Graduate School of Public Policy

Last week NU GSPP hosted online webinar with Dr. Togzhan Kassenova, the Washington, DC-based senior fellow at the Center for Policy Research, SUNY-Albany and a nonresident fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Togzhan Kassenova is an expert on nuclear politics, WMD nonproliferation, strategic trade controls, sanctions implementation, and financial crime prevention.

During the webinar Dr. Kassenova presented her new-released book “Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave up the Bomb” that was published in February 2022 by Stanford University Press. Atomic Steppe tells the untold true story of how the obscure country of Kazakhstan said no to the most powerful weapons in human history. This book takes inside Kazakhstan’s extraordinary and little-known nuclear history from the Soviet period to the present.

As author stressed, “the Soviet military did not give much thought to the well-being of local people or environment. Nuclear tests were conducted without much care about the impact of radiation. In the Cold War arms race, people of Semipalatinsk region became collateral damage.” She also added that “Kazakhstan’s anti-nuclear movement could be seen as an important part of Kazakhstan’s growing national identity. It reflected the desire of Kazakhstan’s multi-ethnic society to take agency over its fate.”

The book presentation was warmly received by NU GSPP community. The School’s Post-Doctoral Scholar Zhanibek Arynov stressed that “Atomic Steppe is about the people”, while one of the webinar listeners noted that “the book is a landmark for Kazakhstan history”.

Watch the full video from the past NU GSPP Webinar: