Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev said on Tuesday that Kazakhstan will never supply nuclear materials that could be used to make weapons of mass destruction to other countries.

After 49 years of tests at the Semipalatinsk test site, around one million Kazakh citizens have suffered from radiation poisoning, Nazarbayev told a joint news conference with Israeli President Shimon Peres in Astana, the Interfax news agency reported. "Kazakhstan suffered the severities of nuclear tests itself."

Therefore, countering nuclear weapons and its proliferation is "very acute and important" to Kazakhstan, he said.

"Kazakhstan guarantees that it will not provide its nuclear materials to other countries," he said.

Semipalatinsk was once the world's largest nuclear test site, where nearly 500 tests were carried out from 1949 to 1989. Nazarbayev ordered the shutdown of the site in 1991.

Source: Xinhua