ASTANA – Thirty-five years after Kazakhstan closed the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site and began giving up the nuclear arsenal it inherited from the Soviet Union, the world is moving back toward a security environment in which nuclear weapons are again seen by some as an answer rather than a danger.
That was one of the central concerns raised during the Sept. 22 online discussion dedicated to what Kazakhstan’s nuclear experience can teach the world today. Photo credit: Embassy of Kazakhstan in Washington Organized by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Council on Strategic Risks, the discussion brought together Kazakh and United States officials and experts who were directly involved in the nuclear threat reduction efforts of the 1990s.
Their focus was not only on what Kazakhstan did after independence, but on whether the lessons of that period can still work in a world defined by geopolitical rivalry, weakening arms control and rapidly developing artificial intelligence. The answer was not straightforward.
The environment that allowed Kazakhstan and the U.S. to cooperate on eliminating nuclear dangers was unusually favorable. Today, major powers are again competing militarily, key arms control agreements have lapsed or been abandoned, and new technologies are making strategic calculations more complex.
But Kazakhstan’s experience offers one lesson that remains relevant: security does not necessarily become stronger when a country possesses more nuclear weapons. When a nuclear arsenal was seen as a risk, not an asset When Kazakhstan became independent, it inherited the world’s fourth-largest nuclear arsenal.
The country also inherited the consequences of the Soviet nuclear program. Between 1949 and 1989, the Soviet Union conducted 456 nuclear tests at the Semipalatinsk site, affecting approximately 1.5 million people. Kazakhstan closed the site on Aug. 29, 1991, and subsequently relinquished the nuclear weapons and delivery systems left on its territory.
For Laura Holgate, former U.S. ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the significance of that decision goes beyond disarmament. She noted that Kazakhstan’s leaders recognized that the weapons were not necessarily an asset that would protect the newly independent country.
They could instead make Kazakhstan more vulnerable to confrontation with other major powers. “To recognize that that was a source of weakness or risk of insecurity rather than a source of security,” Holgate said, was an “incredibly bold and courageous decision.” That point is particularly relevant today because nuclear deterrence continues to shape how states think about security.
Magzhan Ilyassov, Kazakhstan’s ambassador to the U.S., recalled a conversation he had as a young exchange student in the U.S. in the early 1990s. Americans he met had grown up fearing that the Soviet Union might attack them. Kazakh Soviet people had grown up with a similar fear of the U.S.
Yet on both sides, nuclear weapons were understood as defensive. Magzhan Ilyassov, Kazakhstan’s ambassador to the U.S. Photo credit: Embassy of Kazakhstan in Washington “I never thought that we would drop it on you. It was our defense,” Ilyassov recalled. That contradiction remains at the heart of the nuclear debate: if every country sees its own nuclear weapons as defensive, but another country’s arsenal as a threat, the logic of deterrence can become an argument for more proliferation.