"Am I therefore become your enemy,because I TELL YOU THE TRUTH...?"
(Galatians 4:16)

Inside the nuclear underworld:Deformity and fear

SEMEY,Kazakhstan-Kazakhstan's nuclear orphans are a distressing sight.The first child I met in the local orphanage was lying limply in his crib. His giant, pale head was perched on his tiny shoulders, covered in bed sores, like a grotesquely painted paper-mâché mask. Peering out, a pair of tiny black eyes darted around.It took me a few seconds to understand what I was seeing. The doctor told me he was 4 years old.Through the bars in the next crib, I saw another child, twisted with deformities. His fragile legs and arms turned in impossible contortions.These are the children of Kazakhstan's terrifying nuclear past. Decades of Soviet nuclear testing unleashed a plague of birth defects.When the Soviet Union tested its nuclear devices, it chose eastern Kazakhstan, one of its remotest, most desolate areas. But no one bothered to evacuate the people living there.The testing began in 1949 at a site known as Polygon and continued until 1989. According to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, there were 456 tests, including 116 nuclear bombs tested above ground.The Polygon site officially closed on August 29, 1991-16 years ago this week.Local officials say there were hundreds of thousands of people, possibly as many as a million, who lived in the region during the nuclear testing.The end of the Cold War might have ended this dark chapter, but thousands are still paying a terrible price.From the old Soviet city of Semipalatinsk, now renamed Semey, it was a long grueling drive across the barren, flat Kazakh plain. Nature can be hostile here, with temperatures hitting over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in summer, then plunging to 40 below in winter.The people living in the villages scattered throughout this former nuclear testing zone have been through the unspeakable. Seriqkaisha is 62 years old. She remembers watching the mushroom clouds as a child."We were very frightened," she told me, "because the windows in our house would blow out and the walls would shake. My parents both died of cancer, and my own son is handicapped."Almost every family in Seriqkaisha's village, 20 miles from the old test site, is affected-from cancers to impotency to birth defects and other deformities.Meeting people was proving hard.The genetic defections and illnesses that afflict so many here are frequently a source of shame.The doctor told me that people hide their deformed family members from outsiders.For decades,they have felt like animals in a zoo, she said, and had grown to distrust prying eyes.The region also has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, according to local health officials.Tragically,many young men who discover they are impotent-one of the effects of nuclear fallout-end their own lives....
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