ABSTRACT

Kazakstan is an immense country, the largest landlocked state in the world and the major state in terms of area, apart from Russia itself, in the FSU. Kazakstan has boundaries with the Russian Federation, China, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The key issue in its severance from the Soviet Union was, as in the other two nuclear republics, Belarus and Ukraine, the question of nuclear arms. Both the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the Strategic Nuclear Arms Reduction Treaty (START) were signed in December 1993, and on 24 May 1995, it was announced that all nuclear weapons formerly deployed in Kazakstan would either be destroyed or transferred to Russia. In September 1997, an agreement was signed with China, which thereby joined the USA and Russia as predominant states in the exploitation of Caspian petroleum. The main minority problem concerns the Muslim Uighurs who inhabit an area overlapping eastern Kazakstan and western China.