Kazakhstani and U.S. Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs Have Cleaned up Nuclear and Biological Waste Sites
U.S. DEFENSE THREAT REDUCTION AGENCY
After the 1991 disintegration of the Soviet Union and Russia’s subsequent hasty withdrawal, Kazakhstan’s new government faced tremendous challenges dealing with environmental reclamation, the closure of dangerous weapons of mass destruction (WMD) facilities, and health problems associated with a population that had been exposed to 40 years of WMD storage and testing.
Quickly recognizing the scope of these problems, Kazakhstan reached out to the United States and the international community for help. Over more than 30 years of partnership and cooperation, Kazakhstan first led the way in the signing of international nonproliferation agreements and then became the global leader in nonproliferation that it is today.
That leadership continued in early November 2023 when Director Rebecca Hersman, U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), and Kingston Reif, deputy assistant secretary of defense for threat reduction and arms control, traveled to Kazakhstan to meet with Kazakhstani officials and commemorate 30 years of nonproliferation cooperation between the two countries.
The engagements included U.S. discussions with Kazakhstan’s ministries of Health, Agriculture, Energy, the National Guard and National Nuclear Center (NNC) to commend Kazakhstan for its global leadership role in nonproliferation causes.
Hersman signed new memorandums of understanding (MOU) with both the National Guard and NNC leadership to codify joint goals and expectations for continued nuclear security cooperation under the U.S.-Kazakhstan Umbrella Agreement.
Nuclear waste problem
Before its declaration of independence in 1991, Kazakhstan housed a significant portion of the Soviet Union’s strategic nuclear and conventional forces. Since the late 1940s, the Soviets had conducted at least 456 nuclear tests and experiments at the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site in Kazakhstan.
In addition to these facilities, Kazakhstan inherited a chemical weapons production factory in Pavlodar and biological weapons plants and facilities in Stepnogorsk and Almaty.
Kazakhstan also hosted other plants and sites that mined and refined strategic minerals and manufactured conventional weapons. Soviet secrecy ensured that few Kazakhstani government officials knew the extent of these WMD military-industrial enterprises, military forces test facilities and weapons ranges.
In the shadow of more than 40 years of nuclear testing, President Nursultan Nazarbayev, then-leader of newly independent Kazakhstan, signed both the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) and the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and established Kazakhstan’s Atomic Energy Agency. This new agency was charged with interacting with the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency and its team of inspectors and experts. The Semipalatinsk region was home to 1.3 million people, and some 30,000 residents suffered from radiation exposure due to Soviet nuclear testing. President Nazarbayev looked to the international community for help with this environmental and health crisis.
Nazarbayev understood that closing the Semipalatinsk facility involved not only destroying its deadly infrastructure and ending testing, but also reclaiming contaminated land, recultivating the soil and the environment, and aiding people living in the region.
When the Russians hastily abandoned the site, the Kazakhstani government, through its appointment of Vladimir Shkolnik as head of Kazakhstan’s Atomic Energy Agency, quickly engaged the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency and the U.S. Departments of Energy and Defense and invited U.S. nuclear engineers and physicists to visit Kazakhstan.
Many areas of Semipalatinsk posed an environmental threat, including the Degelen Mountain Complex. Both people and livestock in the region were being exposed to secondary radiation. Kazakhstan’s government requested help from the U.S. Department of Defense to help seal 181 contaminated tunnels at Degelen and to address countless other material risks across Semipalatinsk.
A combined effort
The U.S. Department of Defense agreed. The requested project had support from the U.S. Congress and the estimated cost was well worth the project’s value to the global WMD nonproliferation effort. This project constituted part of the new security strategy for the U.S. that placed a premium on reducing the testing of new weapons of mass destruction and their technologies. The U.S. secretary of defense authorized the project in early 1995, and then-Minister of Science and New Technologies Vladimir Shkolnik signed the new “Elimination of Nuclear Weapons Infrastructure” agreement.
Kazakhstan’s National Nuclear Center was responsible for carrying out all aspects of the work, including tunnel preparation, scientific measurement, explosive demolition and sealing the tunnels. U.S. experts provided technical guidance, quality control and certification of the work.
A short time later, Minister Shkolnik recommended using the Degelen Mountain Complex for a test of the new international monitoring system. That system, which was just being established, would consist of 321 monitoring stations located in treaty nations around the globe. These stations would gather seismic, infrasound, hydroacoustic, and radionuclide data, and transmit it to 16 certified analytical laboratories.
Results from these tests revealed that Kazakhstan could serve as an ideal territory for future monitoring of nuclear testing in the region. Seismic waves from any nuclear test would encounter minimal resistance from northeastern Kazakhstan’s topographical and geological formations. Subsequently, scientists at Kazakhstan’s National Nuclear Center and the Lamont-Dougherty Atmospheric Observatory of Columbia University developed a a joint project to set up a series of eight wideband seismo-logical stations that would be able to monitor and characterize natural, commercial and nuclear explosions. These stations would become part of the international monitoring system.
Threat of biological weapons
The Soviet Union had the most well-organized and powerful offensive biological weapons program in the world. The Stepnogorsk Biological Weapons Complex was built in the 1980s and was one of dozens of sites run by Moscow. Anthrax, tularemia, plague, smallpox, the Marburg virus and other pathogens were produced in large quantities and made ready to be placed into the weapons that the Soviets envisioned using in the event of war.
The Stepnogorsk complex consisted of 25 buildings covering over 2 square kilometers. One section was solely dedicated to producing massive quantities of anthrax. Fully mobilized, the facilities could produce 300 metric tons of anthrax in 10 months.
The USSR’s dissolution left Kazakhstan with this deadly complex. After the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, preventing a biological weapons transfer to a hostile state or terrorist group became a major U.S. foreign policy objective. President Nazarbayev’s government engaged the U.S. and the European Union in new cooperative biological weapons prevention programs. One of the first U.S.-Kazakhstan projects was carried out at the Scientific Research Agricultural Institute, now called the Research Institute for Biological Safety Problems, the new nation’s only institution concentrating on veterinary virology.
Professor Saidigapbar Mamadaliev, director of the institute, recommended that the Kazakhstan government consider security and safety enhancements to the institute’s strain museum as a possible joint project with the U.S. Biological Weapons Proliferation Prevention program. The initial project was launched in April 2000. Over the next three years, the agricultural institute’s scientists inventoried the museum and the institute’s strains, developed and installed new security systems, and conducted biological safety training for personnel.
By 2000, Kazakhstan’s anti-plague center in Almaty had established, staffed and maintained 10 regional stations and 17 field stations capable of monitoring the outbreak of plague in towns, villages and nomadic herdsmen living on the nation’s vast steppe. Under the Threat Agent Reduction and Response program, U.S. officials were prepared to help Kazakhstan consolidate and modernize its peaceful anti-plague system with new laboratory equipment, computers and detection equipment in the remote field stations.
During 2004-05, four other laboratories and medical centers in Kazakhstan joined the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Threat Agent Detection and Response program. Kazakhstani scientists and U.S. biological experts and project managers developed requirements for new projects that would modernize diagnostic capabilities to minimize the need for retaining dangerous pathogen strains in the remote field stations and develop a network of trained scientists to prevent, detect and contain a biological weapons terrorist attack.
Kazakhstan became one of the leading nations in cooperating with the United States in this new program. By 2005, similar cooperative projects were defined and being implemented in Georgia and Uzbekistan. In 2005-2006, negotiations with Azerbaijan and Ukraine resulted in new biological proliferation prevention programs with the implementation of bilateral cooperative programs.
One of the most prominent of these projects were efforts to clean up Vozrozhdeniye Island in the Aral Sea, controlled after independence by Uzbekistan. The Soviets had contaminated it through research into the deadly pathogen anthrax.
A great deal of effort and resources have been spent cleaning up and securing WMD facilities left behind by the Soviet Union. In 30 years, the government and the people of Kazakhstan have not only gone from victim to champion in their efforts to secure and remediate former WMD sites, but they have also become global leaders in the WMD nonproliferation effort.
During the DTRA visit to Kazakhstan in November 2023, U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Reif highlighted these remarkable achievements.
“Kazakhstan’s efforts to strengthen global nuclear security and biosecurity have made the world safer,” he said. “It was an honor to see firsthand the many fruits of our partnership and discuss focus areas for continued cooperation.”
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