Decades of nuclear bomb testing by the Soviet Union have left a damaging fallout in Kazakh children generations later.
Between 1949 and 1989, the Soviet Union exploded 460 nuclear bombs in eastern Kazakhstan. About 200,000 villagers living within 45km of the test site, the 'Polygon', were exposed to high levels of radiation for.
Not only were they not protected but they were treated as human guinea pigs, instruments of study in the event the Cold War turned into nuclear war. But what is probably most devastating of all is what is happening today.
Children born decades later and never directly exposed to nuclear fallout are sick and getting sicker. They are the product of "radiation-induced mutation in the chromosomes of sperm and ova". In other words, the damage their parents and grandparents suffered in the Soviet Union's heedlessness has not only been passed down but also intensified in the third, fourth and fifth generations.
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