Kazakh Independence and Nuclear Renunciation
Kazakhstan was the last republic to leave the Union, declaring independence a week after the Belovezha Accords had already dissolved it. Nursultan Nazarbayev, first secretary since 1989, became president and would remain in power until 2019. The republic inherited around 1,400 strategic warheads, the Baikonur cosmodrome, and the Semipalatinsk Polygon, where four decades of testing had exposed an estimated 1.5 million people to fallout; the closure of the site in August 1991 had been one of the first assertions of republican authority against Moscow. Under the 1992 Lisbon Protocol and with financial and technical support from the American Nunn-Lugar programme, Kazakhstan transferred all warheads to Russia and dismantled the associated infrastructure, acceding to the Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear state in 1993. In exchange it received security assurances from Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum -- the same instrument that assured Ukraine.
- Year: 1991 CE
- Category: Political
