The path to the military-political success of the RDS-6S tests
August 12, 2013 marks the 60th anniversary of the test of the first Soviet hydrogen bomb RDS-6s. It was an experimental charge, of little use for military operation, but for the first time in world practice it could be installed on an aircraft carrier. Thus, the success of the test became evidence not so much of a scientific and technical as of a military-political breakthrough.
In 1946, in the remote village of Sarov, where a small plant of the Ministry of Ammunition No. 550 was located, work began to create a base for KB-11 (since 1966 - the All-Union Research Institute of Experimental Physics). The bureau was tasked with developing the design of the first Soviet atomic bomb RDS-1.
On August 29, 1949, RDS-1 was successfully blown up at the Semipalatinsk training ground (Training ground No. 2 of the USSR Ministry of Armed Forces).
More than a year earlier, on June 15, 1948, the chief of KB-11, Pavel Zernov, signed an "Instruction for theoretical work." It was addressed to the chief designer of KB-11, Yuli Khariton, and his closest assistants, physicists Kirill Shchelkin and Yakov Zeldovich. Until January 1, 1949, they were instructed to perform a theoretical and experimental verification of the data on the possibility of implementing the following RDS designs: RDS-3, RDS-4, RDS-5, and before June 1, 1949, according to RDS-6.
Two days later, Zernov concretizes this task as follows: “To develop by January 1, 1949, on the basis of the available preliminary data, a preliminary design of the RDS-6. To develop RDS-6, it is necessary to organize a special group of 10 scientific workers in the research sector and a special group of 10 design engineers in the design sector. Please submit your proposals on the staffing within five days."
Saturated period
In total, the Plan of research, development and test work of KB-11 for 1951 included work on RDS-1 (already for serial products), RDS-1M, RDS-5 (4), RDS-2M, RDS -7, RDS-8 and RDS-6s and RDS-6t. Not all of what was claimed was brought to the later stages of development, not to mention the manufacture of an experimental product for field tests.
The presence in the documents of two indices RDS-6s and RDS-6t was explained by the fact that at first two fundamentally different thermonuclear physical schemes were being worked out: the so-called Andrei Sakharov's puff RDS-6s and Yakov Zeldovich's "pipe" RDS-6t. In the course of the work, the second scheme disappeared and only a "puff" remained, which was successfully tested in August 1953.
Thermonuclear tests have already been actively carried out in the United States. In America, newspaper and magazine hype was whipped up around the possibility of creating a superbomb. For example, in Science News Letter, Dr. Watson Davis published an article on July 17, 1948, entitled "A Super Bomb Is Possible."
On November 1, 1952, on the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean, on the Enewetok Atoll, a thermonuclear explosion of a huge physical installation was made using liquid deuterium, a heavy isotope of hydrogen. From here, by the way, the phrase "hydrogen bomb" went for a walk on the pages of newspapers.
On March 8, 1950, the deputy head of the PSU Avraamy Zavenyagin wrote a letter to the head of KB-11 Pavel Zernov, immediately under two stamps: “Top secret (special folder)” and “Keep along with the cipher. Only personally."
In the letter, Zavenyagin suggests the following:
a) by May 1, 1952, according to the principle proposed by Comrade Sakharov A. D., the RDS-6s product with a small multi-layer filling on ordinary magnesium (this is how lithium was coded in the correspondence) with the addition of 5 conventional units of yttrium (a radioactive isotope of hydrogen - tritium) and in June 1952, to test this product to verify and clarify the theoretical and experimental foundations of the RDS-6s;
b) by October 1, 1952, submit proposals on the design of the RDS-6S, its technical characteristics and production time.
By the end of the summer of 1953, the first Soviet thermonuclear charge was ready for testing. Work began on the preparation of a full-scale experiment at test site No. 2 (Semipalatinsk nuclear test site).
The year 1953 for KB-11 was planned to be very busy. In addition to testing the hydrogen bomb, it was necessary to provide three tests of new atomic bombs with their dropping from carrier aircraft. Work was underway on the ballistic body for the RDS-6s. The charge had not even been made yet, and the first technical assignments for equipping the bomb compartment of the Tu-16 long-range jet bomber were already being prepared for the superbomb.
On April 3, 1953, less than a month after Stalin's death, the new chief of KB-11, Anatoly Aleksandrov, together with Yuliy Khariton, Kirill Shchelkin and deputy chief designer Nikolai Dukhov, signed a list of employees sent to test the RDS-6s.
At the end of May, a reconnaissance reconnaissance group flew to the training ground to find out the state of structures and buildings assigned to KB-11. It was necessary to check both the sites where the test of the RDS-6s was planned, and the structures that were built at the airfield of the testing ground for assembly work with products tested when they were dropped from an airplane with an explosion in the air.
Stunning news
When developing the RDS-6s, designers and technologists had a lot of trouble associated with a number of new materials. The real power of the charge depended on the solution of the problem, which on paper is determined only by the completeness of the calculations and the accuracy of the physical constants. Nevertheless, new technological problems were so important that on June 25, 1953, Zavenyagin, Kurchatov, Aleksandrov and Khariton, in a detailed note addressed directly to Lavrenty Beria, reported on the progress of work as if a Politburo member was working as a chief technologist. The note was just about the details for the RDS-6s. No one in the atomic department, including Beria himself, knew that the very next day he would be humiliated, slandered, and soon shot, most likely even before the RDS-6s was tested.
On June 26, 1953, Beria signed an order of the USSR Council of Ministers No. 8532-rs on the design assignment for the construction of a SU-3 plant (for uranium enrichment) at Combine No. 813. On the same day he was arrested, and at the July 1953 Central Committee Plenum he was struck out of life. country.
The first test of Soviet thermonuclear weapons took place on August 12, 1953. A week earlier, Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR Georgy Malenkov at an extraordinary session of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR said that the United States is not a monopoly in the production of the hydrogen bomb either.
A month earlier, on July 2, 1953, at the plenum of the Central Committee, Malenkov cited as an example of "criminal anti-state actions" Beria's decision "to organize a hydrogen bomb explosion without the knowledge of the Central Committee and the government." That is, Malenkov boasted of what he had condemned before.
On the day of Beria's arrest, the Ministry of Medium Machine Building of the USSR was formed on the basis of the first, second and third main directorates under the Council of Ministers of the USSR. Vyacheslav Malyshev was appointed the first minister, Boris Vannikov and Avraamy Zavenyagin were appointed deputies.
The reorganization was prepared by Beria, such important matters are not resolved overnight. The lower layer of atomic lobbyists learned about this restructuring later, everyone was deafened by the news about Beria.
This is what the largest atomic designer of the USSR, Professor David Fishman, recalled about these days. On the twentieth of June, he flew to the training ground among the KB-11 employees, the group stayed in Omsk and spent the night at the airport hotel. In the evening, David Abramovich, listening on the radio to a message about some solemn meeting in Moscow, drew attention to the fact that Beria was not mentioned when listing the party-state leadership. With that, Fishman fell asleep - the flight was scheduled for early morning.
At the test site, everyone immediately got involved in the work, and after half a month the field phone rang. At this moment, Fishman was installing a lamp on the tower - in the place where the center of the RDS-6s was supposed to be when it was attached to the tower before detonating. This illumination was used to adjust the optical equipment for measurements. The call was made by Alexander Dmitrievich Zakharenkov (later the chief designer of a new facility in the Urals, Deputy Minister of Medium Machine Building of the USSR). He advised Fishman to descend from the height so as not to fall from the following news: Beria was arrested.
The news was really stunning, especially for the representatives of the Council of Ministers. It was they, like the representatives of the MGB and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, who oversaw the issues of the regime and security. But even this news did not disrupt the intense pace of preparation for the tests.
At the last line
The political cost of the success or failure of the 1953 hydrogen explosion was almost the same as that of the 1949 atomic explosion. As Andrei Sakharov wrote in his memoirs, "we were at the last line." More than there was, it was no longer possible to worry.
August 12, 1953. 7:30 am local time (at 4.30 am Moscow time). The temperature of the luminous zone of the explosion, determined by the method of a fireball, significantly exceeded the solar one. A huge red-orange glow was visible from a distance of 170 kilometers. The size of the explosion cloud was 15–16 kilometers in height and 15–17 kilometers in width. The total TNT equivalent was estimated at 400 kilotons.
On August 20, 1953, Pravda published a government report on the testing of a hydrogen bomb in the Soviet Union. Sakharov and his colleagues felt themselves triumphant.
Later, in the same dimensions, KB-11 developed a hydrogen charge for an aircraft bomb, designated RDS-27, which was successfully tested on November 6, 1955 by bombing with a Tu-16. An air bomb with an RDS-27 charge was transferred to the Air Force and became the first military thermonuclear ammunition. And the USSR finally constituted itself as a thermonuclear power.
