 The Cradle of The A-bomb By Anatoly SOROKA |
I often ask myself a question, why do we have so much evil in this world. And violence with continuous wars. I hate wars. Moreover I hate violence and evil. In my reflections about the matter I find that people who lived some hundred years ago felt the same. We live in the 21st century and believe that we build, or at least try to do all our best to make our society ideal with -out social programs being worked, trying to improve conditions of the individual's life. And at the same time the individuals or the society need to defend themselves, inventing various adaptive mechanisms. One of the questions to which I have wanted an answer was: what was the nuclear weapon created for, to prevent evil or to bear it? Perhaps this is a matter of philosophy but not only...
I have a friend in Russia who works on Arzamas-16, one of the strategic areas where the first A-bomb was produced. Once upon a time I visited him and he promised to show me that place. First I thought it would be impossible for him to do this. But the friend of mine succeeded and obtained a special pass for me.
So my wish is fulfilled on a clear September morning. The train gradually slows and finally stops. The silence of the virgin forest around the train is interrupted only by the distant barks of a dog and ... the burring of blood-thirsty September mosquitoes ... This discovery raises a slight panic, all the more so as passport control is clearly being dragged out - the frontier post officer literally bores my passports with his glance, while mosquitoes simultaneously prick our skins...
Arzamas-16 is not only a state within a state, fenced off on all sides by barbed wire, a wide control strip and frontier observation towers. It also incorporates the intellectual forces of a huge country on one place - the creation of the mightiest and most destructive weapons to have been manufactured on Earth - thermo-nuclear weapons. The first Soviet atom bomb was created here, behind barbed wire, then the world's first hydrogen bomb. Here Sakharov, Zeidovich, Tamm and Frank-Kamensky all worked once...
A narrow concrete road, winding round the trees, brought us quite quickly to the main streets of the secret city. By a quirk of fate, the first atomic centre in Russia was located near the Sarovsky Monastery, where the famous St. Serafim Sarovsky lived who foretold many cataclysms of our uneasy century. The ancient structures of the monastery, bordering standard, large-panel, multi-storied houses, make a classic hybrid of the Russian provincial city. But the main focus of secrets is not here - the so-called industrial zone is hidden away from curious eyes: even satellites cannot work out what is being cooked up in the secret shops and bunkers of Arzamas-16.
The level of secrecy is such that even the designers of a subdivision do not know what is happening in the next one. When it was officially announced that a hydrogen weapon had been produced in the USSR, the design section chief of the atomic centre of Arzamas-16 expressed his astonishment in a conversation with colleagues: "Imagine, apparently another centre is working on this weapon." The first hydrogen bomb prepared for testing was practically under his nose... A video recording of the first hydrogen explosion is shattering: this is probably what the apocalypse looks like...
Whereas staffs are prevented from wandering round the weapon-making shop, I was acquainted with the conversion programme of Arzamas-16. With the help of pieces of iron, resembling knitting needles, you can fire back the glass in a flier's cabin during a crash, pull down congealed brimstone in wagons, or carry out a number of other operations, subject only to a direct blast. The unique laser units are impressive: with only mild blood radiation they cure complex cardiovascular diseases: the X-ray equipment fits into an ordinary case: unprecedented carat meters used in the clinics of the famous ophthalmologist Svyatoslav Fyodorov... Scientists are ready to share their discoveries, offering the original copy, prepared for technical cooperation...
The presence of a stranger in the secret city of Arzamas-16 would have been considered some sort of mad fantasy about eight years ago - only a few people ever knew of its very existence, named abstractly as an "object". In Arzamas-16, as in the past, they continue perfecting nuclear weapons. Of course, today's bomb has become more "elegant", smaller in size and far safer. But it hasn't become any easier to sleep - we still live in a world loaded with nuclear weapons...
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More in the section:
A Trip to Siberia
Investigating Terra Incognita: Bashkiria
Kyiv Beaches and the "Ukrainian Mentality"
Read also previous issue' articles:
THE EAR: Time to Stop Traffic Terror
The USSR: What was it?
Socialist Realism From One Collector's Viewpoint
Weak Laws Make Ukraine Europe's Dumping Ground
Social Entrepreneurship Expands in Ukraine
Lenin and Ukraine
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