WMDDealing with the Soviet Nuclear Legacy
On 29 August 1949, the Soviet Union conducted their first nuclear test. Over a 40-year period, they conducted 456 nuclear explosions at Semipalatinsk, in eastern Kazakhstan — 116 aboveground and 340 underground. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many of the scientists and military personnel abandoned the site and fled the country, leaving behind large quantities of nuclear materials, completely unsecured. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) has been quietly helping Kazakhstan deal with the Soviet nuclear legacy.
The Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) has been quietly carrying out a collaborative nonproliferation mission with the government of the Republic of Kazakhstan for more than twenty-six years.
DTRA’s mission is to enable the Department of Defense, the U.S. government, and the agency’s international partners to counter and deter weapons of mass destruction and improvised threat networks. DTRA says that the ongoing project at the former Semipalatinsk Test Site (STS) in Kazakhstan is an example of the nonproliferation work that DTRA accomplishes with allies and partners around the world.
The Semipalatinsk Test Site dates back to the origin of the Soviet Union’s nuclear program. Established in 1947 and referred to as “The Polygon,” the site covers nearly 7,000 square miles of remote steppe in eastern Kazakhstan.
On 29 August 1949, the Soviet Union conducted their first nuclear test. Over a 40-year period, they conducted 456 nuclear explosions at Semipalatinsk, 116 aboveground and 340 underground.
DTRA says that after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the testing not only ceased, but many of the scientists and military personnel abandoned the site and fled the country. They left behind a vast complex of tunnels and boreholes across the test site. Most worrisome, the Soviets left unexpended nuclear materials, completely unsecure, presenting an extreme danger to the public and a significant proliferation risk to the world. The people of the newly formed Republic of Kazakhstan looked to their new government to solve the problem.
“There was a very strong non-nuclear sentiment in the newly formed country of Kazakhstan at the time,” said Luke Kluchko who was the first project manager from the then Defense Nuclear Agency (DNA), now DTRA, who assisted in helping Kazakhstan recover from the disaster left behind from the Soviets.
“The country’s first president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, immediately declared the site closed. There was a cancelled nuclear test that the Soviets had been preparing which remained in a tunnel for a number of years until they could figure out what to do with it,” Kluchko said.
To properly eliminate the workings of the test site, Kazakhstan created the National Nuclear Center (NNC) on 15 May 1993. The current General Director for the NNC, Erlan Gadletovich Batyrbekov, said that after the closing of the test site, a new set of issues came up that needed to be resolved by their government.
