The caption says this is model of the first Soviet bomb at “the Polygon,” which was the code name for the Semipalatinsk test site.5 Somehow it manages to look very futuristic (the big circles, the large poles) and yet quite rustic (the trees, the way in which everything looks like it has been fashioned by hand by some ancient Kazakh craftsman).
(If anyone has any insight into what function the poles and the big circle have, I’d love to know.)
This is one of the more intimate photographs of the Soviet bomb I’ve ever seen. Photographs of the Trinity gadget in arrangements like this have been common for a few decades, now, but Soviet equivalents are quite rare.
The most profoundly indicative of the Soviet situation and the most graphically arresting. A bedraggled Russian worker, straight out of Gogol, posing next to a riveted, crude, and terrible atomic bomb. It’s a dystopic juxtaposition: the desperate old paired with the horrible new.
The “bomb” appears to be an early bomb casing model used for aerodynamic testing.6 I suspect they used these proto-casing the same way the US did: dropping them endlessly from planes, to make sure they wouldn’t spin or pinwheel in unpleasant ways that would rattle the sensitive internal components.
