Soviet atomic bomb project
The Soviet atomic bomb project was authorized by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union to develop nuclear weapons during and after World War II.
Physicist Georgy Flyorov, suspecting a Western Allied nuclear program, urged Stalin to start research in 1942. Early efforts were made at Laboratory No. 2 in Moscow, led by Igor Kurchatov, and by Soviet-sympathizing atomic spies in the US Manhattan Project. Subsequent efforts involved plutonium production at Mayak in Chelyabinsk and weapon research and assembly at KB-11 in Sarov.
After Stalin learned of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nuclear program was accelerated through intelligence gathering on the US and German nuclear weapon programs. Espionage coups, especially via Klaus Fuchs and David Greenglass, included detailed descriptions of the implosion-type Fat Man bomb and plutonium production. In the final months of the war, the Soviet "Russian Alsos" task force competed against the Western Allies' Alsos Mission to capture German and Austrian nuclear scientists and material, including refined uranium and cyclotrons. The Soviet project utilized East German industry for further uranium mining, refinement, and instrument manufacture. Lavrentiy Beria was placed in charge of the atomic project, and the replication of the Fat Man bomb was prioritized.
The Manhattan Project had established a monopoly on the global uranium market. The Soviet project relied on SAG Wismut in East Germany and the development of the Taboshar mine in Tajikistan. Domestic large-scale production of high purity graphite and high purity uranium metal, to construct plutonium production reactors, was a significant challenge.
In late 1946, F-1, the first nuclear reactor outside North America, achieved criticality at Laboratory No. 2. In mid-1948, the A-1 plutonium production reactor became operational at the Mayak site, and in mid-1949, the first plutonium metal was separated. The first nuclear weapon was assembled at the KB-11 design bureau, led by Yulii Khariton, in the closed city of Arzamas-16.
On 29 August 1949, the Soviet Union secretly conducted its first weapon test, RDS-1, at the Semipalatinsk Test Site of the Kazakh SSR. Simultaneously, project scientists had been developing conceptual thermonuclear weapons. The US detection of the test, via anticipatory atmospheric fallout monitoring, led to a US crash program to develop thermonuclear weapons, opening of the nuclear arms race of the Cold War.
Boosted fission and multi-stage thermonuclear weapons were developed during the 1950s, testing expanded to Novaya Zemlya and Kapustin Yar, and fissile material production sites grew, including the invention of the gas centrifuge. The program created demand for nuclear weapons delivery, command and control, and early warning, influencing the Soviet space program. Soviet nuclear weapons played a major role in the Cold War, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Sino-Soviet border conflict.
Early efforts
Background origins and roots
As early as 1910 in Russia, independent research was being conducted on radioactive elements by several Russian scientists. Despite the hardship faced by the Russian academy of sciences during the national revolution in 1917, followed by the violent civil war in 1922, Russian scientists had made remarkable efforts toward the advancement of physics research in the Soviet Union by the 1930s. Before the first revolution in 1905, the mineralogist Vladimir Vernadsky had made a number of public calls for a survey of Russia's uranium deposits but none were heeded. Such early efforts were independently and privately funded by various organizations until 1922 when the Radium Institute in Petrograd opened and industrialized the research.From the 1920s until the late 1930s, Russian physicists had been conducting joint research with their European counterparts on the advancement of atomic physics at the Cavendish Laboratory run by a New Zealand physicist, Ernest Rutherford, where Georgi Gamov and Pyotr Kapitsa had studied and researched.
Influential research towards the advancement of nuclear physics was guided by Abram Ioffe, who was the director at the Leningrad Physical-Technical Institute, having sponsored various research programs at various technical schools in the Soviet Union. The discovery of the neutron by the British physicist James Chadwick further provided promising expansion of the LPTI's program, with the operation of the first cyclotron to energies of over 1 MeV, and the first "splitting" of the atomic nucleus by John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton. Russian physicists began pushing the government, lobbying in the interest of the development of science in the Soviet Union, which had received little interest due to the upheavals created during the Russian revolution and the February Revolution. Earlier research was directed towards the medical and scientific exploration of radium; a supply of it was available as it could be retrieved from borehole water from the Ukhta oilfields.
In 1939, German chemist Otto Hahn reported his discovery of fission, achieved by the splitting of uranium with neutrons that produced the much lighter element barium. This eventually led to the realization among Russian scientists, and their American counterparts, that such reaction could have military significance. The discovery excited the Russian physicists, and they began conducting their independent investigations on nuclear fission, mainly aiming towards power generation, as many were skeptical of the possibility of creating an atomic bomb anytime soon. Early efforts were led by Yakov Frenkel, who did the first theoretical calculations on continuum mechanics directly relating the kinematics of binding energy in fission process in 1940. Georgy Flyorov's and Lev Rusinov's collaborative work on thermal reactions concluded that 3–1 neutrons were emitted per fission only days after similar conclusions had been reached by the team of Frédéric Joliot-Curie.
World War II and accelerated feasibility
After a strong lobbying of Soviet scientists, the Soviet government initially set up a commission that was to address the "uranium problem" and investigate the possibility of chain reaction and isotope separation. The Uranium Problem Commission was ineffective because the German invasion of Soviet Union eventually limited the focus on research, as the Soviet Union became engaged in a bloody conflict along the Eastern Front for the next four years. The Soviet atomic weapons program had no significance, and most work was unclassified as the papers were continuously published as public domain in academic journals.Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leader, had mostly disregarded the atomic knowledge possessed by the Soviet scientists as had most of the scientists working in the metallurgy and mining industry or serving in the Soviet Armed Forces technical branches during the World War II's eastern front in 1940–42.
In 1940–42, Georgy Flyorov, a Russian physicist serving as an officer in the Soviet Air Force, noted that despite progress in other areas of physics, the German, British, and American scientists had ceased publishing papers on nuclear science. Clearly, they each had active secret research programs. The dispersal of Soviet scientists had sent Abram Ioffe's Radium Institute from Leningrad to Kazan; and the wartime research program put the "uranium bomb" programme third, after radar and anti-mine protection for ships. Kurchatov had moved from Kazan to Murmansk to work on mines for the Soviet Navy.
In April 1942, Flyorov directed two classified letters to Stalin, warning him of the consequences of the development of atomic weapons: "the results will be so overriding it won't be necessary to determine who is to blame for the fact that this work has been neglected in our country." The second letter, by Flyorov and Konstantin Petrzhak, highly emphasized the importance of a "uranium bomb": "it is essential to manufacture a uranium bomb without a delay."
Upon reading the Flyorov letters, Stalin immediately pulled Soviet physicists from their respective military services and authorized an atomic bomb project, under engineering physicist Anatoly Alexandrov and nuclear physicist Igor V. Kurchatov. For this purpose, the Laboratory No. 2 near Moscow was established under Kurchatov. Kurchatov was chosen in late 1942 as the technical director of the Soviet bomb program; he was awed by the magnitude of the task but was by no means convinced of its utility against the demands of the front. Abram Ioffe had refused the post as he was too old, and recommended the young Kurchatov.
At the same time, Flyorov was moved to Dubna, where he established the Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions, focusing on synthetic elements and thermal reactions. In late 1942, the State Defense Committee officially delegated the program to the Soviet Army, with major wartime logistical efforts later being supervised by Lavrentiy Beria, the head of NKVD.
In 1945, the Arzamas 16 site, near Moscow, was established under Yakov Zel'dovich and Yuli Khariton who performed calculations on nuclear combustion theory, alongside Isaak Pomeranchuk. Despite early and accelerated efforts, it was reported by historians that efforts on building a bomb using weapon-grade uranium seemed hopeless to Soviet scientists. Igor Kurchatov had harboured doubts working towards the uranium bomb, but made progress on a bomb using weapon-grade plutonium after British data was provided by the NKVD.
The situation dramatically changed when the Soviet Union learned of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Immediately after the atomic bombing, the Soviet Politburo took control of the atomic bomb project by establishing a special committee to oversee the development of nuclear weapons as soon as possible. On 9 April 1946, the Council of Ministers created KB–11 that worked towards mapping the first nuclear weapon design, primarily based on the American approach and detonated with weapon-grade plutonium.
Work on the program was accelerated by constructing a nuclear research reactor near Moscow which went critical for the first time on 25 October 1946. Even while this facility was still in the planning stage, a government commission inspected and approved a location east of the Urals for a plutonium production facility similar to the American Hanford Site, with nuclear production reactor much larger in size than the research reactor, combined with a radiochemical extraction factory. Constructed some fifteen miles east of the small town of Kyshtym, this plutonium production complex came to be known as Chelyabinsk-40 and later still, as Mayak.
The area was chosen in part because of its proximity to the Chelyabinsk Tractor Plant which had merged during the war with the evacuated Kharkov Diesel Works and parts of the Leningrad Kirov Plant into a major tank production complex popularly known as "Tankograd". To supply the complex and dozens of other armament works in the area, a huge new power station had gone up in 1942 from which electricity could be drawn. Chelyabinsk province, particularly around the small town of Kyshtym, was also a major gulag station, with some twelve forced labor camps in the area.