One of the more poignant moments of the 25th anniversary of the day (Aug 29) when Kazakhstan unilaterally closed all the nuclear testing sites of the erstwhile Soviet Union on its soil, was the laying of wreaths and lighting a flame of hope at the memorial in Astana in honour of the victims of nuclear testing.
The sombre but simple ceremony, dignified in its deportment and yet dogged in its determination, was being marked by the Women in Support of Victims of Nuclear Testing organisation.
Indeed, on that very day of Aug 29, 1991, President Nursultan Nazar-bayev of Kazakhstan, with the support of a popular national movement of civil society against nuclear tests, closed down the Soviet nuclear test site at Semipalatinsk in the north of the country.
It was the very first such act in the history of nuclear disarmament.
The sheer terror, human and physical consequences of nuclear testing should never be underestimated for any state whether in Kazakhstan, the Pacific, North Africa, North America or East Asia.
The logistics are indeed humbling. The Soviet Union, for instance, carried out a staggering 456 nuclear tests at Semipalatinsk alone in its weapons programme. Kazakhstan at the time had the dubious distinction of hosting the fourth largest nuclear arsenal in the world after the United States, Russia and China.
It is not a coincidence that Nazarbayev hosted an international conference on “Building a Nuclear Weapon-Free World” to mark the above 25th anniversary. But, he has got his work cut out.
As a strong proponent of nuclear disarmament and getting rid of the nuclear arsenals of the nine countries that do possess them — the US, Russia, China, Britain, France, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea — and with Kazakhstan just elected as a member of the United Nations Security Council for 2017 and 2018, he faces an uphill task in persuading the Big Five permanent members of the council, namely the US, Russia, China, Britain and France, let alone the remaining four of the Nuclear Club, to at least start thinking of let alone abandoning their nuclear arsenals.
In Astana a few days ago, the great and the good of the International Club of the Converted for building a nuclear weapon-free world, convened in the Kazakh capital for a conference espousing inter alia their heartfelt experiences as victims of nuclear testing; their reasoned passion for global nuclear disarmament; their concerned urgency that this process of decommissioning should start sooner than later; their rightful concern that if the world does ignore this clarion call to nuclear disarmament, it does so at its peril given an unintended sleepwalk into potential Armageddon in a nuclear war especially concerning the Korean Peninsula, or the Middle East, or South Asia, or God Forbid for that matter given the potential acquisition of low grade uranium to assemble a dirty bomb by terrorist groups or rogue non-state actors.
This latest salvo of sentiments on nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation comes against an international background, which frankly is not favourable. In the words of UN Under-Secretary General and the Head of its Conference on Disarmament Michael Moller, for instance, there is a “current deadlock in nuclear disarmament”, presumably between the US, Russia and China, with the three single largest arsenals of radioactive weapons of mass destruction.
Similarly, the pace of nuclear disarmament, according to Moller, has slowed down in recent times, with all the nuclear weapons countries continuing to modernise their arsenals at a cost which none of them can ill afford. According to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, for every US$10 billion (RM41 billion) that is spent on peace, some US$100 billion is spent on nuclear weapons and their maintenance alone. At the same time, North Korea continues with its aggressive nuclear testing activities to the chagrin of the world, including its ideological and ethnic other half, South Korea, and even its long-standing apologist, China.
In the United Kingdom, the conservative government of Prime Minister Theresa May with the support of the non-Corbynite faction of the Opposition Labour parliamentary party have voted to renew Her Majesty’s nuclear deterrent capability by replacing Trident with a more modern system at a potential cost to the taxpayer in excess £32 billion.
This has not deterred devolved Scotland under the Scottish National Party (SNP) of First Minister Nicola Sturgeon to take a definitive stance against renewing Trident and to make the country a nuclear weapons-free zone. Should Scotland gain independence from the UK in the next such referendum as Sturgeon has promised to campaign for in the aftermath of the UK referendum in June in which the majority of Britons decided to vote to exit the European Union, it would be interesting to see how an independent SNP government navigates Scottish extrication from Trident (or its successor) and for that matter how it mitigates the hundreds of jobs that would be lost with alternative job creation, assuming the current base of the Trident-bearing submarines on the Clyde will be moved to a base in England.
Then, of course, there is the intriguing and to many the disturbing prospect of a Donald Trump presidency in the US should Trump win the presidential election against Hilary Clinton in November. Already a group of former US Republican National Security officials spanning more than five decades have warned that the country would face a huge challenge because of Trump’s “reckless” utterings on foreign policy and the arms race, which could put US national interests in danger.
Cynics may regard the conference declaration titled ‘The Astana Vision: From а Radioactive Haze to a Nuclear Weapon-Free World” as the usual pie-in-the-sky aspirational stuff, which has manifested over the years in the spectacular failure of the UN system and process to pre-empt nuclear proliferation let alone to see the eradication of all such weapons.
One intriguing morsel of hope is the hint given by Lassino Zerbo, the executive secretary of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organisation that the organisation may be in membership talks with Israel, which has yet to officially acknowledge that it has nuclear weapons — perhaps the worst kept state secret in the world.
Another is the proposed establishment by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of a permanent depositary of low enriched uranium (LEU) called the IAEA LEU Bank, which would have a physical reserve of 90 metric tonnes of LEU at any given time to create an assured supply of nuclear fuel for a typical light water reactor for nuclear power stations — in other words, the use of nuclear fuel for peaceful civilian purposes. This bank will be based in Oskermen in Kazakhstan, which has more than six decades of experience in nuclear fuel supply, and which together with Canada and Australia have the world’s largest reserves of uranium. The US and Russia are the only two countries that currently have a LEU reserve bank.
Indeed, according to Roman Vassilenko, Deputy Foreign Minister of Kazakhstan, Astana intends to build its very first nuclear power station. He agrees that nuclear energy should be part of a modern energy supply mix together with other sources, including green energy and renewables.
Environmental purists may reject this apparent contradiction in Kazakh nuclear policy. But as IAEA director-general Yukiya Amano stressed in his message to the conference, Kazakhstan has made a valuable contribution to the conclusion of the nuclear power deal between Iran and so-called P5+1 countries by supplying some of the LEU to Iran under IAEA supervision.
As for Nazarbayev, local politics aside, his vision is for the 25th anniversary of the Semipalatinsk test site closure to be the dawn of a new phase in nuclear disarmament. The ultimate aim is to have a world free of nuclear weapons by 2045 to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the UN.
Only time will tell whether this is the rhetoric of aspiration or of pragmatism!
Mushtak Parker is an independent London-based economist and writer