In Episode 18 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg looks back at the
Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement of the closing years of the Cold War, when the
Western Shoshone people, whose traditional lands were being contaminated by
the nuclear blasts at the US government's Nevada Test Site, made common cause
with the Kazakh people of Central Asia who opposed Soviet nuclear testing at
the Semipalatinsk site. Kazakh activists travelled to Nevada to join protests
at the Test Site, while Western Shoshone leaders travelled to Kazakhstan to
join protests at Semipalatinsk. This initiative eventually evolved into the
Abolition 2000 Global Network to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons, which as recently
as 2016 held an International Conference on Building a Nuclear-Weapon-Free
World in Astana, Kazakhstan, again attended by Western Shoshone leaders. The
story of indigenous peoples impacted by nuclear testing on their usurped lands
has come to us from several places around the world, including the French test
site at Gerboise Bleue in Algeria -- known to the local Tuareg nomads as Tanezrouft. Other examples are the Chinese test site at Lop Nur, on lands of the Uighur people in Xinjiang, and British testing on Aboriginal lands at Maralinga, in the Australian outback. The Nevada-Semipalatinsk movement provides an inspiring example of indigenous peoples and their supporters building solidarity across hostile international borders and superpower influence spheres. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

Music: Kazakh Folk Song
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJ-IjHVhbTo

Production by Chris Rywalt

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