Kazakhstan is surrounded by nuclear neighbors — Russia to the north and west, China to the east, and India and Pakistan to the south. Until 1995, when it completed a year’s long multi-nation effort to disassemble and remove the Soviet nuclear weapons and supporting infrastructure from its territory, Kazakhstan hosted (but did not independently control) what amounted to the world’s fourth largest nuclear arsenal. In the country’s northeast, the area around the city of Semey, the Soviet Union conducted at least 456 nuclear weapons tests between 1949 and 1989, leaving a catastrophic legacy of environmental contamination and devastating humanitarian costs.
The Soviet nuclear weapons testing site near Semey (formerly Semipalatinsk), was officially closed by Kazakhstan’s president on August 29, 1991, ending four decades of radioactive pollution that the region’s people continue to pay for in premature deaths, birth defects, miscarriages, infertility, and other physical, psychological, social, cultural, and economic impacts.
Contrary to the notion that Semey was remote and uninhabited, for the region’s population, their homeland was rich in wildlife and wilderness, valued as a pastureland, and revered for the literary tradition born from its poets.
Following a powerful international collaboration known as the Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement, in the late 1980s and 90s Kazakh civil society came together to renounce nuclear weapons and call for their abolition. Kazakhstan continues to play a leading role in seeking the complete abolition of nuclear weapons. In 2006, Kazakhstan joined four neighboring countries to establish the Central Asian Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone which was signed at Semey twelve years before Kazakhstan adopted and ratified the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).
In March, Kazakh Ambassador Akan Rakhmetullin served as president of the third Meeting of States Parties (3MSP) to the TPNW at United Nations headquarters and was supported by at least 45 delegates representing Kazakh civil society, including several dozen youth delegates.
Speaking at the UN between side events, two of the delegates, Aigerim Seitenova and Yerdaulet Rakhmatulla, discussed Kazakhstan’s evolving role in disarmament efforts. Seitenova and Rakhmatulla are co-founders of a civil society group called Qazaq Nuclear Frontline Coalition. Seitenova spoke in support of TPNW, saying the nuclear ban treaty offers not only a world without nuclear weapons but also redress for those who have suffered from testing and use. One of her goals is to encourage more young people, especially from nuclear-affected communities, to get involved in the movement. At the same time, she has been educating government ministry officials about TPNW.
Even though nuclear testing in Kazakhstan ended over 35 years ago, she says compensation to affected communities and apologies remain outstanding. “If you ever come to Semey, you will see how much pain there is and how much anger there is,” Seitenova said. “My region has been ignored by the government for more than 20 years.” In order to draw global attention and understanding of Kazakhstan’s nuclear legacy, last March Seitenova released Jara – Radioactive Patriarchy: Women of Qazaqstan, a documentary film she directed and produced.
Working closely with Seitenova, Rakhmatulla, who is from Kazakhstan’s uranium-rich south, says that as an ally of those in the Semey region, an important part of their movement is not only raising awareness of TPNW but also forging strong ties with nuclear affected communities around the world including those in the Pacific (Marshall Islands, French Polynesia, and Kiribati) as well as downwinders in the US desert southwest, Australia, nuclear veterans, and Japanese and Korean victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.
He talks about the role the United States played in helping Kazakhstan dismantle and remove its nuclear infrastructure in the 1990s as an example of international disarmament cooperation.
We can fund peace instead of funding violence and destruction of the world.
Aigerim Seitenova
While most of their focus is on civil society, Seitenova says it’s important to acknowledge her own government’s efforts in pursuing nuclear disarmament. Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has done “an amazing job,” she says, having served as chair of the NPT Preparatory Committee in 2024 and as president of 3MSP in 2025. Furthermore, Kazakhstan continues to co-chair (with Kiribati) an informal working group in pursuit of victim assistance, environmental remediation, and international cooperation and assistance as spelled out in the nuclear ban treaty.
Seitenova says that TPNW offers a vision of the world she wants for future generations, calling for an end to the status quo based on investing in weapons and war. “We can fund peace instead of funding violence and destruction of the world.”
Another Kazakh youth, Adiya Akhmer, a university student in Kazakhstan’s capital Astana, is a co-founding member of Steppe Organization for Peace (STOP), a Kazakh youth initiative for nuclear justice. She is from Pavlodar, a city in the country’s northeast, around 200 miles from Semey. Akhmer’s mother grew up in what was designated a “minimum radiation risk zone” but her maternal grandmother came from a “maximum risk zone” and died of cancer when Akhmer’s mother was 12 years old. As a child, Akhmer heard stories of evacuation and relatives witnessing a “giant burning mushroom.” Prior to the late 1980s, very little information about the Soviet nuclear program was known. That changed with the Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement, says Akhmer.
In 2023, Akhmer and her colleagues attended the second meeting of States Parties to the TPNW where they organized a side event on Kazakhstan’s nuclear legacy. Since that time, she has been a dedicated advocate for nuclear victims’ assistance, environmental remediation, and the pursuit of nuclear justice. She serves on a working group under Kazakhstan’s Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources, to revise a law related to the protection of nuclear affected communities. She and colleagues also review Kazakh laws as they are related to their TPNW obligations. In an email, Akhmer wrote, “I strongly believe in data-informed advocacy where my roles as a youth activist and researcher meet.”
Pursuit of a world free of nuclear weapons, she says, means justice for affected communities everywhere because even today, fourth and fifth generations continue to face health and socio-economic challenges. She says her movement’s contribution is to put human dignity and security at the center of nuclear academic and policy discussions while commemorating the lived trauma of nuclear test victims and other frontline communities worldwide. Deeply proud of Kazakhstan’s leadership role in global disarmament, her message is simple: “Don’t let such a tragedy repeat itself.”
Togzhan Kassenova, a Kazakh nuclear researcher and author of Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave Up The Bomb, praised efforts by young professionals, scholars, and activists. She says that by amplifying the voices of impacted communities, they are bringing positive change to global discussions of nuclear justice. She is encouraged by the intergenerational cooperation and partnership led by nuclear test survivors who engage with Kazakh parliamentarians and government agencies as they reinvigorate the nuclear abolition movement.
Kazakh’s nuclear justice work extends beyond youth movements. One of Kazakhstan’s most prominent anti-nuclear activists is Karipbek Kuyukov, a painter and nuclear abolition campaigner who attends arms control and disarmament meetings around the world. Born in 1968 near the Semipalatinsk test site, Kuyukov began painting as a schoolboy. Like one of his favorite Russian painters, Ivan Shishkin, Kyukov enjoys painting animal portraits and landscapes untouched by humans. But his best known works reflect the fear and destruction caused by forty years of nuclear weapons tests.
His paintings depict hellish mushroom clouds towering over human figures fleeing in fear, a child wearing a gas mask cowering in a corner trapped by a game of radioactive tic-tac-toe or a distraught woman sitting before a window looking out at a nuclear explosion. What makes Kuyokov’s painting even more exceptional is that he does them using only his feet and teeth, for he was born with no hands or arms, a stark reminder of the painful legacy of nuclear weapons testing.
Speaking at an exhibition of his work inside the United Nations in March, Kuyukov explains his primary motivation. “Kazakhstan is one of the first countries to give up nuclear weapon testing,” he said. “People in Kazakhstan want to live without any nuclear explosions or testing.”
Shakerbanu Myrzakhanova was born early in the era of Soviet nuclear testing in the Semey region. In those days people were aware of testing but didn’t know about the extent of the destruction. “We believed that our country—the Soviet Union—was the most peace-loving country and nuclear tests were conducted to strengthen the country’s defense capabilities,” she wrote in an email.
Those tests, she says, impacted people and the environment, causing genetic mutations, birth defects, and psychological stress, even on newborns, which she says she has seen with her own eyes.
Kazakhstan’s closure of the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site inspired the UN General Assembly in 2009 to proclaim August 29 as International Day Against Nuclear Testing. Myrzakhanova says she is extremely proud of the leadership role Kazakh youth are taking in the pursuit of nuclear disarmament.
Calling nuclear weapons testing a “terrible crime against humanity,” she says “the Earth is our common home and it is very fragile…Everyone should be doing their bit to prevent the use of nuclear weapons.”
September 26 is the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons.
