Totskoye nuclear exercise The Totskoye nuclear exercise was a military exercise undertaken by the Soviet army to explore defensive and offensive warfare during nuclear war . The exercise , under the code name " Snowball " , involved an aerial detonation of a nuclear bomb as powerful as the two bombs used in the American nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined . The stated goal of the operation was military training for breaking through heavily fortified defensive lines of a military opponent using nuclear weapons . An army of 45 , 000 soldiers marched through the area around the epicenter soon after the nuclear blast . The exercise was conducted on September 14 , 1954 , under the command of Marshal Georgy Zhukov to the north of Totskoye village in Orenburg Oblast , Russia , in the South Ural Military District . History . In mid - September 1954 , nuclear bomb ing tests were performed in Totskoye range during the training exercise " Snezhok " ( " Snowball " or " Light Snow " ) with some 45 , 000 people , all Soviet soldiers and officers who were exposed to radiation from a bomb twice as powerful as the one dropped on Hiroshima nine years earlier . The exercise was commanded by the Marshal of the Soviet Union , Georgy Zhukov . At 9 : 33 a . m . on 14 September 1954 , a Soviet Tu - 4 bomber dropped a atomic weapon from . The bomb exploded above Totskoye range , from Totskoye . During the exercise more than 45 , 000 were deliberately exposed to radiation . It involved the 270th Rifle Division , 320 planes , 600 tank s and 600 armored personnel carriers . The soldiers were told that there would be a regular military exercise featuring a mock nuclear explosion and that it would be filmed . The military personnel were not issued any protective gear . Deputy Defense Minister Georgy Zhukov witnessed the blast from an underground nuclear bunker . The planes were ordered to bomb the explosion site five minutes after the blast , and three hours later ( after the demarcation of the radioactive zone ) the armored vehicles were ordered to practice the taking of a hostile area after a nuclear attack . The residents of selected villages ( Bogdanovka and Fedorovka ) that were situated around from the epicenter of the future explosion were offered temporary evacuation outside the radius . Most of the local population was never warned , however . Consequences . Thousands who are believed to have sought help in local hospitals would later be surprised to find that their medical cards , containing their histories of sickness , had disappeared from the regional hospital . That fact was confirmed by a former soldier who participated in the exercise , Alexey Petrovich Vavilov , in his interview with the television news broadcasting program Podrobnosti ( Telechannel INTER ) more than 50 years later . Over half a century later , this matter is still under strict control of the federal government . The local law enforcement personnel continue to harass the journalists who try to obtain footage from the range . The exercise became widely known only in 1993 . Even the soldiers who participated in the exercise did not know that they had taken part . The government congratulated the local population for their heroism in providing the " nuclear shield " for their Motherland . September 14 is considered in Russia a day of creation of the state ' s nuclear shield .