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replicated tasks that their Los Alamos counterparts had undertaken several years earlier. To Georgi Flerov, one of the co-discoverers of spontaneous fission in an experiment set up in a Moscow subway station in February 1940, fell Louis Slotin’s dangerous job: establishing the criticality of two plutonium hemispheres as they moved closer together. Scientists disagreed for a time over whether they had allowed for sufficient compression to produce implosion. The problems were solved, and by summer 1949 Kurchatov was ready to test his bomb. The Soviet Alamogordo was near the town of Semipalatinsk, in northeast Kazakhstan. It was steppe country, very hot in summer, and far away from prying eyes. The bomb was assembled at the foot of a 100-foot tower. Yuli Khariton nested the initiator between the plutonium hemispheres, then, at 2.00 in the morning of 29 August, the ‘article’, as the bomb was nicknamed, was carried up the tower in a freight elevator. At the top the bomb was armed, by Flerov among others. Kurchatov went off to the command post, Beria to an adjacent cabin to sleep. As with Trinity, it rained during the night, causing a brief delay in the test. As with Trinity, the weather improved a bit as dawn arrived. Kurchatov ordered the countdown. At 7.00 it reached zero. The steppe turned white with illumination; the shock wave struck the command center, breaking the glass. ‘It worked,’ said Kurchatov. Beria hugged and kissed him and Khariton. If the bomb had not worked, a scientist later recalled, ‘they would all have been shot’.28

The test bomb was the equivalent of 20 kilotons of TNT, roughly the same as the gadget had yielded at Alamogordo four years and one month earlier. Beria confirmed the shot’s success with an observer who had witnessed an American test several years earlier, then called Stalin with the news. Grumpy at having been awakened, Stalin told Beria that he already knew the result and hung up, once more inciting Beria to fury. The scientists responsible were secretly awarded high state honors, with the highest—Hero of Socialist Labor—going to those slated to be executed if the test shot had failed. The Soviets had entered the nuclear age.29

5. The bomb and the onset of the Cold War

The timing and context of the explosion are impossible to ignore: 1949 was a year of extraordinary tension in the Cold War world. There is, of course, much to say about the Cold War, though most of it is best said somewhere else. Suffice it to say here that, by 1946 anyway, the United States and the Soviet Union had fallen out in a bitter dispute over a host of issues. They disagreed over the disposition of postwar Germany: To what extent should it be punished? Should its size be reduced? Should it be united or divided into spheres of influence controlled by its liberators? They argued over other European states too, with the Americans insisting on free elections in the Soviet-liberated nations of Eastern Europe (especially Poland), while the Russians argued that whoever liberated a country got to shape its political future; as the British and Americans had done in Italy in 1943-4, so the Soviets would do in Bulgaria, Romania, and any other nation where the Red Army had sacrificed soldiers to the elimination of Fascism. There were quarrels over money and goods—the United States had an abundance of both, some of which the Russians wanted for relief and reconstruction—over ideology, principles, and values, over who constituted a danger to whom, over such seeming arcana as the internationalization of waterways, the repatriation of German prisoners, the meaning of language in treaties and agreements, and the definition of such terms as ‘imperialism’, ‘freedom’, and ‘socialism’. On 9 February 1946 Stalin accused the capitalist West of having started the Second World War in an effort to ‘re-divide the “spheres of influence” in their own favor’, insisting that capitalism ‘contains in itself the seeds of a general crisis and of warlike clashes’. Two weeks later, the Moscow embassy’s George Kennan warned, in his famous ‘Long Telegram