CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - Saulesh Yessenova Apocalypse by Deterrence: Searching for Closure After the 40-year Nuclear War in Soviet Kazakhstan
The Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site was the main Soviet proving ground where 116 atmospheric and 340 underground explosions of atomic and thermonuclear bombs were conducted, producing radioactive fallout comparable to that in the Pacific region. In Qazaq society, this violent 40-year history has been framed as a genocide committed by the USSR.
I approach this claim as a manifestation of apocalyptic thinking and a form of communication with the future within radiological time. Converging multiple temporalities, this anthropogenic time carries uncanny projections of cumulative effects of nuclear decay into the future. When will these threats and anxieties end? This ethnographic inquiry, addressing this societal question, evoking sentiments about destiny, hope, and sovereignty in a contaminated environment, leads to a historical analysis. I retrace the experiences of communities that lived in the shadow of the bomb and conscripts recruited to do the dirty work, alongside the perspectives of bureaucrats and scientists tasked to defend the Soviet political self. This exercise helps establish the symbiotic relationship between the MAD doctrine, which drove the international nuclear exchange, and the biopolitical regime in Kazakhstan that ensured smooth operations of nuclear weapons testing. My key argument is that this doctrine never stood outside the technopolitics of the Cold War; rather, MAD was a technology of power originated in imperial visions and practices that scaffolded a spatialized apocalypse by deterrence that shaped the necropolitics of the nuclear age and the ongoing quest for closure in a society put in harm’s way.