ-vehicle to the pilots and it brought them to the settlement. And long afterwards we kept standing at the entrance to the adit and looking up the mountain: 'What will Tchemaya bring us next?'

    The preparation for the experiment ran the routine way. After lasting analyses we decided to install the trailers with registration devices at the distance of about one kilometer and a half from the entrance to the adit. It was no traditional solution because usually we installed the trailers at a distance of one hundred meters from the adits entrance. But the slope of the mountain at the entrance of the adit was too steep. The trailers were moved across the valley to a place where a small anonymous river flowed in springtime and after rainfalls, and we installed them on the slope of the opposite mountain-massif. We had to lengthen the cable lines which would lead signals from sensors that were installed in the adit to the registration trailers. All that demanded expenditure and that were not small, but the security of the registration results was of a very great importance and there was really something threatening in that overhanging rock-massif at the entrance to the adit.

    By the way, in that chain of mountains at the foothills of which we installed the trailers, there was a wonderful place with dark-green moss with an astonishing neat form of surface, and close to it a small river named Vodopadnaya broke itself a way through the hanging rocks. This river began at the nearest blue glacier and rolled down to the valley over cascades of smaller waterfalls with ringing sounds. In the middle of that glade there were the remains of a house and a workshop of Norwegian settlers from the end of the nineteenth century. We loved to get to rest in this glade. It was wonderful there, and the absolute silence was disturbed solely by the noise of the falls with crystal-clear water.

    The nineteenth and the twentieth centuries - what a short moment in the history of our Earth. And it was such a strange feeling that nearby, behind a small pass, intensive work was being fulfilled to prepare an underground nuclear test, and that the risen human mind was encountering nature. Would nature allow us this time to understand a small part of its endless secret?

    Man has perceived and woken up the giant energy of nature. Time will pass and the picture of our planet will be determined not by nuclear arms, but by a colossal source of warmth and energy. It would provide man with a sail and with this sail man would break free from the embrace of the solar system into far space to search for his analogues or, probably, for other forms of life. Then they will recall the already nameless first testers penetrating now the most concealed secrets of the energy of the substance.

    But meanwhile everything was ready to carry out the underground nuclear explosion in the Tchemaya mountain. The command post lay on a small hill near the strait some ten kilometres from the Tchemaya mountain. From there one might see only the upper part of the mountain where the nuclear charges had been installed. The command post was equipped quite modestly: there were several wooden one-storey barracks, with antennas of the management and control system for the detonation of the nuclear devices placed on them; there was also a canteen and a small coal boiler-house. Some ordinary red flags marked the landing site for several helicopters to bring the State Commission and all the testers from this height down to Belushka or another safe place in case of an unusual outcome of the explosion. A reconnaissance helicopter was also stationed there. It would usually take off before the explosion to carry out radioactive and visual reconnaissance in the Tchemaya mountain region before and after the explosion.

    But there were still two days left before the explosion when we once came by car to the height where the marines on duty showed us the small carcass of a dead seal-baby. The seals were eternal companions of the strait. The downcast marines told a simple and tragic story. One of them walked along the shore of the bay and suddenly he saw at close range this playful baby seal, which crawled on land obviously to enjoy a promenade on mother earth. The marine took his cap and began to wave it in order to get the baby seal back into the waters of the bay, but the little seal caught the cap with his bright white teeth and started to pull it. The marine was taken by surprise: the problem was that the cap was public property and the petty officer would blame him for the loss. He didn't wait long but cuffed the baby seal with his left hand on its head: give the cap back! But that stroke of the brave onto the soft little head of the animal turned out to be lethal. And that was the whole of the history! He brought the baby in his arms to the height and all the marines looked sadly at the breathless body of the innocent being. They didn't take off the seal's soft grey pelt to get it dressed, but brought the baby to the bay - probably its mother would come to say goodbye. After some days the body disappeared - where to? Only the Barents Sea knows.

    Meanwhile time neared the 'Teh'-hour - the moment of the detonation of the nuclear charges installed in the adit. Everybody participating in that final stage of work was up to the mark, the rest - there were about one thousand military and civil experts -sailed on vessels early in the morning, still in twilight, into the sea at a safe distance. The vessel would feel only a silent stroke and that would signal them that the nuclear explosion had been executed and that soon they might return to the settlement.

    The long expected cyclone necessary for the performance of the test came. According to the development of the meteorological situation Moscow gave its OK for the explosion, and the last consultation arrived several hours before the 'Teh'. Everybody stood still; only from the wagon of the detonation service a loud and solid voice announced by radio the countdown of seconds before the explosion - three seconds remained, two, one. And in absolute silence we saw a part of the Tchemaya mountain get down slowly, no, it would be more correct to say it crawled down. The earth shook at the top of the mountain and only after that did we hear a dull rumble as if it were a sigh of the earth. I sensed these movements, the vibrations of the earth, with pride, because on that day I tore away a particle of secrecy, because I won, and thank you so much, mother nature, you gave me this possibility. This was the pride of a real man, oh no, not the one in night clubs and bars in the capital city. This was the pride of joy at the understanding of the world.

    Oh my god, then we saw three candles of white radioactive steam going up over the mountain to an altitude of several kilometers, as if an evil ghost ascended to the heavens. And an avalanche of about fifty million cubic meters of frozen soil some half a kilometer in width and some sixty meters in depth went through the whole valley like a tsunami wave, pulled down our trailers and went up the opposite foothills. Later, as we saw a film taken from the reconnaissance helicopter, we repeated these scenes several times holding our breath and watching our mobile generators which stood astride the trailers burning like matches as the avalanche came over them. Our trailers came to the surface in that torrent mass of soil and ice, they had been turned upside down and thrown to the edge of the avalanche. Their multi-layer case of aluminium and foamed plastics had been torn up at several places. Two hours after the explosion we came back to the place where our registration trailers had been standing and saw all this with our own eyes.

    I got through one of the torn up holes into one of the trailers at once, and I felt limitless joy: the interior of the trailer hadn't been damaged and the whole registration system had fulfilled the prescribed programme long before the avalanche arrived. We had got full information. And so the evil ghost of the Tchemaya emitted his exhalation into the heights, in the direction where the wind drove the clouds away from the adit, and we looked silently at the skies - we felt sorry about the blue space where it flowed, being seized by the cyclone. The radioactive emission carried by the movement of the cyclone would be controlled there, in that far distance, for three days by an AN-24 aircraft specially equipped with an air-collection and a radioactive isotope data processing system, as it always was done.

    We looked sadly at the twisted face of the mountain and of the valley. Next year a swallow lake emerged at the heaped up barrier, but a brook found its way from under the barrier.

    And today, visiting the strait with inspection teams, I always come to this barrier (it is like returning again and again to my youth), and again and again I recollect my friends and the usual routine of the severe but happy everyday life I led here every summer and every autumn for twenty years. And now every year I feel nostalgic about Novaya Zemlya, so I say goodbye to the working people of the Arctic.