Inside the town that has been nuked so much it has an atomic lake

The most nuked place on the planet was the site of more than 400 nuclear bomb tests – but kept completely secret from its residents for decades.

The town of Kurchatov, Kazakhstan, is dotted with craters and even an ‘atomic lake’, as the Soviet Union used it as a bombing test site during the Cold War.

465 nuclear and hydrogen bombs were dropped in the area – similar to the US Los Alamos region.

But locals were devastated by the constant bombings – which they were told were ‘weather events’.

In 1965, a hydrogen bomb 11 times the strength of the one used in Hiroshima was dropped in Kurchatov, creating a massive crater which was eventually turned into what locals refer to as the ‘atomic lake’.

The town, once home to more than a million people, is now only home to a few thousand who recalled the horrors of the Cold War testing.

A woman named Nadezhda Golovina spoke to filmmakers Thomas Brag and Staffan Taylor on Youtube, and said: ‘We didn’t know it was so bad.

‘They used to tell us to leave the house in case it collapsed, a window or the door of the stove would open and ashes would fall out. The chandeliers were swinging.’

Other residents told of how many locals developed cancer from the radiation, similar to locals who were told it was safe to remain near Pripyat in Chernobyl.

Lyubov Filina added: ‘We were kids back then and we didn’t understand anything.

‘Even adults didn’t know that the mushroom cloud was more dangerous than vibration or broken windows.’

Filina’s son was born in the late 1980s with congenital defects, which she believes were caused by radiation exposure.

In 1991, the nuclear testing in the region finally ceased shortly before the fall of the Soviet Union – but marks of the damage are still seen throughout the town.

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