by Kulpash Konyrova

Astana, Aug 29 (EFE).– The United Nations declared Aug. 29 the International Day Against Nuclear Tests at the initiative of those who have by far suffered most from the poisonous effects of decades of nuclear weapons testing, the people of Kazakhstan.

On a bright summer day 60 years ago, a large white cloud rode the wind toward an “aul,” the Kazakh word for village. The children who were playing outside ran after the cloud shouting gleefully “Parachute! Parachute!”

Many years later, that playful moment would have tragic consequences. The cloud, which looked more like a mushroom than a parachute, was from a scheduled nuclear surface explosion on the then-secret Semipalatinsk nuclear testing ground in northeastern Kazakhstan.

Among the children who, in their innocence, mistook the cloud for a parachute, were this reporter’s father and a little girl who lived next door. They were between 7 and 10 years old.

Many years later, the little girl would die of a horrible disease – leukemia. Powerless, the doctors would raise their hands in dismay, explaining that it was a consequence of the nuclear tests conducted for 40 years not far from that village on the Kazakh prairies. This reporter’s father would develop vitiligo at the age of 60.

In 1949, the Soviet Union opened the Semipalatinsk testing ground in Kazakhstan, which at the time was one of the 15 Soviet republics.

The first nuclear test at the site took place on Aug. 29, 1949. The power of that first bomb was 22 kilotons. In total, from 1949 to 1989, the secret testing ground in Kazakhstan conducted at least 468 nuclear tests.

The tests resulted in the radioactive contamination of the entire eastern part of Kazakhstan. It is approximately 18,000 sq. kilometers (6,949 sq. miles) of “uranium land.”

Notably, the Semipalatinsk nuclear testing ground is the only testing site in the world where people continued to live during and after the tests.

The Soviet powers at the time did not even warn locals about the next scheduled tests. So people could not even hide in bomb shelters, as the procedures prescribed.

Such indifference affected my kin. One day, this reporter’s great-aunt, who lived in that village, went down to the river to do laundry.

Right at that moment, the next scheduled surface burst occurred, and she looked up at the flash of the nuclear mushroom cloud and was blinded for the rest of her life.

In this family, the grown-ups explained to the children in whispers that a bomb explosion had caused the blindness. In those days, it was prohibited to talk about such things.

The truth became known only after Kazakhstan’s independence.

The population was exposed to the radiation, which led to diseases and early deaths. The data collected by Soviet scientists are still classified.

On Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, Kazakhstan, like the rest of the world, marked the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings.

Unfortunately, little is known in the world about the tragedy from which the Kazakh people have suffered and are still suffering.

The total number of irradiated people in Kazakhstan is 1.5 million, or a little more than 8 percent of the total population of 18 million.

When this reporter was a correspondent for the national television channel “Khabar” (Kazakh for “News”), I reported on the birth of a two-headed girl in Pavlodar, a regional center in northern Kazakhstan.

Doctors at the time assumed that such a genetic disorder could be the result of exposure to radiation.

The world first learned the truth about the Semipalatinsk nuclear testing ground after the launch of the Nevada-Semipalatinsk international anti-nuclear movement. The main purpose of the movement was to shut down the nuclear testing grounds. The Kazakh people poured all their anguish and grief into the movement.

In 1989, a decree by the president of independent Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, closed the Semipalatinsk testing ground, and five years later nuclear tests were stopped at all testing grounds all over the world.

By signing the testing ground shutdown decree, the Kazakh leader had set a precedent in the history of mankind where a nuclear power voluntarily abandoned its nuclear program and became one of the most stable and prosperous countries.

But the nuclear testing ground did not die. It will live on for at least another million years. With plutonium’s radioactivity rate taking 24,000 years to fall by half, it will take a million years for the radiation level of the “nuclear land” of the Semipalatinsk testing ground to go back to normal.

At the urging of Nazarbayev, the United Nations declared Aug. 29 the International Day against Nuclear Tests in 2009.

And the ATOM Project was also launched by Nazarbayev on Aug. 29, 2012, as a campaign to raise global awareness about the consequences of nuclear weapons explosions and testing.

To date, the ATOM Project’s online petition has collected more than 160,000 signatures worldwide. EFE