Soviet atomic bomb project
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
The Soviet project to develop an atomic bomb began during World War II in the Soviet Union. They tested their first nuclear weapon in 1949.
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The beginnings
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, British, 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 to not 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 was not yet 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 in the United States and United Kingdom (which the Russians had code-named Enormoz), much by the spies Alan Nunn May, 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" on the accuracy 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 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 American 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, 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.
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 labor.
Important Soviet nuclear tests
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.
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 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.
All of Joe 1, Joe 4, and RDS-37 were at Semipalatinsk Test Site, Kazakhstan.
Tsar Bomba
Tsar Bomba was the biggest nuclear bomb 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. 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. It was hot enough to induce third degree burns at 100 km.
The test was at Novaya Zemlya Nuclear Range on Novaya Zemlya Island in the Arctic Sea.
Chagan
Chagan was 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 (at least as of 2004). 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.
See also
- Andrei Sakharov
- Arzamas-16
- History of nuclear weapons
- History of the Soviet Union (1927-1953)
- Manhattan Project
- Military history of the Soviet Union
- Nuclear warfare
- Nuclear weapon
- Tsar Bomba
- Semipalatinsk Test Site
- Yuli Khariton
External links
- PBS.org on Kurchatov (http://www.pbs.org/opb/citizenk/)
- Soviet and Nuclear Weapons History (http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Russia/index.html)
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 068480400X
Since 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
