‘Every step towards disarmament matters,’ nuclear testing survivors warn
Nuclear Test Survivors March Through UN Halls as Disarmament Momentum Faces New Headwinds
Qinilo.com – On a Monday morning in late August, a small procession of diplomats, scientists, young activists, and survivors of nuclear explosions moved through the corridors of the United Nations Headquarters in New York. The walk, organized under the #StepUp4Disarmament banner, preceded the General Assembly's high-level commemoration of the International Day against Nuclear Tests, observed every year on 29 August. Its destination was a large photograph mounted in the Assembly building — an image of ordinary people gathered at the gates of Kazakhstan's Semipalatinsk test range, demanding its permanent closure.
The march carried a message forged over decades of suffering: that no community should again be subjected to the invisible violence of nuclear detonations. Among those walking was Karipbek Kuyukov, a Kazakh artist and lifelong anti-nuclear campaigner whose own body bears the physical imprint of that history. Born without arms as a consequence of radiation exposure endured by his parents near the test site, Kuyukov now paints by guiding his brush with his lips and toes — a daily act of creation that doubles as a public statement against the weapons that stole his limbs.
A Legacy Written in Radiation
The Semipalatinsk polygon, located in northern Kazakhstan, hosted 456 nuclear detonations between 1949 and 1989. Hundreds of thousands of residents in surrounding villages and towns were exposed to elevated radiation levels, and the biological consequences have been transmitted through family lines across multiple generations. Kuyukov's parents were living witnesses to those blasts.
"My parents were living witnesses of those tests, and as a result, I was born without arms," Kuyukov said.
He was twenty years old when Kazakh poet Olzhas Suleimenov ignited the Nevada-Semipalatinsk anti-nuclear movement, linking the plight of Kazakh communities with those of Indigenous peoples near the United States' Nevada test site. Kuyukov recalled standing shoulder to shoulder with a chief of the Shoshone nation at a protest, and later joining peaceful rallies at the gates of Semipalatinsk alongside activists from French Polynesia — where France conducted tests at Mururoa Atoll — and from Japan.
"The entire nation rose up against this monster, against the Semipalatinsk polygon," he recalled.
On 29 August 1991, the site was finally shut down. At Kazakhstan's initiative, the General Assembly later proclaimed that date the International Day against Nuclear Tests. The year 2026 marks thirty-five years since the closure.
"I can say with pride that my country, Kazakhstan, began its path to sovereignty precisely with that peaceful decision," Kuyukov said. "I believe this is a great honour for us and can serve as a worthy example for other countries."
Diplomatic Voices and Generational Responsibility
Addressing the assembled participants, Izumi Nakamitsu, the UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, emphasized that the silence which fell over Semipalatinsk three and a half decades ago was neither accidental nor inevitable.
"It was achieved through the determination of people, communities and leaders who rejected nuclear testing," she said.
Kairat Umarov, Kazakhstan's Permanent Representative to the United Nations, characterized the walk as "a very simple but very powerful way to remind us that every step towards disarmament matters" — a phrase that has become the rallying line of the day's events.
The commemoration also coincided with the thirtieth anniversary of the opening for signature of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), the multilateral instrument that would ban nuclear explosive testing worldwide once ratified by all forty-four signatory states. Robert Floyd, Executive Secretary of the CTBT Organization, spoke directly to the young people participating in the march, framing disarmament not as a single legislative act but as a long arc of responsibility.
"The day will come when your generation will lead, will make the decisions, will be in the boardrooms, will be in the assembly halls," Floyd said. "And we will be cheering on your great steps forward."
Warnings from the Assembly Floor
In a subsequent address to the full General Assembly, Nakamitsu cautioned that anxieties over a possible resumption of nuclear explosive testing have resurfaced amid deepening geopolitical tensions. She invoked the Secretary-General's standing admonition that the world must never witness another nuclear explosion.
Annalena Baerbock, President of the General Assembly, underscored that the fallout from nuclear detonations recognizes no national boundary.
"In an interconnected world such as ours, there is no truly 'remote region' immune from the effects or dangers of nuclear testing," she said.
Eighty-One Years of Unbroken Exposure
Among the speakers was Tina Cordova, a fourth-generation survivor of the 1945 Trinity test in New Mexico — the first atomic detonation in human history. She had joined the morning's symbolic walk before taking the Assembly floor to describe five successive generations of cancer within her family.
"We were the first people exposed to radiation anyplace in the world as ash fell from the sky in the days after the bomb," she told the delegates. "We were never warned before or after of the danger, so we lived our lives off the land as we always did."
Cordova closed her remarks with a direct appeal: after eighty-one years since that first Trinity blast, it is time, she urged, to set families, children, and grandchildren free from the continuing threat of nuclear weapons.
For Kuyukov, whose life's work has been to ensure that the story of Kazakhstan's test survivors is never reduced to a footnote in disarmament negotiations, the struggle now extends beyond his own generation. It belongs to those who will inherit the decision-making tables, the treaty halls, and the moral weight of choosing whether the next thirty-five years bring genuine peace or merely another pause between explosions.
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