This book is the result of more than twenty years of research by the author. He began piecing together information about the 1954 Totsky nuclear exercises in the late 1980s, but it was only with the abolition of censorship in the USSR that it became possible to publish articles about this great secret of the Orenburg region and the country. Newspaper and magazine publications, thoroughly revised and expanded, comprise this book, the first edition of which was published in 2011. It is based on the testimonies of participants in the military exercises of September 14, 1954, and Orenburg civilians who witnessed, and even suffered, the nuclear explosion. Individual chapters, under the general title 'The Strength of Material,' describe the difficulty of uncovering the truth. The book is about the responsibility of scientists, military personnel, and the authorities—everyone who conducted the Totsky experiment—to the people, to Russia, to history.