Kazakhstan Issues Stamps Honoring The ATOM Project

January 30, 2015

On Jan. 15, Kazakhstan’s postal service issued two new stamps commemorating The ATOM Project (“Abolish Testing: Our Mission”), the country’s most recent large-scale nuclear nonproliferation campaign. The 100-tenge stamps feature images from The ATOM Project’s website and the project’s logo. Ten thousand commemorative stamps have been issued.

The ATOM Project, launched in 2012, works to legally end nuclear testing in the short term and eventually to eliminate the world’s stockpiles of nuclear weapons. The project’s website contains an online petition urging world leaders to bring the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) to full force and permanently end the development and testing of nuclear weapons. (The treaty has been signed by 183 countries and ratified by 163 but to enter into force it needs signatures and ratifications by eight specific nuclear weapon states and nuclear capable states listed in Annex 2 to the CTBT: India, Pakistan and North Korea need to sign and ratify, while China, Egypt, Iran, Israel and the United States need to ratify the treaty.) The petition has so far collected more than 96,000 signatures. The organisers hope to deliver the petition to world leaders, thereby using public pressure to effect change.

Through ATOM Project Ambassador Karipbek Kuyukov, the project participates in nonproliferation events around the world. Kuyukov was born near the former Semipalatinsk testing ground in East Kazakhstan. Despite being born without arms as a result of his parents’ exposure to radiation from the testing, Kuyukov grew up to be an artist, painting with his mouth and feet. He uses his art to support his activism, sharing images of the beauty of the landscape he grew up in and the devastation nuclear testing wreaked on the people and the environment there.

Since the closure of the Seminpalatinsk testing site in 1991, the government of Kazakhstan has worked consistently to end nuclear testing and the development of nuclear weapons. The country famously disarmed itself after the collapse of the Soviet Union, giving up the world’s fourth largest nuclear arsenal. The country’s two new stamps honor yet another example of the work of the country’s citizens and government to make the world a safer, saner place.