Kazakhstan's nuclear legacy

After its independence, Kazakhstan had to deal with the legacy of being one of the centres of the Soviet Union's huge nuclear arsenal and nuclear weapons industry. There were particular concerns about the former nuclear testing site at Semipalatinsk, a vast swathe of contaminated land where there were tunnels with spent plutonium. When the Soviet Union ended in 1991, the site was left open to scavengers. Louise Hidalgo talks to the former head of America's nuclear weapons laboratory, Dr Siegfried Hecker, about the secret operation by Russian and American scientists to make the site safe; it's been called the greatest nuclear non-proliferation story never told.PHOTO: The Semipalatinsk site in 1991 (Getty Images)

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Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there. For nine minutes every day, we take you back in time and all over the world, to examine wars, coups, scientific discoveries, cultural moments and much more. Recent episodes explore everything from the death of Adolf Hitler, the first spacewalk and the making of the movie Jaws, to celebrity tortoise Lonesome George, the Kobe earthquake and the invention of superglue. We look at the lives of some of the most famous leaders, artists, scientists and personalities in history, including: Eva Peron – Argentina’s Evita; President Ronald Reagan and his famous ‘tear down this wall’ speech; Thomas Keneally on why he wrote Schindler’s List; and Jacques Derrida, France’s ‘rock star’ philosopher. You can learn all about fascinating and surprising stories, such as the civil rights swimming protest, the disastrous D-Day rehearsal, and the death of one of the world’s oldest languages.