The K Project - Aftereffects

Aftereffects

Although the weapons used in the K Project were much smaller (up to 300 kilotons) than the United States Starfish Prime test of 1962, the damage caused by the resulting EMP was much greater because the K Project tests were done over a large populated land mass, and at a location where the Earth's magnetic field was greater. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the level of this damage was communicated informally to scientists in the United States.

After the 1991 Soviet Union collapse, there was a period of a few years of cooperation between United States and Russian scientists on the high-altitude nuclear EMP phenomenon. In addition, funding was secured to enable Russian scientists to formally report on some of the Soviet EMP results in international scientific journals. As a result, formal scientific documentation of some of the EMP damage in Kazakhstan exists but is still sparse in the open scientific literature.

The 1998 IEEE article, however, does contain a number of details about the measurements of EMP effects on the instrumented 570 km telephone line, including details about the fuses that were used and also about the gas-filled overvoltage protectors that were used on that communications line. According to that paper, the gas-filled overvoltage protectors fired as a result of the voltages induced by the fast E1 component of the EMP, and the fuses were blown as the result of the slow E3 component of the EMP, which caused geomagnetically induced currents in all of the sub-lines.

The Aqmola (Astana) to Almaty buried power cable was also shut down by the slow E3 component of the EMP.

Published reports, including the 1998 IEEE article, have stated that there were significant problems with ceramic insulators on overhead electrical power lines during the tests of the K Project. In 2010, a technical report written for a United States government laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, stated, "Power line insulators were damaged, resulting in a short circuit on the line and some lines detaching from the poles and falling to the ground."