“The
pollution of the atmosphere by radioactive particles almost completely
disappeared. We had been paying for our nuclear testing with thousands, even
tens of thousands of human lives. And [in 1963] we stopped paying.”
- Andrei
Sakharov, Russian nuclear physicist,
lead scientist in the
development of
Soviet nuclear weapons, Soviet dissident,
and activist for
disarmament, peace and
human rights, speaking about the US-Soviet
agreement to
halt atmospheric nuclear tests.
At the end
of August 2016, Kazakhstan hosted the international conference “Building a
Nuclear-Weapon-Free World,” marking both the 25th anniversary of the closure of
the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site and the UN International Day Against
Nuclear Tests (Aug. 29). The social, environmental and human health
consequences have been reported elsewhere [1], but one aspect of these effects
doesn’t seem to receive as much attention as it should; that is the question of
whether nuclear weapons tests had lasting, inherited effects on the genome of living
things touched by the fallout. The question is often treated as a big unknown,
or a fear-mongering worry of anti-nuclear activists for which no evidence has
ever been found.
One reason
evidence was never found, in some countries, was that no one wanted to know. If
scientists in the civilian and military nuclear sectors found that there was
trans-generational genetic damage from radiation, the results could not be kept
secret in an open society and they would be very bad for the continued
expansion of the industry. However, in
the Soviet Union, scientists were able to pursue this line of research because
they were confident the results would remain top secret. No one ever expected
that everything would be in the open after the collapse of the USSR in 1991. Ironically,
the research was done most freely in the society that had the least freedom in
access to information. This fact was illustrated by Kate Brown in her book Plutopia, in the chapters in which she
described the data kept on the rural inhabitants who lived downwind of the Soviet
Mayak nuclear fuel factory, where both disasters and regular operations have contaminated
the environment for decades. [2] Research
done on the British and New Zealand atomic test veterans have also demonstrated
inherited effects on the children and grandchildren of the veterans (see previous post on this topic).
As for
Kazakhstan, the subject of inherited damage was explained by Dr. Boris Gusev of
the Semipalatinsk Institute of Radiation Medicine. He has been involved in
research on the effects of the nuclear detonations in both the pre and
post-Soviet era. He spoke in two documentary films made in recent years, and
his comments in them have been transcribed below.
__________
Dr. Boris Gusev speaking in
The whole
territory was sacrificed. Why Kazakhstan? The USSR was a huge land with
millions of possibilities and the Polygon could have been located somewhere in
the mountains or some other place where there were no people, nobody. So please
go ahead, explode as you wish [somewhere else]. But no. It was done there.
Kazakhstan was an important satellite back then. Everyone was quiet. No one
dared utter a word in protest.
It was called
Anti-Bruscellosis Dispensary #4. It was a cover up of course, the brainchild of
the KGB. The institute was highly secretive. Everybody who was hired that year,
and years before, had to sign a document prohibiting them from revealing any
information. That was very serious because if you didn't follow the rules, you
would go to prison for a long time.
Treatment was
not the objective. Do I acknowledge that? Yes, I do. Those people in the
hospital received almost no treatment. We were only examining them.
The existence
of a local population must be part of any nuclear war scenario. What do the
people do? How do they behave? Who died? And so on. That was the scenario
played out here, I think. So the man who compared himself to the laboratory
rabbit was absolutely right.
All organs have
somatic cells. In natural conditions about one in a million mutates, but those
are from natural causes and they are destroyed by the immune system. But under
the influence of ionizing radiation and other components such as heavy metals,
a process called somatic mutation occurs. As it turns out, somatic mutation
appears to be 100% inheritable.
We reported
directly to Moscow. These are the records of illness. These [records] are from
the most seriously affected villages next to the Polygon. We observed and
analyzed the population. We investigated which were the main illnesses that
were linked to exposure from radiation. We compiled them into risk groups and
so on. All this data was top secret. When I was a doctor, a neuropathologist,
back then all our life was on the road. We observed the population, we returned
for a quick wash and shave, and then we were back out again. On the first floor
where the hospital is now we had an enormous laboratory which processed this
work. We knew precisely where the radiation was. We knew precisely how much of
the different types of radiation people were being exposed to, what dose the population
was receiving. That is, we were not idle. We knew everything.
But the most
important thing was that willingly or unwillingly the people living in the
regions of the Polygon had been pulled into this game between the United States
and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union played the worst role, of course,
because it allowed its citizens to live through the most real type of nuclear
war. They were thinking about a preventive nuclear war—that if there was going
to be one, then they had to know what would happen to people. And, therefore,
no one was evacuated. Instead, they were observed to see how many would die,
how many would become ill and so on.
Do you feel
a little bit guilty that you took part in the Soviet Union’s experiment?
My good man,
how far we are from one another. From a moral, ethical point of view and in
knowledge of that time you ask this question—and are probably correct in doing
so—but there is no answer to this question. Simply, there isn’t one. I can’t
explain it. And you will never understand what the former Soviet Union was. You
will never understand this in your lifetime.
Over the last
15 years we have thoroughly analyzed all the material in the archives. We have
made our conclusions and published our research. And at the same time we have
continued our planned research on the population. Now a huge group has
appeared, of 250,000 to 270,000 people. These are the children of parents who
have been irradiated. We thought that everything would go smoothly, that chromosomal
damage and genetic effects would be confined to only the generation of people
who were irradiated, and they could not be inherited by future generations. But
it turned out this was wrong.
__________
One final
point, which is obvious but seems to be seldom mentioned, is that what is true
for humans is true also for every other species that was exposed to the nuclear
bomb detonations, and the effects might in fact be much worse. There are many
open questions now which perhaps no one wants to pursue. For example, there
have been many reports on the “mysterious wave of antelope deaths” on the
plains of Kazakhstan, [3] but no one seems to have pursued research on one of
the obvious possible causes. One report briefly mentioned a study that looked
at present radiation levels but didn’t pursue the issue any further:
The
large geographical area over which die-offs occurred suggests that a single
environmental contaminant is not particularly plausible, and soil, water and
air analyses completed are largely within normal ranges for detectable
radiation and known contaminants and pollutants… Since at least the 1950s saiga
[antelope] die-offs have been recorded in Kazakhstan. [4]
The first
Soviet nuclear bomb explosion in Kazakhstan occurred in 1949. Perhaps the die-offs
occurred before then but were never recorded in the absence of modern state
institutions that could keep the records. In that case, however, surely there
would have been some local knowledge of such events held by the elders of the
local population. The fact that present levels of radiation are within normal
ranges means little when the inherited effects would be linked to the exposures
suffered by organisms in previous generations, both transient levels of
external doses and longer-lasting internal doses. These trans-generational
effects are still so poorly misunderstood that it would be impossible to
dismiss radiation exposure as an ultimate cause of the weakened immunity that
may be linked to the proximate cause of this mass death by infection.
In an
article in The Ecologist, Dr.
Christopher Busby explains that what is at issue is not just a few genetic
mutations, which would fade away over time in the population. The phenomenon
being observed is trans-generational genomic instability, which he explains
thus:
If
a cell was damaged, it somehow switched on a mechanism that communicated to its
descendants a signal to randomly mutate... it also transmitted the same signal
to other cells around it... This effect has been seen now in many systems and
the trans-generational genomic damage switch has been shown to operate in
Chernobyl studies where in some rodents (bank voles) there are measurable
effects even after 20 generations. This is scary stuff indeed. No one knows the
reason for such a process but it has been suggested that it favors the survival
of a population at the expense of the individual. [5]
In the
case of the saiga antelope, radiation could be a single cause, a partial cause
or not a cause at all, but it is striking that it is not being considered more
seriously in the scientific inquiry. But then again, we must remember that the
secrecy of the Soviet era is gone. Some lines of research will not be pursued
because, you know, what if we found something?
Notes
[1] Aiman
Turebekova, “Astana to
Host Major Nuclear Disarmament Conference,” Eurasia World, August 24,
2016.
[2] Mike McCormick, interviewer, Plutopia:
Interview with Kate Brown on Talkingstick TV. January
18, 2014.
[4] Update
on the saiga antelope tragedy in Kazakhstan, Saiga Conservation
Alliance, September 4, 2015.
[5] Chris Busby, “Bomb
Test Veterans’ Grandchildren Suffer Health Effects,” The Ecologist,
October 16, 2014.
