Soviet atomic bomb project

The Soviet atomic bomb project was authorized by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union to develop nuclear weapons during and after World War II.

Physicist Georgy Flyorov, suspecting a Western Allied nuclear program, urged Stalin to start research in 1942. Early efforts were made at Laboratory No. 2 in Moscow, led by Igor Kurchatov, and by Soviet-sympathizing atomic spies in the US Manhattan Project. Espionage coups, especially via Klaus Fuchs and David Greenglass, included detailed descriptions of the implosion-type Fat Man bomb and plutonium production. In the final months of the war, the Soviet "Russian Alsos" task force competed against the Western Allies' Alsos Mission to capture German and Austrian nuclear scientists and material, including refined uranium and cyclotrons. The Soviet project utilized East German industry for further uranium mining, refinement, and instrument manufacture. Lavrentiy Beria was placed in charge of the atomic project, and the replication of the Fat Man bomb was prioritized.

The Manhattan Project had established a monopoly on the global uranium market. The Soviet project relied on SAG Wismut in East Germany and the development of the Taboshar mine in Tajikistan. Domestic large-scale production of high purity graphite and high purity uranium metal, to construct plutonium production reactors, was a significant challenge.

In late 1946, F-1, the first nuclear reactor outside North America, achieved criticality at Laboratory No. 2. In mid-1948, the A-1 plutonium production reactor became operational at the Mayak site, and in mid-1949, the first plutonium metal was separated. The first nuclear weapon was assembled at the KB-11 design bureau, led by Yulii Khariton, in the closed city of Arzamas-16 (Sarov).

On 29 August 1949, the Soviet Union secretly conducted its first weapon test, RDS-1, at the Semipalatinsk Test Site of the Kazakh SSR. Despite the hardship faced by the Russian academy of sciences during the national revolution in 1917, followed by the violent civil war in 1922, Russian scientists had made remarkable efforts toward the advancement of physics research in the Soviet Union by the 1930s. Before the first revolution in 1905, the mineralogist Vladimir Vernadsky had made a number of public calls for a survey of Russia's uranium deposits but none were heeded. The discovery excited the Russian physicists, and they began conducting their independent investigations on nuclear fission, mainly aiming towards power generation, as many were skeptical of the possibility of creating an atomic bomb anytime soon. Early efforts were led by Yakov Frenkel (a physicist specialised on condensed matter), who did the first theoretical calculations on continuum mechanics directly relating the kinematics of binding energy in fission process in 1940.

World War II and accelerated feasibility

thumb|250px|right|The 1942 Soviet report on the feasibility of uranium titled: Disposition No. 2352: "On the organization of work on uranium.

After a strong lobbying of Soviet scientists, the Soviet government initially set up a commission that was to address the "uranium problem" and investigate the possibility of chain reaction and isotope separation. The Uranium Problem Commission was ineffective because the German invasion of Soviet Union eventually limited the focus on research, as the Soviet Union became engaged in a bloody conflict along the Eastern Front for the next four years. The Soviet atomic weapons program had no significance, and most work was unclassified as the papers were continuously published as public domain in academic journals.

In 1940–1942, Georgy Flyorov, a Russian physicist serving as an officer in the Soviet Air Force, noted that despite progress in other areas of physics, the German, British, and American scientists had ceased publishing papers on nuclear science. Clearly, they each had active secret research programs. The dispersal of Soviet scientists had sent Abram Ioffe's Radium Institute from Leningrad to Kazan; and the wartime research program put the "uranium bomb" programme third, after radar and anti-mine protection for ships. Kurchatov had moved from Kazan to Murmansk to work on mines for the Soviet Navy.

In April 1942, Flyorov directed two classified letters to Stalin, warning him of the consequences of the development of atomic weapons: "the results will be so overriding [that] it won't be necessary to determine who is to blame for the fact that this work has been neglected in our country." The second letter, by Flyorov and Konstantin Petrzhak, highly emphasized the importance of a "uranium bomb": "it is essential to manufacture a uranium bomb without a delay." Despite early and accelerated efforts, it was reported by historians that efforts on building a bomb using weapon-grade uranium seemed hopeless to Soviet scientists.

Immediately after the atomic bombing, the Soviet Politburo took control of the atomic bomb project by establishing a special committee to oversee the development of nuclear weapons as soon as possible.

Organization and administration

The German assistance

From 1941 to 1946, the Soviet Union's Ministry of Foreign Affairs handled the logistics of the atomic bomb project, with Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov controlling the direction of the program. However, Molotov proved to be a weak administrator, and the program stagnated. Beria is noted for leadership that helped the program to its final implementation.

Espionage

Soviet atomic ring

thumb|right|250px|The nuclear and industrial espionages in the United States by American sympathisers of communism who were controlled by their rezident Russian officials in North America greatly aided the speed of the Soviet nuclear program from 1942–54. The willingness in sharing classified information to the Soviet Union by recruited American communist sympathizers increased when the Soviet Union faced possible defeat during the German invasion in World War II. in September 1942. Anatoli Yatzkov, another NKVD official in New York, was also involved in obtaining sensitive information gathered by Sergei Kournakov from Saville Sax.

In 1943, Molotov shared with Kurchatov the intelligence data accumulated through NKVD espionage. Kurchatov told Molotov, "The materials are magnificent. They add exactly what we have been missing." According to Richard Rhodes, "...Kurchatov learned enough, to transform the Soviet program...information that would accelerate the Soviet program by a full two years." This included an alternative to the problem of uranium isotope separation in making a bomb. Instead, Plutonium-239 could be used, which could be produced in a uranium-graphite pile through the absorption of neutrons by Uranium-238. Additionally, according to Kurchatov, the espionage material "made us include diffusion experiments in our plans along with centrifuge."

Soviet intelligence management in the Manhattan Project

In 1945, the Soviet intelligence obtained rough blueprints of the first U.S. atomic device. Alexei Kojevnikov has estimated that the primary way in which the espionage may have sped up the Soviet project was that it allowed Khariton to avoid dangerous tests to determine the size of the critical mass. These tests in the U.S., known as "tickling the dragon's tail", consumed a good deal of time and claimed at least two lives; see Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin.

The published Smyth Report of 1945 on the Manhattan Project was translated into Russian, and the translators noted that a sentence on the effect of "poisoning" of Plutonium-239 in the first (lithograph) edition had been deleted from the next (Princeton) edition by Groves. This change was noted by the Russian translators, and alerted the Soviet Union to the problem (which had meant that reactor-bred plutonium could not be used in a simple gun-type bomb like the proposed Thin Man).

One of the key pieces of information, which Soviet intelligence obtained from Fuchs, was a cross-section for D-T fusion. This data was available to top Soviet officials roughly three years before it was openly published in the Physical Review in 1949. However, this data was not forwarded to Vitaly Ginzburg or Andrei Sakharov until very late, practically months before publication. Initially both Ginzburg and Sakharov estimated such a cross-section to be similar to the D-D reaction. Once the actual cross-section become known to Ginzburg and Sakharov, the Sloika design become a priority, which resulted in a successful test in 1953.

Comparing the timelines of H-bomb development, some researchers came to the conclusion that the Soviets had a gap in access to classified information regarding the H-bomb at least between late 1950 and some time in 1953. Earlier, e.g., in 1948, Fuchs gave the Soviets a detailed update of the classical super progress, including an idea to use lithium, but did not explain it was specifically lithium-6. By 1951 Teller accepted the fact that the "classical super" scheme wasn't feasible, following results obtained by various researchers (including Stanislaw Ulam) and calculations performed by John von Neumann in late 1950.

Yet the research for the Soviet analogue of "classical super" continued until December 1953, when the researchers were reallocated to a new project working on what later became a true H-bomb design, based on radiation implosion. This remains an open topic for research, whether the Soviet intelligence was able to obtain any specific data on Teller–Ulam design in 1953 or early 1954. Yet, Soviet officials directed the scientists to work on a new scheme, and the entire process took less than two years, commencing around January 1954 and producing a successful test in November 1955. It also took just several months before the idea of radiation implosion was conceived, and there is no documented evidence claiming priority. It is also possible that Soviets were able to obtain a document lost by John Wheeler on a train in 1953, which reportedly contained key information about thermonuclear weapon design.

Initial design of thermonuclear weapons

thumb|250px|left|

Early ideas of the thermonuclear bomb came from the Russian espionages in the United States, and the internal Soviet studies. Though the espionage did help the Soviet studies, the early American thermonuclear designs and concepts had substantial flaws, so it may have confused, rather than assisted, the Soviet effort to achieve the nuclear capability. The designers of the early thermonuclear bombs envisioned using an atomic bomb as a trigger to provide the needed heat and compression to initiate the thermonuclear reaction in a layer of liquid deuterium between the fissile material and the surrounding chemical high explosive. The group would realize that a lack of sufficient heat and compression of the deuterium would result in an insignificant fusion of the deuterium fuel. This second bomb idea was not a fully evolved thermonuclear bomb in the contemporary sense, but a crucial step between pure fission bombs and the thermonuclear "supers". Due to the three-year lag in making the key breakthrough of radiation compression from the United States the Soviet Union's development efforts followed a different course of action. In the United States they decided to skip the single-stage fusion bomb and make a two-stage fusion bomb as their main effort. Unlike the Soviet Union, the analog RDS-7 advanced fission bomb was not further developed, and instead, the single-stage 400-kiloton RDS-6S was the Soviet's bomb of choice. The test produced a yield of 400 kilotons, about ten times more powerful than any previous Soviet test. Around this time the United States detonated its first super using radiation compression on 1 November 1952, code-named Mike. Though the Mike was about twenty times greater than the RDS-6S, it was not a design that was practical to use, unlike the RDS-6S. and would even exceed them in time.

Logistics

thumb|right|The 1981 CIA intelligence data showing the Soviet nuclear weapons sites in throughout the former Soviet Union. Declassified in 2017.

Mining of raw uranium

The single largest problem during the early Soviet program was the procurement of raw uranium ore, as the Soviet Union had limited domestic sources at the beginning of their nuclear program. The era of domestic uranium mining can be dated exactly, to November 27, 1942, the date of a directive issued by the all-powerful wartime State Defense Committee. The first Soviet uranium mine was established in Taboshar, present-day Tajikistan, and was producing at an annual rate of a few tons of uranium concentrate by May 1943. Taboshar was the first of many officially secret Soviet closed cities related to uranium mining and production.

Demand from the experimental bomb project was far higher. The Americans, with the help of Belgian businessman Edgar Sengier in 1940, had already blocked access to known sources in Congo, South Africa, and Canada. In December 1944 Stalin took the uranium project away from Vyacheslav Molotov and gave to it to Lavrentiy Beria. The first Soviet uranium processing plant was established as the Leninabad Mining and Chemical Combine in Chkalovsk (present-day Buston, Ghafurov District), Tajikistan, and new production sites identified in relative proximity. This posed a need for labor, a need that Beria would fill with forced labor: tens of thousands of Gulag prisoners were brought to work in the mines, the processing plants, and related construction.

Domestic production was still insufficient when the Soviet F-1 reactor, which began operation in December 1946, was fueled using uranium confiscated from the remains of the German atomic bomb project. This uranium had been mined in the Belgian Congo, and the ore in Belgium fell into the hands of the Germans after their invasion and occupation of Belgium in 1940. In 1945, the Uranium enrichment through electromagnetic method under Lev Artsimovich also failed due to USSR's inability to build the parallel American Oak Ridge site and the limited power grid system could not produce the electricity for their program.

Further sources of uranium in the early years of the program were mines in East Germany (via the deceptively-named SAG Wismut), Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania (the Băița mine near Ștei) and Poland. Boris Pregel sold 0.23 tonnes of uranium oxide to the Soviet Union during the war, with the authorisation of the U.S. Government.

Eventually, large domestic sources were discovered in the Soviet Union (including those now in Kazakhstan).

The uranium for the Soviet nuclear weapons program came from mine production in the following countries,

{| class="wikitable"

! style="font-weight: bold;" | Year

! style="font-weight: bold;" | USSR

! style="font-weight: bold;" | Germany

! style="font-weight: bold;" | Czechoslovakia

! style="font-weight: bold;" | Bulgaria

! style="font-weight: bold;" | Poland

| 1945

| 14.6 t

| 1946

| 50.0 t

| 15 t

| 18 t

| 26.6 t

| 1947

| 129.3 t

| 150 t

| 49.1 t

| 7.6 t

| 2.3 t

| 1948

| 182.5 t

| 321.2 t

| 103.2 t

| 18.2 t

| 9.3 t

| 1949

| 278.6 t

| 767.8 t

| 147.3 t

| 30.3 t

| 43.3 t

| 1950

| 416.9 t

| 1,224 t

| 281.4 t

| 70.9 t

| 63.6 t

Plutonium production

Reactors in italics were built for tritium production.

{| class="wikitable sortable mw-collapsible"

|+Plutonium production reactors in the USSR

!Reactor name

!Site

!Design power (MWth)

!Upgraded power (MWth)

!Began operation

!Shut down

!Total plutonium (tons)

!Design

!Coolant circuit

|Mayak Production Association

|100

|900

|19 June 1948

|16 June 1987

|6.138

|LWGR

|Single-pass

|AV-1

|Mayak Production Association

|300

|1200

|5 April 1950

|12 August 1989

|8.508

|LWGR

|Single-pass

|AV-2

|Mayak Production Association

|300

|1200

|6 April 1951

|14 July 1990

|8.407

|LWGR

|Single-pass

|AV-3

|Mayak Production Association

|300

|1200

|15 September 1952

|1 November 1990

|7.822

|LWGR

|Single-pass

|AI-IR

|Mayak Production Association

|40

|100

|22 December 1952

|25 May 1987

|0.053

|LWGR

|Single-pass

|OK-180

|Mayak Production Association

|100

|233

|17 October 1951

|3 March 1966

|HWR

|Closed-circuit

|OK-190

|Mayak Production Association

|300

|27 December 1955

|8 November 1965

|HWR

|Closed-circuit

|OK-190M

|Mayak Production Association

|300

|16 April 1966

|16 April 1986

|HWR

|Closed-circuit

|LF-2 "Ludmila"

|Mayak Production Association

|800

|May 1988

|In operation

|HWR

|Closed-circuit

|"Ruslan"

|Mayak Production Association

|800

|1100

|12 June 1979

|In operation

|LWR

|Closed-circuit

|I-1

|Siberian Chemical Combine

|400

|1200

|20 November 1955

|21 September 1990

|8.237

|LWGR

|Single-pass

|EI-2

|Siberian Chemical Combine

|400

|1200

|24 September 1958

|31 December 1990

|7.452

|LWGR

|Closed-circuit

|ADE-3

|Siberian Chemical Combine

|1450

|1900

|14 July 1961

|14 August 1990

|14.020

|LWGR

|Closed-circuit

|ADE-4

|Siberian Chemical Combine

|1450

|1900

|26 February 1964

|20 April 2008

|19.460

|LWGR

|Closed-circuit

|ADE-5

|Siberian Chemical Combine

|1450

|1900

|27 June 1965

|5 June 2008

|19.144

|LWGR

|Closed-circuit

|AD

|Mining and Chemical Combine

|1450

|2000

|25 August 1958

|30 June 1992

|15.433

|LWGR

|Single-pass

|ADE-1

|Mining and Chemical Combine

|1450

|2000

|20 July 1961

|29 September 1992

|14.184

|LWGR

|Single-pass

|ADE-2

|Mining and Chemical Combine

|1450

|1800

|January 1964

|15 April 2010

|16.317

|LWGR

|Closed-circuit

| colspan="6" |Total

|144.9

| colspan="2" |

Important nuclear tests

thumb|The [[mushroom cloud from the<br>first air-dropped bomb test in 1951.<br>]]

thumb|250px|The Soviet program of nuclear weapons produces the stockpile reaching at its height in 1986 exceeding the United States stockpiles.

RDS-1

The RDS-1, (Russian: PДC), was the first Soviet nuclear device that was test fired in Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan on August 29, 1949. The first nuclear test, that proved the Russia's nuclear capability, has many codenames within Russian political community including the internally code-named First Lightning (Первая молния, or Pervaya Molniya).

Nonetheless, the test was widely known as "RDS-1" (Россия делает сама, Rossiya Delayet Sama, which translate as "Russia Does it Herself"), which was suggested by Igor Kurchatov– all Russian nuclear tests were then followed the RDS nomenclature. The Americans codenamed the test as Joe 1. The energy yield measurement and its design was mostly based on the American design "Fat Man", using a TNT/hexogen implosion lens design.

RDS-2

The RDS-2 was a second important nuclear test that was conducted on September 24, 1951. The Soviet physicists measured the energy yield of the device at the 38.3 kiloton. The U.S. codenamed the test as "Joe-2".

RDS-3

The RDS-3 was a third nuclear explosive device that was test fired on October 18, 1951, also in Semipalatinsk. Known as Joe 3 in America, this was a fission device using a composite construction of levitated plutonium core and a uranium-235 shell with estimated blast yield of 41.2 kt. The RDS-3 was also distinguished of being the first Russian air-dropped bomb test which was released at an altitude of 10 km, it detonated 400 meters above the ground.

RDS-4

RDS-4 represented a branch of research on small tactical weapons. It used plutonium in a "levitated" core design. The first test was an air drop on August 23, 1953, yielding 28 kilotons. In 1954, the bomb was also used during Snowball exercise at the Totskoye range, dropped by Tu-4 bomber on the simulated battlefield, in the presence of 40,000 infantry, tanks, and jet fighters. The RDS-4 comprised the warhead of the R-5M, the first medium-range ballistic missile in the world, which was tested with a live warhead for the first and only time on February 5, 1956

RDS-5

RDS-5 was a small plutonium based device, probably using a hollow core. Two different versions were made and tested.

RDS-6s

RDS-6s, the first Soviet test of a hydrogen bomb, took place on August 12, 1953, and was nicknamed Joe 4 by the Americans. It used a layer-cake design of fission and fusion fuels (uranium-235, lithium-6 deuteride, and lithium-6 deuteride tritide) and produced a yield of 400 kilotons. This yield was about ten times more powerful than any previous Soviet test.

RDS-1, RDS-6s, and RDS-37 were all tested at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan.

Tsar Bomba (AN602)

The Tsar Bomba (Царь-бомба) was the largest, most powerful thermonuclear weapon ever detonated. It was a three-stage hydrogen bomb with a yield of about 50 megatons. This is equivalent to ten times the amount of all the explosives used in World War II combined. It was detonated on October 30, 1961, in the Novaya Zemlya archipelago, and was capable of approximately 100 megatons, but was purposely reduced shortly before the launch. Although weaponized, it was not entered into service; it was simply a demonstrative testing of the capabilities of the Soviet Union's military technology at that time. The heat of the explosion was estimated to potentially inflict third degree burns at 100 km distance of clear air.

Chagan

Chagan was a shot in the Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy (also known as Project 7), the Soviet equivalent of the US Operation Plowshare to investigate peaceful uses of nuclear weapons. It was a subsurface detonation. It was fired on January 15, 1965. The site was a dry bed of the river Chagan at the edge of the Semipalatinsk Test Site, and was chosen such that the lip of the crater would dam the river during its high spring flow. The resultant crater had a diameter of 408 meters and was 100 meters deep. A major lake (10,000 m<sup>3</sup>) soon formed behind the 20–35 m high upraised lip, known as Chagan Lake or Balapan Lake.

The photo is sometimes confused with RDS-1 in literature.

Secret cities

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union created at least nine closed cities, known as Atomgrads, in which nuclear weapons-related research and development took place. The code names were generally given by the name of the nearest large city, suffixed with the last two digits of the postcode. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, all of the cities changed their names. All are still legally "closed", though some have parts of them accessible to foreign visitors with special permits (Sarov, Snezhinsk, and Zheleznogorsk).

{| class="wikitable sortable mw-collapsible"

! Cold War names

! Current name

! Established

!Establishments

!Current name

! Primary functions

| Arzamas-16

Arzamas-75

| Sarov

| 1946

|Design Bureau-11

|All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics

| Weapons design and research, warhead assembly

| Sverdlovsk-44

| Novouralsk

| 1946

| colspan="2" |Ural Electrochemical Integrated Plant

| Uranium enrichment

| Chelyabinsk-40

Chelyabinsk-65

| Ozyorsk

| 1947

| colspan="2" |Mayak Production Association

| Plutonium production, component manufacturing

| Sverdlovsk-45

| Lesnoy

| 1947

| colspan="2" |

| Uranium enrichment, warhead assembly

| Tomsk-7

| Seversk

| 1949

| colspan="2" |Siberian Chemical Combine

| Uranium enrichment, plutonium production, component manufacturing

| Krasnoyarsk-26

| Zheleznogorsk

| 1950

| colspan="2" |Mining and Chemical Combine

| Plutonium production

| Zlatoust-36

| Tryokhgorny

| 1952

| colspan="2" |Instrument Making Plant]]

right|thumb|267x267px|The Radioaktivnost warning sign left at the now-ruined and abandoned [[Laboratory B by Lake Sungul, ca. 2009.]]

The Soviets started experimenting with nuclear technology in 1943 with very little regard of nuclear safety as there were no reports of accidents that were ever made public to learn from, and the public was kept in ignorance about the radiation dangers. Many of the nuclear devices left behind radioactive isotopes which have contaminated air, water and soil in the areas immediately surrounding, downwind and downstream of the blast site. According to the records that the Russian government released in 1991, the Soviet Union tested 969 nuclear devices between 1949 and 1990— more nuclear testing than any nation on the planet. Iodine-131, a radioactive isotope that is a major byproduct of fission-based weapons, is retained in the thyroid gland, and so poisoning of this kind is commonplace in impacted populations. When the earliest tests were being conducted, even the scientists had only a poor understanding of the medium-and long-term effects of radiation exposure - many did not notify each other of their work if they had serious accidents or radiation exposure. The domestic government's investment in cleanup measures seems to be driven by economic concerns rather than care for public health. The most significant political legislation in this area is a bill agreeing to turn the already contaminated former weapons complex Mayak into an international radioactive waste dump, accepting cash from other countries in exchange for taking their radioactive byproducts of nuclear industry.