Mick Hartley

I was aware that Kazakhstan was where the Soviets did their nuclear tests, but not of the grim and still ongoing aftermath. From the Telegraph – Atomic bombs destroyed their lives – now they want Russia to pay:

Sixty years ago a nuclear bomb ten times more powerful than the one that destroyed Hiroshima exploded at the bottom of a 178-metre shaft in this remote (but not unpopulated) corner of Kazakhstan.

The blast excavated a basin a quarter of a mile wide and several hundred feet deep, sending up a plume of pulverised rock and radioactive material that was detected as far away as Japan.

It was not a one off. The hydrogen bomb was one of 456 nuclear weapons detonated by the Soviet Union at the Semipalatinsk Test Site, a 7,000 square mile swathe of steppe known as the Polygon.

The tests started in 1949 and continued right up until 1989 and the fall of the Berlin wall. They account for a quarter of all the nuclear explosions in history, creating an ongoing health crisis of a scale and nature that is hard to fathom.

The Kazakh authorities estimate that one-and-a-half million people living in nearby cities, towns and villages were exposed to the residual fallout.

The region has elevated rates of cancer, heart disease, birth defects and fertility problems – all linked to the tests. Suicides are common and the area’s graveyards are filled with people who died young.

But as well as sickening those who were directly exposed, the fallout has worked its way into the population's DNA, leading to mutations that have been passed down through the generations.

It's a long article, with, as you'd expect, plenty of personal testimony of suffering, high cancer rates, and birth defects.

“The nuclear weapons tests were undertaken in the knowledge that the local ethnic Kazakhs could be harmed or even gradually eradicated,” said Dr Alexis-Martin.

“The lack of impetus and action across the decades by successive Soviet, Russian, and Kazakhstan governments and the global community amounts to ‘slow genocide’ – this arises when an ethnic or cultural group is gradually and systematically destroyed due to cumulative and sustained harm over time.”

I imagine there's zero chance of Putin being moved by a sense of Russia's historic responsibility, but that's no reason not to publicise these Soviet crimes.