"All the guests from the Socialist countries, all the defense ministers were there," said Ivan Skvortskov, a former military officer who appears in the film. He said they watched from a mountain command post 10 to 12 miles from the explosion site.

At the time, about a million people lived within 100 miles of the test site. Nuclear specialists said the extent of the radioactive fallout would have depended on weather conditions. Kuibyshev, about 80 miles to the west of the site, had about 800,000 inhabitants in the 1950's and Orenburg, about 100 miles to the east, had about 265,000. Three miles from the explosion site was the village of Totskoye, and less than 20 miles away the small town of Sorochinsk, where villagers in the documentary said many people later developed cancer and other illnesses attributed to radiation.

Similar reports have also come from Americans who lived downwind from atmospheric tests, among them inhabitants of Utah and of the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific.

As the Soviet film shows troops in trenches and makeshift shelters, the narrator says that "over 45,000 personnel, thousands of cars, hundreds of guns and tanks" were concealed and camouflaged. Villagers interviewed in the Finnish documentary said women and children had been evacuated from Totskoye. Men who chose not to leave were told to dig ditches, lie down and close their eyes. "Some dug ditches, others didn't," said Stepan Sidorov. "Some hid in the cellars." Mock Battle in the Smoke

From the mushroom cloud expanding in the sky, the film shifts to the corpses of goats and sheep brought in for the experiment. The narrator says that animals within 1,200 yards of the explosion died and others, 4,000 yards away, were injured and burned. He says that an hour after the explosion, radiation measurements of 50 roentgen showed that "it is possible to attack through the explosion region." Soldiers are then seen staging a mock battle through this region, a smoking steppe, heavy with dust.

At the time, according to the Defense Nuclear Agency in Washington, the maximum exposure permitted for United States troops was five roentgen a year.

As the filmed battle rages in the blast zone, a veteran in the documentary says, "Some, the majority even, had no protective clothing, and besides it was impossible to use gas masks" in 115-degree temperatures. But the narrator says, "The offensive troops, using protective equipment, passed through this territory without any damage to their health."