Soviet atomic bomb project

Andrei Sakharov (left) with Igor Kurchatov (right)

The Soviet project to develop an atomic bomb began during World War II in the Soviet Union. The USSR tested its first nuclear weapon in 1949.

Nuclear physics in the Soviet Union

Soviet interest in nuclear physics had begun just after the annus mirabils in physics in 1932, in which a variety of important nuclear discoveries and achievements were made (the identification of the neutron and positrons as fundamental particles, the operation of the first cyclotron to values of over 1 MeV, and the first splitting of the atom by Cockcroft and Walton). The mineralogist Vladimir Vernadsky had made a number of public calls even before 1917 for a survey of Russia's uranium deposits. But such surveys were never made, as it was discovered that the main motivation for uranium ores at the timeâ€"radium, which had scientific as well as medical usesâ€"could be retrieved from borehole water from the Ukhta oilfields.

Because much of the ideology of the Soviet Union revolved around science for primarily practical and industrial applications, though, nuclear physics was not strong in the country. Fearing the possibility of something like Lysenkoism in physics, Soviet physicists, led by Abram Ioffe, had attempted to emphasize their commitment to strengthening the Soviet economy and industry, and were purposefully avoiding lines of research which could be accused of being too "theoretical" and "impractical", which is what nuclear physics was generally perceived to be in the 1920s and early 1930s.

After the discovery of nuclear fission in the late-1930s, scientists in the Soviet Union, like scientists all over the world, realized that nuclear reactions could, in theory, be used to release large amounts of binding energy from the atomic nucleus of uranium. As in the West, the news of fission created great excitement amongst Soviet scientists and many physicists switched their lines of research to those involving nuclear physics in particular, as it was considered a promising field of research. Few scientists thought it would be possible to harness the power of nuclear energy for human purposes within the span of many decades. Soviet nuclear research was not far behind Western scientists: Yakov Frenkel did the first theoretical work on fission in the Soviet Union in 1940, and Georgii Flerov and Lev Rusinov concluded that 3Â±1 neutrons were emitted per fission only days after similar conclusions had been reached by the team of Frederic Joliot-Curie.

Beginnings of the program

Joseph Stalin was first informed of American nuclear research because of a letter sent to him in April 1942 by Georgii Flerov, who pointed out that nothing was being published in the physics journals by Americans, Britains, or Germans, on nuclear fission since the year of its discovery, 1939, and that indeed many of the most prominent physicists in Allied countries seemed not to be publishing at all. This nonevent was very suspicious, and accordingly Flerov urged Stalin to start a program. However, because the Soviet Union was still involved with the war with Germany on its home front, a large scale domestic effort could not yet be undertaken.

Administration and personnel

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, which then disappeared from the maps for forty-five years.

Other important figures were Yuli Khariton and the future dissident and lead theoretical designer of their hydrogen bomb, Andrei Sakharov.

Espionage

The project had the benefit of much espionage information gathered from the Manhattan Project, which the Soviets code-named Enormoz. The intelligence obtained by Beria from the Atomic Spiesâ€"Alan Nunn May, Klaus Fuchs, Theodore Hall and the Rosenbergsâ€"was not however shared freely among the project's scientists, but was rather used as a "check" on the accuracy of their work. 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 closely 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 Hiroshima and Nagasaki they knew that the Allied design would work.

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 the chief of security at this time, his reputation for ruthlessness was always present, and the Soviet atomic bomb project received status as the highest priority of national security after 1945.

Scholar Alexei Kojevnikov has estimated, based on newly released Soviet documents, that the primary way in which the espionage may have sped up the Soviet project was that it allowed Khariton to avoid dangerous tests to determine the size of the critical mass ("tickling the dragon's tail," as they were called in the U.S., which consumed a good deal of time and claimed at least two lives).

Logistical problems the Soviets faced

The single largest problem during the early 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 penal labour (including political prisoners and other unwelcome voices).

Important Soviet nuclear tests

Joe One, the first Soviet atomic test.

First Lightning

The first Soviet atomic test was First Lightning on August 29, 1949, and was code-named by the Americans as Joe 1. It was a replica of the American Fat Man bomb whose design the Soviets knew from espionage.

The first (not "true") Soviet hydrogen ("Super") test, dubbed "Joe 4".

Joe Four

The first Soviet test of a hydrogen bomb was on August 12, 1953 and was nicknamed Joe 4 by the Americans; it was not a "true" fusion bomb (it was more like a "boosted" fission bomb than a staged thermonuclear device, and had a yield comparable to large fission weapons; around 90% of its yield was directly or indirectly from fission).

RDS-37

The mushroom cloud from the first "true" Soviet hydrogen bomb test in 1955.

The first Soviet test of a "true" hydrogen bomb in the megaton range was on November 22, 1955. It was dubbed RDS-37 by the Soviets. It was of the multi-staged, radiation implosion thermonuclear design called Sakharov's "Third Idea" in the USSR and the Teller-Ulam design in the USA.

Joe 1, Joe 4, and RDS-37 were all tested at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan.

Tsar Bomba

Tsar Bomba casing on display at Arzamas-16.

The Tsar Bomba was the biggest nuclear device ever built by anyone, and was a fusion bomb with a yield of ~50 megatons. It was detonated on October 30, 1961, and was capable of approximately 100 megatons, but was purposely reduced shortly before the launch. Although weaponized, it was not a realistic weapon of war, but was part of sabre-rattling between the Soviet Union and United States during the Cold War. The explosion was hot enough to induce third degree burns at 100 km.

The test was conducted at Site C on Novaya Zemlya Island in the Arctic Sea.

Chagan

Chagan nuclear test, photo not to be confused with Joe 1.

Chagan was shot in the Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy or Project 7, the Soviet equivalent of the US Operation Plowshare to investigate peaceful uses of nuclear weapons. It was an underground test (note the debris fallout in the photo), and was fired on January 15 1965. The site was a dry bed of the Chagan River at the edge of the Semipalatinsk Test Site, and was chosen such that the lip of the crater would dam the river during its high spring flow. The resultant crater had a diameter of 408 meters and was 100 meters deep. A major lake (10,000,000 m³) soon formed behind the 20-35 m high upraised lip, known as Lake Chagan or Lake Balapan.

The area is still radioactive (as of 2006). The test apparently violated the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, and the United States complained to the Soviets, but the matter was dropped.

The photo is sometimes confused with Joe 1 in the literature.

Secret cities

Cold War name	Current name	Established	Primary function(s)
1946\|Weapons design and research, warhead assembly
1946\|Uranium enrichment
1947\|Plutonium production, component manufacturing
1947\|Uranium enrichment, warhead assembly
1949\|Uranium enrichment, component manufacturing
1950\|Plutonium production
1952\|Warhead assembly
1955\|Warhead assembly
1956\|Uranium enrichment
1957\|Weapons design and research

References

The two most authoritative books on the Soviet project are Holloway and Rhodes, both published in 1995:
*David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy 1939-1956 (Yale University Press, 1995), ISBN 0300066643
*Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (Simon and Schuster, 1995), ISBN 068480400XSince their writing, though, a number of important documents have been released by the Russian government under the heading Atomnyi Proekt SSSR starting in 1998, which have suggested significant changes from the other historical sources (which were bound by certain methodological problems relating to the state of declassification at the time of their writing). Many corrections have been made in a number of chapters in Kojevnikov's 2004 book:
*Alexei Kojevnikov, Stalin's Great Science: The Times and Adventures of Soviet Physicists (Imperial College Press, 2004), ISBN 1860944205

External links

*PBS.org on Kurchatov
*Soviet and Nuclear Weapons History
*Russian Nuclear Weapons Museum (in Russian)
*Images of Soviet bombs (in Russian) — RDS-1, RDS-6, Tsar Bomba, and an ICBM warhead
*Annotated bibliography on the Russian nuclear weapons program from the Alsos Digital Library

Soviet atomic bomb project: Encyclopedia BETA

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