DOWNWIND FROM POLYGON

...On February 26, Olzhas Sulei-menov, a well-known Kazakh poet who was campaigning for a seat in the Congress of People's Deputies, threw away his script for a televised speech and instead called for a public meeting two days later in Kazakhstan's capital, Alma-Ata...

...In Kazakhstan, recent releases of radiation from Semipalatinsk and the plight of people living downwind in and around Karaul have been receiving unprecedented publicity...

...Though this is one of the poorer regions of the Soviet Union, people look vigorous, if weatherbeaten...

...Last May, IPPNW and the Nevada-Semipalatinsk Movement invited a broad spectrum of peace activists, environmentalists, and scientists from all over the world to a congress in Alma-Ata to formulate strategies to win a comprehensive test ban...

...The Nevada-Semipa-latinsk Movement, a Kazakhstan-based grass-roots organization with several hundred thousand members dedicated to seeking a comprehensive test ban, claims partial credit for the suspension...

...Akihiro Takahashi, who was fourteen when the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima killed fifty of his sixty classmates, wept openly as he told rapt delegates about his life since 1945: "While struggling with this frail and damaged body, I have often wondered in despair, 'Do I really need to live with all this pain?' But each time I have answered, 'I cannot let the deaths of my classmates be in vain...

...Starting in 1949, the Soviet government conducted atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons only about thirty miles from Karaul at Semipalatinsk 21, the Soviet equivalent of the U.S...

...Delegates were by no means unanimous about the value of a comprehensive test ban and the proper strategies to pursue—one sign that the test-ban campaign's future may be clouded...

...He found a sympathetic audience in International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), which had been campaigning to end testing, and whose co-president, Dr...

...Such a grass-roots movement already exists in the Soviet Union, where public awareness and anxiety about the effects of low-level radiation have intensified since the 1986 nuclear power plant accident at Chernobyl...

...Because releases from Semipalatinsk have been kept secret until recently, the Soviet downwinders don't know how much radiation exposure they have suffered...

...George, a small downwind community in Utah, has lost her older sister and her six-year-old daughter to cancer—because, she was convinced, they had lived downwind from the Nevada Site...

...Since the 1950s, a Semipalatinsk hospital known as Medical Institution No.4 has posed as a brucellosis research center while observing and collecting data on radiation victims...

...The congress rather uneasily united radiation victims and activists with anti-nuclear physicians, many of whom are relatively new to the peace movement, and with several scientists who have worked or are still employed at U.S...

...By contrast, exposure close to Chernobyl averaged 300 rems...

...But he can pinpoint one stark instance of his troubles: Last year, his fourteen-year-old granddaughter drowned herself...

...On February 12 and 17, 1989, a Soviet military installation in Kazakhstan registered two radioactive gas leaks from Semipalatinsk...

...Downwind from Polygon The toll at a Soviet test site BY ANN MARIE CUNNINGHAM The eastern part of the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan, which borders Mongolia and China on the steppes of central Asia, strongly resembles Montana's Big Sky country: Windblown green plains roll on for miles, interrupted only by an occasional flock of dark-brown sheep or a remote village of a couple of thousand souls...

...By contrast, the Polygon is far from a major employer in Kazakhstan, where most residents are farmers or coal miners...

...Persuading the United States to agree to a comprehensive test ban probably will require a popular groundswell along the lines of the 1982 nuclear freeze movement...

...In Karaul, villagers are convinced that their myriad health problems, including cancers, birth defects, and an extraordinarily high rate of teen-age suicide, are due to forty years of nuclear detonations at the Polygon, as they call the Soviet test site...

...American delegates discovered that the Soviet and American testing programs had borne close resemblance in the 1950s...

...While the more than 700 delegates to the test-ban congress represented twenty-two countries, at least half the registrants were from the United States, where organizers hoped to generate wide public support in time for the upcoming conference at the United Nations...

...Van der Vink says that "out of self-interest, the Department of Energy spends a great deal of money on conservative and redundant procedures to prevent accidents...

...you can't worry about whether you're down at the bottom of the pit...

...Tests in Nevada cost from $70 million to $200 million each, depending on the type...

...But a visitor to one isolated hamlet, Ka-raul, encounters a shockingly unexpected sight: The local midwife shepherds a half-dozen severely crippled and retarded young people, ranging in age from four to thirty...

...But at Semipalatinsk, the Soviets use cheaper and sloppier methods, and venting accidents are frequent...

...Elsewhere, residents wear black armbands or take out newspaper ads announcing, Today, your country spent millions testing a nuclear weapon...

...The Department of Energy spends more than $ 1 billion a year in Nevada, according to Dr...

...The congress sent appeals for a comprehensive test ban to Presidents Gorbachev and Bush and the participants in the U.N...

...Footage recently released by the Soviet Ministry of Defense clearly showed gases escaping from the earth after an underground test at the Polygon...

...She says she knows of about twenty similar local cases...

...Women here, she says, are afraid to have children...

...Though they have been ignored by the mass media, some American peace activists have sought a comprehensive test ban since the 1960s, protesting regularly at the Nevada Test Site...

...In 1953, when the Soviets first tested their hydrogen bomb, Karaul was evacuated, except for forty men who were told to remain behind...

...position...

...But the five officially acknowledged nuclear powers—the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and China—have continued testing underground, averaging one explosion a week...

...Ray Kidder, for example, is a nuclear physicist and weapons designer from Lawrence Livermore, and author of a report that debunked the Reagan Administration's position that nuclear-weapons tests were necessary to ensure reliability...

...conference to consider amending the Treaty will begin...

...Claudia Peterson, a thirty-five-year-old Mormon from St...

...Unlike the Nevada Test Site, the Polygon has been silent since October 19,1989, when the Soviet government temporarily suspended testing...

...Not surprisingly, the meeting was often highly emotional...

...Protesters had already forced cancellation of eleven of the eighteen tests scheduled there in 1989...

...Chuck Wolter, a Navy veteran from Minnesota who in the mid-1950s participated in atomic testing at Camp Desert Rock, the military base near the Nevada Test Site, commented, "We were told to do the same thing...

...amendment conference, and drafted a long list of strategies and ideas for peace groups...

...Shortly before the summit last June, Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze called a comprehensive test ban the preeminent issue in arms control, the key to ending nuclear proliferation and eliminating the health and environmental hazards connected with nuclear-weapons production...

...They know that if they have another Baneberry, public outcry may shut them down...

...Since the Cold War has ended and scientists have developed several reliable methods to detect cheating, the only obstacle to a comprehensive test ban is the Bush Administration's adamant opposition...

...They are already up to their neck in local issues, some of which are closely related to ending weapons tests, anyway...

...Life has not run smoothly for him since: Most of his relatives are sick, he says, with ailments he can describe only imprecisely...

...water, or in outer space...

...No independent epidemiological study has determined exactly how much illness plagues their community, and whether health problems can be tied to radiation exposure...

...Like other elderly residents of Karaul, the veteran remembers the mushroom-shaped clouds that appeared regularly on the southwestern horizon throughout the 1950s...

...Scientists from Semipalatinsk maintain that the highest dose the four villages closest to the Polygon could have received is 160 rems...

...Paul Rodarte Jr., a Paiute Indian who lives downwind from the Nevada Test Site, thought some of the Kazakh villagers resembled his own relatives...

...She wishes to thank Galina Patterson and the translating staffs of the congress and of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War for their help in preparing this article...

...Five thousand turned out, and Suleimenov, who later won his election, founded the Ne-vada-Semipalatinsk Movement, choosing a name that he hoped would attract overseas support, especially in the United States...

...Over the next two years, Soviet testing will be phased out altogether at Semipalatinsk, and starting in 1993, will continue only at an alternate site on Novaya Zem-lya, a large, remote island in the Arctic Circle, where harsh weather has limited previous tests to only one or two annually, conducted during five months of the year...

...However, Soviet scientists at the congress, including Nephyo-dov and several long-time employees of Semipalatinsk 21, said they supported a comprehensive test ban—even though it would effectively put them out of work...

...This figure is based on current radiation measurements in the soil close to the Polygon's boundaries...

...While several reputable studies have documented unusually high rates of cancer in American downwind communities, most of the evidence concerning Soviet downwinders' bad health has been anecdotal...

...An amendment banning all nuclear testing must be approved by the Soviet Union, which favors it, the United States, and the United Kingdom, which usually goes along with the U.S...

...I must be the voice conveying their silent cries to those who remain.' " The climax of the congress was the delegates' journey to Karaul, where Soviet downwinders told their stories and laid out a feast of horsemeat and fermented horse's milk...

...In Cleveland, Des Moines, and all over Oregon, for example, citizens toll church bells or observe a moment of silence during services whenever a test weapon is detonated...

...Lown, making it the second-largest employer after the gambling industry: "Since testing is gambling, too, you could say that Nevada has only one industry," says Lown...

...The Soviet Union unilaterally ceased testing in 1985, when it announced a five-month moratorium and eventually extended it for eighteen months, resuming testing only because the United States refused to stop...

...At present," says Lev Ne-phyodov, a senior scientist who has worked at the Soviet test site for twenty years, "off-site radiation is not as high as it is around German power plants that burn coal...

...All atmospheric testing ended in 1963, when 118 nations signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty barring nuclear explosions in the atmosphere, under Ann Marie Cunningham was a delegate from the Lawyers' Alliance for World Security to the International Citizens Congress for a Nuclear Test Ban...

...The risk of unemployment may be an obstacle to the test-ban movement in the United States...

...Too overcome to talk to Ka-raul's bereaved mothers, she helped Japanese delegates make paper cranes and pass them out to the children of the village...

...One purpose of the congress was to unite Soviet and American radiation victims—downwinders, atomic veterans, "liquidators" (the Soviet name for cleanup workers from Chernobyl)—with Japanese survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki...

...weapons laboratories...

...According to Gregory van der Vink, the Nevada Test Site has not had a significant accidental off-site release since 1970, when a test code-named Baneberry went awry...

...Nearby, a seventy-two-year-old man wearing a round peaked cap and a suit jacket bedecked with military medals, fondly recalls "those wonderful American boys" he met at the end of World War II...

...To date, Zhangelova has been unable to gain access to the hospital's records...

...Maira Zhangelova, a Kazakh physician and legislator with invalid relatives in Karaul, calls the villagers' experience "a blank spot" in nuclear history...

...Bernard Lown, has long been known as "the Ahab of a comprehensive test ban...

...For example, Melinda Kassen, an attorney from the Environmental Defense Fund's Colorado office, said, "My major responsibility is keeping Rocky Flats [one of the Department of Energy's weapons production plants] closed...

...Theodore B. Taylor, a nuclear physicist and former weapons designer who left Los Alamos in 1956, described nuclear weapons as "an addiction—you either quit or you die," and called for a comprehensive test ban as "the only way to stop the weaponeers...

...Only six are still alive...

...Still, he favors a limited test ban, not a complete one: "You have to get the Bush Administration on a slippery slope...

...Alcohol was supposed to thicken your cells' walls, like the white of an egg, and protect you against radiation...

...According to Gregory van der Vink, an American geophysicist who is an expert on nuclear testing, confining all Soviet testing to Novaya Zemlya will be arduous and expensive, and may slow the Soviet weapons program...

...Moreover, both neighboring Norway and the small Inuit population around Novaya Zemlya have already voiced opposition to the prospect of stepped-up testing in their backyard The activities of the Nevada-Semi-palatinsk Movement are sanctioned by Soviet foreign policy, which has repeatedly supported a comprehensive test ban...

...To date, forty-one nations have agreed, and in January 1991, the U.N...

...Department of Energy's Nevada Test Site...

...One national project is "Cities Talk Back," a campaign to enlist major cities' support for a comprehensive test ban on the grounds that money spent on testing could be better applied to urban problems...

...Other long-time activists have worked behind the scenes to persuade the requisite one-third of all signers of the Treaty—forty nations—to convene at the United Nations and adopt a comprehensive test ban amendment...

...But most at the congress recognized the urgency of the issue...

...Another potential obstacle is the already-crowded agenda of many American activists...

...Taylor described chilling new weapons the United States is developing to get around the Threshold Test Ban Treaty of 1974, which limits tests to weapons of less than 150 kilotons...

...One man said that before the bomb test, he and the other remaining villagers were told to drink 200 grams of vodka each, "whether we wanted it or not...