But volcanoes in those days were silent, and the United States did not conduct nuclear tests. An airplane took off from the English airfield and took air samples in the upper atmosphere. It turned out: on August 29, a Soviet plutonium bomb was detonated on the territory of Northern Kazakhstan. The world did not yet know that it was made from German uranium according to American drawings. Stanislav Pestov, a writer and physicist, tells how this happened.
Buzzing Kurchatov
… And what a shame: our country had the opportunity to make an atomic bomb before anyone else. An institute dealing with the problems of radioactive materials has been working in the USSR since the 1920s. Spontaneous fission of uranium and secondary neutrons - the basis for a chain reaction - were first discovered in the USSR. And we calculated the critical mass of uranium. The project of the atomic bomb was first proposed by the employees of the Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology Maslov and Shpinel. But no one, including the General Staff of the Red Army, was interested in this until the end of the war. And abroad development was in full swing.
The first information about the British atomic project reached the USSR through the NKVD. They were provided by the "Cambridge Five" led by Kim Philby. Later, data on the American bomb in the USSR was sent by Klaus Fuchs. Motin, an assistant to the Soviet military attaché in Canada, once took out samples of uranium dioxide under the buckle of a trouser belt. Because of this, his stomach was irradiated, and he received a full blood transfusion three times a year.
All documents went to the leadership of the USSR, but only Stalin could make a decision, who was not at all interested in some atoms invisible to the eye. In 1942, one Wehrmacht officer was killed near Taganrog. In his tablet they found documents from which it followed that the Germans were interested in our uranium. Only then did the country's leadership show at least some, albeit sluggish, interest in the atomic bomb. The laboratory of measuring instruments No. 2 was organized under the leadership of Igor Kurchatov, from which the modern Institute of Atomic Energy eventually grew. But even then, according to the recollections of I. Golovin, Kurchatov's deputy, he constantly complained: "I am like an annoying fly for Stalin - I keep buzzing about the bomb, but he just brushes me off."
Fence paint
The attitude of the authorities towards nuclear scientists changed only when, in 1945, the United States dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Soviet military delegation visited the atomic ashes and, as proof, brought to Stalin the head of an unknown Japanese with traces of terrible burns. Only then did the work begin in the Land of Soviets! Kurchatov finally received a huge amount of funding.
Geologists rushed to look for uranium in our vast expanses, but they found it as a result of physics, and in Germany. Academician Khariton miraculously found 100 tons of uranium oxide there - a yellow substance used to paint fences. From it in the city of Sarov the charge for the first Soviet atomic bomb was made. For its creators, they arranged "communism in one separate city": the counters in Sarov were full of sausages, caviar, butter … But the inhabitants of this "paradise" also risked in a terrible way.
The explosion was scheduled for 6 am on August 29, 1949. But the wires used to detonate the bomb were too short. While looking for new ones, while splicing … The first Soviet atomic bomb was detonated at 7 o'clock. The power turned out to be almost calculated - 20 kilotons. It is curious that immediately after the manufacture of the "product", as it was supposed in the USSR, was "hanged", that is.recorded in a personal card in the name of G. Flerov, the future academician and laureate of the State Prize. After the explosion, colleagues joked: "When you decide to quit the institute - how will you report to the personnel department?"
Expert opinion
Nuclear club ticket
Vladimir Evseev, Senior Researcher, Center for International Security, IMEMO RAN:
- Over the years, different countries needed nuclear weapons for different purposes. For the USSR after 1949 it was a guarantee of survival, but at the end of the 1980s its importance declined. Under Gorbachev, it was believed that the West was friendly to us. In the 90s, the situation began to change again, the country's leadership realized that nuclear weapons were needed to compensate for the imbalance not in our favor with regard to conventional weapons. When Marshal Sergeyev was the Minister of Defense, some of us even believed that to maintain stability it was enough to develop only strategic nuclear forces. The fact that ordinary structures should not be forgotten either became finally clear in August last year after the armed conflict with Georgia. For example, North Korea has a different motivation for possessing a nuclear bomb.
The local leadership needs it mainly to preserve the communist regime in its current form. Iran, developing a nuclear project, seeks to emphasize its role as a regional or even an all-Muslim leader. India and Pakistan need a bomb for mutual containment. Israel, which has never acknowledged that it possesses nuclear weapons, but most likely possesses 200 plutonium-based warheads, will insure itself against attack from neighboring Arab countries.
