Closed City Chelyabinsk-70 - Alternative View

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Closed City Chelyabinsk-70 - Alternative View
Closed City Chelyabinsk-70 - Alternative View

Video: Closed City Chelyabinsk-70 - Alternative View

Video: Closed City Chelyabinsk-70 - Alternative View
Video: An Englishman in Chelyabinsk (Англичанин в Челябинске) 2024, March
Anonim

Chelyabinsk-70 is a strange city. It constantly changes its location: yesterday it was located between Chelyabinsk and Sverdlovsk, today - between Chelyabinsk and Yekaterinburg, where it will be tomorrow - nobody knows. No ordinary person has ever set foot there. It is impossible to get there. Even from anti-aircraft guns. It is easier for foreigners to get into space than Chelyabinsk-70. The local silence rings in your ears, and the purity makes you ashamed to throw your cigarette butt past the urn. The working class plays chess there during lunchtime, and for every person with higher education there are 0.2 people without. In Chelyabinsk-70, everyone knows everything about everyone's personal life, but no one knows anything about production. Old atomic bombs are not thrown out there, but handed over to a museum, and new ones are local fun. Jokes aside, but Chelyabinsk-70, now given a new life in the image of Snezhinsk,until recently was the most secret of the Soviet ZATO. And there were reasons for that.

How the US bit out Sakharov's puff

On April 9, 1946, by a decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, on the basis of the branch of the 2nd laboratory of the Academy of Sciences, Design Bureau No. 11 was formed, headed by the Deputy Minister of Medium Machine Building under the pseudonym Minsredmash, by the way, the central administration of the entire nuclear industry of the Country of Soviets was hidden) Pavel Zernov and the outstanding physicist Yuli Khariton, who took the post of chief designer. Experimental production, and then the first nuclear weapons plant, was dispersed in the secret Arzama-se-16 - the former village of Sarov, immersed in the forests on the border of the Nizhny Novgorod (at that time - Gorky) region and the Mordovian Republic. At the cost of incredible efforts, a sample of the first Soviet nuclear bomb RDS-1 was ready already in 1949, which successfully passed tests and proved its suitability for mass production.

The work of KB-11 did not stop for a minute. In the spring of 1950, the leading nuclear physicists of the USSR, the future Nobel Prize winners Andrei Sakharov and Igor Tamm, and the talented graduate student of Tamm, Yuri Romanov, arrived at the Sarov "facility". From that moment, intensive work began on the creation of a hydrogen bomb. Years of trial and error have borne chilling fruits. On August 12, 1953, at the Semipalatinsk test site, the compact "thermonuclear product" RDS-6s, the famous "puff", was successfully tested, which declared - the Soviets surpassed the United States by a head. The result was so terrible that the realization of its destructive power made Sakharov himself protest against further tests (although the academician never repented of the creation of weapons of mass destruction in his entire life). But the process of the nuclear race could no longer be stopped.

Why all this boring educational program? The fact is that the most secret of the secret Soviet science city - Chelyabinsk-70, has its history since the test of the hydrogen bomb.

New "object"

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After testing the hydrogen bomb at KB-11, a highly respected commission arrived from Moscow. It included, in particular: the "father" of the first Soviet atomic bomb Igor Kurchatov, academic physicists Anatoly Aleksandrov and Yakov Zeldovich, Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences Kirill Shchelkin, Doctor of Sciences Yevgeny Zababakhin, Landau's student Maxim Frank-Kamenetsky and, of course, Comrade Sakharov himself. Together with the chief designer Khariton, they discussed plans for the future. And this is what they came to: the Soviet Union needs a second weapons center, similar to the Sarov ZATO. For the post of chief designer of the future nuclear institute, Kurchatov nominated Shchelkin, and an experienced engineer and industrialist Dmitry Vasiliev was proposed as director. The commission had no objections - both candidates were respected and professional people. It remains only to choose a test site for the future nuclear complex.

Since the new scientific center was to develop powerful and dimensional thermonuclear warheads, it was absolutely unacceptable to place it near large administrative centers. In this regard, the entire European part of the USSR was automatically rejected. The "object" definitely had to be carried out beyond the Urals. The problem was that all the promising places were either already given away for construction, or were located in such a wilderness that laying the minimum communications there would have cost an unaffordable pretty penny. There is a legend that Stalin forced Beria, the head of the Special Committee on the Nuclear Problem under the Council of Ministers, to personally surf the space over the Urals and a good half of Siberia in a helicopter in search of a suitable place. But this is just a legend, at that time Beria had already been arrested for betraying the Motherland. In fact, everything was much more logical and prosaic. The regions were swept aside one after another, until the Minister of Medium Machine Building and an experienced industrial organizer Avraamy Zavenyagin proposed building an "object" directly in the Urals, far from the state borders - between Chelyabinsk and Sverdlovsk. According to the memoirs of a researcher at KB-11 Viktor Zhuchikhin, the commission willingly agreed to the proposed option. “These two cities are connected by rail and highway,” writes Zhuchikhin. - True, the road is of poor quality, but they have already begun to reconstruct it. It is possible to "crash" into these transport routes without great expenses. In addition, the proximity of the Mayak chemical plant will make it possible to quickly resolve issues related to the manufacture of experimental materials. "A small radiological laboratory in the village of Sungul with ready-made housing stock and basic infrastructure, already functioning in that region, became a significant help. So it was possible not only to save time for construction, but also to immediately start preparatory scientific work.

Non-existent city

On March 24, 1955, by the decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR No. 586-362, the creation of a new nuclear NII-1011, a backup of KB-11, was finally approved. This is how the Russian Federal Nuclear Center - All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Technical Physics (RFNC - VNIITF) was born. In the same year, nuclear physicist Yevgeny Zababakhin was sent to the "facility" under construction as deputy scientific supervisor and head of the theoretical department. In 1960, he became the head of the research institute and stayed in this position for almost a quarter of a century, until his death in 1984. He also owns the phrase: "Because there is no third world war that we are!" These words, simple at first glance, are the main reason why the best specialists of the vast Land of Soviets over and over again did the impossible and thousands of people hid their lives,as a state secret. There are very few details about the life of that, closed from the whole world, science city. Since 1957 he managed to try on several pseudonyms - "Kasli-2", "Che-lyabinsk-50", "Chelyabinsk-70".

The existence of the youngest of the Soviet ZATOs was kept in the strictest confidence. If the Western intelligence services were quite well informed about the same Arzamas-16, although they could not get there, then the ubiquitous American intelligence for decades did not even realize that somewhere in the Ural taiga was hiding not just a backup of the first atomic town, which it was originally supposed to become but a powerful nuclear institute. Only under Gorbachev, who was not stingy to reveal all cards to the overseas guests, did the discouraged delegates finally learn about the true power hidden in our nuclear bins. If they could more accurately calculate all the megatons in TNT equivalent accumulated during the Cold War, each would have had at least a couple of gray hairs.

Ahead of the whole planet

The Sarov Design Bureau was the first of its kind, but it was the designers from Chelyabinsk-70 that owned the lion's share of the record achievements. In the secret city of the Ural Mountains, the lightest and smallest nuclear warheads, the most durable, heat-resistant and shock-resistant warheads, the most economical and lowest-power devices, as well as the purest nuclear warhead intended for peaceful purposes were created. But all these "very-very" fade against the background of a truly formidable weapon, the most powerful explosive device ever created by man - the AN602 product. In the people it is better known as "Tsar Bomba" or "Kuzkina Mother". The unimaginable 58.6 megatons, which the thermonuclear "Mother" showed during tests at the "Dry Nose" test site on Novaya Zemlya in 1961, were awarded a separate chapter in the Guinness Book of Records. The blast from the explosion was visible more than 1000 km from the epicenter, from Norway to Alaska, and the seismic and atmospheric shock waves circled the globe three times. The very crust of the earth trembled with the unlimited potential of the Soviet Union. By the way, at that time the most devastating bomb in the US nuclear arsenal was a charge with a capacity of "only" 15 megatons, and the famous explosion on the Bikini Atoll in the center of the Pacific Ocean (which the liberal media still no-no, and even scare children) was twice as weak indicator demonstrated by AN602.at that time, the most devastating bomb in the US nuclear arsenal was a charge with a capacity of "only" 15 megatons, and the famous explosion on the Bikini Atoll in the center of the Pacific Ocean (which the liberal media still no-no, and scare children to this day) was twice weaker than the figure demonstrated AN602.at that time, the most devastating bomb in the US nuclear arsenal was a charge with a capacity of "only" 15 megatons, and the famous explosion on the Bikini Atoll in the center of the Pacific Ocean (which the liberal media still no-no, and scare children to this day) was twice weaker than the figure demonstrated AN602.

Today there is no Chelyabinsk-70. He was reborn under the poetic name Snezhinsk and slightly opened up to the world. Just enough so that people can appreciate its nature - the picturesque Cherry Mountains and the serene surface of the Sungul, Strong and Sinara lakes. Of the ten cities of Rosatom, it is rightfully considered the most beautiful and comfortable. But it won't be easy to go to Snezhinsk for the weekend, the status of the closed city still remains with him. The territory is still surrounded by a two-level fence with barbed wire, and you can get into the city only after passing five checkpoints. Without a pass is an impossible task. But somewhere deep behind the veil of secrecy, a small quiet town leads a measured life from among those where it is good to raise children and meet a dignified old age. And you can't say that these friendly people live and work at the heart of the country's nuclear project.

Magazine: Historical Truth No. 1. Author: Ignat Volkhov