Declassifying disaster: ravages of nuclear testing - Kazakhstan - Column

On palm Sunday the calamitous story of Kazakhstan was featured on CBS's 60 Minutes. "If you think the world's worst nuclear disaster occurred at Chernobyl or Hiroshima, it didn't. It occurred at Semipalatinsk," began Ed Bradley. "In 1949 the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb on a test site just a few miles away, and more was to come. For the next four decades, over 500 nuclear bombs were exploded here, more than 100 of them in the atmosphere." Bradley then introduced viewers to Dr. Boris Gusev, the chief doctor at Clinic Number Four, who kept secret the information about the medical effects of the testing until the Kazakhstan authorities recently declassified it. He revealed that the local population was callously exposed over and over because the government wanted to know the consequences of a possible nuclear war. The first hydrogen bomb detonated in 1953 was 470 kilotons or 30 times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Tests were conducted underground after 1963, but they still resulted in exposure.

Gusev was in the U.S. in April to meet with U.S. scientists and discuss the effects of the secret testing. This encounter took place not in Washington or Alma Ata, nor in a scientific forum, but under the auspices of the United Methodist Church's General Board of Global Ministries. Concurrent with the board's spring meeting, scientists gathered in Stamford, Connecticut, to hear Gusev, director of the Scientific Research Institute of Research Medicine and Ecology in Semipalatinsk, reveal long-concealed information about the health effects of nuclear testing on three generations.

Gusev gained international attention partly through the work of the mission board. After a 1991 visit to Russia by Bishop J. Woodrow Hearn, then president of the board, and its general secretary, Randolph Nugent, the board began a Russian initiative, establishing congregations, conducting a massive food lift in the winter of 1991-1992 and sending medical supplies and personnel. Cathie Lyons, head of the board's health and welfare department, visited Kazakhstan in April 1993 and met Gusev. He told her he was ready to reveal the catastrophic results of 40 years of testing and wanted to meet American scientists, share his research and find ways to help the people of the region.

The resultant April meeting in Stamford included some of the country's top experts in nuclear science and medicine: James Warf, who worked on the Manhattan project; George L. Voelz, who was with the Atomic Energy Commission and is an expert on low-dose radiation; nuclear physicist Rudi Nussbaumm, who became "sensitized to the deliberate propaganda of the powerful while trying to survive the Nazi occupation in Holland"; and David Rush, a longtime activist in Physicians for Social Responsibility and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Gusev was accompanied by representatives of the regional health department and the Semipalatinsk State Medical Institute. He stated that about 400,000 adults and their children were affected by radiation in the Semipalatinsk region, a secret test area originally administered by Stalin's security chief Lavrenti Beria.

Gusev worked as a neurologist at the secret military institution, then became head doctor. For 30 years, he said, he worked in a "ghost" institution whose information was available only to Soviet authorities in Moscow. "Top secrecy and pledges of secrecy by the personnel covered our institution like a web, preventing any leakage of information about the nature of our work. The system produced the desired results: the population of the affected region was completely unaware of the reason for its suffering." Although the government was fully informed of the danger of nuclear testing for inhabitants of the region, it established the test site in a heavily populated area in 1949. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had occurred. Not only did the government fail to inform the people or to test them for effects; it promoted the idea that the tests were harmless.

Gusev revealed the extent of the damage in the region. Birth defect rates are ten times those of Europe, America and Japan, he said. Staggering death and disease rates are affecting the population immune systems, leukemia, anemia, cancer - the list of horrors goes on. Water and food sources are contaminated, and the death rate from disease is triple that in other parts of the former Soviet Union. Testing equipment, treatment centers and drugs are needed in this desperately poor region, which has no pharmaceutical factories. Gusev appealed to the world community and particularly to the church and to the scientists present. "Now we seek opportunities for help and collaboration in research and opportunities to publish data about our public health situation."

Following the dialogue, the visitors traveled to hospitals and health facilities in Fort Worth, Houston and Akron. Next summer a U.S. scientific team will travel to Kazakhstan, and in October there will be a larger scientific colloquium in Stamford. Hearn, incoming president of the Council of Bishops and presider at the dialogue, said the Board of Global Ministries had done a "unique and exciting thing" in bringing the group together to explore response to the medical problems generated by nuclear testing and production. For decades the U.S., the Soviet Union and other nations developed and tested nuclear weapons. As the program book for the scientific dialogue stated: "Today these nations (and successor states) are left to deal with the effects of their actions on human health and the natural environments of the land and territories, and on the global community as a whole."

COPYRIGHT 1994 The Christian Century Foundation
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