Ever since the Soviet Union pledged to stop testing nuclear weapons over the Earth's surface, dubious tests began to be carried out in mines and wells. In the Donbas, this was arranged in an operating mine, not far from residential buildings.
In August 1963, the USSR, the USA and the UK signed the Moscow Treaty, which banned nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in space and under water. It was hardly a coincidence that two years later the Soviet Union launched a program of underground nuclear explosions "in the interests of the national economy."
The research institutes of the closed cities Arzamas-16 and Chelyabinsk-70 worked on “Program No. 7”. It was a twin of the American Plowshare project and assumed the use of devices with a capacity of up to 50 thousand tons in TNT equivalent for mining, seismic sounding, and excavation. Until 1988, the USSR conducted from 124 (officially) to 169 (presumably) “peaceful nuclear explosions”. There were two of them in Ukraine.
The first, codenamed "Fakel", was staged in the Kharkov region in the summer of 1972. An explosion in a well at a depth of more than 2 kilometers then tried unsuccessfully to stop the emergency gas release. The second thundered in Donbass, a few kilometers from Yenakiyevo and 60 kilometers from Donetsk. Here the experiment was staged right in the operating Yuny Kommunar mine.
27 explosions from 1957 to 1973.
UNDER THE TERRICON AT UNCOM
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The city of Yunokommunarovsk, formerly Yunkom, Yuny Kommunar is one of the dozens of mining towns in Donbass. A typical industrial province that no one sees, that no one knows about, where many thousands of people live the mining routine: change underground, alcohol, the threat of silicosis and collapse, the hope of regression after early retirement.
Compensation for damage to health in the workplace.
Now under the control of the so-called. "DNR". In 2016, the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine renamed the city in absentia to Bunge (the first name of the mine is "Yunkom").
Millions have left such towns. Former President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych once said that he was also “born under a waste heap on Yunkom”.
Since the beginning of the 1960s, social tension began to grow in Donbas. The region has returned to the old way of conducting dialogue with the authorities - strikes. The shooting in Novocherkassk sparked a wave of protests. The workers demanded better living and working conditions, but they achieved their goal only partially.
In 1978, a Donbass engineer Vladimir Klebanov headed the Association of the Free Trade Union of Workers in the Soviet Union, which included several dozen activists. They tried to achieve recognition by the International Labor Organization, but were dispersed by the KGB.
On September 16, 1979, a potentially lethal nuclear explosion took place at the Yunokommunarovsk mine.
Management building of the "Yunkom" mine 1955-1956 Source: miningwiki.ru
SO IT WAS
On that day, the population of the areas adjacent to the Yuniy Kommunar mine was instructed to carry out blasting operations. The people were ordered to leave their homes for the day and were evacuated to the nearby village of Staraya Colony. There, the residents of Yunokommunarovsk were met by field kitchens and a cordon of soldiers of the Interior Ministry troops.
At this time, a nuclear charge with a capacity of 300 tons of TNT was blown up in the mine. The bomb was made in Arzamas-16. The device was placed in a specially created mine working between coal seams. To prevent the gaseous products of the explosion from escaping outside, the chamber was blocked with reinforced concrete bridges with a total thickness of more than 6 meters.
Seconds after the explosion, the unexported residents of Yunkom felt an earthquake. In some houses, cracks appeared on the walls, but these were the only visible consequences of the experiment. The next day, the mine continued to work, in the morning the miners went to the face. They worked near the center of yesterday's nuclear explosion.
The closed city where the first atomic bomb of the USSR was developed. Now - Sarov.
Camouflage cavity of the "Cleavage" object. Source: Mining Encyclopedia / wiki.gr-tech.ru
ILLEGAL PLAN
The Yuny Kommunar mine was not one of the big ones (it produced 2000 tons of coal per day), but it had the notorious "gas" mine. For twenty years, from 1959 to 1979, 235 gas and coal dust emissions occurred at the mine. In 28 cases, they ended in the death of miners. In the late 1970s, the Yunkom mine was considered one of the most dangerous in the Donbas.
The research institute "VNIPIpromtechnologii" was engaged in solving the problem. They developed a plan to reduce the stress between the rock layers by detonating a small nuclear charge. The project was named "Cleavage Object" - a reference to the term meaning rock stratification. This is where the official background - testing new technologies, combined with the elimination of potential hazards during coal mining - ends.
Behind the formal logic of engineers and physicists, one can see some ambiguity in their plans. The first thing that raises doubts is the economic side of the issue. The low profitability of coal mining in the USSR could not recoup the colossal costs of developing and using small nuclear charges to eliminate gas pollution. Second, although as a result of the experiment, the Yunkom's gas content was reduced almost threefold, this method was no longer used. But Yunkom was far from the only mine in Donbas with similar problems.
Given the effect of the 1963 Moscow Treaty, Yunkom, with its gas emissions, could simply be a cover for nuclear weapons tests. This version is confirmed by the fact that all the documentation on the "Cleavage" was taken to Moscow shortly after the explosion and remains secret to this day.
Mine "Yunkom". Photo: fedor_vic / photo.qip.ru
INHERITANCE RADIATION
After the nuclear explosion, the mine continued to extract coal for another 23 years. Yunkom was closed due to unprofitability in 2002. From the moment of the experiment to the closure of the mine, an increase in mortality was recorded in the city. These facts are not necessarily connected, but according to Sergei Glazkov, who was once the Yunkom's butcher and then its watchman, none of those who worked in 1979 have survived.
In the summer and autumn of 2014, the front passed through the town and, in the end, it found itself in the so-called “DPR”. Today, the Yuny Kommunar mine operates in a water pumping mode. No one knows what will happen if the groundwater carries the reinforced concrete bridges around the explosion site.