REPORTING FROM ESOF TURIN
RecoveRing fRom a destRuctive past
since gaining independence, the inhabitants of Kazakhstan have been striving to clear up the nuclear mess left by the soviets. tom Kennedy reports that in spite of intensive testing, the republic has made a remarkable recovery.
F
ar from bringing an abrupt halt to the development of nuclear weapons, the horrific, and many say unnecessary and barbaric obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki simply triggered a race to build bigger and more lethal bombs. The wars that had swept across Europe and Asia had been fought with almost unbelievable ferocity, civilian deaths counted for nothing, yet it was widely accepted that the best way to achieve, not so much peace, as balance of power, was to outgun the enemy, thus locking the world into what almost became a suicide pact. Hostilities did not end with the defeat of Germany, and indeed, one of the primary causes of World War II continued to fester like an infected sore as the Iron Curtain came down. In the uneasy period that followed, the Great Powers vied with each other to be ahead in the ability to unleash hell on earth, and during the 1950s and into the 1960s, hundreds of bombs, many of far greater magnitude than those used on Japan, were set off in saber rattling tests. Such was the secrecy surrounding these developments in what became known as the “nuclear deterrent” that when the post-war reactor at Sellafield in the UK went on fire, the US military refused to help on the grounds that their own
security would have been compromised by any release of information. In the US and the UK, nuclear weapons were being developed within societies that were not really keen on secrecy, and indeed there were widespread ban-the-bomb protests, but in the Soviet Union, there was never any question of sha