Kazakhstan’s legacy of nuclear testing and its post-Soviet nuclear future

Abstract

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, an expansive arsenal of nuclear weapons was scattered across thousands of sites in newly independent states. The collapse meant that the new nations of Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan inherited a total of more than 3,000 strategic nuclear warheads controlled by Russia. Amid the social, political, and economic crises that marked the early 1990s for much of the former Soviet Union, the prospect of new states possessing nuclear weapons unsettled many Western leaders. With anxieties high, the United States, the United Kingdom, and other European powers pursued nonproliferation agreements leading to complete disarmament of the three new nations. After a few years of diplomatic wrangling, the leaders of Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan agreed to move, dismantle, and destroy their inherited arsenal. As a cornerstone of this commitment, they became signatories of the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in exchange for security and sovereignty assurances from the United States, Russia, and the United Kingdom as outlined in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. As non-nuclear-weapon-state parties to the NPT, they are prohibited from ever acquiring or manufacturing atomic weapons. But with Russia’s unprecedented invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and Vladimir Putin’s ominous nuclear threats to any country bold enough to get in Russia’s way, the issue of whether the Soviet Union’s successor states have made the right choice has been called into question in the popular media. Indeed, the most dangerous effect of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine is that it exposes the shortcomings of the NPT—in particular, that there seem to be no real security guarantees for states that do not possess nuclear weapons when those states face existential threats from their neighbors. US foreign-policy “realists,” such as John Mearsheimer, have long argued that nuclear weapons are the best deterrent against foreign aggression. The case of Kazakhstan, however, shows something different for technological, political, and historical reasons. Holding onto the inherited cache would have meant potentially dire consequences for the newly minted nation-state as it sought to make a stable and recognized place for itself in the world. For one thing, like Belarus and Ukraine, Kazakhstan lacked the proper infrastructure, military force, and finances to maintain or even activate the inherited nuclear arsenal. In addition, Moscow had full operational command and control of its nuclear arsenal in Kazakhstan, as well as elsewhere, including the