During the Cold War, nearly a quarter of all the world’s nuclear testing took place in Kazakhstan, in secret. In 1986, a high-profile disaster in Ukraine changed that.

Seventy years ago, an explosion in a far-flung corner of Soviet-ruled Kazakhstan set off an arms race that took the world to the brink of nuclear Armageddon. Four years earlier, the US had ended the Second World War by dropping atomic bombs on Japan. Joseph Stalin’s USSR was hellbent on catching up.

The blast at the Kremlin’s secret Semipalatinsk nuclear testing site, which rocked Kazakhstan on 29 August 1949, was the first of 456 atomic explosions conducted there over the next 40 years. Codenamed Pervaya Molniya (First Lightning) by the Soviets and Joe-1 by the Americans (after ‘Uncle Joe’, their nickname for Stalin), the first explosion released 22 kilotons of nuclear energy, or 22,000 tonnes of TNT, into the atmosphere. Over the next four decades, the bombs detonated at Semipalatinsk released energy 2,500 times greater than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. It was that ruthless display of US military might that launched the Cold War arms race with Washington’s new rivals in Moscow, as the panicked Soviets – helped by spies within the US arms programme – scrambled to split the atom and become a superpower in the newly polarised world.

Mushroom clouds

Today, villagers living around the Polygon, the Russian word for ‘test site’, which became synonymous with Semipalatinsk, have traumatic memories of mushroom clouds exploding on the horizon during their childhood. ‘We’d be sent outside, and we’d crouch in ditches. We saw mushroom clouds: big and terrifying ones’, recalled an old lady called Galina Tornoshenko, born in 1949, the year of the first nuclear test. ‘I was small at the time, but I remember it well.’

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