Dr. Togzhan Kassenova is a nonresident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a Washington, DC-based senior fellow with the Center for Policy Research, SUNY-Albany.
She is an expert on nuclear politics, WMD nonproliferation, and financial crime prevention. She currently works on issues related to proliferation financing controls, exploring ways to minimize access of proliferators to the global financial system.
Previously, Kassenova worked as a senior research associate at the University of Georgia’s Center for International Trade and Security in Washington, DC, as a postdoctoral fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, and as an adjunct faculty at the Monterey Institute of International Studies and George Washington University.
Kassenova holds a Ph.D. in Politics from the University of Leeds.
From 2011 to 2015, Kassenova served on the UN Secretary General’s Advisory Board on Disarmament Matters.
Kassenova is the author of award-winning Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave Up the Bomb (2022), From Antagonism to Partnership: The Uneasy Path of the U.S.-Russian Cooperative Threat Reduction (2007), and Brazil’s Nuclear Kaleidoscope: An Evolving Identity (2014). Her latest publications include “Countering the Challenges of Proliferation Financing,” “Kazakhstan’s Nuclear History: Lessons for the Future of Disarmament,” and “Prospects for Nuclear Governance in Brazil.”
Kazakhstan’s leadership on nuclear and biological risk reduction for the last 30 years serves as a core model for regional and international security. Please join us for a moderated discussion on the history of this work and Kazakhstan’s increasingly global role in the changing WMD threat landscape.
The United States is sending anti-tank rounds containing depleted uranium to Ukraine.
The private sector, governments, and international bodies can counter illicit proliferators’ exploitation of the international financial system in their efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery.
What kind of country would Kazakhstan or Ukraine be if, back then, they had tried to push their way into the nuclear club?
The nuclear testing component left a devastating legacy in Kazakhstan because for 40 years the military tested nuclear weapons, both in the atmosphere and later underground.
What is happening in Ukraine is not a fluke but rather a pattern of the long-term experience that former Soviet republics lived through. It is a pattern of disrespect.
Above all, what made this unique and sensitive operation possible was the fundamental trust between the governments of Kazakhstan and the United States. With only a couple of years’ worth of diplomatic relations, the two countries dealt with serious political, technical, security, and logistical challenges.
The untold true story of how the obscure country of Kazakhstan said no to the most powerful weapons in human history.
Kazakhstan stands as an important case study of nuclear reversal. Yet most accounts of this case merely highlight the return of the nuclear weapons left on Kazakh territory to Russia. Left out are the human dimensions of this story. In Atomic Steppe,Toghzan Kassenova artfully weaves together first-hand accounts and archival data into a rich accounting of a tumultuous period.
The secret military exercises would alter the country’s fate—and lands.
