"We'll show them Kuzkin's mother!"

Кузькина мать, Kuzkin's Mother, in Russian, was a slang term for the Tsar Bomb, the 50-57 megaton H-bomb dropped on Novaya Zemlya back in 1961. It usually translates as "We'll show you what's what", and is what Nikita Krushchev was purported to say how the Kennedy administration should perceive the test. But, given the usage of 'mother' in Russian and other languages, one can't help but throw in the "Yo' momma" connotation, as in "Yup tvai-you mat'": "I fuck your mother". Interestingly, Novaya Zemlya is probably one of the most radioactively polluted sites on the planet, and what with global warming opening up a permanent Northwest Passage along Russia's north coast, promises to unhatch all sorts of interesting horrors formerly trapped in ice.

Around the same time, the United States was conducting Operation Argus in the South Atlantic, launching H-bombs into orbit at the Earth's geomagnetic equator, supposedly to influence the van Allen radiation belts.

I have to ask "Why such a large Soviet bomb against a barren archipelago above the Arctic Circle?" and also "Why a series of large American bombs in the middle of the South Atlantic Magnetic Anomaly?".

Were I given to flights of paranoid fantasy, I'd think that Krushchev wasn't referring to us Americans when he spoke of the "them" he wanted to fuck the mother of on a barren ice covered isolated piece of desolation. And I also wonder why, of all places, Operation Argus was so close to Bouvet Island, another barren ice covered isolated piece of desolation.

Let the wheels turn.

Oh, and pictures!

M. corona

Mechanicus viginticigarinii