The Claws of the Bear: A History of the Soviet Armed Forces from 1917 To The Present by Brian Moynahan

Author:Brian Moynahan [Moynahan, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2014-09-23T22:00:00+00:00

Part Four – The Mouth of the Cannon: Khrushchev and the Bomb

Chapter Twenty-Eight – Armageddon: The Bomb

The Russians were slow into the nuclear field. They had made little headway in nuclear physics before the war and Barbarossa stopped most research. There was some native base, besides the treason of physicists in the West, to build on when Stalin ordered an all-out effort for a nuclear bomb following Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Igor Kurchatov, the leading force in this drive, was directing four nuclear physics laboratories at the Leningrad Physicotechnical Institute by 1934.[373] Abram Ioffe had established a laboratory to study the nucleus at the end of 1932. The Radium Institute was directed by V. G. Khlopin, a radiochemist who later developed the industrial processes for producing plutonium.[374] The director of the Leningrad Institute of Physical Chemistry was N. N. Semenov, later to win a Nobel Prize for his work on chain reactions. A keen eye was kept on research abroad, notably at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge.

Soviet research was remarkably open, a sign that the leadership had little idea of its importance. Papers were published on the separation of isotopes and the production of heavy water in the spring of 1940. Two physicists working under Kurchatov discovered the spontaneous fission of uranium. A Uranium Commission was established in June 1940. Plans were made for the production of heavy water, the construction of cyclotrons, studies of isotope separation and for exploration of scarce uranium deposits. But funding was modest. A proposal by Kurchatov for an experimental reactor was turned down by the Uranium Commission in November 1940.[375]

Progress was largely halted by Barbarossa. Kurchatov found himself by the Black Sea working on counter-measures to German naval mines. The efficient Russian spy network reported in 1942 that the British, Americans and Germans were working on a nuclear bomb. An observant former student of Kurchatov, a young air force lieutenant, noticed that US scientific magazines were no longer publishing anything of interest on nuclear fission and that the names of the leading Western physicists had vanished from print. He concluded that the Americans were working on a bomb in secret. He wrote to Stalin, who was irritated that such important intelligence had come from a mere lieutenant rather than the Academy of Sciences.

Stalin was assured that the development of a uranium bomb would take between ten and twenty years and that its cost would be astronomic. The Russians lacked the vast resources in science and cash necessary to get ahead with real development whilst still fighting a war. However, Kurchatov was brought back to Moscow as director of a small nuclear centre in February or March 1943.[376] He set himself three main research goals: to achieve a chain reaction in an experimental reactor using natural uranium; to develop methods of isotope separation; and to study the design of both the U-235 and the plutonium bombs. By the end of 1944 he had a hundred-strong team, tiny compared with the US effort. Kurchatov began to build a

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