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

Abstract

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.