Kazakhstan and Nunn-Lugar: A Non-Proliferation Success Story

Washington D.C., August 29, 2015 – Today’s anniversary of the historic closing in 1991 of the Soviet Union’s nuclear test site at Semipalatinsk has brought new public attention to more than 20 years of U.S., Russian and Kazakh cooperation to remove and clean up after nuclear weapons – the subject of a landmark conference earlier this summer organized by the National Security Archive.

In May 1992 meetings with then-U.S. president George H.W. Bush, the president of the newly independent former Soviet republic, Nursultan Nazarbayev, had committed Kazakhstan to a non-nuclear future and the removal of more than 1,000 former Soviet nuclear warheads still on Kazakh territory. Earlier, in August 1991, Nazarbayev (then the head of the Kazakh Communist Party) had decreed the closure of the Semipalatinsk test site, thus signaling his agreement with the popular Nevada-Semey movement that protested the human and environmental damage from decades of nuclear tests.

Trilateral RK-US-RF Cooperation at the Former Semipalatinsk Test Site (Slides from Dr. Erlan Batyrbekov's presentation at the National Nuclear Center)

 

The close cooperation of the Russian military, together with funding from the visionary (but underappreciated) Nunn-Lugar program in the U.S., successfully removed all the Soviet-era warheads from Kazakhstan by 1995. Subsequently, Nunn-Lugar funding also underwrote nearly two decades of scientific cooperation involving Russian and American institutes together with the Kazakh National Nuclear Center to clean up and secure hundreds of radioactive underground sites of test explosions in multiple locations in the “Polygon” (the test site nickname after its shape on the map).

Kazakhstan has since become a global leader for non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, noted for its playing prominent roles at the most recent Nuclear Security Summits, its plan to host the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) low-enriched-uranium fuel bank (with support from Sam Nunn’s Nuclear Threat Initiative), and the new home in Astana for the International Science and Technical Center after Moscow pulled out of Nunn-Lugar programs in 2013. The IAEA and the Kazakh government formally signed the fuel bank agreement on August 27, 2015 in Astana with Senator Nunn present for the occasion. Nunn commented, “We are in a race between cooperation and catastrophe.”

Veterans of the Kazakh success story gathered in Astana in early June for the second in the series of “critical oral history” conferences organized by the National Security Archive to illuminate the history of the Nunn-Lugar initiative and bring its lessons to bear on current and future proliferation challenges.

The Russian delegation, headed by Col. Gen. Evgeny Maslin (former head of the 12th directorate of the General Staff, in charge of nuclear warheads), included the former chief of staff of the Strategic Rocket Forces, Col. Gen. Victor Yesin, senior Russian nuclear expert Maj. Gen. Vasily Lavrishchev, and Maj. Gen. Anatoly Svetikov who both accompanied President Nazarbayev to the 1992 Washington meetings and later commanded the actual withdrawal of warheads from Kazakhstan.

The American delegation, headed by White House senior director for non-proliferation Laura Holgate (subsequently nominated by President Obama to be U.S. ambassador to the IAEA), included the first U.S. ambassador to Kazakhstan, William Courtney, and two of his successors, John Ordway and Kenneth Fairfax, together with non-proliferation expert William Potter from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. The former assistant secretary of defense for WMD, Andy Weber, brought to the table his personal experience inidentifying and removing highly enriched uranium, as well as inspecting former Soviet bioweapon facilities left in Kazakhstan; and Pulitzer-Prize-winning author David Hoffman also provided expertise dating back to his 1991 trip with then-Secretary of State James Baker to Kazakhstan.

The conference’s formal sessions included Kazakh Foreign Minister Erlan Idrissov and Senate Chairman Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, who gave their perspectives on the historic decisions taken by Kazakhstan in the 1990s and thereafter. Energy Minister Vladimir Shkolnik – who played a key role both in the 1990s and in the organization of the conference – participated in both ceremonial and discussion sessions.

Key Kazakh veterans who came to the table included former Deputy Foreign Minister Bolat Nurgaliev, former head of the Nuclear Center Dr. Kairat Kadyrzhanov, the long-time head of the military's verification center Col. Assylbek Mendygalyev and his successor Col. Amangeldy Aubakirov, current ambassador for non-proliferation Barlybey Sadykov, and deputy director of the Nuclear Center Sergei Berezin.

The conference’s formal sessions were hosted by the Foreign Ministry of Kazakhstan, with the group portrait of participants on the main stairway of the Ministry in downtown Astana. The first two days of discussion sessions took place at the Bal Qar Gai horse-riding resort outside of Astana, in the large yurt-style wedding hall of the facility.

The Kazakh Ministry of Energy hosted the conference participants on a charter flight from Astana to Semey on the third day of the conference, and on a helicopter journey (in Soviet-built Mi-8 choppers) over the former test site, including a view of Ground Zero and a ceremonial stop on top of Degelen Mountain, where teams of Russian, Kazakh and American scientists worked for years to clean up and secure former underground testing tunnels.

The National Nuclear Center of Kazakhstan provided its state-of-the-art conference room for one of the discussion sessions after the helicopter trip, along with lunch in the former Kurchatov Institute cafeteria, tours of the Institute’s museum documenting all the Soviet tests, and a ceremonial Kazakh feast inside a yurt erected for the occasion on the grounds.

Perhaps the most impressive presentation of the entire conference came from the Nuclear Center’s director general, Dr. Erlan Batyrbekov, during the discussion at Kurchatov. Dr. Batyrbekov provided the participants with a 24-slide PowerPoint talk summarizing the “Trilateral RK-US-RF Cooperation at the Former Semipalatinsk Test Site,” detailing the history of nuclear testing (with specific numbers of tests, boreholes, dates and locations), the dangers of proliferation by scavengers after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the wide range of the Center’s initiatives, and the ongoing radiological monitoring and remediation activities.

Other conference sessions covered the landmark decisions made by the Kazakh leadership in the early 1990s to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and remove the nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and infrastructure left by the Soviet Union. Specific topics included the Project Sapphire removal of enough highly-enriched uranium to make a score of nuclear weapons, the decommissioning of the Soviet-era BN-350 reactor with secure storage of the downgraded fuel on the territory of the former test site, and the challenges of cleanup at the Stepnogorsk anthrax factory and the Vozrozhdeniye Island bioweapons test site.

The conference briefing book, compiled by the National Security Archive team (Svetlana Savranskaya, Tom Blanton, Malcolm Byrne, Anna Melyakova, Rinat Bikineyev, Peter Oster and Chris Johnson) included the actual declassified transcript of the May 1992 Bush-Nazarbayev meeting, together with highest-level memcons, cables and reports covering the crucial early years (1991-1995) of Nunn-Lugar-funded cooperative threat reduction in Kazakhstan. The primary sources also included several of Ambassador Courtney’s influential cables, and discussions between Russian president Boris Yeltsin and U.S. presidents Bush and Clinton in the 1990s.

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