As Russia warns of the rising risk of nuclear war, and relations with the United States sink into a deep freeze, communities close to the vast Soviet-era nuclear testing site in northern Kazakhstan have a message for leaders: "Let us be a lesson." Hundreds of tests were carried out between 1949 and 1989 on the barren steppe near the city of Semey, formerly known as Semipalatinsk, close to the Kazakh-Russian border. Many nuclear proliferation experts believe resuming testing by either nuclear superpower more than 30 years after the last test is unlikely soon.
As millions of people head to the theaters this weekend to see Christopher Nolan’s epic Oppenheimer, a new study has been released that tracks the radioactive devastation wrought by the U.S. government’s first nuclear weapons test. The “Trinity” test, as it was secretly known, was the first nuclear detonation by the American military, occurring on July 16, 1945. That test resulted in the distribution of radioactive deposits to 46 U.S. states, as well as to parts of Canada and Mexico, the new res