In the 1990s, the United States and other countries helped the newly independent states that had been part of the Soviet Union to deal with their nuclear weapons and materials. It’s a story that has been almost completely forgotten, but it contains a number of lessons that might be helpful today.
David Frum reminds us of that effort. I was involved in it. A few additional thoughts.
It wasn’t just the United States that helped. Although Senators Sam Nunn (D-GA) and Richard Lugar (R-IN) started the funding, the International Science and Technology Committee, funded by the European Union, Japan, and Norway, in addition to the United States, also helped to support nuclear weapons scientists suddenly without jobs.
And it wasn’t just Kazakhstan. Most of the former Soviet republics had leftovers from the Soviet nuclear weapons programs – from mining through production plants to the weapons stationed in Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan. Help was needed in materials accountability and in moving the weapons back to Russia, which inherited the USSR’s status as a nuclear weapons power.
I am pretty sure that I have seen the site pictured in Frum’s article. The caption is “The destruction of a Soviet-era nuclear testing site in Kazakhstan in 2000.” It looks like the sealing of one of the tunnels in the Degelen Mountain testing area. Nuclear tests were carried out in the tunnels. Some of them left metallic plutonium behind.
When I saw in 2001 that the tunnels had been sealed, I realized that they would have to be opened up again. They were, in the recovery of plutonium during 2005-2007. It probably was a good idea to seal them early, though, because scavengers were at the test site, removing copper wire that had been used for the tests.
The Soviet Union formally ended December 25, 1991. In early February, the three directors of the American weapons laboratories – Los Alamos, Livermore, and Sandia – were on their way to Sarov, Russia’s equivalent of Los Alamos. Scientists and engineers from those laboratories and others followed. As Frum notes, Vladimir Putin ended the cooperation in 2012. Kazakhstan now has removed its weapons-related nuclear material. The Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site and other nuclear operations left a great many things to clean up.
President George H. W. Bush eliminated a large number American nuclear weapons in a unilateral gesture intended to show Mikhail Gorbachev that the US would not take advantage of Russia in its disarray. Frum emphasizes that Soviet weapons were eliminated, but weapons were eliminated on both sides.
Those of us who were part of it made new friends and spent time in countries we never imagined would be open to us. It felt like making the world a better place. It was the best thing I did in my career.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner.
way2blue
Cheryl, thank you for your tangible contribution to making the world a safer place.
BGinCHI
When we were applying for Fulbrights, we looked at K’stan and countries in that region.
I wish I knew more about everyday life there. Very curious.
Mike in NC
I recall when G. H. W. Bush had nuclear weapons removed from all Navy surface ships. Everybody welcomed that.
Cheryl Rofer
@BGinCHI: It depends on where you are. The cities are similar to cities everywhere. I stayed in a fifth-floor walkup in Almaty for a month. The country is different. I recommend a working knowledge of Russian or Kazakh if you plan to stay somewhere outside a city. I picked up a little Russian to use with the street vendors.
way2blue
p.s. my husband, many years ago, was involved with issues related to the Nevada Test Site. Specifically—if the barrels of radioactive material leaked and got into the groundwater—where would it go? (He has some interesting stories about working on the test site, including one about being there during an underground test… )
BGinCHI
@Cheryl Rofer: We’re brave, but taking our (at the time) almost 4-year-old made the calculation different.
It was easy to say yes to Norway.
Richard Guhl
When I was a kid in the 50s, my hometown of Stamford, CT, 35 miles from NYC, conducted air raid warning tests every Saturday at noon. Being a somewhat precocious child I was well aware of the significance… and the futility. Every time the sirens sounded, I’d look to the sky, afraid I’d see the missiles streaking across the sky, wondering if I’d die swiftly in the fireball, shortly thereafter in the blast, or agonizingly from radiation sickness. Such was the horrific nightmare of a child who took a newspaper clipping about Quemoy and Matsu to his third grade show-and-tell.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis I recall the deathly pall that fell across the country, and then the sense that it became almost unspeakable to talk about the horror afterwards. I grew up thinking I’d never see forty.
So, thank you, Cheryl for the magnificent work you and your colleagues did. I have lived long enough to endure the misery of this past year. And now my fear is for the horrors that might await my granddaughter and her generation as they cope with a world turned awry by dumping CO2 in the atmosphere. And yet, as long as life endures, hope remains.
trollhattan
Unilateral nuclear disarmament was absolutely the best thing H.W. Bush accomplished in office and I will always be happy to credit him for it. His kid might have taken some notes.
Thanks for the first-hand account Cheryl. What a great opportunity, to participate in something historic and positive like that.
Victor Matheson
Great post. Always nice to have an uplifting story on the blog. (Well, at least one that doesn’t involve cute animals!)
Lapassionara
@Richard Guhl: my hometown conducted those tests too. We were convinced our city was so strategically important that it would be one of the first targets. I remember reading a magazine article in the early 50’s that predicted that the Russians would have ICBM’s within 3 years, and I thought, well I only have 3 years to live.
The decisions made by the US government in an effort to keep communism from spreading were just horrible, for the most part. On the one hand, the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe. On the other, the undermining of various democratically elected governments, Chile, Iran, for examples. And the wars — Korea, Vietnam, ….. Just awful and short sighted.
Richard Guhl
@Lapassionara: Stamford probably was targeted too. It had been by the Nazis during World War 2, because of a precision ball and roller bearings factory.
We’re still fighting the consequences of World War 1.
Lapassionara
@Richard Guhl: Yes.
Brachiator
Thanks for this insider view into efforts at nuclear disarmament. It’s good to know that an attempt at international cooperation actually succeeded.
trollhattan
@Lapassionara:
With two Boeing plants and the shortest traveling distance for a Soviet missile or bomber, we did our little-kid duck-and-cover drills in the Seattle schools. I was sufficiently young to think it was a smart thing to do, and not merely a thing to do.
Lapassionara
@trollhattan: We did those too. A few years later, I read “Hiroshima” and realized the utter futility of our drills. Many years after that, I saw “The Day After” and realized the utter insanity of our weaponry.
Jackie
@trollhattan: Grew up in Richland, and the drills were very commonplace in the ‘60s for those living next door to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Like you, we were young enough to believe they would save our lives! LOL
HumboldtBlue
Speaking of nukes, Greg Mitchell will debut a documentary about the atomic bomb on Tuesday, March 30.
Atomic Cover-up
Ruckus
@trollhattan:
He wouldn’t have learned anything from that.
Yutsano
@trollhattan:
Add in five military installations. Washington was gonna get blown all to Hades if the 1983 nuclear war scare had actually happened. We were always told to prepare for bombings ever since I was a kid. But that’s what growing up near Navy bases entailed.
RaflW
I looked through the Frum thread yesterday, and I agree with whoever said that probably none of that ratcheting-down and decommissioning would be possible today.
Imagine all the slavering hawks like Graham and Cotton saying that any unilateral disarming would be like throwing away your assault rifle right before a hurricane. (Graham is such an obvious coward that I can’t actually think of him using and AR 15, but the threat he made today was the sort of multi-layered racism that just sickens me. But I digress, slightly).
It just shows how important it was to have done the de-nuking the world did, when it could, because conditions shift, and opportunities may not come again for long periods. I’m thankful for the clear heads and supporting efforts of folks like Cheryl.
Amir Khalid
@RaflW:
It’s my understanding that Graham (you mean Lindsay, right?) is a JAG lawyer, i.e. a military officer, so he must have had some kind of firearms training, right?
Ruckus
@trollhattan:
@Lapassionara:
I was sick a lot as a kid so I read, a lot. Having seen pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki it was pretty obvious even to a young kid, that hiding under a school desk would not do a whole lot, other than have one more thing to fall on you, or slow down the blast for less than a millisecond. At best. It seemed futile to worry about it in the moment, as there really wasn’t anything to do if it happened.
It’s always sort of made me wonder, why we spend almost no time trying to figure out how to live with each other, rather, the history of man is how much time has been wasted upon domination and destruction.
Cheryl Rofer
@RaflW: Back in the 1990s, the Republicans were at it, although a bit differently. Why should we pay our enemy, when they probably are using the money to make more bombs anyway? was the go-to then. I recall thinking, you fools, we are removing some of their nuclear weapons and making things safer for everyone. In effect, as Frum says, the cheapest disarmament program ever, although I don’t recall anyone saying it out loud because it would have been bad for dealing with Russia.
Eventually Putin decided that that was the case, and besides, Americans were sneaking around his secret establishments. But by 2012, they had much better systems for accounting for nuclear material, and the danger that weapons scientists would go to Iran or other places had subsided.
Yutsano
@Jackie: Basically, the only “safe” place in the state is the upper eastern slope of the Cascades. Party in Chelan then!
Subsole
@Lapassionara: It’s a small point, but Korea had a lot more to do with Uncle I. Vissarionovich than Uncle Sam Eaglebiblefootballgun.
Subsole
@Ruckus: Nothing more futile than teaching a know-it-all.
Subsole
@Ruckus: The history of man is a failure to read history…
Ruckus
@Amir Khalid:
Might have been a very, very limited amount.
For 2 yrs, on board ship I carried a loaded 45 pistol on in port watch. I’d done this for a year before I had to qualify with the weapon. I’d fired about a half dozen rounds, 22 caliber, on an indoor range in boot camp. The first watch I stood I was shown how the weapon worked, by the guy I relieved. He’d received the same amount of training I had. None. I’d fired and learned before I enlisted. And qualification was firing 2 clips, 5 rounds each off the back of the ship while underway in the middle of the ocean and successfully hitting the water and not anything else. IOW I never got any actual training in small arms, or any other kind, even though the ship I served on only existed to deliver a huge amount of firepower. We even could fire nuclear weapons, although I don’t think we ever had any on board.
So, in my experience it is possible that no, he didn’t actually receive much or any small arms training.
Subsole
@Ruckus: Submarine?
Ken
I remember sometime in the mid- to late-90s, reading an article about the guards in one of the FSU countries and what they were paid (sometimes) to guard the sites, and thinking “I could come up with twice their yearly salary as a bribe….” It’s remarkable (and a tribute to the disarmament program) that we didn’t end up with a dozen new nuclear nations.
Jager
My brother-in-law spent a lot of time in Kazakhstan after the Russians left. He was working on projects to get their agriculture going outside of the old Soviet system. Larry said when the Russians left, they took all the dairy cattle, beef cattle, chickens, every tool, tractor, truck, plow, and milk pail with them. They stripped the country of its means of food production. With help, the Kazaks quickly were able to feed themselves, and now they export Ag commodities around the world. He tells a great story about being invited to a traditional Kazak celebration, he felt obligated to drink the fermented mare’s milk. Lar doesn’t recommend it. He made some great friends there.
Ruckus
@Subsole:
And learn anything from it when they do, other than do the same thing again – more violently.
@Subsole:
How do you teach a know it all? I find that their brains are so full that there is no room to stuff in any more.
And even worse is what it’s full of….
Subsole
@Jager: Lord, that sounds like how the French left Africa…
Jackie
Jay
Cheryl Rofer
@Jager: That’s another untold story, of the people who went to those countries to help with agriculture, local governance, newspapers, and other things we take for granted. They helped put those countries on the right track.
Ruckus
@Subsole:
DDG. Guided missile destroyer.
Subsole
@Ruckus: LOL, yeah. I found a few good, hard knocks usually cured that. Certainly improved MY capacity to osmose some facts…
sab
@Cheryl Rofer: My sister had a friend that did that. He died of non-hodgens lymphoma in his forties. No family history of cancer. Just got exposed to stuff in the ‘stans.
Ruckus
@Cheryl Rofer:
I used to think we could take a lot of the small/not so small things for granted. Before I was really exposed to the selfishness of many, many of our fellow humans. I’ve often thought that the political term conservative really means selfish bastard. The up graded, modern meaning is “Fuck you I stole mine.”
Dan B
@Yutsano: We were at Hunt’s Bluff far up Lake Chelan May 18, 1980 when the dark clouds passed over the mountain ridges and the cloud of ash al.ost a mile thick obscured the lower half of the lake. Nuclear fallout from hits of strategic sites in WA would make for an ‘On the Beach’ style party in Chelan at the foot of the lake.
trollhattan
@Jay:
BBC has been reporting on it. Evidently, the region is a hotspot packed with furriners because they’re developing natural gas extraction fields there. Big Earl knows no boundaries. Lots of folks are missing, some fled into the bush. Hope they know the way out.
trollhattan
Know what would make your wedding day even more memorable? Inviting Trump.
Ruckus
@Subsole:
I’ve spent most of my 71 yrs trying to learn more. Any even half way look at life is that there is far more out there than any one person can know more than a tiny portion of, and some/most of us have little desire and/or skill to learn past the minimum necessary to eat, sleep, fuck, rinse repeat, except for those who want more stuff, even if they can’t use 90% of it, because you know – stuff shows how good you are and gold plated (or spray painted) stuff shows that even more. If you need proof of the last bit, that fucking guy (TFG) should do the trick.
Subsole
@Amir Khalid:
Amir,
Hope I am mot imposing, but I was wondering if you could help remedy my ignorance.
Who is y’all’s Canada, or Mexico?
I ask because I was reading about the coup in Myanmar and I got to wondering about how that would ripple outward. Granted, you guys have a LOT of water and an entire Thailand between you and them, but I got to thinking about the region and how things connect over there…and realized I didn’t know much of anything. I can’t even recall the last time I’d heard anyone here in America mention the region, outside of Vietnam.
Who are the big players, the main rivalries and allies and such? Who dominates the headlines over there?
Jager
@Cheryl Rofer:
A broadcast engineer friend worked on a radio station in a box project for those former soviet countries. A shipping container with 2 small studios, a low-power FM transmitter, and a short self-supporting tower. A plug-and-play operation that could be dropped and on the air in a few days.
Jackie
@trollhattan: ??? They are obviously Trumpies, so no pity for the bride and groom whatsoever!
J R in WV
@Richard Guhl:
This, so much this! I was a little kid, and after school every day I went down into the crawl space under our house and worked to try to dig a shelter.
Unfortunately our house was on a ridge top, and the very hard cap rock that created that ridge was nearly un-diggable by a little kid with a pick and shovel.
One would have needed a compressor and jackhammer to make any reasonable progress. But it helped me, because I was tired enough to sleep well at night despite the terror of nuclear confrontation.
Years later my dad had professionals continue my excavation with just the jackhammer I mention, to install a new furnace down there.
Subsole
@Ruckus: I was reading about the BJP over in India and it really is…surreal?…how similar they are to European and American conservatism.
They want to unite the nation under one ruling aristocracy. Their patriotism is loud and performative and showy, but they don’t really want, or even believe in a nation – they just want a mechanism.
And what are their plans for this mechanism? To roll time back a few millennia. To a simpler, crueler age. Where nothing is connected.
The real core of conservatism is smallness. They want a small world that ends at the county line. And that yearning for smallness breeds smallness of character. And worse, it prunes the greatness from otherwise healthy character.
The immigrant bashing, minority lynching, queerphobia, misogyny, greed, ecological defilement… It all stems from smallness. Small dreams for a small world, sold by small, angry chickenshits for the smallest of change.
They want to go live in a nice, small, cozy cave, away from the big bright, vibrant -and, yeah, dangerous, unpredictable world. But we outgrew the cave ages ago. So they just shove their heads up their butts and call THAT a cave. They want the power of the state, the massive potential of a nation…and for what? To bludgeon anyone and everything that reminds them the world is NOT small, and never has been.
I despise it. Just the smallness. The squalid, scrabbling pettiness of their vision alone is contemptible. Nevermind the wanton, bullying cruelty. The pain for pain’s sake.
Were I religious, I would honestly think Trump is an avatar of their small god.
RaflW
@Amir Khalid: Decades ago, and probably not of that calibre. He’s a flabby old desk jockey, and scared of his own shadow. Not a good combo for an armed person.
Subsole
@RaflW: If I weren’t flabby and scared, I wouldn’t need the gun.
Yahtzee, atheists!
Ruckus
@Subsole:
A number of ways to say it, smallness, selfishness, simple minded, thoughtless.
Conservatism, in it’s purest form says that everything was perfect when….. and does not want to learn anything different. It has always been such, and in much smaller worlds/nations/communities it works, after a fashion. Add in a few billion other humans and it never does, there are just too many holes in the boat to keep it afloat when it is over full. So there are 2 possibilities, reform the political concepts of conservatism – smallness as you put it, into an actual working concept, or hope all the extra population dies off. Liberalism is that alternative to a large percentage dying off. Conservatism can never get that, it is the political concept of I’ve got mine, Fuck You. To change we need to be in power long enough to make the change stick, or give them what they want for everyone else. A conundrum if you will.
Simpler, conservatism is exclusive, liberalism is inclusive. An issue is that conservatism being exclusive they expect us to solve the problem the way they would, exclude. They can’t see our side, they exclude everything and everyone that doesn’t agree with them.
Ruckus
@Ruckus:
Look at the divide between rural and cities.
Rural has fewer people, spread farther apart. They don’t have to get along as well, their lives are less involved with others.
Cities are crowed in comparison or in actuality. You don’t get along, fit in, even poorly, and the whole thing can fall apart. Cities are more liberal because you have to be more inclusive to just to live there. You may or may not like it but being a too far outlier in a city gets you, the outlier pain, which is actually self inflicted. Notice that suburbs are often less liberal than the city they surround because they can be like a more rural area, more space between people.
Add in faux news and the other ilk like them, conservative newspapers and conservatism gets support, in areas that don’t have the structure of more crowed areas.
This makes it sound more simple than it is but I see this as a big part of the whole.
Amir Khalid
@Subsole:
There is an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Myanmar is a member country, but its politics seem to be contained within its borders. Its military rulers have been like this for many decades, and there’s never been any spillover into other ASEAN countries. As appalling as the military junta has been this time around, there is essentially zero chance of ASEAN intervening. I think that ASEAN nations worry much more about China throwing its weight around in the region.
Subsole
@Amir Khalid: I see, thank you. I will look into that more.
I was wondering also if people were a little hesitant to intervene because Colonialism has kind of discredited the idea. I could see countries that spent time in an empire being hesitant to involve themselves in their neighbors’ business.
That said, the Myanmar junta looks appalling.
Subsole
@Ruckus: That actually is a really elegant explanation.
Erik
@Cheryl Rofer:
Thanks Cheryl. I lived in Kazakhstan for a couple of years setting up an technology commercialization/entrepreneurship support system and still frequently travel there (except for the last year of COVID!) Fascinating country, history and culture.
Kazakhstan’s decision to give up its nuclear weapons and have the US help with the nuclear and biological weapons scientists is a very unappreciated win both here in the U.S. and worldwide. Thanks for being a part of that!
Erik
@BGinCHI:
Hi BGinCHI,
If you are still interested in travelling/visiting Kazakhstan, let me know, be glad to tell you more about the country. Lived for 2 years in Astana (now Nursultan) and still travel (before COVID) frequently for work. Almaty is especially lovely.
lurking since John was a rethuglican
OT : Kazakhstan is home to one of the Best Singer in the World. Dimash Kudaibergen has a voice of an angel . My favorite is S.O.S d’un terrien en détresse . It’s sung in French , just 1 of the11 languages he sings in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W29zEuZVaxs