Consequence of the Cold War?

16 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan's population
still suffers from the legacies of the former superpower's claim to
greatness.

It is here that the Communist leader, Joseph Stalin first developed and
tested the Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal. From 1949 to 1991, the
Soviet regime detonated over 700 nuclear bombs, with over 68 being
detonated in one year alone. The detonation zone was supposedly a
deserted region.

The truth, though, was that the region home to thousands of nomadic
Kazakh herders. And civilians became the unwitting participants in the
Cold War's great games. Herders and their families living in the
vicinity of the Polygon, the nuclear test site, were exposed to massive
levels of radiation in the nuclear fall- out.