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http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/03/02/news/journal.html
Nuclear rocks stay 'hot' in Kazak wasteland
By C.J. Chivers The New York Times
Thursday, March 3, 2005
The road is an aged dirt track cutting a line across the Central Asian steppe, past grazing cattle and horses, arriving at a hillock overlooking a parched basin.
There are no warning signs. There is no gate beside the abandoned guard shack at the remains of the fence. Only the climbing numbers on the radiation detector suggest perhaps it would be best to turn around.
Below, before much of it was vaporized or blown asunder, had been one of the more awful open-air laboratories a nation has ever made, and one of the darker secrets never kept.
Here had briefly stood a metal tower roughly 10 stories tall, ringed by a sampling of sturdy objects: brick buildings, a bridge, bunkers of reinforced concrete and a park of idle tanks and aircraft, some with live animals tethered inside.
Concrete observation towers radiated away in several directions, their instruments connected by subterranean wire to a command post where the experiment's masters could assess their work.
On this spot on a summer's morning in 1949, Soviet scientists detonated Stalin's first atomic bomb. Over the next 40 years, in the air above this basin and within the earth of the surrounding steppe and mountains, scientists detonated at least 455 more.
Kazakhstan's nuclear arsenal is now gone. But one of this sprawling nation's dismal inheritances after decades of Moscow's rule is this vast poisoned zone.
And it is a measure of the disarray and poverty bedeviling many corners of the former Soviet Union that access here is fully unrestricted. If you can find your way to the old gate, you can enter at will.
The car continues on, bouncing over the washboard trail, passing the buckled remains of an observation tower three kilometers, or about two miles, from the center, ground zero for a bomb that U.S. intelligence officials nicknamed Joe One. (A derivative of Stalin's first name.)
Near the very center, Yuri Strilchuk, an employee at Kazakhstan's National Nuclear Center, which conducts limited monitoring of the radiation emanating here, leaves the car and treads forward, taking care not to drag his feet or overturn small stones. The ground, he says, is still "hot." Flipping stones turns the hotter sides up.
Before him are the ruins: scorched embankments of a vanished bridge, concrete bunkers with tops sheared away by shock waves of unimaginable force, the pond-sized hole on the spot where the tower that held Joe One stood. Stalin regarded the work here as so vital that the atomic program's director, Igor Kurchatov, worried that if he failed he would be shot.
The nearby research city, now called Kurchatov, was not on maps. Its postal address was frequently changed to mislead spies. Strilchuk moves forward. The sights are otherworldly.
The blast generated such heat that the surface of the steppe was liquefied and splashed onto the steel and concrete, where it cooled. The substance remains a thick and dark lacquer, frozen as it oozed and dripped.
It is also underfoot. Marble-sized balls of glassified soil crunch beneath Strilchuk's boots. He reads his radiation meter and offers advice. Safer to stand here, he says. Not there.
Bits of life have returned around him. Grass pokes through the baked soil. Birds bank on the wind. Here and there are droppings of sheep, goats, horses and cows, which wander the test site to graze. There are signs of man: empty vodka bottles on the glassified soil, torn bags of potato chips.
One of the many worrisome facts of life here is that the site mixes accessibility, contamination and incomplete knowledge about just what hazards hundreds of tests have left behind.
It is a peculiar post-Soviet legacy. No one who comes here can be sure of the risks. No one who lives nearby can be sure the meat in markets did not graze on this radioactive grass. No one knows where all the irradiated metal has gone.
What is known is this: The site has been stripped almost bare. Scavenging work gangs have pulled up the copper cables from the ground, and dismantled and carted away the parked aircraft, cars and fighting vehicles.
In the past decade almost everything has vanished. Strilchuk recalled seeing the blast-warped barrel of an artillery piece a few years ago, jutting from a partly melted bunker; it too has disappeared, radioactive waste sold for scrap.
For a country that started with promise, the looting is a disappointment. In 1991, President Nursultan Nazarbayev declared Kazakhstan a non-nuclear zone, and by 1994 the bombs and bombers were gone. This cooperation alleviated fears of nuclear proliferation in a Muslim state and helped build relations with the West.
But Kazakhstan, a nation sapped by mismanagement and corruption, has had less success cleaning the nuclear mess it inherited.
Residents as far away as Siberia complain of symptoms from exposure. Various studies have labeled the region an environmental disaster. And the extent of pollution remains unknown.
Zhenis Zhotabaev, the center's science director, said that to assess the range properly and create a contamination map and develop a management plan, soil samples should be taken throughout the range.
Because of poor financing, one sample has been taken inside boxes 4,000 meters wide, not 10 meters as recommended. "We have to cover it kind of randomly," he said.
International aid has come, but not enough. And if the sights where Joe One roared to light and flame are any indication, the money that has come did not arrive on time. Out on the range, on the once-molten soil, Stalin's test range has been picked clean.
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