TOKYO / ASTANA （INPS Japan) – Across the vast steppe of northeastern Kazakhstan, the scars of the Cold War remain visible. At the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site, the Soviet Union conducted 456 nuclear tests between 1949 and 1989, exposing nearby communities to radiation and leaving health and environmental consequences that have endured across generations.｜JAPANESE｜
On Aug. 29, 1991, Kazakhstan closed the site. Thirty-five years later, that decision has renewed relevance. Nuclear weapons are again assuming a larger role in national security strategies. The United States, Russia, China and other nuclear-armed states are modernizing their arsenals. New START, the last treaty imposing legally binding limits on U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear forces, expired in February 2026. In May, the 11th Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty ended without agreement on a final document.
At a time when nuclear weapons are being reasserted rather than marginalized, Kazakhstan’s choice raises a basic question: Must national security ultimately depend on possessing them?
A Nuclear Test Site Closed by Public Pressure
In 1989, the Kazakh poet Olzhas Suleimenov helped launch the Nevada-Semipalatinsk anti-nuclear movement, linking the Soviet site with Nevada and highlighting the human costs of nuclear testing on both sides of the Cold War. Hundreds of thousands joined protests demanding an end to the tests.
Against that backdrop, then-President Nursultan Nazarbayev signed the decree closing Semipalatinsk on Aug. 29, 1991.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, Kazakhstan inherited intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear warheads, temporarily giving it what was widely described as the world’s fourth-largest nuclear arsenal. Yet the newly independent state chose to transfer or dismantle those weapons and joined the NPT as a non-nuclear-weapon state.
From Nuclear Victim to Disarmament Advocate
Kazakhstan then sought to turn the experience of Semipalatinsk into a broader disarmament agenda.
It ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty and helped establish the Central Asian Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone with Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. In 2009, at Kazakhstan’s initiative, the U.N. General Assembly designated Aug. 29 as the International Day against Nuclear Tests.
Kazakhstan also hosts facilities in the global system for detecting nuclear explosions, while the International Atomic Energy Agency operates a Low Enriched Uranium Bank in Oskemen to reduce incentives for countries to develop their own enrichment capabilities.
Looking Beyond Warhead Numbers
Kazakhstan’s disarmament diplomacy has also emphasized the human consequences of nuclear weapons.
Around Semipalatinsk, concerns about health and environmental damage persist decades after testing ended. That experience has shaped Kazakhstan’s role in the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or TPNW, where it has stressed victim assistance and environmental remediation as well as prohibition.
Together with Kiribati, another country deeply affected by nuclear testing, Kazakhstan has supported efforts to create an international funding mechanism for those purposes.
The principle goes beyond preventing future use: the international community also bears responsibilities for harm already inflicted. Semipalatinsk, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Marshall Islands and Kiribati are separated by geography and history but connected by the human cost of the nuclear age.
Kazakhstan and the Role of Civil Society
Civil society has been part of Kazakhstan’s nuclear story from the beginning. The Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement showed that opposition to nuclear testing was not confined to government diplomacy.
Since independence, Kazakhstan has worked with civil society organizations, humanitarian institutions, researchers, survivors, medical experts, young people and faith-based groups to keep the human consequences of nuclear weapons in international debate.
Among them is Soka Gakkai International (SGI), which has long advocated nuclear abolition as a question of human survival and dignity.
At the first Meeting of States Parties to the TPNW in Vienna in 2022, Kazakhstan and Kiribati joined the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and SGI in organizing a side event on victim assistance and environmental remediation.
In 2023, Kazakhstan’s diplomatic mission, SGI and the Center for International Security and Policy (CISP) organized another Vienna event on the consequences of nuclear testing at Semipalatinsk, including testimony from younger generations living with its legacy. Later that year in Astana, Kazakhstan’s Foreign Ministry and CISP brought together SGI, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), the International Committee of the Red Cross and others for a conference marking the International Day against Nuclear Tests.
Reflecting on this cooperation, Hirotsugu Terasaki, Chief Executive Director of SGI Peace Center, has emphasized the common ground between Kazakhstan and Japan as societies marked by the consequences of nuclear weapons and testing.
“Many people in Kazakhstan share the same strong desire for nuclear disarmament,” Terasaki told IDN, an INPS Japan media partner, in an earlier interview, drawing a parallel with the aspirations of people in Japan shaped by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
His observation points to a broader dimension of Kazakhstan’s engagement with civil society: cooperation built not only around diplomatic objectives, but also around shared historical experience, humanitarian concerns and a determination to prevent future generations from enduring similar suffering.
These initiatives reflect a broader pattern: states negotiate treaties and security arrangements, while civil society brings survivors’ testimony, medical evidence, environmental damage and intergenerational responsibility into the discussion. For Kazakhstan, whose closure of Semipalatinsk was shaped by a popular anti-nuclear movement, such cooperation is part of the foundation of its disarmament diplomacy.
A Nuclear Connection With Japan
Kazakhstan’s relationship with Japan is also shaped by a shared history of nuclear suffering.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki experienced nuclear weapons in war; Semipalatinsk experienced their effects through testing. Japan has supported medical and research cooperation with affected communities, and Tokyo hosted an international conference on assistance to the Semipalatinsk region in 1999. Medical professionals and researchers in Semey, Hiroshima and Nagasaki have maintained exchanges.
Japan also co-sponsored the U.N. resolution establishing Aug. 29 as the International Day against Nuclear Tests and has worked with Kazakhstan to promote the entry into force of the CTBT.
A World Moving in the Opposite Direction
The international environment surrounding the 35th anniversary is bleak.
More than 10,000 nuclear warheads remain worldwide, and major nuclear powers continue to modernize their arsenals. With New START gone, the United States and Russia no longer operate under a comprehensive, legally binding framework limiting their strategic nuclear forces.
The NPT Review Conference ended in May without a final document, the third consecutive review cycle to end without substantive consensus. The CTBT, opened for signature three decades ago and supported by nearly the entire international community, has still not entered into force.
Memory Is Not Enough
Writing in The Astana Times ahead of the anniversary, Dauren Aben of the Kazakhstan Institute for Strategic Studies described the lesson of Semipalatinsk in simple terms: not merely to remember, but to “remember and act.”
Nuclear policy is often framed through deterrence, strategic stability and balance of power. Semipalatinsk offers another measure: communities exposed to radiation, contaminated land and younger generations carrying consequences from tests they never witnessed.
In 1991, Kazakhstan could preserve the nuclear arsenal it inherited as a symbol of national power, or give it up. It chose the second.
That decision did not eliminate nuclear weapons or guarantee irreversible disarmament. Today, the world may instead be entering a new era of nuclear competition.
But one fact remains: a state that had the opportunity to become a nuclear power chose not to do so.
Over the next 35 years, Kazakhstan connected that choice to nuclear-weapon-free zones, the global test ban, the TPNW, victim assistance and environmental remediation. Its cooperation with SGI and a broad range of civil society organizations forms part of that history.
From Nov. 30 to Dec. 4, the first Review Conference of the TPNW will take place at U.N. headquarters in New York. Most nuclear-armed states remain outside the treaty.
Even so, the question posed by the treaty increasingly resembles the question posed by Kazakhstan’s experience:
Does possessing nuclear weapons make nations safer?
Or does genuine security ultimately require a world in which nuclear weapons no longer exist?
Across the former Semipalatinsk testing grounds, traces of the explosions remain — reminders of what humanity has already done with nuclear weapons.
But 35 years ago, Kazakhstan gave the site another meaning: evidence that a country could move from building and testing nuclear weapons toward a deliberate decision to reject them.
The question now is whether the rest of the world still has the political will to make the same choice.
This article is brought to you by INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International, in consultative status with UN ECOSOC.
INPS Japan