Stories: Nuclear Testing
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JFK’s Most Underrated Achievement
The spot where the Soviet Union blew up its first atomic bomb is an expansive, gently rolling part of the steppe in northeastern Kazakhstan. Between 1949 and 1989, the Soviet Union conducted more than 450 nuclear tests, over 100 of which were atmospheric, meaning the device was detonated on the ground or in the air. When I visited in August with a group...
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Nuclear Steppe
1. In north-east Kazakhstan, close to the Russian border, lies Kurchatov city, a small, rundown town that was once one of the USSR’s most closely guarded secrets. Kurchatov housed many of the USSR’s top scientists as they developed and tested the weapons that comprised the Soviet nuclear arsenal. The city appeared on no public maps...
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A Safer World at Ground Zero
Standing at ground zero of the Soviet Union’s first nuclear-bomb explosion, it’s clear why the Kremlin saw this site as an ideal place to test its emerging nuclear-weapons program. Now part of modern-day Kazakhstan, the Semipalatinsk Test Site, or the Polygon, as it was informally known, stretches across a swath of...
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Kazakhstan’s Foreign Minister on All Things Nuclear
Kazakhstan’s foreign minister, Erlan Idrissov, spoke for an hour to ten journalists who participated in a reporting trip to Kazakhstan in August, a huge but little-known Central Asian country whose government has been active in global nuclear issues. The excursion was organized by the International Reporting Project in collaboration with the Stanley Foundation. Here are excerpts of...
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The Cost of Being the World’s No. 1 Uranium Producer
If you make a toxic mess under one of the most isolated parts of the planet, does it matter if you don't clean it up? Does it make a difference if that mess will be there for thousands of years? Scientists are asking those questions as Kazakhstan has steadily risen to become the world's No. 1 uranium producer, surpassing...
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Secrets of Semipalatinsk: How Nuclear Theft Was Averted in Central Asia
Anastacia Kyseleva saw her first atomic mushroom cloud from the fields near her village. Residents of Kanonerka, located near the Russian border in eastern Kazakhstan, had only heard the mysterious explosions from previous tests at the nearby Soviet nuclear test site of Semipalatinsk. This time, in 1956, soldiers came and ordered everyone outside – a move experts now suspect was made...