This interpretation still maintains that it’s possible some craters may be older, going to the height of Cold War testing.
To wield an extraordinarily complex piece of weapons technology in combat, without having tested it out, is practically suicidal. Beyond the simple possibility of blowing up in your face, or fallout and toxic after-effects blowing in the opposite direction that was intended, poisoning one’s own populace or troops, there’s the international humiliation of being made to look like an ass, proverbially speaking with one’s pants around one’s ankles in the middle of the snow.
No, one must rigorously test one’s weapons technology, and as discreetly as possible, minimizing the amount of intelligence as to one’s capabilities, successes and failures, making its way back to one’s enemies. In this light, the Soviet Union was well known to have conducted underground nuclear tests in Siberia as well as Kazakhstan – to the lament and immense suffering of many of the region’s peoples. Only a fool or extremely naive person, however, would think that an accurate summation of covert and top-secret testing could be obtained from an Internet website