Between 1964 and 1996, China detonated 45 nuclear devices in the Lop Nur desert of Xinjiang, transforming a once-inhabited steppe into one of the world’s most toxic testing grounds. Official accounts describe the site as “barren and uninhabited.” Independent evidence tells another story — of Uyghur and Kazakh pastoralists uprooted from ancestral lands, resettled with no warning or compensation, and left exposed to invisible death.
Villagers recall soldiers arriving under orders to clear vast areas for “national defence needs.” They were moved to zones still inside the fallout belt, without protection or explanation. Contaminated food, poisoned water, and radioactive dust became part of daily life. Today, those families and their descendants carry the burden of China’s atomic age — a catastrophe written out of official history.
How widespread is the human toll?
Estimates of exposure vary, but the scale is staggering. The World Uyghur Congress and the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation told the UN Human Rights Council that Lop Nur released roughly six million times the radioactive material of Chernobyl. Around 1.48 million people were directly affected.
Japanese physicist Jun Takada calculated that at least 194,000 died from acute radiation sickness, while millions more suffered chronic illness. Cancer rates in Xinjiang are up to 35% higher than China’s national average. Uyghur surgeon Dr Enver Tohti has documented alarming clusters of leukaemia, lymphomas, and severe birth defects — including reports of eight in ten children in some villages born with cleft palates.
Even soil samples collected in neighbouring Gansu and Kazakhstan show enduring contamination, with high levels of plutonium-239 and other isotopes linked directly to Chinese tests. Research from Central Asian laboratories confirms excess radiation doses among communities near the border — proof that fallout travelled far beyond Lop Nur.
Why does Beijing still deny responsibility?
Beijing maintains that no civilians were harmed and bars independent epidemiological studies. Medical archives remain classified, and official Chinese publications from the 1990s dismissed radiation illness entirely. Yet internal reports from the late 1970s — later suppressed — noted spikes in cancers, hair loss, and birth deformities in surrounding areas.
While a small number of Han Chinese veterans of the nuclear test units have received token compensation, Uyghur civilians have been ignored. Calls by the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and other advocacy groups for cleanup and medical screening have gone unanswered. China alone among major nuclear powers refuses to acknowledge harm to its people.
For the families still living in Xinjiang’s irradiated shadow, silence has become policy. Their suffering — erased from textbooks and censored from media — is a reminder that the victims of Lop Nur were not enemies of the state, but its collateral. Until Beijing opens its archives and allows independent investigation, the desert’s fallout will remain an open wound — buried, but never healed.