Nuclear Contamination from Weapons Complexes in the Former Soviet Union and the United States

APR 01, 1996

The race for nuclear arms supremacy resulted in the discharge of large amounts of radioactivity into the environment, far more by the USSR than by the US.

DOI: 10.1063/1.881495

Don J. Bradley

Clyde W. Frank

Yevgeny Mikerin

Over a 50‐year period, the Soviet Union and the United States developed the largest nuclear weapons complexes in the world. In doing so, they also created the world’s largest inventories of radioactive waste. Although some of the waste has been stored in safely managed systems such as tanks or converted into stable and storable forms such as glass, significant amounts of it have been released into the environment. This article focuses primarily on these weapons‐related discharges because of their size and less‐well‐known nature.

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More about the Authors

Don J. Bradley. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, Washington.

Clyde W. Frank. US Department of Energy, Washington, DC.

Yevgeny Mikerin. Ministry of Atomic Energy of the Russian Federation, Moscow.