An academic book editor once said to me that it usually means no good when a history book becomes timely. While publishers certainly hope that their books are widely read, unfortunately it is often an international crisis that makes the media, and a general audience, turn to history books for advice. In Europe, a new political and public interest in nuclear weapons has emerged following Russia’s aggressive war on Ukraine. Russia’s nuclear threats have raised new attention to nuclear deterrence, a topic that had long been mostly ignored outside security circles. While history usually does not provide simple answers, in-depth historical research can help us better understand the complex policy choices surrounding nuclear weapons.
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Roundtable Review 16-15
Togzhan Kassenova. Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave Up the Bomb. Stanford University Press, 2022. ISBN: 9781503632431.
25 November 2024 | PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt16-15 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo
Editor: Diane Labrosse
Commissioning Editor: Elisabeth Roehrlich
Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Pre-Production Copy Editor: Bethany Keenan
Contents
Introduction by Elisabeth Roehrlich, University of Vienna. 2
Review by Mariana Budjeryn, Harvard Kennedy School 5
Review by Artemy M. Kalinovsky, Temple University. 8
Review by Davide Orsini, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich. 11
Response by Togzhan Kassenova, University of Albany, SUNY. 16
Introduction by Elisabeth Roehrlich, University of Vienna
An academic book editor once said to me that it usually means no good when a history book becomes timely. While publishers certainly hope that their books are widely read, unfortunately it is often an international crisis that makes the media, and a general audience, turn to history books for advice. In Europe, a new political and public interest in nuclear weapons has emerged following Russia’s aggressive war on Ukraine. Russia’s nuclear threats have raised new attention to nuclear deterrence, a topic that had long been mostly ignored outside security circles. While history usually does not provide simple answers, in-depth historical research can help us better understand the complex policy choices surrounding nuclear weapons.
Togzhan Kassenova’s timely book, Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave up the Bomb, reminds its readers of nuclear history’s many dimensions. Referring to the famous Kazakh landscape in its title, the book offers a detailed account of what Soviet nuclear testing meant for the Semipalatinsk region of Kazakhstan. The book thus is also an example of the renewed scholarly interest in the history of nuclear testing.[1] By giving voice to the people of the region, Kassenova makes it clear that nuclear weapons programs are more than a foreign policy and defense choice. The Soviet nuclear program severely affected the environment and the health of the people who lived in the region, with lasting consequences. In detailing this history, the book provides deep historical background to the post-Cold War developments that eventually led to the non-nuclear weapon state Kazakhstan.
The three reviewers assembled here each bring their distinct expertise to this roundtable. Artemy Kalinovsky is a foremost expert on Soviet history, including Soviet legacies in central Asia.[2] Mariana Budjeryn has deeply studied the history of the nuclear disarmament of Ukraine, which, next to Belarus and Kazakhstan, had inherited Soviet nuclear weapons after the superpower’s dissolution.[3] Davide Orsini is a historian and anthropologist whose research is grounded in Science and Technology Studies and in Environmental History.[4] They thus are a unique group to comment on the many aspects of Kassenova’s book.
The three reviewers agree on the book’s importance. As Kalinovsky points out, it fills a crucial gap in the history of US-Central Asian relations, a topic that had been largely neglected by scholars. Similarly, Budjeryn underlines that despite the “renaissance of nuclear studies” since the 2010s, the disarmament of the former Soviet republics rarely had been studied by using other than US archival documents.[5]
The reviewers recommend the book to various audiences, both inside and outside academia. The book is “thoroughly researched and beautifully written” (Budjeryn); a “powerful, well documented, and intimate account” (Orsini); and presented in a “direct, accessible style” (Kalinovsky). They also positively emphasize how transparent Kassenova is about her own personal connections to the history she writes. On the first page of the book’s prologue, she tells her readers that her father’s family comes from Semipalatinsk and that her father advised the Kazakh government on nuclear decision-making.
Orsini and Kalinovsky mention that the book’s accessible style and the use of personal anecdotes at times comes at the price of neglecting details of certain scientific and political contexts. Kassenova uses her substantial response to the reviewers to answer the questions raised by them. Her response is a very welcome addition to the book, which was published nine days before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Since then, Kassenova explains, she keeps being asked whether Kazakhstan should have kept its weapons and if a military nuclear program would have been technically feasible. In her response she offers a differentiated answer to that question as well as her thoughts on what she expects from Kazakhstan’s civilian nuclear future. Today, Kazakhstan is the world’s largest supplier of uranium.
Contributors:
Togzhan Kassenova is a Washington, DC-based Senior Fellow with the Center for Policy Research at the University at Albany and a Nonresident Fellow with the Nuclear Policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is an expert on nuclear politics, WMD nonproliferation, and financial crime prevention. She currently works on issues related to proliferation financing controls, exploring ways to minimize proliferators’ access to the global financial system. From 2011 to 2015, Kassenova served on the UN Secretary General’s Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters. In addition to award-winning Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave up the Bomb (Stanford University Press, 2022), Kassenova is the author of From Antagonism to Partnership: The Uneasy Path of the U.S.-Russian Cooperative Threat Reduction (ibidem-Verlag, 2007) and Brazil’s Nuclear Kaleidoscope: An Evolving Identity (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2014).
Elisabeth Roehrlich is an Associate Professor in History at the University of Vienna, Austria, where she is also Vice Dean of the Faculty of Historical and Cultural Studies. Before taking up her tenure-track professorship, Roehrlich was an Elise Richter Senior Fellow at the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna. Roehrlich received her doctorate in 2009 from the University of Tübingen, Germany, and since then has held fellowships at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the German Historical Institute (both in Washington, DC), the Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies in Oslo, and Monash University South Africa in Johannesburg. Her first monograph on Austrian foreign policy was awarded the Bruno Kreisky Recognition Prize for the Political Book in 2010. Her work on the history of the International Atomic Energy Agency has appeared in journals such as Diplomacy and Statecraft, the Journal of Cold War Studies, Cold War History, and the IAEA Bulletin, and her monograph, Inspectors for Peace: A History of the International Atomic Energy Agency, was published with Johns Hopkins University Press in 2022.
Mariana Budjeryn is a senior research associate at Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center, Project on Managing the Atom. She is the author of Inheriting the Bomb: The Collapse of the USSR and the Nuclear Disarmament of Ukraine (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023).
Artemy M. Kalinovsky is Professor of Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet Studies at Temple University and the Principal Investigator of an ERC funded project, based at the University of Amsterdam, which investigates the legacies of socialist development in contemporary Central Asia in order to examine entanglements between socialist and capitalist development approaches in the late twentieth century. He earned his BA from the George Washington University and his MA and PhD from the London School of Economics. His first book was A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Harvard University Press, 2011). His second book, Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Cornell University Press, 2018), won the Davis and Hewett prizes from the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.
Davide Orsini (PhD, Anthropology & History, University of Michigan) is a Marie Sklodowska Curie Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, where he is conducting a research project on the history and socioecological implications of nuclear decommissioning practices (msca-if, nucleardecom: Half-lives/Afterlives: Labor, Technology, Nature, and the Nuclear Decommissioning Business-Grant Number 101023603-REA European Union). He is the author of The Atomic Archipelago: US Nuclear Submarines and Technopolitics of Risk in Cold War Italy (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022).
Review by Mariana Budjeryn, Harvard Kennedy School
The 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, a nuclear superpower, was fraught with many nuclear dangers, including a single largest wave of nuclear proliferation to Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine, who, in addition to Russia, inherited large chunks of the Soviet nuclear arsenal and the infrastructure that delivered it. Yet besides a handful of academic accounts from the 1990s,[6] and recollections by US officials,[7] all of them drawing largely on Western sources and explaining Western policies, post-Soviet nuclear proliferation and disarmament ended up on the margins of nuclear history. Even as the renaissance of nuclear studies gained momentum through the 2010s, the cases of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine were often omitted from political scientists’ databases because of the particular and unprecedented nature of post-Soviet proliferation through state collapse. The appearance of serious historiographic work that gave the subject a proper treatment and dug into indigenous archival records seemed, like history itself, to be contingent on a confluence of factors, including the emergence of scholars dedicated to mining these once-peripheral historical veins.
And so, when the causes and consequences of post-Soviet nuclear disarmament burst into a sharp public focus following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, it is no wonder that even expert discussions on the subject were rife with misperceptions and simplistic narratives. In Western discourses, where a tenacious conflation of the Soviet Union and Russia persists to this day, the disarmament of Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine has long been viewed as a non-decision given that these nascent states had neither the command and control over nuclear arsenals on their territories, nor the capacity to establish it; that Russia was logically and unquestioningly the only successor of the USSR; and that therefore all Soviet nuclear weapons were Russian and had to be ‘repatriated’ from the non-Russian lands.
Togzhan Kassenova’s Atomic Steppe, a thoroughly researched and beautifully written account of Kazakhstan’s nuclear history, is a long-awaited remedy to both the regrettable gap in nuclear scholarship and the poorly informed opinions about the options explored and agency exercised by the non-Russian Soviet nuclear successors. Contra the subtitle of the book—“How Kazakhstan Gave up the Bomb”—the scope of Atomic Steppe goes well beyond Kazakhstan’s nuclear predicament of the 1990s. Kassenova dedicates the first part of the book to the country’s nuclear backstory: its role in the Soviet bomb project as a source of uranium ore and, most importantly, the site of the nuclear testing range, the Polygon, at Semipalatinsk, where the Soviet Union conducted more than 500 nuclear test between 1949 and 1991, when the site was closed by Kazakhstan’s autonomy-minded authorities.
Nuclear testing at the Semipalatinsk Polygon, its human and environmental toll, as well as the cynical negligence of the Soviet military and political authorities who proceeded to blame the adverse health effects caused by nuclear testing on the victims themselves (61), all became relevant at the time of Kazakhstan’s transition to independent statehood. Kassenova rightly claims for ethnic Kazakhs a place alongside other colonized and indigenous peoples who suffered disproportionally from nuclear testing by the metropoles: indigenous Americans in Nevada and New Mexico and Pacific Islanders, Aboriginals in Australia, natives of Algeria and Polynesia, and natives of Lop Nur (54-55). This drives home the often-overlooked point that colonialism has not been the sole prerogative of the capitalist West, but took similar ruthless forms in the Communist East and continues to thrive to a horrendous effect in Putinist Russia.
By the late 1980s, when the bonds of repression and social control had loosened with the advent of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his reforms, Kazakhstan’s popular anti-nuclear sentiment was freed to manifest itself in the social movement “Nevada-Semipalatinsk” that not only raised public awareness of nuclear testing in Kazakhstan and its consequences well beyond the country’s borders, but also became part and parcel of Kazakhstan’s own national reawakening and drive for a greater autonomy from Moscow (76-84). It has also influenced Kazakhstan’s deliberations over the fate of its nuclear inheritance once the country became an independent state in December 1991 and found itself a host of the world’s fourth-largest nuclear arsenal, as well as sprawling infrastructure and debris from nuclear mining, fuel fabrication, and testing. Kazakhstan’s large nuclear fuel complex, discussed in detail by Kassenova, should give pause to those who claim that Kazakhstan had no option but to become a non-nuclear state (126-131).
What followed and ultimately culminated in Kazakhstan’s accession, in December 1993, to the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons as a non-nuclear-weapon state was an intense period of negotiations between the United States, Russia, and the new and mostly unknown state of Kazakhstan. At the negotiating table with powerful and seasoned interlocutors, Kazakhstan held its own, in no small measure due to the energetic and capable, if authoritarian, President Nursultan Nazarbayev. While Nazarbayev’s figure looms large in Kazakhstan’s nuclear story, as it does in the rest of its contemporary history, Kassenova brings many more personae dramatis into the story: Olzhas Suleimenov, the leader of the “Nevada-Semipalatinsk” anti-nuclear movement; Tulegen Zhukeev, Kazakhstani president’s advisor; Vladimir Shkolnik, head of Kazakhstan’s Agency on Nuclear Energy, as well as William Courtney, the first US ambassador to Kazakhstan and a capable translator of interests and positions between Washington and Almaty; and Andrew Weber, a US Foreign Service officer who became a key figure in the daring Project Sapphire, a clandestine operation to remove 600 kilograms of highly enriched uranium from a plant in northern Kazakhstan (185-199).
By breaking down impersonal state-level analysis into the people, institutions, and processes that wove this history into being, Kassenova goes beyond tropes such as “Kazakhstan thought,” or “it was in the interest of the US,” or “Russia demanded,” and traces how national interests, positions, and demands emerged in deliberations amid a dynamic international environment that was still feeling the after-tremors of the Soviet collapse. Rather than attempting to distill the dominant driver that “caused” Kazakhstan’s nuclear disarmament, Atomic Steppe focuses on complexities, not simplicities, and exposes how the new state of Kazakhstan had to balance its nascent security policy—determining whether Russia was a threat (151) or an ally (164)—as well as its economic prospects (159-161) and its place in the international system when deciding its nuclear future.
Atomic Steppe contributes to a handful of academic fields and should be equally pertinent to students of diplomatic, military, and Soviet history; state and national identity building following the Soviet collapse; social movements; and colonial and post-colonial studies. It should also spark a greater academic interest to Kazakhstan itself, and more broadly, Central Asia, a region that is undeservedly overlooked in international relations and security studies. The author’s own immersion in the nuclear story of her country and its people, including her trips to the Polygon and conversations with witnesses and survivors, borrows from anthropology and yields an account that is as rich as it is empathetic. Indeed, in a touchingly candid and refreshingly personal prologue, Kassenova makes transparent her authorial relationship to the country and the people she writes about (3-7). Far from raising suspicion of bias, Kassenova’s deep connection to her subject makes her account all the richer and more meaningful.
Review by Artemy M. Kalinovsky, Temple University
The United States may still be the only country to have ever used a nuclear bomb, but its erstwhile superpower rival, the Soviet Union, was no slouch when it came to developing, building, and testing these nuclear weapons. A northeastern part of the Kazakh SSR was one of the main sites for Soviet nuclear weapons tests. The nuclear tests poisoned the soil and the water and left people in the area with a host of medical problems caused by exposure to radiation, some of which were passed down to children who were born after the testing had already stopped. The region was home to ethnic Kazakhs, survivors of a famine caused by policies of sedenterization and collectivization in the early 1930s, as well as Russians and other Soviet nationalities who had been resettled in the region or who had arrived there as prisoners. Kazakhstan was also one of the four republics where Soviet nuclear weapons were stationed. When the Soviet Union fell apart in 1991, Kazakhstan inherited a sizable nuclear arsenal; instead of keeping them, it joined Ukraine and Belarus in transferring its arsenal to Russia and destroying what remained. It did so with financing and technical assistance from the United States.
While the book’s title suggests that this is a work of political and diplomatic history on the period after Kazakhstan’s independence, the first half of the book (chapters 1 to 5) actually covers the history of atomic testing in Kazakhstan, the effect it had on people and nature, and the Soviet government’s reluctance to acknowledge the problem. Chapters 4 and 5 tell the story of scholars and activists who protested this state of affairs, first tentatively and then with growing vehemence as the policy of glasnost (openness) unleashed by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev broadened the space for debate and resistance to Soviet policy. The author also shows how the rise of Nursultan Nazarbayev, a successful party apparatchik and a figure of all-union importance in the years 1990–1991 (Gorbachev had wanted him as vice president, but ultimately picked Valentin Pavlov, who betrayed him in the coup) was tied up with the emerging politics of nuclear testing. Every republic had its own grievance against the union center, but in Kazakhstan political mobilization was tied up with the growing anti-nuclear movement.
It is the second half of the book that gets into the story foreshadowed in the title. Here, drawing on declassified US and Kazakhstani materials, as well as interviews with diplomats and scientists on both sides, Kassenova shows how the key decisions were made and international agreements hashed out. Kazakhstan inherited nuclear weapons, but not the mechanism to control or launch those weapons, which remained with Moscow. Still, it was not a given that the newly independent state would relinquish those weapons, and Kassenova brings forth the voices of those who were concerned about Kazakhstan’s place between China and Russia, and who argued that the newly independent country should hold on to its missiles. On the US side, the insistence on convincing Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan to give up their nuclear weapons was based not just on a desire to limit the number of nuclear powers in the world, but also on the temptation that those weapons—and fissile material left over from tests and production—might make for governments seeking sources of in a time of economic collapse.[8]
The second half of the book may explain how Kazakhstan gave up the bomb, but it is the first half of the book which illustrates why. In these chapters, the author draws on the testimony of survivors and medical professional to relate in shocking detail the many horrors suffered by people in the service of the nuclear weapons program. The testimonies, accompanied in some cases by photographs, are juxtaposed against the bland and evasive language of the bureaucracy. To be fair, the bravado of some of the military and civilian officials responsible for the testing program, such as the general who swam in a contaminated lake to demonstrate that the water was safe, are shocking in their own way. Long suppressed from public discussion, these issues burst forth in the perestroika era, such that anti-nuclear politics overrode any potential public support for holding on to nuclear weapons after independence.
Atomic Steppe is written in a direct, accessible style, and the author has clearly chosen to foreground the emotional and political stakes, sometimes at the expense of technical discussions about nuclear weapons and waste, and sometimes at the expense of more detailed analysis regarding the politics and diplomacy of giving up those weapons. Overall, this is a choice that is well rewarded; moreover, considering the importance of the issues on the one hand, and how few English-language readers will know much about them on the other, the decision to write an a more accessible book rather than one that reads like a more traditional monograph is certainly wise. Historians of nuclear weapons, as well as those interested in diplomatic history, will learn plenty from this book and find much to admire in the scholar’s craft. (It is worth noting that, for all of the books about US-Russian relations since 1991, this is probably the first book-length treatment of relations between a Central Asian country and the US.)[9] This book confirms, among other things, that in order to understand the international relations of the last three decades we need to think beyond Washington and Moscow.
That said, there are some issues that I wish the author had explained more thoroughly. Among them is the question of the nuclear weapons’ operability. The author notes that the weapons remained under the control of the Russian military. Had Kazakhstan chosen to go a different route, though, would it have been very difficult, from a technical perspective, to rearrange the launch protocols? Was such a scenario studied? Second, while the first part of the book certainly shows why there would be little support for maintaining nuclear weapons after independence, this aspect of the story largely fades away after chapter 5. Is it sufficient to explain the difference between Kazakhstan and Ukraine, where disarmament was a less certain proposition?[10] Did public attitudes still matter? Was Nazarbayev thinking of the anti-nuclear movement when he signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty? The epilogue suggests that the government has often neglected the survivors even as Kazakhstan became a much wealthier state in the 2000s, suggesting that perhaps the power of the movement faded. What about those who thought Kazakhstan should keep it? Kassenova discusses the case of Burkitbai Aiaganov, a historian who made a case for holding on to the weapons (137). What about the others? How were these views received in Nazarbayev’s inner circle? How seriously were these positions considered?
After the devastating first half of the book, the second five chapters seem to build towards a happy ending, of sorts: Kazakhstan has left behind its nuclear legacy, and seems to be secure on the international stage, maintaining good relations with its two more powerful neighbors as well as with other countries in the region. The tone of the epilogue is somewhat melancholy, reminding us that people today are still living with the devastating consequences of those nuclear tests and that the government of Kazakhstan has often neglected the survivors. Events that have unfolded since the book’s publication give more reasons for worry. In January 2022, Russian forces entered Kazakhstan to help the regime of Kassym-Jomart Tokaev put down protests. Although the troops were supposedly there at Tokaev’s request, it was still an unusual move: Russia had largely avoided intervening directly in post-Soviet conflict in Central Asia. A month later, Russia launched its full scale invasion of Ukraine, and many Ukrainians have understandably asked whether giving up their nuclear weapons was really such a wise move. As I was writing this review, nuclear weapons were moving from Russian into Belarus; more worrying still, Aleksandr Lukashenko claimed that Putin was ready to station nuclear weapons in any country that requested their presence.[11]
Atomic Steppe is a timely book and a major accomplishment; it reads today as a reminder of how fragile the post-Cold War world really was.
Review by Davide Orsini, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich
Togzhan Kassenova’s book, Atomic Steppe, is a powerful, well-documented, and intimate account of Kazakhstan’s atomic history under Soviet rule and in the aftermath of the events that in 1991 led to the end of the Soviet Union and to the country’s formal independence from Moscow. The book’s narrative revolves around the story of the Polygon in the Semipalatinsk region, where Soviet military authorities conducted more than 450 atmospheric and underground nuclear tests for over forty years (1949–1991).
The first part of Atomic Steppe describes the shaping of the region, which is celebrated for its pastoral, commercial, and rich agricultural landscape, by the Russian colonial presence that started in the seventeenth century. Once an imperial outpost presiding over commercial exchanges, natural resources extraction, labor exploitation, and the transformation of nomadic traditions, by the dawn of the Cold War Semipalatinsk had become a strategic platform of the Soviet military-industrial complex. It hosted intercontinental ballistic missile silos and launch ramps, research centers, and, more importantly, a nuclear testing ground where the first Soviet bomb engineered by Igor Kurchatov came to light.[12] The super-secret test site, which was overseen by dozens of scientists and protected by Soviet military authorities, remained off limits to non-authorized personnel, including thousands of downwinders who have been involuntarily exposed to radioactive dust and other contaminating materials that were produced during the tests. Until 1986, military and health authorities ignored, denied, secreted, and only unsystematically monitored the severe health conditions of the victims to gauge the biological effects of radiation. During the escalation that brought many young Kazakhs to protest the discriminatory and illiberal rule of Moscow in the 1980s, the Polygon surged as the symbol of Soviet oppression.
As in other Soviet republics where concerns over political discrimination and ecological disruption inspired anti-Russian independentist movements, in Kazakhstan anti-nuclear organizations became the protagonists of a new wave of protests culminating in the 1989 Nevada-Semipalatinsk march.[13] A symbol of the ecological and human toll suffered by the Kazakhs under Soviet nuclear colonialism, after independence the Semipalatinsk region came to the attention of the international community as part of a vast nuclear apparatus that with the disintegration of the Soviet Union risked falling out of control.[14] With the opening of uncertain geopolitical scenarios and surrounded by nuclear weapons states such as Russia, China, Pakistan, and India, Kazakhstan adopted a strategic ambivalent posture about the future of the remaining Soviet nuclear apparatus, which included thousands of warheads, missiles, armed bombers, and plutonium production facilities. Since President Nursultan Nazarbaev and his entourage knew that Kazakhstan lacked the technical know-how and effective control over this nuclear infrastructure, they therefore felt that it constituted an unwanted legacy that needed to be dismantled eventually. Given the strategic interests and global security implications of such delicate issue, though, Kazakhstan exploited its status of a “temporary nuclear power” to secure American financial and technical support for the management of its inherited nuclear apparatus, and to seek reassurance that the newly independent state would be protected in case of aggression by powerful and unstable neighbors (145).
From the early 1990s to the end of the last century, Kazakhstan experienced a transition that led it to renounce its status of nuclear weapon state and to reshape the meaning of its post-Soviet nuclear legacy. In the second part of her book, Kassenova uses concrete examples to show how diplomatic and scientific collaboration (at multiple levels and with different registers) worked in procuring Kazakhstan’s “farewell to bombs” (208). Financial assistance from the US (with the 1991 Cooperative Threat Reduction Program of the Department of Defense) assured funds for the safe reduction and dismantling of nuclear weapons infrastructure in former Soviet non-Russian republics (namely Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan), but the implementation of the plan would not be possible without the knowledge exchange and collaboration on the ground between military and civilian experts and research centers in the United States, Russia, and Kazakhstan. Kassenova argues that “even more important than political will at the highest level was the uniting power of science” (209).
In multiple instances, she stresses the entrepreneurial role of scientists and nuclear weapons experts, who addressed the safety implications of specific sites and managed complex cleanup and decommissioning operations, solicited state agencies awareness, and on various occasions spent their personal scientific authority and reputation to provide channels of communication with otherwise reluctant and diffident collaborators, as in the case of Russian authorities providing information on former Soviet strategic nuclear infrastructure. From this point of view, Atomic Steppe represents a tangible contribution to the study of science diplomacy and to the transnational history of science and technology in a region that has received scarce attention in comparison to others.[15] At times, though, the use of personal anecdotes collected from the experts who were involved in the cleanup operations decades after the facts may result in in a sort of celebratory narrative that glosses over more complex and maybe conflictual dynamics of knowledge exchange. In this regard, it would be useful to have information of things that did not go according to plans: of failures, mishaps, misunderstandings, and goals that could not be reached.
The previously unexplored archival material and the personal interviews to which the author had access—also thanks to her unique position of daughter of one of President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s strategic advisors, as she explains in the introduction—offer a vivid picture of the complex endeavor of freeing Kazakhstan from nuclear weapons, but not from the consequences of its nuclear history. Not only will the victims of nuclear tests and their future generations continue to suffer and die from radioactive exposure and contamination, but even after the partial “cleanup” and decommissioning of the nuclear test site, the Polygon remains a toxic wasteland with thousands of people living around it, dwelling through it, and scavenging from it.[16] Attempts to map, circumscribe, and contain hot spots in an area of 18,000 square kilometers remain contested and will probably never achieve sufficient accuracy, and yet experts of the Kazakhstan’s National Nuclear Center, in charge of monitoring and characterizing the former test site, consider portions of the Polygon suitable to commercial and agricultural uses (262).[17]
Here the reassuring view of Kazakhstan’s nuclear future that emerges in the last two chapters of the book risks representing the problematic management of the post-Soviet legacy as an element of the past that can be circumscribed while moving forward. Is it even possible to think of a “peaceful nuclear program” and of “reimagining the Atomic Steppe,” when the Polygon continues to be used as a nuclear waste repository, and as a testing ground (albeit with conventional explosives) to “calibrate […] important detection equipment?” (236, 250). What about the data produced by expert agencies, like the prestigious National Nuclear Center based in Kurchatov, the citadel of science presiding over the Polygon, whose slogan is “From national tragedy to national patrimony?”[18] Can the rehabilitation of Semipalatinsk and of Kazakhstan’s nuclear history happen on the ruins and open wounds of Soviet nuclear colonialism?
Today Kazakhstan is one of the largest producers of uranium in the world. Its rich reserves put the country in the position of becoming a major player in the global nuclear industry. But what are the political and environmental implications of this commitment to a nuclear future that many in the country do not want?[19] Where will the wastes that are produced during and after the operational life of future nuclear facilities and power plants be stored? Kassenova rightly acknowledges that different communities living around Semipalatinsk have ambivalent memories and interpretations of the past. Some locals believe that exposure to radiation made them invulnerable, some adapted to the living conditions offered by toxic ruins and landscapes by adopting a sort of strategic ignorance of radiation risks, while others invoke the lingering presence of toxic waste to claim their right to health assistance, while being diagnosed with “radio phobia” (255-265).[20]
The Kazakh case could be usefully compared to other contexts in which the toxic legacy of the Cold War nuclear weapon production and of nuclear accidents remains unresolved and contested.[21] In The Nuclear Borderlands, Joseph Masco argues that the Manhattan Project not only produced contaminated materials and wastelands that can be hardly cleaned up: the bomb changed forever the ways in which human beings live and interpret the world, exploding the concepts of time and space with the impossibility to contain its effects.[22] In New Mexico, as in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and in the state of Washington, narratives of the patriotism of those who contributed to make America safer by building its nuclear arsenal have for a long time overwritten the voices of those who suffered most of the consequences from contamination, land expropriation, and labor exploitation.[23]
In Kassenova’s account, the Kazakh state seems to have addressed (albeit partially and problematically) the environmental disruption and health conditions of the Polygon that were denounced during the 1980s protests. One question I would like to foreground is whether other environmentalist groups, activists, and non-governmental organizations continue to bring attention to the situation in Semipalatinsk, and what the dynamics of contestation of evidence about risk provided by state agencies are.[24] This point is crucial for addressing important questions about the credibility of future nuclear programs that need transparency and clear distinctions between nuclear developers and regulators.
Atomic Steppe fills many knowledge gaps about the nuclear history of Central Asian states and illuminates, with the evidence of unexplored archival material and the voices of direct witnesses, the difficult process of nuclear disarmament in post-Soviet Kazakhstan. Reading the book was useful for reflecting on the meaning of nuclear security and on the distance that often exists between the view of political elites and that of people on the ground, whose lives and safety are as important as nuclear security.
Response by Togzhan Kassenova, University of Albany, SUNY
I am grateful to Mariana Budjeryn, Artemy M. Kalinovsky, and Davide Orsini for thoughtful treatment of Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave up the Bomb. My response will center on the questions and reflections of the three reviewers and will align with two sets of themes. First, should Kazakhstan have kept its nuclear weapons, and would a military nuclear program have been technically feasible? Second, what does Kazakhstan’s nuclear future look like, and is there space for peaceful nuclear energy in a land abused by a military nuclear program?
Atomic Steppe was published on 15 February 2022, just nine days before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Unsurprisingly, one of the most common questions I have received since then is whether Kazakhstan made a mistake when it gave up nuclear weapons.
Let us first address technical and practical matters. Kazakhstan’s nuclear inheritance included two main components: Soviet nuclear weapons, and nuclear infrastructure and material. Kazakhstan did not have operational control and command of nuclear weapons. It could not launch the weapons or prevent Moscow from launching them from its territory. In Kazakhstan, military forces under Moscow’s command physically controlled the warheads, missiles, missile silos, launching pads, and heavy bombers. Artemy Kalinovsky asks about the technical feasibility of taking control over Soviet nuclear weapons and rearranging launch protocols and whether Kazakhstan studied such a scenario. To my knowledge, Kazakhstan’s leadership did not consider that as an option.
Mariana Budjeryn rightly notes that the narrative outside of Kazakhstan and Ukraine squarely focuses on the fact “that these nascent states had neither the command and control over nuclear arsenals on their territories, nor the capacity to establish it,” and that this narrative is used to deny agency to these two countries in their nuclear decisionmaking. It is important to point out that the legal status of the weapons on Kazakhstan’s territory was unclear until 1994. Those were Soviet, not Russian, weapons, and they could not be removed from the territory of a sovereign Kazakhstan without a political decision by Kazakhstan’s leadership.
Kazakhstan fully controlled the second component of its nuclear arsenal: tons of nuclear material and infrastructure that could support a nuclear program. Nuclear material is the most technologically demanding part of a nuclear weapons program. Once a country has nuclear material, it is past the main hurdle on the way to a nuclear device. If Kazakh leaders had made a political decision to pursue a nuclear program, they would have possessed a good “starter pack.” This did not derive from the Soviet nuclear weapons, which these leaders did not control, but rather from the nuclear material and related infrastructure, which they fully controlled.
Kazakhstan’s leadership was making decisions on their country’s nuclear future outside of the narrow space of what was technically feasible. The main drivers in favor of a non-nuclear path were strategic and political. Kazakhstan was previously an obscure part of the Soviet Union. Moscow treated non-Slav people in the Soviet republics as second-class citizens, and the image the Soviet government portrayed outside was always Russia-centered.[25] The world did not know much about Kazakhs or Kazakhstan. In 1991, Kazakhstan received independence, and for the first time, it had a chance to enter the international community on its own terms.
Kazakh leaders had qualms with the discriminate global nuclear order, which divided the world into nuclear “haves” and nuclear “have-nots”: countries that could have nuclear weapons and countries that were forever prohibited from obtaining them (140-141). Still, they understood the value of existing norms.[26] If Kazakhstan were to break into a nuclear club, it would be seen as a disruptor of the global nuclear order and an irresponsible player in the international security system. That was not the image the newly independent Kazakhstan wanted to present. The Kazakh leadership wished for their country to enter the world as a responsible and peaceful new nation. To answer Kalinovsky’s question on whether the public mood mattered for Kazakh leadership in its disarmament decision, the anti-nuclear sentiment of the population contributed to a conducive domestic political context in which decisions were made, but it was not the main factor. The main driver was survival as a new state.
At the time of the Soviet collapse, Kazakhstan was in deep crisis. It lacked legal-regulatory frameworks and institutions. It lacked technical expertise and technology. The most immediate challenge it faced was the economic crisis due to the disruption of intra-Union supply chains. Kazakhstan’s coffers were empty, but its land was rich in natural resources. To get those resources out, sell them on the international market, and train specialists who could build up the institutions, Kazakhstan needed outside help. It could not afford to become a pariah state, cut off from the outside world.
If Kazakhstan had decided to pursue nuclear ambitions, it would have undermined its own future and the stability of the international order. It would not have been able to develop and sell its natural resources, get its economy off the ground, or feed its people (the alternative scenario would be a Central Asian version of North Korea: a country with nuclear weapons but one which was ostracized, with a starving population). Kazakhstan would not have received fast and full access to international markets and institutions. It would have been a completely different country from what it is today.
The development of a latent nuclear capability in Kazakhstan or a full-on nuclear weapons program would have dealt a blow to the global nuclear order. Such a decision would have undermined an already fragile nuclear non-proliferation regime under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.[27] Other nuclear threshold countries would be encouraged to pursue nuclear weapons.
Unfortunately, neither Kazakhstan nor Ukraine received sufficient acknowledgment from the international community for their non-nuclear choices, which benefited international security.[28] Russia’s unprovoked war against Ukraine brought back the discourse on the utility of nuclear weapons, with some observers questioning whether Kazakhstan and Ukraine made a mistake by giving up a nuclear option.[29] The onus should not be on Kazakhstan or Ukraine to prove they made the right choice, but on Russia. Russia violated the promise it made in 1994 under the Budapest Memorandum not to threaten Kazakhstan and Ukraine in return for their non-nuclear choices.[30]
Forty years of Soviet nuclear tests at the Semipalatinsk nuclear testing site, known as the Polygon, left deep wounds in Kazakh society. For decades, people were denied agency over their own fate—the Soviet military carried out its nuclear experiments, poisoning locals’ land and food with neither remorse nor acknowledgment (chapter 3). No official ever apologized to tens of thousands of families who lost their loved ones due to the effects of ionizing radiation.[31] Moreover, many families continue to pay the price for the Soviet nuclear tests: they continue to lose their loved ones early to cancer and other diseases; their children continue to get sick (chapter 11).
It is not surprising that against the backdrop of this collective tragedy, the word “nuclear” elicits a strong negative response among Kazakhstan’s population. There are legitimate concerns about Kazakhstan introducing nuclear power that are compounded by the societal trauma of Soviet nuclear tests. Kazakhstan’s environmental groups are firmly against nuclear power. Over the years, the government’s communication on nuclear energy issues failed to build public trust.
Since the mid-1990s, the government of Kazakhstan has made several attempts to introduce nuclear power. Every time, public opposition pushed it to postpone its plans. Yet, in recent years, the government has taken determined steps towards adding nuclear power to its energy matrix. Proponents of nuclear power point out that since parts of Kazakhstan are energy-deficient, nuclear power can help stabilize the electricity production base, help Kazakhstan meet its clean energy goals, and utilize Kazakhstan’s rich uranium resources.[32]
If Kazakhstan’s government commits to nuclear energy, it would have to earn public trust and delineate military and peaceful applications of nuclear power in the public perception. More importantly, Kazakhstan’s leadership must be ready to deal with several challenges. How can it guarantee that such an important and high-risk project doesn’t fall victim to corruption? How can it guarantee the highest nuclear safety and security standards? How can the final permanent disposal of spent nuclear fuel and nuclear waste be solved? How can it educate and train the necessary workforce? And above all, who can be a reliable partner to build its nuclear power plant? Kazakhstan’s current shortlist of four potential partners includes Russia’s Rosatom.[33] Choosing Russia as a partner should be questioned in the aftermath of its invasion of Ukraine, the occupation of Ukraine’s nuclear power plant by the Russian military, and the sanctions regime imposed on Rosatom’s subsidiaries.
In this thoughtful review, Orsini wonders whether “the rehabilitation of Semipalatinsk and of Kazakhstan’s nuclear history [can] happen on the ruins and open wounds of Soviet nuclear colonialism.” I can attest that it is hard to find anyone in Kazakhstan who, if they had a choice, would sign up for their land to be used as a playground for Soviet nuclear experiments. Yet, we must face the fact that the Soviet military nuclear program did exploit Kazakhstan, and we cannot change history. While the weapons infrastructure was dismantled, the important scientific infrastructure remains and should be put to peaceful use for scientific and international security purposes. Orsini writes that “the Polygon continues to be used as a nuclear waste repository […] and as a testing ground (albeit with conventional explosives) to ‘calibrate […] important detection equipment’.” Those references relate to two important initiatives described in Atomic Steppe. First, spent fuel from a now-stopped fast breeder reactor in Aktau was moved to the former testing site (236-239). No single country in the world has resolved the challenge of permanently disposing of spent fuel and nuclear waste. The spent fuel was moved to a more secure facility at the Polygon for safety and security reasons.
The second episode refers to the Omega experiment that was conducted in one of the testing tunnels at the Semipalatinsk Polygon before the tunnel was sealed for good (250). The scientists used conventional explosives to perform a test to calibrate equipment used to monitor the ban on nuclear tests. Such verification measures are indispensable for enforcing the global ban on nuclear tests once it enters into force. In a 180-degree turn of events, the Semipalatinsk Polygon, which was used to test nuclear weapons in the past, can now serve the opposite goal. For example, Kazakhstan can now offer its infrastructure and expertise for disarmament verification.[34] As a Kazakh, I firmly believe that the pain imposed by the Soviet government on the people of Kazakhstan should be brought to light, and questions of nuclear justice should become part of a broad discourse. Yet, it is also important not to get stuck in the self-victimization narrative of the “open wounds of Soviet nuclear colonialism.” Kazakhstan has a chance to move forward and make inherited nuclear infrastructure work for peace.
[1] For another more recent monograph on the history of nuclear testing see Toshihiro Higuchi, Political Fallout: Nuclear Weapons Testing and the Making of a Global Environmental Crisis (Stanford University Press, 2020).
[2] Artemy Kalinovsky, Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Cornell University Press, 2018).
[3] Mariana Budjeryn, Inheriting the Bomb: The Collapse of the USSR and the Nuclear Disarmament of Ukraine (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022).
[4] Davide Orsini, The Atomic Archipelago: US Nuclear Submarines and Technopolitics of Risk in Cold War Italy University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022).
[5] For an anthropological approach to the legacies of Soviet nuclear testing in Kazakhstan, see the work of Magdalena E. Stawkowski, for instance: “A Town that Fell Asleep: Malignant Infrastructures of Soviet-era Nuclear Ruins in Kazakhstan,” in Jacob Darwin Hamblin and Lina Marie Richards, eds., Making the Unseen Visible: Science and the Contested Histories of Radiation Exposure (Oregon State University Press, 2023): 92-106.
[6] Existing accounts of post-Soviet nuclear disarmament include: William Potter, “The Politics of Nuclear Renunciation: The Cases of Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine,” Occasional Paper No. 22 (Henry L. Stimson Center, April 1995), https://www.stimson.org/1995/politics-nuclear-renunciation-cases-belarus-kazakhstan-and-ukraine/; Mitchell Reiss, Bridled Ambition: Why Countries Constrain Their Nuclear Capabilities (Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1995); Steven Miller, “The Former Soviet Union,” in Nuclear Proliferation after the Cold War, ed. Mitchell Reiss and Robert Litwak (Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1994).
[7] Some of the most important works include: James Addison Baker and Thomas M. DeFrank, The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War and Peace, 1989–1992 (G.P. Putman & Sons, 1995); Strobe Talbott, The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy (Random House, 2002); Ashton B. Carter and William J. Perry, Preventive Defense: A New Security Strategy for America (Brookings Institution Press, 1999); Thomas Graham, Jr., Disarmament Sketches: Three Decades of Arms Control and International Law (University of Washington Press, 2002).
[8] The closest analogue to the first half of Atomic Steppe is Kate Brown’s Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2013); while Brown is mostly concerned with the trade-offs made by scientists and middle class professionals living in the shadow of nuclear projects, Kassenova is more intent on bringing forth the voices of those who had nothing to gain and everything to lose from the tests.
[9] For an overview of the political science literature, see Alexander Cooley, “On the Brink and at the World’s Edge: Western Approaches to Central Asia’s International Politics, 1991–2021,” Central Asian Survey, 40:4 (2021): 555-575.
[10] See Mariana Budjeryn, Inheriting the Bomb: The Collapse of the USSR and the Nuclear Disarmament of Ukraine (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2023).
[11] Yulia Talmazan, “‘Nuclear Weapons for Everyone’ Who Joins Belarus and Russia, Putin Ally Promises,” NBC News, 29 May 2023; https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/nuclear-weapons-ukraine-belarus-lukashenko-russia-putin-rcna86640 [Accessed June 30, 2023].
[12] David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy 1939–1956 (Yale University Press, 1994).
[13] Jane I. Dawson, Eco-Nationalism: Anti-Nuclear Activism and National Identity in Russia, Lithuania, and Ukraine (Duke University Press, 1996); Matthew R. Auer, “Environmentalism and Estonia’s Independence Movement” Nationalities Papers 26:4 (1998): 659-676.
[14] For the concept of “nuclear colonialism” see Valerie L. Kuletz, The Tainted Desert: Environmental and Social Ruin in the American West (Routledge, 1998). Similarly, Tracy Brynne Voyles has deployed the concept of wastelanding to explore environmental racism in the United States, particularly in relation to uranium extraction in the Navajo Country. See Tracy Brynne Voyles, Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in the Navajo Country (University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
[15] Kenji Ito and Maria Rentetzi, “The Co-production of Nuclear Science and Diplomacy: Towards a Transnational Understanding of Nuclear Things” History and Technology 37:1 (2021): 4-20; John Krige, ed., How Knowledge Moves: Writing the Transnational History of Science and Technology (University of Chicago Press, 2019); Naomi Oreskes and John Krige, eds., Science and Technology in the Global Cold War (MIT Press, 2014).
[16] Magdalena Stawkowski, “Life on an Atomic Collective: The Post-Soviet Retreat of the State in Rural Kazakhstan” Études rurales (2017): 196-219, 200; Magdalena Stawkowski, “‘I am a Radioactive Mutant’: Emerging Biological Subjectivities at the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site,” American Ethnologist 43:1 (2017): 144-157.
[17] Catherine Alexander, “A Chronotope of Expansion: Resisting Spatio-temporal Limits in a Kazakh Nuclear Town,” Ethnos 88:3 (2023): 467-490; Magdalena Stawkowski, “The Continuing Danger of Semipalatinsk,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist (6 October 2016, https://thebulletin.org/2016/10/the-continuing-danger-of-semipalatinsk/.
[18] Cited in Alexander, “A Chronotope of Expansion,” 476.
[19]“Kazakh People to Decide on Nuclear Plant Construction,” World Nuclear News, 1 September 2023, last accessed 28 November 2023: https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Kazakh-people-to-decide-on-nuclear-plant-construct; “Kazakhstan to Hold Referendum on Nuclear Plant Construction,” Reuters, 2 September 2023, last accessed 28 November 2023: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/kazakhstan-hold-referendum-nuclear-plant-construction-president-2023-09-01/.
[20] Alexander, “A Chronotope of Expansion;” Stawkowski, “‘I am a Radioactive Mutant;’” Adriana Petryna, Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl (Princeton University Press, 2013).
[21] See for example Barbara Rose Johnston, ed., Half-lives & Half-Truths: Confronting the Radioactive Legacies of the Cold War (School for Advanced Research, 2007); Jacob Darwin Hamblin and Lina Marie Richards, eds., Making the Unseen Visible: Science and the Contested Histories of Radiation Exposure. (Oregon State University Press, 2023); Stephanie Malin, The Price of Nuclear Power: Uranium Communities and Environmental Justice (Rutgers University Press, 2015); Lindsay Freeman, This Atom Bomb in Me (Stanford University Press, 2019).
[22] Joseph Masco, The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico. (Princeton University Press, 2006). On the limits, contradictions, and grotesque ironies of cleanup efforts of military toxic wastes, see Shiloh R. Krupar, Hot Spotter’s Report: Military Fables of Toxic Waste. (University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
[23] Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford University Press, 2013).
[24] Alexander, “A Chronotope of Expansion;” Stawkowski, “Life on an Atomic Collective.” See also Gabrielle Hecht, Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (The MIT Press, 2012); Olga Kuchinskaya, The Politics of Invisibility: Public Knowledge about Radiation Health Effects after Chernobyl (MIT Press).
[25] Mariana Budjeryn and Togzhan Kassenova, “Nuclear Shades of Red Racism,” InkStick Media, 2020, https://inkstickmedia.com/nuclear-shades-of-red-racism/.
[26] Maria Rost Rublee, Nonproliferation Norms: Why Countries Choose Nuclear Restraint (University of Georgia Press, 2009).
[27] Harald Müller, David Fischer, and Wolfgang Kötter, Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Global Order, (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 1994).
[28] Mitchell Reiss, Bridled Ambition: Why Countries Constrain Their Nuclear Capabilities (Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1995).
[29] John Ullyot and Thomas D. Grant, “The Lesson of Budapest? Hold On to Your Nuclear Weapons,” 2 March 2022, Wall Street Journal, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-lesson-of-budapest-hold-on-to-your-nukes-ukraine-russia-invasion-nuclear-weapons-proliferation-11646257487.
[30] Mariana Budjeryn and Matthew Bunn, “Budapest Memorandum at 25: Between Past and Future,” Managing the Atom, Harvard University, March 2020, https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/budapest-memorandum-25-between-past-and-future.
[31] L. M. Pivina, B. I. Gusev, S. Bauer, R. A. Winkelman, and K. Apsalikov, “Development of a Cause-of-Death Registry among the Population of Several Raions in the East-Kazakhstan Oblast Exposed to Radiation Due to Nuclear Weapons Testing at the Semipalatinsk Test Site,” Final report of the Project “Health Effects of Nuclear Weapons Testing at Semipalatinsk Test Site, Kazakhstan, on the Population in Semipalatinsk Oblast (Semipalatinsk Follow-Up)” 2002.
[32] “Kazakhstan Shines Spotlight on Nuclear-Powered Future,” World Nuclear News, 16 April 2024, https://world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Kazakhstan-shines-spotlight-on-nuclear-powered-fut.
[33] Assel Satybaldina, “Nuclear Power Plant in Kazakhstan: What’s Next,” Astana Times 18 August 2023, https://astanatimes.com/2023/08/nuclear-power-plant-in-kazakhstan-whats-next/
[34] Togzhan Kassenova, “Kazakhstan’s Nuclear History: Lessons for the Future of Disarmament,” in Pavel Podvig, ed., Verifying Disarmament in the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, UNIDIR, 2022, https://unidir.org/files/2022-06/UNIDIR_Verifying_Disarmament_TPNW.pdf.