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 Date of exercise: June 14, 1995
Atom-95, a training exercise carried out at the Kursk Atomic Power Plant in the summer of 1995, is an event that Russia's security forces point out to show that they are taking seriously the threat of terrorism involving nuclear and radioactive materials. In the mock scenario, terrorists take the nuclear plant hostage, declaring that they will blow up the reactor if their demands are not met. Local police, fire, and medical facilities are involved in the exercise, along with agents of the Federal Security Service (FSB) and other federal forces. When negotiations fail, the command team decides to take the plant by force. A masked SWAT team is assembled, storms the reactor building, and is able to subdue the role-playing terrorists.
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The event was videotaped and packaged into a public relations video that the FSB has used to successfully lobby for the creation of a new Anti-Terrorist Task Force. As the FSB narrator ironically notes in the video, this anti-terrorist exercise would have been declared a complete success if only it hadn't happened on the very same day that Chechen separatists had taken hostage an entire hospital full of people in the Russian city of Budyonnovsk.