• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1220 0

nuclear-weapons work during the war and the dislocation suffered by Ioffe and his physicists, Soviet scientists had not suspended their thinking about nuclear power and atomic weapons. Peter Kapitsa, mired in a liquid oxygen project and believing in any case that no bomb was in prospect any time soon, nevertheless suggested to a group of scientists in October 1941 that an atomic bomb, capable of destroying ‘a major capital city with several million inhabitants’, was theoretically possible. Popular science magazines carried reasonably accurate stories about the Soviet ‘discovery’ of fission and ongoing nuclear work in well-appointed labs. Russian physicists, who had before the war read and replicated the experiments of their counterparts elsewhere, and who had made discoveries of their own, did not forget what they had learned while the war raged. Stalin’s ‘hedged’ bomb project started in 1943. Khariton, Zeldovich, and others never abandoned work on explosives; engineers dedicated themselves to projects of a scale commensurate with what would be needed to create a bomb. As Holloway points out, the Soviets managed to test, in 1951, a gun-assembly uranium core bomb, for which Fuchs had provided no help. What did help, and despite more Soviet suspicion ofAmerican disinformation, was publication, just weeks after the atomic bombings, of an official US report called Atomic Energy for Military Purposes, usually called the Smyth Report after its author, Princeton physicist Henry D. Smyth. As they had with their agents’ reports from the United States, Soviet authorities read the Smyth Report ‘with great interest’.23

What most determined the timing of the first Soviet bomb test in 1949 was not information learned from spies but, Holloway concludes, the availability of uranium in the Soviet Union. ‘As soon as uranium became available in sufficient quantity,’ he writes, ‘Kurchatov was able to build and start up the experimental reactor.’ Fuchs, who had not visited the Soviet Union, thought that he had accelerated the Soviet bomb project ‘by one year at least’; Holloway is willing to make this one to two years’ time saved through intelligence information, and notes that the British, who were far better represented at Los Alamos than the Soviets, took five years from deciding to build a bomb to testing it, about a year longer than the Russians. ‘One should not overestimate the importance of [the] Soviet intelligence community in setting up the atomic program although its efforts and its contribution were commendable,’ wrote Khariton, who was there. Emphasis on the role of espionage in the Soviet project exaggerates the extent to which proliferation explains the extension of nuclear knowhow. A better model is polycentric, acknowledging as it does multiple sources of knowledge and multiple sites of imaginative and productive work on the nucleus. Physicists in the Soviet Union can share the credit and must share the blame for their efforts to build an atomic bomb after 1945.24

4. Stalin decides to build the bomb

Truman had told Stalin at Potsdam on 24 July that the United States had a powerful new weapon, though he failed to specify what it was. ‘We guessed at once what he had in mind,’ said Foreign Minister Molotov some years later, and the general G. K. Zhukov claimed that Stalin had said, ‘we’ll have to have a talk with Kurchatov today about speeding up our work’. According to Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Stalin now knew that he must try to enter the war against Japan before the Americans dropped the first of their bombs; in the event, of course, he did not quite make it. After Hiroshima, Stalin realized the strategic importance of the bomb. With the United States ambassador Averell Harriman and counselor George Kennan on 8 August, the dictator seemed sanguine, though he let the Americans know the significance of Soviet intervention in the Pacific War and hinted that atomic secrecy was unlikely to be permanent. Privately, Stalin brought together the Kremlin’s commissar (and commissariat) of munitions and Igor Kurchatov. ‘A single demand