The State - News from Dec. 1, 1988

Satellite photographs showing the site of a Soviet nuclear accident said to have occurred in 1957--but never acknowledged by Moscow--were published by a Swedish space research company. The computer-enhanced images showed that a 100-square-mile area around a military nuclear complex east of the Ural Mountains was still abandoned three decades after the disaster. About 30 villages that appeared on pre-1950 maps were overgrown or destroyed. Former farmland was deserted and a large river was blocked. The photos were taken in 1987 and 1988 by a French-Swedish satellite and the U.S. Landsat satellite for a private, Stockholm-based firm.