Kazakhstan-North Korea: A study in nuclear contrast

Pyongyang rattled the world on Sept. 9 with its fifth nuclear in bomb test, and a few days later Astana, Kazakhstan got bouquets from lawmakers in Washington marking the 25th anniversary of that nation shutting down its mega-toxic atomic bomb test site.

Twenty years after giving its nuclear-tipped missiles back to Mother Russia and giving its "wealth" of lethal plutonium to Uncle Sam for safekeeping, Kazakhstan is the richest nation in Central Asia, whereas the gulag state of North Korea is a hell hole of famine and fear.

By 1989 the citizens of this northernmost nation of Central Asia were hearing for the first time that hundreds of birth defects were being linked to the radiation contamination of 456 nuclear explosions in the Semipalatinsk region. Of these 116 were conducted in the open air, with radiation and fallout spread throughout a wide region.

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