Beautiful Downtown Kaboomsk - center city on the left, the main motorway in the foreground and the city's famous landmark "leaking plutonium tanks" in the center. They are the only man made structures on earth that can be seen from outside our galaxy with radiation detectors.

The industrial city of Kaboomsk is the site of Uflarkistan's largest single industrial plant, the former Uflark SSR Kaboomsk State Briefcase, Luggage and Nuclear Weapons Factory. It was built in the 1950's as the Soviet Union's central suitcase manufacturing plant. Intended to outshine luggage factories in the West, it was built to gigantic standards employing over 100,000 workers. The plant fell on hard times as tens of millions of suitcases piled up in warehouses because of a mistake made in the Kremlin's central planning system. It had been forgotten that no one in the Soviet Union was allowed to travel.

Rather than shut the plant down and lay off the workers, a decision was made to use the expertise at the factory and shift it's production from luggage to nuclear weapons. The plant was transferred from the Durable Consumer Goods Making Ministry to the Medium Machine Building Ministry and an ambitious new production plan was implemented.

The conversion was not without its problems however. Engineers and designers accustomed to producing travel bags and hat cases were now responsible for hydrogen bomb assembly and neutron detonator development.  Due to the rushed production schedule of the cold war there were a number of unfortunate mishaps, such as the one which took place on October 17, 1963 with an RDS-6s Hydrogen Bomb.

The RDS-6s used a U-235 fissile core surrounded by alternating layers of fusion fuel (lithium-6 deuteride spiked with tritium), and fusion tamper (natural uranium) inside a high explosive implosion system. The inner core was based on a design reversed engineered from an American Tourister Travelodger-III dresser trunk. The small U-235 fission bomb, assembled inside a leatherette hatbox was to act as the trigger (about 40 kt). The fuse was based on a standard combination lock. However the case's hinges were not properly designed to restrain the device's weight and popped open unintentionally when it was moved to a different part of the plant. It exploded and vaporized everything within a 40 mile radius. Moscow's official explanation for the disaster was that a bird had landed on a power line.

In 1987 the Kaboomsk Plant was officially transferred to the Uflark SSR Medium to Heavy Industrial Enterprises Ministry. It began the long process of conversion back to civilian production of suitcases without atomic bombs. Although this might seem to be a simple process, it was in fact quite complicated and a few small production errors have delayed the plant's full re-opening. Problems have included minor issues with the quality of fit and finish and several regrettable, but rare incidents where leftover nuclear devices detonated in retail stores.

Kaboomsk is also involved in the forefront of Uflarkistan's pioneering efforts to curb the spread of nuclear weapons to the Third World countries, particularly those in Central Asia and Europe. In 2005, the Kaboomsk plant, in cooperation with, and funded by the United States Government, initiated a recall of over 70,000 suitcase nuclear weapons built between 1962 and 1986 using a database created from warranty  registration cards. Thanks to  the excellent record keeping of the Kaboomsk workers over 99% of the weapons were found and returned to the plant for disassembly and disarming. The remaining 300 or so suitcase bombs are presumed to be either misplaced, discarded or sold on eBay and no longer covered under any warranty.