According to data published by the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation [1, 2] from 1945 to 1963 360 nuclear devices of various kinds with a total power of -513 Mt were exploded in the Earth's atmosphere, of which about 194 Mt were due to fission reactions. The major part of these explosions were produced by the USA, the USSR, and Great Britain. It is these explosions that formed the main (up to 70%) accumulation of long-lived artificial radionuclides, which has led to the occurrence of a source of global contamination of the environment in addition to the natural radiation background. In this paper we estimate the contribution made by nuclear explosions produced by the USSR from 1949 through 1990 to the annual production and content of radioactive products in the stratosphere of the Northern Hemisphere, and also to the fallout and buildup on the Earth's surface.When obtaining the estimates we used the double-layer model in which the atmosphere is conventionally split into two reservoirs-tropospheric and stratospheric, connected to one another by the tropopause. The content of an individually chosen radio nuclide in each reservoir varies due to the combined action of three basic mechanisms, mechanical fallout from the stratosphere into the troposphere and from the troposphere onto the Earth's surface, radioactive decay, and also production from tests. Exchange of impurities present in the reservoirs occurs in accordance with the period of semiproduction of radioactive particles and aerosols, which in this paper is taken to be equal 1.5 years from the stratosphere and 30 days from the troposphere [3]. We also took into account in the calculations the latitude and seasonal variations in the height of the tropopause.When obtaining the initial information required to estimate the production of radioactive products from Soviet tests in the Earth's atmosphere we collected and generalized experimental data on the conditions under which the nuclear explosions occurred.The general characteristics of the different forms of nuclear explosions which illustrate the dynamics of their occurrence and which enable us to outline the pattern of tests as whole, are shown in Figs. 1 and 2. Over the whole period considered the Soviet Union carried out 715 nuclear tests, of which 65% (467 explosions) took place at the Semipalatinsk proving ground (South), 19 % (132 explosions) took place at the Novozemel'ya proving ground (North), and 16 % (115 explosions) occurred in tests carried out in various parts of the country for purposes of the national economy [4][5][6][7]. In addition, one nuclear explosion occurred as part of warfare manoeuvres using a nuclear weapon in the Totsky region of the Orenburg area [8].A comparison of the data in Figs. 1 and 2 shows that despite the large number of tests that occurred in the southern proving ground, their contribution to the overall TNT equivalent is small and amounts to only 6.7%. For explosions carried our in the northern proving ground, the opposite picture i...
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