The Soviet Atom Bomb

Podcast Transcript

On August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union successfully tested its first atomic bomb.

The announcement shocked the world, especially the United States, which predicted the Soviets wouldn’t have Nuclear Weapons until the mid-1950s.

The big question was, how did the Soviets make the bomb so fast? Well, the Americans inadvertently helped them, as did the resources they captured in Eastern Europe.

Learn more about how the Soviets got the bomb on this Episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

One of the biggest advances in physics in the first half of the 20th century was the discovery of the structure of the atom and its nucleus.

The discoveries of the nucleus, radiation, and the identification of radioactive elements were among some of the greatest discoveries of the period.

While Russians were heavily involved in the physics community at this time, they weren’t among the most prominent names, nor were they the ones making the most significant discoveries.

That isn’t to say that Russian physicists weren’t good, just that Russia wasn’t the epicenter of the physics world at this period.

The culmination of these discoveries, at least for the purpose of this episode, was the discovery of nuclear fission in December 1938 by a German team that included Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassmann, Lise Meitner, and Otto Frisch.

This discovery was exciting for physicists, and many researchers around the world began their own independent research into fission.

Most focused on generating power via a controlled fission reaction, but several governments had a different idea. They realized that the splitting of the atom could be done in an uncontrolled reaction, which could, in theory, result in a massive explosion.

Russian physicists such as Yakov Zeldovich, Georgy Flerov, and Igor Kurchatov understood the physics well enough to see its military potential.

However, for the Soviet Union, its fission research had to be halted due to the start of the Second World War and the German invasion in 1941.

By 1942, Georgy Flerov noticed that the US, Germany, and the United Kingdom had all stopped publishing research on nuclear fission. He realized this meant that other countries must be working on creating an atomic bomb.

He reported this information to Stalin, who approved the Soviet Atomic Bomb project in 1942.

The Soviet atom bomb program wasn’t realistically feasible at that time, given they were in the middle of a life-or-death struggle with the Germans.

Even before the war, there had been issues in conducting nuclear physics research in the Soviet Union.

The Soviet Union had almost none of the infrastructure needed to extract uranium ore, and at that time had not found any deposits of uranium within its borders.

As uranium was needed for research, in particular enriched uranium, it essentially halted all scientific experimentation.

The Soviet program was much smaller than the American program at this point, with approximately just twenty physicists working on the project.

Their research primarily focused on general atomic fission that could support both nuclear reactors and possibly weapons.

However, the Soviet project gained a new urgency in 1945 when the Trinity Test was conducted in New Mexico, and two atomic bombs were dropped over Japan.

Knowing that the Americans had a working atom bomb, and with the war with Germany now behind them, the Soviet atomic program became the top priority.

Despite all the money and attention the program received, in 1945, the Soviets were far behind not just the Americans but also the British.

Yet, within four years, they managed to detonate their own atomic bomb.

How were they able to do this with relatively limited resources and a post-war economic infrastructure that was depleted?

First, they were able to create a solid research program..

The Soviet atomic program’s architecture fused a scientific core inside the shell of the state security apparatus. In September 1945, Stalin created the Special Committee under Lavrentiy Beria to drive the bomb effort with emergency powers over resources, personnel, and secrecy.

Beria was the chief henchman of Joseph Stalin and the man who oversaw many of his purges and killings. He will be the subject of his own episode in the future as his story is both fascinating and horrific.

The First Chief Directorate, led by Boris Vannikov, managed the sprawling new industry. Igor Kurchatov, a talented experimentalist with a gift for organizing teams, became the scientific leader.

Kurchatov and Yulii Khariton built the research institute known as KB 11 in Sarov, Russia, and around them, they gathered a formidable cadre of scientists that included the elite of the Soviet scientific community.

The state poured money and manpower into mines, reactors, chemical plants, and enrichment facilities. Gulag labor was used heavily in uranium mining and construction. Even in a devastated postwar economy, nuclear work received absolute priority in materials and transportation.

Another big reason was espionage.

Within the Manhattan Project, the American atomic program, there were multiple cases of “atomic spies,” who would provide the Soviets information on the development of the American program.

The Soviets had infiltrated the Manhattan Project from the beginning.

The majority of the research took place at a secret facility in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and was led by Robert Oppenheimer.

Two bomb designs were developed during the Manhattan Project: a uranium bomb, which was used over Hiroshima, and a plutonium bomb, which was used over Nagasaki.

While the Soviets had multiple spies who had infiltrated the Manhattan Project, for the sake of time, I will only discuss three of the confirmed spies.

The most well-known spy was Klaus Fuchs.

Fuchs was a German scientist who was originally working on the British bomb program. He was brought on because of his staunch anti-Nazi views, but the program leaders did not realize he was also rabidly pro-Soviet.

Fuchs supplied a steady stream of technical reports on bomb theory, implosion hydrodynamics, and design parameters. He also provided the Soviet Union with a technical report and specifications needed for fission bombs of both the plutonium and uranium designs.

His motivations to aid the Soviets are typically attributed to two main reasons.

The first was simply that he was a Communist. The second was his belief that nuclear weapons should not be held by a single country. He believed that the best way to guarantee global security was for multiple countries to hold the bomb, as if more than one country had the weapon, there was the potential for retaliation if they ever used it.

Another spy was Harry Gold.

Gold was from Switzerland, but worked in America as a laboratory chemist. Notably, he was not at Los Alamos, so he was used as a communications liaison for the spies working on the project.

He was caught passing the information gathered from Fuchs to the Soviets.

Gold’s arrest led to other Soviet Spies getting arrested who were involved in the Manhattan Project.

One of those spies was David Greenglass, who was an American machinist who worked on the Manhattan Project.

Greengrass was arrested and admitted to having passed sketches of lens geometries that helped Soviet analysts avoid fruitless designs.

Another key spy was physicist Theodore Hall.

Hall was one of the youngest scientists recruited to work on the Manhattan Project.

By 1944, Hall felt it was impossible for the Germans to make the atomic bomb and was worried about an American monopoly on nuclear weapons. He was fearful that a nuclear monopoly would lead to Fascism in America.

That, coupled with General Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project, stating that the real target of the bomb was the USSR, resulted in Hall reporting on scientists, conditions, and the basic science being used at Los Alamos.

Hall, Greenglass, and Fuchs were the only confirmed spies working in Los Alamos until a fourth, Oscar Seborer, was identified in 2019.

It is believed that there were probably more informants for the Soviets working on the Manhattan Project who were never discovered.

The spying efforts were helpful to the Soviet Union as they were able to altogether avoid tests that would’ve been needed to determine such things as the critical mass of uranium or plutonium required.

In general, spying accelerated the process because they didn’t have to go through all of the testing and theoretical debates that the Americans had to go through. They basically had the equivalent of a cheat sheet with many of the answers to basic questions.

Even though spies were helping the Soviets get the information, they were worried that the reports they were getting from their American agents were false.

For that reason, the Soviets didn’t simply copy and reverse engineer the bomb, but instead used it as a guide for their scientists.

Another thing that spurred the Soviet program was the use of captured scientists and resources from the war to advance the program.

The Soviets recruited or compelled German specialists to help them. Manfred von Ardenne, Gustav Hertz, Peter Thiessen, and Nikolaus Riehl contributed to isotope separation concepts, vacuum technology, and uranium metallurgy.

Their work did not replace the Soviet scientific core. Instead, it accelerated specific industrial bottlenecks such as high vacuum pumps, cascade control, and reactor-grade uranium metal.

They also didn’t trust the German scientists working with them, which is why the Germans were relegated to lower-priority projects.

All of the things I’ve mentioned so far were important to the development of the Soviet bomb program. However, all of the physicists in the world, and all of America’s atomic secrets would be for nothing if they couldn’t get their hands on uranium and develop the ability to enrich it.

While the work at Los Alamos gets most of the attention from the Manhattan Project, it was the enrichment of uranium and the creation of plutonium where most of the money was spent.

The war’s end gave the Soviets the raw materials they needed. Soviet trophy brigades and security teams scoured occupied territory for uranium ore and equipment.

The uranium mines at Jáchymov, Czechoslovakia and the newly created Wismut uranium mining enterprise in East Germany became early lifelines for nuclear material.

The Germans also had diffusion plants, which would be used to enrich the Uranium for the bomb. It is estimated that the aid of the German scientists and materials allowed the Soviets to speed up the program by at least six months and possibly more.

The culmination of the Soviet atomic bomb program took place on August 29, 1949, at the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan.

The USSR detonated a device they dubbed RDS 1, which Western observers called Joe 1.

The yield, a little over twenty kilotons, was similar to a Fat Man-class implosion device, which was used over Nagasaki.

The United States learned of the first Soviet atomic test just days after through atmospheric monitoring. After the detonation, radioactive debris drifted eastward and was detected by a U.S. Air Force aircraft equipped with special air-sampling filters flying near Japan.

The samples contained isotopes characteristic of a nuclear explosion, and further analysis at laboratories in the United States confirmed that the Soviet Union had successfully tested an atomic bomb.

President Harry Truman publicly announced the discovery on September 23, 1949, ending any doubt about the Soviet Union’s nuclear capability.

The political shock was immediate. American strategy had rested on an atomic monopoly that was now gone.

In Moscow, the success vindicated Stalin’s decision to back Beria’s unforgiving methods and elevated Kurchatov and his colleagues to a protected elite status in the country.

The test launched the next phase of competition, a sprint to thermonuclear weapons that would soon transform strategic doctrine on both sides.

So, going back to the original question, how did the Soviets make the bomb so fast?

It was a mix of all the factors described earlier.

Spying and intelligence gathered from the Americans were undoubtedly a part of it. However, the capture of Eastern European uranium mines and German enrichment facilities also greatly sped the process along.

Underlying everything was a monomanical pursuit of the bomb by Stalin and Beria after the war, which allowed the Soviet Union to achieve weapons parity with the United States and become the second member of the nuclear club.

The Executive Producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The Associate Producers are Austin Oetken and Cameron Kieffer.

Research and writing for this episode were provided by Olivia Ashe.

Today’s review comes from listener Wes_Joe over on Apple Podcasts in the United States. They write.

Muy Bien

Extremely important, very informative. Unlike other history podcasts, no political bias is shown. It is now my favorite!

Thanks, Wes! I always enjoy hitting number one on any podcast chart, even if that is just someone’s personal chart. We will be waiting for you in the Completionist Club.

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