Focus on the health impact of Soviet nuclear testing

Sometime in the late summer of 1982 a newly qualified doctor named Maira Bugembayeva drove the final hundred kilometres toward her new home in the town of Semipalatinsk in northern Kazakhstan. As the car lurched along the uneven road, Maira glanced out of the window across the flat and featureless steppes which stretch into the distance as far as the eye can see. Nothing seemed untoward. And neither should it have, since neither Maira nor the vast majority of her fellow Kazakhs knew anything of the Polygon, the Semipalatinsk Test Site or the secret town of Kurchatov. She had no idea that within fifty kilometers of her new home was centred one of the greatest concentrations of scientific brilliance anywhere within the vast Soviet empire. Somewhere on the horizon of this soulless landscape scientists like senior radiologist Natalia Kurakina were hidden away in a clandestine town working long days and nights studying documents and data of such secrecy that their papers would be carefully locked away at night. It was only when Maira was settled in her new home and began practicing medicine that she realised that not everything was as normal as it had first appeared. Time and again when conducting routine blood tests she found that dozens of her patients had dangerously low white blood cell counts. "They commonly had white blood cell counts less than half the normal level," said Maira. "This contradicted everything I had been taught." Had they known one another at the time Natalia would have been able to tell Maira what probably lay behind the phenomena that she had begun to notice in her consultation room. She would have been able to tell her that the town she now called home sat close to the perimeter of one the biggest and most intensively used nuclear test sites anywhere in the world. In total, 470 nuclear devices of varying composition and power were detonated within an 18,500 square kilometer piece of land known innocuously as the Polygon. From August 1949 when the Soviet Union first developed its nuclear capability until nuclear testing was driven underground by an internationally agreed moratorium in 1963, the Soviet Union exploded 116 devices in the atmosphere above and on the ground of the Polygon. Between 1963 and the closure of the facility in 1989 a further 352 bombs were exploded underground. Tests were carried out not only to measure the efficacy of the weapons but also to measure the effect of radiation on the people exposed to it. These days Maira and Natalia laugh about the different paths their lives took until they finally crossed last year when Natalia joined the Centre for the Study and Protection from Radiation Effects (CSPRE). Now they work in the same office - different fields, but united in purpose - to discover the truth and the real impact that 40 years of testing nuclear devices had on the health of the estimated 1.2 million people who lived during that time in the environs of the town and the villages that surround it. Slowly, bit-by-bit, they and their colleagues are trying to put together the pieces of a disparate and uneven jigsaw puzzle which they hope will unlock one of the great mysteries of radiation poisoning. While hundreds of scientists have studied the radioactive impact of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and latterly the disaster at Chernobyl and compiled extensive data on the acute effects of exposure to radiation, to this day very little is known about the chronic effects of radiation. Semipalatinsk offers scientists a unique opportunity to finally find an answer to the question: What happens to a human body when it is repeatedly exposed to small doses of radiation? Natalia says that during the 20 years she worked at the Polygon meticulous records were kept, but admits that much of that data has disappeared - probably being held by military authorities in Russia she says - and much of that which does exist cannot be trusted. "The authorities were not always honest with their data," Natalia told IRIN. "After the first test in 1949 false wind velocity factors were given that gave the impression that the nuclear cloud formed by the explosion had rapidly dissipated. This was simply not true." In fact, very little is known that anyone can really be sure of. According to the government of Kazakhstan infant mortality is 10 percent higher here than in other areas of the country. The prevalence of blood disease is 30 percent higher, mental retardation is twice the national average and 80 percent of the population in some of the areas close to the test site has been found to be anaemic. Although the government of Kazakhstan have shown themselves keen in the past to use the nuclear test site to attract both attention and donor support to a country struggling to cope with the economic catastrophe brought on by the collapse of the Soviet Union, they are also keen to learn through empirical scientific procedure the real impact of the tests on the people of Semipalatinsk district. To that end they turned for help to the Japanese government who, ever sensitive to the impact of nuclear weapons, obliged and sent a team of scientists to Semipalatinsk in 1998. Not only did they find enough to concern them, they were suitably impressed by the work of CSPRE to issue them a grant to expand and continue their work. "For two years the Japanese poured over our work, our data and our methodology," said Mikhail Valivach, Vice-Chairman of CSPRE. "They double checked everything but finally they admitted that they were very impressed with our work and agreed to support us." According to Maira Bugembayeva, the key to their work lies in compiling exact data on which people were living in which areas at the time of any given explosion. So while Natalia Kurakina devotes her time to compiling exact data concerning the time, location and power of each blast matched with the radioactive dose of each explosion and the wind patterns on that day, Maira busies herself compiling lists of people who were in the vicinity affected by each blast. By comparing these findings with death certificates in the case of people who have already died and medical records of the living, a correlation between exposure and disease can be extrapolated. For most of the inhabitants of the village of Znamenka - situated right on the edge of the Polygon - the research will come too late. Most of the people who witnessed the seven surface tests carried out close to their village have moved away or have died making case studies like those of Nadejda Leomidov so important. She and her husband Vitaly Phedozovi, whose tubercular like cough and ruddy complexion give weight to his wife’s claim that her husband’s health has been destroyed by the series of tests carried out near the collective state farm where the pair used to work, are two of the few old people left alive in Znamenka. The couple were aged just 9 and 11 when the first test rocked the open steppes in August 1949. "We were playing in the street when we heard a huge explosion. Then we looked up and saw that there were two suns in the sky." That the tests were doing serious damage to the environment was never in doubt for farmers like Vitaly who recalls such sights as the snow turned red, water boiling in the wells and the wheat they farmed changing colour overnight. But as far as their health was concerned Vitaly said that at no point did doctors or any other medical personnel ever examine them. "After one of the tests everyone was complaining of headaches and many people were vomiting. We thought we were being poisoned but when we reported it to the authorities they just told us to drink more vodka." And because of this negligence no one knows what the real impact of these tests has been on the people’s health, but as Nadejda said, "people here die young." Sitting on a bench outside his modest family home, his proud chest decorated by the dozens of medals he won during what the Soviets refer to as the Great Patriotic War, Alijanov Elubai seems capable of surviving pretty much everything. He was wounded five times during the Second World War and says he witnessed at least five nuclear explosions. At the age of 77 he is a respected old man. But, says, Alijanov, he is one of the lucky ones. "Most of my friends, family and acquaintances are dead and many of them died young." The team at CSPRE is naturally reluctant to speculate on what their results might be but admit a fair degree of certainty that they will indeed find strong links between exposure to radiation and prevalence of disease. They also insist that they do not intend to use the results of their research to pursue compensation cases. "Whom would we be able to sue?" asked Natalia Kurakina who cannot help but reflect on the irony that she now spends her time trying to understand the human impact of the same weapons that she helped to perfect. "I do not feel guilty for the work I did at the Polygon," she said, "after all, I believed I was performing a great service to the state. But when I look back on it now, I do wish we had paid more attention to the consequences of what we were doing."