Soviet Nuclear Devastation of Kazakhstan - Cold War DOCUMENTARY
the decision to use Atomic weapons in the war against Japan in August of 1945 set in motion a nuclear arms race that helped Define the Cold War in previous episodes we've explored how nuclear weapons developed in the United States in Great Britain and in the USSR during the immediate post-war period but we didn't look at the impacts of those nuclear programs particularly related to the regions in which the testing took place I'm your host David and today we are going to look at the effects of the Soviet nuclear program with particular focus on Kazakhstan this is the Cold War one of my favorite things about studying history is learning something new especially when it's related to something I thought I knew a lot about that's why I was so thrilled when I discovered a new video Lisa meitner the mother of the atomic bomb from the sponsor of this episode Magellan TV the episode tells the story of the physicist Lisa meitner whose small research team discovered that splitting the atomic nucleus of uranium would release a massive amount of energy leading Albert Einstein to dub her the German Mary Curie and one of the best things about the video it is completely ad-free just like every video on Magellan TV including the new 4k content that's being added every week and Cold War viewers will get a one month free trial by clicking on the link in the description make sure to start your free trial of Magellan TV so you can join us in watching Lisa meitner the mother of the atomic bomb between 1949 and 1989 the Soviet Union conducted over 700 nuclear weapons tests the overwhelming majority of which were conducted in kazakhstan's semi-palatinsk test site known as the polygon Soviet nuclear testing would prove to have expectedly horrifying impacts on nearby residents but it also intertwined with late Soviet politics and the realization of kazakhstan's Independence and the ultimate collapse of the Soviet Union but before we dive into Kazakhstan and semi balatinsk in detail it's first worth briefly recapping the development of the Soviet nuclear weapons program throughout the second world war Soviet Espionage had penetrated the US's Atomic program the Manhattan Project after the July 1945 Potsdam Conference during which U.S president Harry Truman disclosed to Stalin about the atomic bomb even if Uncle Joe already knew about it and then followed by the actual use of the atomic bomb in Japan a month later Stalin immediately instructed the ussr's top scientists to escalate work on the soviet's own project as a matter of urgency Stalin's Infamous police chief lavarenti Beria personally oversaw its implementation and why Baria you might ask well as Stalin's right-hand man varia had developed not only a reputation as a connoisseur of brutality and torture but also one of organizational skill in secret operations Beria accordingly began recruiting top scientists to spearhead the soviet's atomic bomb development at a time when staccanovites workers identified for making a significant contribution to the ussr's Industrial Development were heavily revered and rewarded the nuclear project was not short of enthusiasts two figures in particular Igor korchatov and Yuli hariton would prove highly consequential kurchatov hailing from UFA was the leader of scientific development given his background in nuclear physics their secret City that housed those who worked on the atomic bomb project in Sami balatinsk was even named after him gorchakov he would also later receive the hero of socialist labor award the highest civilian title in the USSR had it on perhaps more interestingly and certainly more unusually was educated at Cambridge University in Britain and was ethnically Jewish as togejan Casanova States in her recent excellent work Atomic step hariton was likely spared from Stalin's purges precisely because of his importance to the Soviet nuclear weapons program so by 1947 then Maria had the Manpower and resources he needed to test the Soviet Union's first successful atomic bomb but there was another challenge where should the bomb be detonated as I mentioned earlier it was ultimately semi-paladinsk in the Kazakh SSR that became the key testing site for nuclear weapons in the Soviet Union there are a number of reasons for this one to quote Joanna lillis from her book Dark Shadows was that quote it was located at a site selected by Stalin's chief of secret police Lavern Tiberia on the grounds that it was uninhabited end quote indeed their region was relatively isolated from major Urban centers like kazakhstan's then capital amata the landscape is also characterized by the harsh sparsely populated step which covers much of Kazakhstan in Central Asia so the thinking was that the testing would cause little damage as we will see however semi-palatinsk's isolation was really just the party line not only did many people live nearby but there were other more Insidious elements underpinning semi-palatinsk selection Stalin's promotion of Russian national culture to a position of Primacy in the Soviet Union during the 1930s and 1940s often saw the non-russian Republic's well-being sacrificed at the altar of the Soviets modernizing project for example Stalin's collectivization saw 1.5 million people in Kazakhstan fully a quarter of its population perished due to famine in what is known as the goal shook in genocide or Asha shearling in addition the great Terror that took place under Stalin saw millions of supposed enemies of the state deported from other parts of the Soviet Union to the harsh steps of Central Asia the region was seen as a Dumping Ground for The Unwanted and the undesirable it was thus not merely geography that informed moscow's decision to hold nuclear tests in Kazakhstan but equally Stalin's complete lack of concern for the consequences these nuclear tests could inflict on the environment and those who actually lived there nevertheless with semi-politants chosen all the necessary infrastructure was hastily built in just two years including the closed city of gorchatov subsequently in August 1949 Beria and gorchatov personally oversaw the first successful detonation of an atomic bomb at the semi-palatians polygon it had an explosion equivalent to 21.1 kilotons by comparison the bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of approximately 15 kilotons the bomb was named rds-1 our DS was actually an arbitrary designation but one of the acronyms developed was rocia Del yet Sama or Russia does it alone this highlights how it was seen as an exclusively Russian project and that Kazakh sacrifices were completely disregarded from the very beginning all subsequent Soviet nuclear weapons would be given this RDS number title with this the USSR had become the world's second nuclear-armed state after the United States and the cold war was truly in motion since the first test conducted in Kazakhstan in August 1949 at least 450 of the Soviet Union's 700 nuclear tests were held in semi-palatinsk one of the most important was the 1953 thermonuclear test of a hydrogen bomb the first weaponization of such an explosion now this test coincided with Stalin's death and the rise of Khrushchev Khrushchev as part of his destalinization policies got rid of Beria as head coordinator of the program and instead placed vyacha slav malishev in charge it was in this context that the 1953 thermonuclear test was being developed it was called slowika meaning layers after its design which placed different layers of fission and fusion on top of each other to create an unprecedentedly large explosion since the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki however scientific knowledge about the effects of exposure to radiation from nuclear testing had become much more advanced than it was in the 1940s one man involved in the Soviet project Victor gavrilov thought that conducting an atmospheric test of this kind above ground that is would be an unmitigated disaster although authorities listened to him delaying the test would be both expensive and would postpone the soviet's ability to display their industrial prowess to the world the Cold War was of course a battle of ideas but it was also one of achievements and showing off the achievements of communist modernity to counter-balance American capitalism was seen as vital the Soviet Authority's solution was therefore to temporarily relocate 2 000 residents who lived within 120 kilometers of the semi-palatians test site as well as further 12 000 people on the outskirts of the zone but governing love was right then 1953 thermonuclear explosion was significant and the Authority's meager protections were woefully inadequate to compare it once again with the 15 kiloton little boy bomb dropped on Hiroshima slika had a yield of around 400 kilotons the implications of this technology did not go unnoticed by one Andres saharov saharov is of course best known for his later role as a dissident during the Brezhnev and Gorbachev eras but it was fundamentally his work as a nuclear physicist at semipawa dinsk that made him so skeptical of the Soviet system in the first place it was after all he alongside hariton who had designed the slika bomb sahadov became briefly and unexplicably Ill after the 1953 test undoubtedly the result of radiation exposure but he nonetheless continued his work on Atomic technology in semi-paladinsk in 1955 for example he worked on yet another bomb this one with a yield of 1.6 megatons four times larger than sloika the successful tests caused minor destruction across the region even in supposedly safe areas resulting in the direct death of a three-year-old girl this experience was particularly disturbing for saharov and he became increasingly critical of nuclear technology later in 1957 he published a paper on the effects of exposure to radiation on human DNA and its potential to cause illnesses like cancer even when people were exposed to high levels for just a brief moment at the same time as high profile scientists in the testing program were voicing their concerns so too were Regional Kazakh authorities during the 1950s monitoring efforts regarding radiation levels in public health had been steadily increasing we've already looked at the devastating environmental and human impacts associated with the 1957 kishtim disaster and semi-politinsk was the site of similar effects in 1958 for example Bahia achbarov from The Institute of regional pathology measured radiation levels 650 times higher than normal in some parts of Northern Kazakhstan at Great personal risks at Great personal risk achbarov and his team also reported that locals were experiencing debilitating health problems ranging from neurological issues to circulation issues the concerns of figures like governilov saharov and echbarov appeared to be Vindicated in 1958 when a moratorium was placed on atmospheric testing although the moratorium was lifted in 1961 it did eventually lead to the 1963 signature of the treaty Banning nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere in outer space and underwater more commonly referred to as the Limited Test Ban Treaty treaty between the U.S the UK and the USSR
which banned atmospheric nuclear tests entirely but this is far from the end of the semi-politan's nuclear story indeed neither the undeniable threat posed by nuclear testing in semi-politinsk nor International legislation actually changed anything why well part of the reason was that the Soviets simply did not care about the consequences but this is still too simplistic equally important was the fact that within the Soviet nuclear industry itself there was no prevalence safety culture in one incident in 1962 for instance some workers in semi-politinsk received huge radiation doses after conducting tests despite not having the correct safety equipment similar incidents would prove extremely deadly at Chernobyl in 1986 when protests buy more inexperienced workers at the power plant about the safety of their actions were actively ignored by their superiors we of course know how this turned out and if you don't well it was not great but was indeed terrible as the old Russian adage says or the fish rots from the head carelessness was built into the Soviet system from its Inception so from 1961 the semi-politan's polygon continued to be used for underground nuclear testing which was yet to be banned predictably the disastrous consequences continued and worsened underground tests caused earthquake-like Tremors damaging buildings in Northern Kazakhstan they also contaminated the water supply in the step where the overwhelming majority of residents relied on agriculture to survive farming became at best harmful and at worst outright impossible these negative effects were exacerbated by so-called peaceful nuclear tests in these cases the Soviets turned craters from underground nuclear tests into lakes and rivers incorporating these contaminated sites into the water system obviously caused even greater issues Downstream and actually spread contamination across the region though these peaceful nuclear tests were later banned for tests above 150 kilotons in 1976 the damage to semi-politan's environment and people had already been done okay so far it's clear that the history of nuclear testing in semi-palatinsk reveals how the Soviet state often considered its citizens and the natural environment secondary to its Ambitions but kurchatov the closed City I mentioned earlier that was built for the polygons workers provides another insight into the pervasive Legacy of the Soviet nuclear weapons industry kurchato was a place of extreme secrecy a closed city as the Cold War Began close cities like corjatov usually received the status as a result of their importance to sites of extreme military interest even today closed cities are an odd subject in the former Soviet Union we still don't know how many of them there were in total and some even remain secret Russia for example acknowledges the existence of 42 closed cities but there are likely many more closed City status however came with several benefits for residents in kurchato's case though living conditions were Grim in its early days it quickly came to possess some of the highest living standards in the whole of the Soviet Union this is because not only were closed cities built with the explicit purpose of housing some of the ussr's best minds but residents also had to live in almost complete isolation from the rest of Soviet Society residents were accordingly compensated for their commitment to the ideological cause benefits usually included better apartments and better access to rare consumer goods take grocery stores for example unlike in the rest of the Soviet Union where they were usually poorly stocked in closed cities like gurjatov they were always fully stocked and even sold items like bananas an extreme Rarity at the time the town of Milo Su in Kyrgyzstan provides an interesting parallel with kurchatos mylusu is located in central Kyrgyzstan in the tianshan mountain range it also became a closed City at the beginning of the Cold War in this case because of its proximity to uranium deposits supposedly the uranium used for the rds-1 test in 1949 was mined here and the city similarly housed top figures from the ussr's scientific community like semi-poweredinsk though the soviet's carelessness ravaged the local environment and caused long-term health issues for locals the town's local economy has also collapsed irreparably since 1991 a fate handed to many such Soviet monogram towns which were built to serve one industry alone but Milo Sue also shows how the adverse effects of Soviet nuclear testing and the Relentless race for Atomic Supremacy during the Cold War was not simply limited to semi-pala dinsk rather scenes in semi-politinsk and its surrounding often played out on a smaller scale across all 15 republics especially in Central Asia the environmental Devastation caused by the Soviet regime in places like semi-politinsk and milosu did not go unnoticed as we've already seen but what could actually be done the possibility of disseminating such knowledge was next to Impossible in the ussr's totalitarian information space this would change in 1986 however with Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost reforms translating roughly to transparency they opened up Soviet media for the first time though the formation of alternate political movements that challenged the hegemony of the Communist Party were still largely banned Soviet citizens increasingly became aware of historical issues like the crimes of Stalin's terror and the suppression of national and ethnic minorities in particular 1986's Chernobyl disaster turned public attention and widespread anger towards the regime's destruction of the environment it also made people question what else the Soviet authorities might have been hiding it's here that we return to saharov his earlier work in samipolar dinsk as I mentioned had already made him deeply fearful of the consequences of nuclear weapons since 1957 he had stopped his work on the Soviet nuclear program and instead became a fully fledged dissident Sahara wrote several essays urging Soviet authorities to open up about their nuclear testing program in Sami balanthinsk and Beyond and in 1975 he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his criticism of the Soviet system though he was sentenced to internal exile for his arguments against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980 by 1986 he was freed and public figures like him would lead the charge against the Soviets covering up of information and human rights abuses glasmos also revealed to The Wider public that the regime had been sitting on a wealth of information about the perverse effects of various State Endeavors on the environment indeed it had been collected by Soviet scientists for decades from semi-palatians to kishtim Regional institutes run by figures like achbarov the scientist we mentioned earlier had continued monitoring people and the environment even though their findings had little impact on the regime's attitude towards them simultaneously scientists from research institutes at Soviet universities had all been working on issues relating to climate change and the environment thus merely lifted the lid on a strong tradition of environmental knowledge in the USSR in this context it was only a matter of time before the truth about semi-palatins would reach Soviet society and the outside world but rather than figures like saharov it was fundamentally the role of kazakhs themselves that proved the most consequential for semi-politis demise during glasnost nationalism was Rising across the USSR from vilious to Tbilisi the first glasnost era protests in Kazakhstan broke out in December 1986 when the first Secretary of the Kazakh sssr the Muhammad kunyayev was dismissed and replaced with the ethnic Russian Gennady colbyn this challenged a long-held precedent in the USSR that the first secretaries of the republics were always ethnically a member of the community over which they were presiding given that Soviet citizens could now protest more openly this was interpreted as a direct attempt by Moscow to try to subjugate the Kazakh sssr entirely to its whim the protests were ultimately suppressed violently by the KGB but the seeds of national mobilization in Kazakhstan had now been sown meanwhile tests continued in semipolar dinsk then 1986 protests made it clear that explicit political agitation was still dangerous so environmental interests increasingly became an outlet for more nationalist sentiments as such the devastation of these semi-politan's region was increasingly interpreted as an attack on the nomadic culture of the kha'zix who lived there this reached a crescendo in February 1989 in response to a test at semi-palatinsk which sought the creation of one of the ussr's first Grassroots anti-nuclear movements known as Nevada semipalatinsk it was called as such to show solidarity with the anti-nuclear movement in the U.S working to close the Nevada Test Site with this kazakh's concerns about the atomic bomb and its effects became truly International bound together by a sense of national and civic responsibility the Nevada Semi Power Vince movement would mobilize thousands of ethnic kazakhs and citizens of all Soviet republics concerned about the effects of nuclear testing subsequently In December 1989 the polygon would see its last ever test and two years later on December 16 1991 Kazakhstan would gain its independence from the Soviet Union glasmos therefore played a key role in revealing the Soviet secrets in semi-pawa dinsk leading to a rising sense of solidarity between ethnic kazakhs and the creation of the ussr's first anti-nuclear movement but what's the legacy of the polygon on semi-politans today well as we mentioned at the beginning of the video the city formerly known as semi-palatinsk is now called semei it's estimated that while the polygon was in use from 1949 to 1989 over 1.5 million individuals were directly exposed to nuclear fallout from the tests unfortunately the genetic Damage Done to many of these individuals has continued to be passed down through generations some studies for example suggest that children born in the same a region since 1991 are still 50 percent more likely to be born with mutations and birth defects economically like malusu in Kyrgyzstan life in the region remains tough given that much of its infrastructure was built specifically for the polygon what happened at semi-politinsk then continues to serve as a sobering reminder of the often destructive impacts of the Cold War and its consequences we hope you've enjoyed this episode and to make sure you don't miss our future work please make sure you subscribe to our Channel and have pressed the Bell button housed in a special reinforced lead line bunker in the middle of one of the most irradiated regions on Earth you'll be fine the polar bear told us so please consider supporting us on patreon at patreon.com the cold war or through YouTube membership we can be reached via email at thecoldwork Channel gmail.com this is the Cold War Channel and as we think about the Cold War please remember that history is Shades of Gray and rarely black and white
2023-06-28 09:30
