Editor's Introduction

Abstract

Our first two articles in this issue of Russian Politics and Law sound an alarm over the more than seven hundred "underground" nuclear detonations conducted on Soviet territory since the 1940s. Peaceful nuclear explosions (PNEs) rocked the countryside regularly for decades, spewing radioactive debris not only into the air but also underground, into the water supply. Leonid Pochivalov ("Russia—Country of Hundreds of Hiroshimas") presents information that makes clear how large (and counterproductive) the Soviet PNE program was. In the second article ("A Creeping Chernobyl"), notable among other things for its not identifying the interviewee by name, Boris Golubov and Kim Smirnov discuss the economic insanity of PNEs. These were used for everything from increasing oil flows from depleted wells to trying to reverse the flow of Siberian rivers from a northerly to a southerly direction as part of the grandest irrigation scheme in human history.