Sept. 1, 1961 - The White House announced today that the Soviet Union resumed the testing of nuclear weapons early this morning by exploding a device over Soviet Central Asia. The explosion took place "in the atmosphere" at Semipalatinsk, 350 miles south of Novosibirsk. It was apparently the first nuclear test by the Soviet Union since its announcement Wednesday that it would resume testing. Although there was no precise estimate of the size of the nuclear device, the White House said that it was larger than the "average atomic bomb" and substantially larger than the bomb exploded over Hiroshima in 1945.
