A dark Soviet secret.

Highway to hell.

In a little town of Ozersk, nestled between the Ural mountains lays a secret that has been closed off for several decades to the general public.

Back in the 1950's, during the Cold War stand off between the Soviet Union and the United States, the Soviets had seen the destructive power of a nuclear attack on the Japanese at Hiroshima that signalled the end of World War 2. They wanted to know what the effect of intense nuclear radiation had on people. The Soviet Union had commissioned several sites known as ZATO (Closed Administrative-Territorial  Formation) where in which most of soviet research and arms manufacturing occurred. These cities never existed on soviet geography and were serviced by scientists and engineers who were never seen in the public.

Pickled radiated brain anyone?

Ozersk was the centre of a massive experimentation program in which over a quarter of a million animals including cats, rats, dogs and cows, were all subject to intense radiation bombardment from α, β and γ rays. They literally lived, breathed and ate (they were fed high doses of radiated food) radiation. When they died, their vital organs like the heart, lungs, etc were sliced into thin pieces and studied or stored in formalin. These jars of stored organs still remain today, left as they were since the end of the cold war and the split of the Soviet Union. Scientists have been able to obtain permission to enter these ZATO's and gather the data collected by their predecessors and hopefully utilize it for some good. The scientists involved in the project say that such data is considered irreplaceable in the scientific community as such extensive experimentation of such kind cannot be done today due to "funding and ethical reasons".

-Material and Images via Bldgblog