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 40 kt RDS-4 nuclear bomb. 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 hypocenter soon after the nuclear blast. The exercise was conducted on September 14, 1954, at 9.33 a.m., under the command of Marshal Georgy Zhukov to the north of Totskoye village in Orenburg Oblast, Russia, in the South Ural Military District. The epicenter of the detonation is marked with a memorial. History In mid-September 1954, nuclear bombing tests were performed at the Totskoye proving ground during the training exercise Snezhok (, Snowball or Light Snow) with some 45,000 people, all Soviet soldiers and officers, who explored the explosion site of a bomb twice as powerful as the one dropped on Nagasaki nine years earlier. After the first nuclear explosion, two additional non-nuclear bombs were exploded shortly after the main blast in order to imitate a second-wave nuclear strike. The participants were carefully selected from Soviet military servicemen, informed that they would take part in an exercise with the use of a new kind of weapon, sworn to secrecy, and earned three months salary. A delegation of high-ranking government officials and senior military officers arrived to the region on the eve of the exercise, which included First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, Nikolai Bulganin, Generals Aleksandr Vasilevsky, Konstantin Rokossovsky, Ivan Konev and Rodion Malinovsky. The operation was commanded by Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Zhukov and initiated by the Soviet Ministry of Defense. At 9:33 a.m. on 14 September 1954, a Soviet Tu-4 bomber dropped a atomic weapon—an RDS-4 bomb, which had been previously tested in 1951 at the Semipalatinsk Test Site—from . The bomb exploded above Totskoye range, from Totskoye. The exercise involved the 270th Rifle Division, 320 planes, 600 tanks and self-propelled guns, 600 armoured personnel carriers, 500 artillery pieces and mortars and 6,000 automobiles. Following the explosion, a Li-2 airplane was put to use on a reconnaissance mission to report the movement of a radioactive cloud produced by the blast, and the most dangerous areas were explored and marked by special reconnaissance troops. After the reconnaissance