‘There were four beautiful mushroom clouds a week. Nobody told us they were dangerous’:
As a small girl Maria Tokasheva would sit on the doorstep of her family’s home watching enraptured as mysterious mushroom-shaped clouds filled the sky.At the time, in the 1960s, the Soviet Union was embroiled in a fierce arms race, but the endless nuclear bomb tests in the Semipalatinsk region of Kazakhstan seemed nothing more to her than a pretty light show.
“I liked to be there,” said Mrs Tokasheva, 49, a mother of one. “I remember atomic mushrooms. My friends and I, we couldn’t understand how dangerous it was because we had seen this mushroom and then something like a rainbow. It was amazing for us.”
Only years later, when she and her friends started to feel exhausted for no apparent reason, did they become concerned. Then her hair started falling out. Now six of her nine siblings have died. And they were not alone.