Seventy Years at Ground Zero:
Once the center of the Soviet Union's "peaceful" nuclear device testing, can Semipalatinsk ever escape its radioactive heritage?
After 456 nuclear explosions in forty years silently decimated its environment and population, a remote corner of Kazakhstan seeks justice and answers.
Soviet nuclear testing in Semipalatinsk sought to reshape the world. They tested military hardware that would legitimize fifty years of Soviet dominance, and they tested explosions to reshape the environment in order to achieve domestic ambitions. Attempts to reshape the environment with nuclear explosions and bring productivity across the nation failed to yield positive results. Instead, the land they tested on became barren, and the people from whom the testing was hidden were poisoned. How do people move on, when a future, or even life in this region seems impossible?
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