Short answers, pulled from the story.
Novaya Zemlya is an archipelago in northern Russia situated in the Arctic Ocean at the extreme northeast of Europe. It consists of two main islands, Severny and Yuzhny, separated by the Matochkin Strait, with the Barents Sea to the west and the Kara Sea to the east. Cape Flissingsky on Severny Island marks the easternmost point of Europe.
The Tsar Bomba was the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated, exploded in an air burst above Zone C at Sukhoy Nos on the 30th of October 1961. Novaya Zemlya had been designated the Soviet Union's primary nuclear weapons testing venue in July 1954. Over the full history of testing, the site hosted 224 nuclear detonations with a combined explosive yield equivalent to 265 megatons of TNT.
The indigenous population consisted of roughly 50-300 Nenets who lived on the islands from 1872 through the 1950s, subsisting on fishing, trapping, reindeer herding, and hunting. In the 1870s several Nenets families had been resettled there as part of Russian Empire colonization. The entire civilian population was transferred to the mainland in 1957 before nuclear testing expanded.
Convoy PQ 17, carrying 297 aircraft, 596 tanks, 4,286 vehicles, and more than 150,000 long tons of cargo aboard 36 merchant ships, departed Iceland on the 27th of June 1942. After the British Admiralty ordered its naval escort to withdraw on the 4th of July, the merchant vessels scattered. Several ships sought shelter in the Matochkin Strait between Novaya Zemlya's two main islands.
A 2015 expedition measuring the glaciers of Novaya Zemlya found radioactivity levels 65-130 times above the background radiation in neighboring areas. In 2023, commercial satellite imagery reported by CNN showed new tunneling and surface construction at the test sites. The Ministry for Atomic Energy has also conducted subcritical underwater experiments near Matochkin Shar each autumn since 1998, reportedly using up to 100 grams of weapons-grade plutonium per test.
Hugh Willoughby, an English navigator, was the first Western European to reach Novaya Zemlya, arriving in 1553. Dutch explorer Willem Barentsz reached the western coast in 1594 and in a 1596 expedition rounded the northern cape and wintered on the northeastern coast, dying before the expedition returned. Henry Hudson also passed through while searching for the Northeast Passage.