Nuclear Test Survivors Our World

artist, an anti-nuclear campaigner and an extraordinary survivor.

On the barren steppe of Central Asia,

hidden from the world, a testing ground,

where, over 40 years, 500 nuclear bombs were exploded

by the Soviet Union.

They called it the Polygon.

The local population was supposed to have been sent to safety,

but some were made to watch.

Thousands lived in villages that weren't cleared.

Villagers endured radioactive exposure the scale of

which the world has never seen.

25 years after the Polygon was abandoned by the Soviet Union,

the effects still blight young people's lives.

This is a film about the victims of the nuclear testing

in the Polygon, and one man who has dedicated his life to preventing it

from ever happening again.

Karipbek Kuyukov was born in 1968 in the furthest flung corners

of the then Soviet empire, here in the vast expanse

of the Kazakh steppe.

Karipbek's parents had already lost two children.

Outwardly they looked healthy, but neither had survived

to their first birthday.

Karipbek has devoted his life to painting,

and, without hands, he paints entirely with his mouth.

Watching him work is to witness a triumph of a human being over

adversity and history.

His subject is here, the so-called Polygon -

an area in Kazakhstan the size of Belgium.

Traditionally sparsely inhabited by nomadic shepherds,

then it was turned into the world's largest laboratory.

Over the space of 40 years, and in total secrecy,

the Soviet Union carried out some 500 nuclear explosions here.

They named it the Polygon - Russian for "testing ground."

Today, the Polygon's landscape is scattered with the detritus

of this vast experiment.

Observation towers built to test the effect of explosions.

Huge craters filled with radioactive water -

"dead lakes", as the nomads call them.

Testimony to an experiment that began in the 1940s.

The Soviet nuclear programme was hurriedly launched by Stalin

in 1946, and tasked to catch up with the Americans.

In charge was the head of Stalin's secret police,

Lavrentiy Beria.

He needed an enormous area for the Polygon -

in theory, with no inhabitants.

This man was there at the start.

He's now 82 years old.

In fact, he was one of a group of 43 people from his village

with special instructions.

They were given a tent and a picnic and told to wait.

They had no idea what was going to happen.

They had just witnessed a nuclear explosion from seven kilometres.

That's when their problems began.

Of the 43 who stayed behind for the picnic,

all but he died prematurely.

The testing continued, taking a toll on his family, too.

The precise events he recounts are very hard to confirm,

lost in the sheer volume of the tests and passage of time.

The nuclear programme was conducted in total secrecy by the Soviet

military throughout the tense years of the Cold War,

and records of what happened here have never been released.

What is known is that for decades atomic bombs were detonated

here on the Kazakh steppes, their impact measurable on all that

stood or was placed in their wake.

Natural landscapes, animals, military hardware, apartment

blocks and people.

Even now, the archives remain closed.

In today's Kazakhstan, stories abound of unwitting locals

being deployed in the tests, some believe to observe the effects

of radiation on humans.

Two hours later, the men returned.

They said they had been taken back to their own village to view

the after effects of an explosion.

Today, Karipbek lives away from the Polygon area,

in the nearby town of Karaganda.

It's just 250 kilometres from the test site, yet

throughout the Soviet years, none of its 300,000 inhabitants

were permitted to know what the tests were all about.

By the late 1980s, awareness was building in Kazakhstan,

culminating in a nationwide movement demanding a stop to the tests.

The young Karipbek became a figure of the movement and an activist.

Here he was filmed at a so-called dead lake, the extraordinary product

of underground testing that had now filled with lethally

radioactive water.

It was the location of an event that profoundly shocked him.

The anti-nuclear testing campaign began here and merged

with the movement for democracy and independence in Kazakhstan.

The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Kazakhstan won its independence.

The Polygon was dismantled, and those who worked

there returned to Russia.

But the closing of the Polygon and a stop to nuclear testing

were not the end of the story.

40 years of experimentation with deadly nuclear weapons

is thought to have affected some 650,000 people.

Doctors like Talgat Muldagaliev are still working to address the health

impact of an unprecedented scale of contamination.

Kazakh doctors have identified zones of varying levels

of contamination around the Polygon.

Now, worrying signs of radiation-linked conditions

are cropping up in places much further from the test area

than previously expected.

Areas that had been considered safe.

Today, Dr Muldagaliev has come to see a new patient,

a 55-year-old from a village 250 kilometres from the Polygon.

The patient has had a sudden and sharp rise in blood pressure,

putting him at risk of a heart attack.

Despite the suddenness of the symptoms and his relatively

young age, he is not responding to treatment, possible signs

of a heart condition caused by radiation.

And there are other facts in his family medical history that

point to the Polygon.

But it seems you don't need to have been born during the time

of tests to be affected.

You can inherit health problems in your genes.

This is the village of Znamenka.

It's less than 200 kilometres from the Polygon, and so in the zone

known as maximum risk.

Pakizad is 25, and she has been visited by her doctor.

Until six years ago, she was leading an ordinary life.

But as she started at university, her body started

doing alarming things.

Then the headaches began and she was diagnosed

with a brain tumour, which was affecting her hormones.

Next, she contracted diabetes and her eyesight

in one eye is failing.

From his studio flat back in Karaganda, Karipbek remains

in close contact with other victims of the testing, and remains

a leading light in a continuing campaign for a nuclear-free world.

In the early 1990s, he and some others received modest compensation

from the Kazakh government, but nothing since.

The country responsible for the testing, the Soviet Union,

no longer exists, and no compensation has been

forthcoming from its main successor country, Russia.

But Karipbek doesn't expect anything from Russia.

Kazakhstan is now a proudly independent country,

seeking to project an image of modernity and openness

to the wider world.

Its capital city, Astana, was purpose-built onto

an existing provincial town.

Its centrepiece, a monument representing the tree of life,

a globe nestled safely at the top.

It's a big day for Karipbek.

He has travelled to the capital with someone special.

They're here as honoured guests at a high profile international

conference celebrating the 25th anniversary of the closing

of the Polygon.

Delegates have come from other countries that have suffered

the effects of nuclear testing.

The conference is hosted by the Kazakh president.

Karipbek's work is exhibited in a foyer.

Karipbek's work has attracted the attention

Karipbek's work has attracted the attention

of the other delegates.

There are still children being born with horrific deformities,

and that will continue for the foreseeable future.

It's happening in St George, Utah, which is downwind

of the Nevada test site.

It's happening in the Marshall Islands, where women

are still giving birth to so-called jellyfish babies -

babies without bones.

The lasting effects of testing are, sort of, forewarnings

of what will happen if nuclear weapons are used again.

No great dramas expected weatherwise through this weekend.

Certainly no cold weather in prospect.