Soviet atomic bomb project
The Soviet project to develop an atomic bomb began during World War II in the Soviet Union and developed its first nuclear weapon in 1949.
The administrative head of the project was Stalin's former chief of security Lavrentii Beria, and its scientific head was the physicist Igor Kurchatov. The project started outside Moscow and later moved to the village of Sarov.
The project had the benefit of much espionage information gathered from the Manhattan Project in the United States and United Kingdom, much by the spies Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall, among others. However, the information was not shared freely among the project's scientists, and was used by Beria as a "check" upon the accuracy of the work of the scientists. After the United States used its atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945, and published the Smyth Report outlining the basics of their wartime program, Beria had the scientists duplicate the American process as close as possible in terms of development of resources and factories. The reason was expedience: the goal was to produce a working weapon as soon as possible, and after 1945 there was clear evidence that the American design was a feasible route to an atomic bomb.
Beria largely distrusted the scientists working under him, which was why he rarely gave them direct access to intelligence information after 1945. He was fond of having multiple teams of scientists working on the same problems, who would only find out the existence of the other team of scientists when they were brought together before Beria to explain the differences in their results with one another. Though Beria was not, during this time, still the chief of security, his reputation for ruthlessness was always present, and the Soviet atomic bomb project received status as the highest priority of national security after 1945.
The single largest problem during the Soviet project was the procurement of uranium ore, as it had no known domestic sources at the beginning of the project (the first Soviet nuclear reactor was fueled using uranium confiscated from the remains of the German atomic bomb project). Eventually, however, large domestic sources were found, and mined using slave labor.
The first Soviet atomic test was on August 29, 1949, and was code-named by the Americans as Joe One. The first Soviet test of a hydrogen bomb was in November 22, 1955. Both were at Semipalatinsk Test Site, Kazakhstan
See also
- Yuli Khariton
- Andrei Sakharov
- History of nuclear weapons
- History of the Soviet Union (1927-1953)
- Manhattan Project
- Nuclear warfare
- Nuclear weapon
- Tsar Bomba
- Semipalatinsk Test Site
- Arzamas-16
External links
References
- David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb.
- Alexei Kojevnikov, Stalinist Science.
- Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun.