Nuclear Weapons Testing Survivor Supports Bike Tour Against Nuclear Weapons

April 23, 2015

By Karipbek Kuyukov

The ATOM Project Honorary Ambassador Karipbek Kuyukov (left) with Wilmington, Delaware Mayor Dennis P. Williams

In April 21, another push – many miles worth, in fact – will be added to the growing worldwide drive to rid the planet of nuclear weapons as the Bike Away the Atomic Bomb riders begin their journey from Washington, D.C. to New York to call for real action to be taken at the UN Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference in New York on April 27.

I won’t be riding with them. I couldn’t hold the handlebars, or anything else, for that matter: when I was born, outside the now-closed Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site in eastern Kazakhstan, it was without arms.

I’m not unusual, where I come from. Forty years of nuclear testing and hundreds of nuclear explosions have blighted swathes of the beautiful steppe there and shattered the surrounding communities, as their effects began to be seen in birth defects and diseases, which continue to this day. The UN estimates that 1.5 million people in Kazakhstan have been affected by the Soviet Union’s nuclear test programme. There are many people like me.

I am determined to be the last.

In a sense, I am lucky: Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president of Kazakhstan, shut down the poisonous Semipalatinsk test site in 1991, in defiance of the government in Moscow, and upon independence set about dismantling Kazakhstan’s formidable nuclear arsenal. Ukraine, Belarus and South Africa join Kazakhstan among the list of countries to renounce their nuclear weapons.

But I and they are also citizens of the world, and while our countries may be free of nuclear weapons, we remain vulnerable as long as the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty remains a dream. We have been waiting since 1996 for this ban to become a reality, and I call on China, Egypt, India, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan and the United States to finally sign and/or ratify this treaty. They must ensure that not one more person suffers from the consequences of nuclear testing and nuclear weapons use in the future.

I may not be able to ride with them, but I will be joining Mayors for Peace, Bike for Peace and The ATOM Project in Washington D.C. before the bikers start this new leg of our journey toward nuclear sanity. We are joining Global Wave 2015 in its schedule of coordinated public actions urging humanity – and particularly the decision-makers at the UN conference – to wave goodbye to nuclear weapons.

Tore Nærland, co-founder of Bike for Peace, and Thore Vestby, mayor of Frogn, Norway, who is also vice president of Mayors for Peace and a member of Parliamentarians for Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament are among those who will be riding for four days from Washington to New York.

For this tour, Vestby says, he has a specific message: That nuclear weapons cannot be used, because of their enormous humanitarian and environmental consequences, and are therefore useless.

He takes the message from Colin Powell, he said, who discusses in the introduction to the film “Nuclear Tipping Point,” about how he came to realise nuclear weapons must never be used.

“The one thing that I convinced myself of after all these years of exposure to the use of nuclear weapons is that they were useless. They could not be used. If you can have deterrence with an even lower number of weapons, well then why stop there? Why not continue on, why not get rid of them altogether?” Powell says in the film.

Participants in the Bike Away the Atomic Bomb bike tour leave Washington DC in route to New York City

Vestby is hoping to meet decision-makers on this trip – particularly those not yet committed to disarmament. “I really hope to meet a lot of mayors along the route, but also senators and members of the House of Representatives in D.C. I also want to meet Republicans who are not on the nuclear disarmament path. I want to hear their arguments. Those are the ones that are important to talk to. You know, the peace and disarmament people are also important, but they are already ‘in place,’ they do not need to be convinced.”

I am asking you to wave goodbye to these weapons, though I cannot do so myself. But I can raise my voice, and my paintbrush, and I will do that until the day I die, to ensure that the world sees what has happened in my country and my community, and more importantly, to make sure that this never happens again, in rich countries or in poor countries or in any other hidden place on earth. Children like me were hidden for long enough. I want to use my voice to tell you about us, now, and use my brush to show you the beauty and heartbreak of my landscape.

I am asking for us to use the conflicts of the past year to fuel our resolve to prevent the unthinkable from happening – again. I ask you to join the more than 6,000 cities of Mayors for Peace, who have declared their opposition to nuclear weapons. I ask you to join the U.S. Conference of Mayors (USCM), who in June adopted the resolution “Calling for Constructive Good Faith U.S. Participation in International Nuclear Disarmament Forums” and asking the American administration to participate constructively in discussions and negotiations on disarmament issues, including at the May 2015 NPT Review Conference. I ask you to join Pope Francis, who has made nuclear disarmament a central theme of his papacy.

I call upon the whole and healthy and comfortable to see what their nuclear arsenals can do, even without being deployed, to the earth and its creatures and to end this madness.

I am happy to be living at a time when my voice can be heard and supported by millions around the world – as it is being supported through The ATOM Project and our petition to end nuclear testing. Our voices can become one powerful voice! As one, we can call for the permanent end to nuclear weapons testing. And with Bike Away the Atomic Bomb, we can add to a momentum toward peace.

The author is the honorary ambassador of The ATOM Project.