When the Radiation Stopped Falling from the Skies May 2, 2025

Past to Present

Fighting the Good Fight and Winning

History doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, but it does haunt us.

As we approach 80 years from the day the US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, it is worth looking back at how a small group of determined activists in the US and the then-Soviet Union came together and fought successfully to end atmospheric testing.

The result saved thousands of people from being exposed to the radiation that above-ground  testing caused in the early days of the Cold War. Too many are already suffering the consequences, in the US known as “Downwinders” but also included are the miners and workers who handled or processed the uranium.

“A lot of us were involved across the country,” says Dr. Barbara Warren, PSR Arizona’s executive director, of the antinuclear actions sweeping the country in ’70s and ’80s.

“We climbed on a bus and went to protest at the Nevada Nuclear Testing Site,” she remembers, “and they arrested us.”

The “we” of local Tucson antinuclear activists includes PSR Arizona members Kathy Altman and Dr. Ivy Schwartz. Thanks to Altman, Tucson was twice home to the  Uranium Film Festival. Felice and Jack Cohen-Joppa, publishers of the “the Nuclear Resister” newsletter, are well known for their work on defusing nuclear war. The couple maintains a long-standing antinuclear protest at Raytheon headquarters in Tucson.

Broad Shoulders to Stand on

The activists of today stand on the shoulders of the original champions of peace. One was cardiologist Bernard Lown. Famous in medical history for inventing the first effective heart defibrillator, Dr. Lown was also known among his colleagues as a leader in the global antinuclear movement — and for us as the co-founding president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, 1961.

For peacekeepers like Dr. Lown, the magic year was 1989.

That year, three years after the horrific explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev pulled the plug on above-ground testing.

Beginning in 1990, the Soviet Union shut down its official and highly secretive atomic testing grounds in the wilds of Kazakhstan in Central Asia called the Polygon for its shape.  

Two years later, George W. Bush ended above-ground testing in the Nevada desert north of Las Vegas. 

Combined, the US and Russia exploded 1,769 atomic bombs, aerial and underground, over a 40-year period. It was a game of nuclear chicken officially and aptly known as Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). The deadly radioactive isotopes that a MAD response would release were woefully misunderstood and flagrantly misused. Little was known then about uranium and plutonium, the primary fuels of the Atomic Age. Today, more is known but not enough.

The Poetry of Peace

It was a poet who unleashed the power of antinuclear voices. Olzhas Suleimenov, a nationally admired Kazakh poet and soon-to-be progressive anti-nuclear politician, appeared on national TV ostensibly to read his poetry. He instead gave an impassioned plea for Soviet leadership to shut down nuclear testing in Kazakhstan altogether. His country agreed.

Kazakh activists had already organized the Nevada–Semipalatinsk group, which by name united the two superpower nuclear nations in antinuclear harmony. In 1990, N-S was joined by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), founded in 1980 by PSR’s Dr. Lown and Dr. Yevgeny Chazov of the USSR. They had been honored with a Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 for their work to stop the bombs.

In 1989, the victory of stopping at least the above-ground segment of nuclear testing after so many hard-fought years was sweet. That year, on the 44th anniversary of the August 6 and 7 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 50,000 Kazakhs and fellow activists gathered at the foot of a volcano next to the Polygon, where they proceeded to throw rocks on the land where the bombs exploded. In Kazakh tradition, the rocks crushed out evil.

In 1991, Kazakhstan declared its independence from the Soviet Union and officially closed the Semipalatinsk site, renouncing its arsenal of nuclear weapons inherited from the USSR, the world’s fourth largest collection of weapons. Those arms were then returned to the newly renamed and Putin-led Russia in 1995.

Kazakhstan today is a global leader in non-proliferation, a participant in the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). This past March, its First Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Akan Rakhmetullin, was elected president of the TPNW disarmament meeting at the UN, a vote that reinforces “Kazakhstan’s long-standing advocacy for a world free of nuclear weapons.” 

Revelry Where There Had Been Bombs

There were numerous other celebrations that year in the shadow of the Polygon, bringing American and European activists together with the Kazakhs in a show of camaraderie and opposition to nuclear weapons and war.

Dr. Warren was among them. She had just joined the Arizona chapter when the offer to attend came her way. What she remembers most clearly was the joy and energy of the Kazakh people who hosted the events.

“They came storming down the hill to greet us,” she said of the reception of the Kazakh community. “They were so happy to see us. I’ll never forget that.” Gorbachev, she said, didn’t attend but he did play host by encouraging a festival of Kazakh culture.

She also hasn’t forgotten the children with physical defects or the man who greeted them when their plane landed, a painter born without arms and legs who labored using his teeth.

According to Hibakusha Worldwide, which offers an interactive map of nuclear locations and environmental impacts, sponsored by IPPNW / PSR, there was a “significant rise in malignant tumors among the local population, especially lung, stomach, breast, and thyroid cancers.”

Hibakusha Worldwide also noted a 2002 study out of the University of Leicester, UK, which found that people living near the test site, who were exposed to high doses of radiation, “had an 80% higher rate of DNA mutations than control groups, and even the children of those directly exposed to fallout had rates that were about 50% higher.” 

Shadows Remain but Uranium Rules

Today, Kazakhstan is independent but impoverished; the Polygon, like the bombed-out Frenchman Flats at the Nevada Test Site, is highly contaminated. No effort has been made to clean it up, as planned. Same is true of Nevada.

Kazakhstan is too poor, with one ironic exception. Kazakhstan is rich in uranium with almost 45% of the world’s reserves.

Last year and leaving little doubt about their sentiments, 65% of the eligible voters in Kazakhstan voted by a 71% margin to approve the government’s plans to build at least one, but probably three nuclear reactors — and turn the country into a uranium super-supplier.

It is now seeking bids from international contractors to build its first reactor.

Newsletter Editor:
Karen Peterson

To learn more about our work, visit Arizona.psr.org
To join our efforts, send a note to Arizona@psr.org