Contaminated soil is "open to wind and rain" and nuclear waste "is dispersed over dozens, if not hundreds, of kilometers around," the pan-European OSCE security body's environment advisor in Dushanbe, Saulius Smalys, told AFP.

The first Soviet nuclear bomb was successfully tested on August 29, 1949, on a field in northeastern Kazakhstan, but the uranium used to make it was extracted in northern Tajikistan.

"After the Soviet era uranium extraction in northern Tajikistan, some 50 million tonnes of radioactive waste still remain. If earthquakes, landslides or other cataclysms were to intensify, the contamination may spread," Smalys warned.

"Extraction was done manually, with sieves. The technology was so primitive that most of uranium bioxides remained in the waste dump," the expert explained.

Stalin, who had launched an arms race with the United States over the bomb's creation, ceaselessly prodded Tajiks on to speed up uranium extraction. Nuclear waste -- the rocks still containing some uranium -- were left in the field without care for ecological concerns.

Nowadays the radiation levels in abandoned mines exceed the norm by scores, while hundreds of Tajiks continue to live on polluted territories, with mine entrances still yawning wide open for the wind to carry contamination far away.

According to OSCE figures, cancer levels in Tajikistan's north are 250 percent higher than in other regions.

"Some mines are in inundated areas, near rivers, and radioactive waste may reach the Syrdaria river with rains," Smalys warned. This would prove a catastrophe to the fertile Fergana valley along the great Syrdaria river, with its 10 million inhabitants.

Thousands of Tajiks live close to dangerous zones, their apartment windows facing the mine-pitted hills.

The OSCE plans to aid Tajikistan in working out a technical project to decontaminate the area and is calling on sponsors such as the international atomic energy agency (IAEA) and the NATO military alliance for funds.

"First of all the mines must be covered with three meters of gravel and clay," Smalys said.

Tajikistan would require "hundreds of millions of dollars" to decontaminate the area of some ten abandoned mines, said Djabor Salomov, vice-director of the Tajik Academy of Sciences' nuclear security agency.

"The waste-littered places are not safe. Locals search for cables and irradiated metals in the dumps to sell or use at home," the state environment committee's councillor Djalil Buzurukov said.

"We have no funds to monitor the contaminated territories. Those mines are a legacy of the past and a menace for our future," Buzurukov added.

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