Past event

Kazakhstan: Living With and Giving Up the Bomb Dr Togzhan Kassenova, Senior Fellow at the Center for Policy Research

The Institute of Middle East, Central Asia & Caucasus Studies (MECACS) presents Dr Togzhan Kassenova on Kazakhstan: Living With and Giving Up the Bomb.

In this talk, Dr Kassenova will share highlights from her recently released book Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave Up the Bomb (Stanford University Press, 2022). She will share the history of Soviet nuclear tests in the Kazakh steppe, their harm to the people and the environment. She will also explain why Kazakhstan decided to give up its nuclear inheritance, including more than a thousand nuclear weapons, more than a hundred intercontinental ballistic missiles, tons of nuclear materials, and critical nuclear infrastructure.

Dr Kassenova is a Washington, DC-based senior fellow at the Center for Policy Research, SUNY-Albany, and a nonresident fellow in the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is an expert on nuclear politics, WMD nonproliferation, and financial crime prevention. She currently works on issues related to proliferation financing controls, exploring ways to minimise access of proliferators to the global financial system. Kassenova holds a PhD in Politics from the University of Leeds. From 2011 to 2015 she served on the UN Secretary-General's Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters.

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