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 windswept grassy steppe roughly the size of Belgium. Even today it feels like the middle of nowhere, though, of course, the local population is still dealing with the radioactive fallout of decades of nuclear explosions.
Peaceful and eerily quiet, the area has few signs now of the 456 nuclear tests conducted here from 1949 through 1989, aside from a series of narrow, three-level concrete structures radiating out from ground zero at regular intervals like spokes on a bicycle wheel. These “geese,” as the Soviets called them — and they do bear a vague resemblance to the bird — held equipment and regular household items and material, which were inspected to determine how they were affected by various levels of radiation, depending upon their distance from the explosion.
As it turns out, the “geese” weren’t the only remnants of the Soviet testing program left behind when the USSR collapsed in 1991. As American, Russian and Kazakh scientists began to piece together later in the ’90s, the site also contained several hundred pounds of plutonium, enough to make numerous nuclear bombs, in a series of underground tunnels beneath what was known as Degelen Mountain. The Soviets used those tunnels to conduct underground nuclear tests starting in 1961, a program that accelerated after they signed the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty — which banned above-ground tests — with the United States in 1963. All told, they conducted more than 200 of these underground tests.
Kazakhstan was left with the legacy of this and other parts of the Soviet nuclear program after gaining its independence at the end of 1991. It opted to give up more than 1,400 nuclear warheads left in its country, transferring those back to Russia in 1995. In 1994, the United States and Kazakhstan teamed up — under the auspices of the Nunn-Lugar nonproliferation program — in a dramatic covert operation, code-named Project Sapphire, to airlift 1,300 pounds of highly enriched uranium and fly it out of the country to the United States, where it could be properly secured. But it took much longer — until last year — for the two countries, with help from Russia, to locate and secure all the plutonium left at Semipalatinsk.
In the interim, there were fears that Kazakhs living in the region, left destitute by the collapse of the Soviet Union — or worse, some nefarious individuals — could get their hands on the highly sensitive material. Soon after the USSR’s collapse, scavengers began scouring the area, which didn’t have so much as a fence to secure it, combing the site for copper wire and other scrap metal to sell. It wasn’t until the recently retired head of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sigfried Hecker, visited the site in 1998 and raised alarms in Washington about the risk of plutonium proliferation that the secret project to remove or secure the material in the tunnels really got underway.
As Hecker recounted in a report published by the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University this year, on his first visit to Semipalatinsk, “I was expecting to see guys on camels pulling on copper cables.” Instead, the report says, he “saw miles of trenches in the brown, dry steppe that could only have been dug by powerful excavating machines.” The Harvard report, which was released in August, was the first public accounting of the operation in its full scope.
And it was a grueling one. It took years of prodding and eventual collaboration with the Russians to locate the material and thenplenty of bureaucratic wrangling to determine what to do with it and how to fund the effort, which was ultimately paid for by the United States via Nunn-Lugar.
Finally, in October 2012, the effort was complete. The dozens of scientists who worked on the project marked the occasion with a gathering at the base of Degelen Mountain, where they unveiled a small monument. It reads: “1996-2012. The world has become safer.”
Emily Cadei reported from Kazakhstan as a fellow with the International Reporting Project (IRP).
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