Chagan

Chagan - darkometer rating : 7 - A former long-range heavy bomber airbase and now ghost town in east Kazakhstan located en route between Semey and Kurchatov and well worth having a good look around when passing through this area. > More background info > What there is to see > Location > Access and costs > Time required > Combinations with other dark destinations > Combinations with non-dark destinations > Photos More background info: it's hard to obtain any reliable and detailed information about this place, but from what fragmented sources can be tracked down on the Internet it seems that the base was founded sometime in the early 1950s. It was a special base for some of the Soviet Union 's most iconic Cold-War -era long-range bombers, including the legendary M-4 "Bison" and the Tu-95 "Bear" (the latter was also the plane that dropped the largest ever nuclear device, the "Tsar Bomba", at Novaya Zemlya – see Russian Nuclear Weapons Museum ). The enormous length of the Chagan aerodrome's runway of ca. two and a half miles (3.5 to 4 km) would certainly corroborate that function. As such, Chagan clearly formed part of the USSR 's nuclear deterrent, whose atomic bomb "ammunition" was primarily tested at the nearby Polygon , the Semipalatinsk Test Site. It may even have been that some of the air-dropped atomic bomb tests were delivered by planes that had taken off from the Chagan base. For a while Chagan was apparently also one of the few homes for the super-sleek T-160, the variable-geometry supersonic strategic bomber that was developed as the counterpart to the USA 's similar B-1 design (see USAF Museum ). Unlike the B-1, which has more or less been retired, the T-160 has been called back into service in the Russian air force with some fanfare (by Russia 's contemporary "Tsar" Vladimir Putin himself, it was reported).