Nevada-Semipalatinsk pennant (Kazakhstan)
This pennant was made in Almaty in 1989 for the Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement. It was used in promoting and disseminating the ideas of the anti-nuclear movement in Kazakhstan and the USA, as well as the wider international community.
The pennant displays the logo of the Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement. Depicted within a circle are a Kazakh aqsaqal elder and a native American with a peace pipe. They are seated opposite each other on the ground, against a background of mountains and the sun. The logo symbolises Kazakhstan and America, both countries where nuclear tests were conducted. Designed by art historian Umit Sakharieva and immunologist Jamilya Isina, the symbol represents a call for the two countries to work together to campaign against the nuclear arms race and to promote peace. It also draws attention to those who suffered as a result of the nuclear testing programmes – the peaceful indigenous people of the two countries.
The Nevada-Semipalatinsk anti-nuclear movement was founded on 26 February 1989, led by renowned Kazakh poet Olzhas Suleimenov. Its origins as a grassroots initiative helped the Nevada-Semipalatinsk anti-nuclear movement to grow rapidly and campaign actively against nuclear testing at the Semipalatinsk Test Site, known as the ‘Polygon’.
Media around the world were quick to report the establishment of the first Soviet civil society anti-nuclear movement in Kazakhstan and this led to an explosion of interest from the international community. On 12 March 1989 US Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack Matlock, travelled to Almaty to find out more about the activities of the new organisation. A short time later, the movement’s deputy leader, well-known public figure Murat Auezov, visited the USA to make contact with American peace-building organisations. A joint programme was developed for activities on an international scale.
Through highly publicised protests and strikes the activists from the Nevada-Semipalatinsk anti-nuclear movement succeeded in attracting global attention. Of the 18 planned detonations in 1989, 11 were stopped, with the last test taking place on 19 October of that year.
On 29 August 1991, a decree was issued to close the Semipalatinsk Polygon permanently. In 2009 the UN General Assembly symbolically declared this date, 29 August, as the International Day against Nuclear Tests.
Following the closure of the nuclear testing site in Kazakhstan, a number of other sites were also closed. This included testing on the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in Russia, where 132 tests were conducted between 1955 and 1990, and in the State of Nevada in America (1,032 tests between 1951 and 1992). In addition, testing ceased on the Mururoa Atoll in French Polynesia, where 210 tests were conducted between 1966 and 1991, and at the dried-up Lop-Nur mountain lake in China (45 tests between 1964 and 1996)
The story of the Semipalatinsk Test Site had begun when the Council of Ministers of the USSR passed a resolution in August 1947 on the establishment of a nuclear testing site, named Training Facility No. 2.
An area of 18 million hectares was allocated for the Semipalatinsk Polygon in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, on the borders of the East Kazakhstan, Pavlodar and Karaganda Regions. The first nuclear weapons test was on 29 August 1949. Over the course of the next 40 years 470 nuclear tests took place at the Semipalatinsk Test Site, of which 118 were atmospheric tests conducted between 1949 and 1963 and 352 were subterranean detonations carried out between 1963 and 1991.
The local population received no warnings about the tests and it was only in 1953 that their existence became public. The military developed a system of safety measures that consisted merely of temporarily evacuating people and animals from the radioactive fallout zone and taking them to primitive shelters in trenches or dugouts. After the blasts, people returned to their homes inside the area contaminated with radiation.
The radioactive fallout covered an area of over 304,000 square kilometres which was inhabited by almost 1.7 million people. Semipalatinsk Region became an environmental disaster zone. In 1957, when medical scientists from Almaty conducted the first surveys of the population living near the test site, they discovered a set of specific medical symptoms linked to the effects of ionising radiation on the body and leading to disrupted metabolism and changes in normal biochemical processes. One and a half million people living in the radiation zone around Semipalatinsk suffered as a result of the nuclear testing in the region.
Between 1993 and 1995 a project was developed to decommission the infrastructure of Kazakhstan’s nuclear testing site and this was completed on 29 July 2000. During this period 181 tunnels were sealed and 13 boreholes destroyed.
Kazakhstan was one of the first countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States to accede to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty. The country made a significant contribution towards the establishment of a nuclear-free world for the 21st century.
Ainur Konysbekovna Akzhasarova holds an MA and is a researcher at the Department of the History of Kazakhstan at the National Museum of the Republic of Kazakhstan