Togzhan Kassenova Livres

Atomic Steppe tells the untold true story of how the obscure country of Kazakhstan said no to the most powerful weapons in human history. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the marginalized Central Asian republic suddenly found itself with the world's fourth largest nuclear arsenal on its territory. Would it give up these fire-ready weapons--or try to become a Central Asian North Korea? This book takes us inside Kazakhstan's extraordinary and little-known nuclear history from the Soviet period to the present. For Soviet officials, Kazakhstan's steppe was not an ecological marvel or beloved homeland, but an empty patch of dirt ideal for nuclear testing. Two-headed lambs were just the beginning of the resulting public health disaster for Kazakhstan--compounded, when the Soviet Union collapsed, by the daunting burden of becoming an overnight nuclear power. Equipped with intimate personal perspective and untapped archival resources, Togzhan Kassenova introduces us to the engineers turned diplomats, villagers turned activists, and scientists turned pacifists who worked toward disarmament. With thousands of nuclear weapons still present around the world, the story of how Kazakhs gave up their nuclear inheritance holds urgent lessons for global security.

This book is a study of cooperative security efforts between the United States and Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It undertakes an analysis of the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Programme and several other programmes established by different U. S. Departments. The CTR process demonstrates both, the achievements and limitations of the evolving new framework of interaction between the U. S. and Russia. This investigation is the first attempt to use the CTR process as a case study for U. S.-Russian strategic relations in the post-Cold War international security system. By answering the questions of why this process is prone to some persistent problems of implementation and why it was possible in the first place, it yields significant conclusions regarding the nature of U. S.-Russian relations, and the achievements as well as limitations in the bilateral relationship since the end of the Cold War. From Antagonism to Partnership contributes to the existing literature on cooperative threat reduction as a study linking CTR to the wider context of the opportunities, challenges and constraints determining the nature of post-Cold War relations between the U. S. and Russia.