In a new twist on glasnost, medical student members of IPPNW’s Soviet affiliate, the Soviet Committee of Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (SCPPNW), recently met with military officers at the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site and grilled them for two hours about the health effects of radioactive leaks from Soviet underground nuclear explosions.
The meeting was part of a three-day series of protests organized by the Semipalatinsk student chapter of SCPPNW last September (1989) and took place in Kurchatov, a “secret city” of 30,000 military and support personnel located within the test site borders. Until recently, the city appeared on no map.
Along with 30 medical students from Riga, Leningrad, Kaunas, Kharkiv, and Moscow, I flew to the remote steppes of Kazakhstan to participate in what SCPPNW medical student coordinator Yuri Dzhibladze called “our first open and active protest specifically against continued Soviet nuclear testing.”
Lieutenant-General Arkady Ilyenko, director of the test site, called the tests “completely safe” and said the growing public movement in Kazakhstan against nuclear testing was fueled by “presentations made by people who are incompetent in these questions.”
But local physicians and medical students pointed to mysteriously high levels of birth defects and cancers in the regions downwind of the test site, and demanded to know why radioactive gases continue to escape during tests, despite repeated assurances that changes in technology would prevent further leaks.
The chief pediatrician for the Semipalatinsk district reported that the incidence of birth defects in the area was 38% higher than elsewhere in the republic and that the figures were even more elevated in villages closest to the test site. It is difficult to give accurate statistics about cancer rates, said local physicians, because the Ministry of Health has not released information about a special oncology hospital in operation near Semipalatinsk until 1985.
After the meeting in Kurchatov, the SCPPNW medical students waved banners reading “No More Hiroshimas: Stop Nevada, Stop Semipalatinsk” and IPPNW Cease-Fire ’89 in a demonstration held just outside the test site borders. The Semipalatinsk medical students also organized discussions and large protests in Semipalatinsk and Karaul, a town of 5,000 in the Abai region which is said to be among the hardest hit by the radioactive fallout.
In Karaul, about 500 residents attended the demonstration carrying their own homemade signs: “Close the Test Site,” “Stop Testing All Over the World,” “Let Us Be Active Today So That We Will Not be Radioactive Tomorrow.”
The first Soviet atomic bomb was exploded near what is now Kurchatov on 24 September 1949. Extensive atmospheric nuclear testing was conducted at the Semipalatinsk test site until 1963 when the Soviet testing program was driven underground by the Limited Test Ban Treaty. For nearly 40 years the Soviet government maintained an impenetrable silence about any possible health consequences of either the atmospheric or underground tests. There were many whispered rumors about “the white death” of radiation, but the taboo remained inviolate until February 1989, when the charismatic Kazakh poet Olzhas Suleimenov made a surprise televised speech about the health effects of the nuclear tests and launched a public campaign to close the Semipalatinsk test site known as the Nevada Movement.
Editor’s Note: For further details of Gale’s trip, please read Chapter 2 of her book Invisible Threads: Independent Soviets Working for Global Awareness and Soviet Transformation