The Soviet Atomic Project

How the Soviet Union Obtained the Atomic Bomb

Lee G Pondrom

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9789813235571
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Physics
• Index: Physics

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The book describes the lives of the people who gave Stalin his weapon — scientists, engineers, managers, and prisoners during the early post war years from 1945–1953. Many anecdotes and vicissitudes of life at that time in the Soviet Union accompany considerable technical information regarding the solutions to formidable problems of nuclear weapons development.

The contents should interest the reader who wants to learn more about this part of the history and politics in 20th century physics. The prevention of nuclear proliferation is a topic of current interest, and the procedure followed by the Soviet Union as described in this book will help to understand the complexities involved.

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Introduction --> Contents:

• Wartime Soviet Industry
• Development of Nuclear Physics Before the Discovery of Fission
• The Discovery of Fission of Uranium
• The Soviet Union and Stalin's Terror 1937–1939
• The Soviet Union and Nuclear Research 1934–1942
• The Manhattan Project Creates Los Alamos
• The Soviet Union Creates Laboratory #2
• Soviet Espionage and the Atomic Project
• Players in the Drama — Stalin, Beria, and Kurchatov
• Industrial Plants Move to the Urals
• The Soviet Union Creates Arzamas-16
• Uranium and Plutonium
• German Scientists and the Soviet Atomic Project
• Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Range
• Appendices:
  • Nuclear Masses
  • Controlled Nuclear Chain Reactions
  • Isotope Separation
  • Charged Particle Accelerators
  • Spontaneous Fission of Uranium, K A Petrzhak and G N Flerov, JETP 10, 1013, (1940)
  • Nuclear Weapons
  • Encryption and Decryption
  • Soviet Intelligence
  • Critical Assemblies

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--> Readership: Students, researchers, and general readers interested in physics and history of science. -->
History of Nuclear Weapons;History of 20th Century Physics0 Key Features:

• Written by a physicist, the perspective on many events is different from other similar studies
• Extensive use of declassified materials from the Soviet archives
• Personal experience in the Soviet Union authenticatics various circumstances described

Chapter 1

Wartime Soviet Industry

1.1.The American Challenge

The Manhattan project was carried out in the continental United States in wartime. While daily life in the US in the 1940’s was restricted by shortages, ration cards, and meatless Tuesdays, and the economy was on a wartime footing, the country was not invaded by enemy forces. The Manhattan project cost $2 billion in then year dollars, 95% of which was spent on construction.¹ To accomplish its mission in a timely fashion required vast industrial capability, electric power, and modern infrastructure. General Groves, the overall head of the US project, has said that the bomb would never have been built in peacetime.² It simply required too many resources. The industry created was comparable to the automobile industry in the US at that time.³

Soviet physicists in 1945 knew that an atomic bomb would work, which left no uncertainty in the achievability of their goal. Nevertheless, in order to reach that goal in only four years after the end of WWII – the successful test of an atomic bomb – the Soviet Union had to create industries for isotope separation and plutonium production comparable to that of the United States. This chapter describes how the infrastructure needed to accomplish this task came into being in the Soviet Union under very difficult circumstances before and during the war.

1.2.Soviet Industrialization Before the War

First it is necessary to briefly describe the situation before the war started. The Soviet Union began a concentrated effort to industrialize the country and catch up with the West soon after the end of the civil war in the 1920’s. Reform of agriculture was necessary in parallel with industrialization, because peasant farming was not efficient enough to feed a growing number of city dwellers and factory workers. The construction of Magnitogorsk was one of the initiatives of Stalin’s first 5-year plan. A site was selected at the southeast side of the Ural Mountains, on the Ural River in the Chelyabinsk Region. Iron ore was available nearby, although coal had to be delivered by railroad. The plan was to build from scratch the world’s largest steel mill, located well into the interior of the country, and safe from possible invaders. The US Steel plant in Gary, Indiana was used as a model for both the plant and the town where the workers lived.

Construction began early in 1929, and the railroad reached the construction site in June of that year. The construction workers came from regional farmers displaced by collectivization, imported workers from the western Soviet Union, and prisoners. Living conditions were initially very primitive. Workers and families lived in tents and makeshift dormitories in a climate which had severe winters. Later on, in the 1930’s, Magnitogorsk attracted Western volunteers interested in the communist experiment. The first steel was produced in 1932, and the mill was up to full capacity by 1937. Half of the steel for tanks in WWII was produced at Magnitogorsk.⁴ The region also had hydroelectric power, and coal mines.

Chelyabinsk is a town to the north of Magnitogorsk, over 100 years older, and an industrial center itself. It had served as a focus for work on the trans-Siberian railroad during the reign of Tsar Nicholas II. It too enjoyed industrial upgrades from the Soviet government in the 1930’s, including a tractor plant and a metallurgical plant, which formed the base for manufacturing tanks for the Red Army in WWII. North of Chelyabinsk lies Ekaterinburg, which was called Sverdlovsk during Soviet times. This town is famous for the assassination of the Tsar and his family by Bolsheviks in 1918. Sverdlovsk furnished new homes for displaced industry from the western Soviet Union.

“The Urals,” wrote president of the USSR Academy of Sciences V.L. Komarov, “is the richest country for iron, non-ferrous metals, light metals, fuel and chemical resources. This region, stretching parallel to the front lines, at a distance of one to two thousand kilometers, is a powerful line of economic fortifications, the richest deposits, factories, and electric power stations, created during the course of the five year plans.”⁵ This region was to play an important role in the Soviet atomic project.

1.3.German Invasion Causes Eastern Migration

In 1941 significant industrial and agricultural resources existed in the western Soviet Union. There were large factories in the Moscow and Leningrad regions, productive agriculture in western Ukraine, and factories in Kiev and Kharkov. The German invasion threatened to overrun all of this territory. Moscow, Leningrad, and Kharkov were also important centers for experimental and theoretical work in nuclear physics before WWII. Evacuations disrupted research as well as industrial production. One of the best known Soviet theoretical physicists, Lev D. Landau, was at Kharkov before the war. A clever nuclear experimentalist, Fritz Houtermans, was also there. Later Landau was at Moscow, as was Peter Kapitza, another internationally known physicist, who had spent 13 years in Cambridge, England, working with Ernest Rutherford.

Industries, arts, women and children, foreign dignitaries, and Vladimir Lenin were all evacuated from Moscow. Wait a minute, you say, Lenin died in 1924, how could he catch a train out of Moscow in 1941? Lenin was, and is preserved in his mausoleum on Red Square. Fear that the Germans would capture Moscow and Lenin in his tomb caused the Soviet government to move the body to Tyumen, in Siberia, where it stayed until March, 1945.⁶

Leningrad was host to Georgy Flerov, Igor Kurchatov, and Yuli Khariton, all of whom we shall learn much more later, as they played key roles in the Soviet Atomic Project. In the 1930’s the institutes at Kharkov and Leningrad each had charged particle accelerators for the study of nuclear reactions. In October, 1938, the Academy of Sciences of the USSR formally established a commission for atomic nuclei. Kharkov had a 1.2 MeV electrostatic accelerator to make neutrons by deuteron stripping. Construction of a cyclotron was started there, but not completed before the war. There was a working cyclotron for neutron production at the Radium Institute in Leningrad, and an electrostatic accelerator at the Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute.⁷ The USSR physics laboratories before the war had capability and equipment for the study of nuclear reactions on par with other leading laboratories in the world.⁸ The Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute began construction on another cyclotron in 1939, which was completed after the war in Moscow. During the Leningrad blockade the Physico-Technical Institute went to Kazan.⁹

The evacuation of the city of Leningrad began in July, 1941, with the packaging of priceless works of art from the Hermitage museum, to be shipped by train to Sverdlovsk.¹⁰ Women and children were also evacuated to the east beginning in July, but the population of the city did not drop that much, because of an influx of refugees from surrounding territories.¹¹ Evacuation of factories making war supplies was problematic, because the products were needed immediately at the front, which was just outside the city. After the city was blockaded, some factory equipment was actually shipped out by air!¹² Some laboratory equipment was similarly evacuated.

The Donets Basin, or Donbass, in eastern Ukraine, was and still is a heavily industrialized region. By the autumn of 1941, some three months after the invasion on June 22, Leningrad and Kiev had been surrounded, and Moscow itself was in grave danger. Shortly after the invasion Stalin proclaimed a ‘scorched earth’ policy, in which no useful equipment or resources should be left for the Germans. When possible, resources were to be moved east rather than destroyed in place. Thus the great movement of factories, machine tools, and all kinds of supplies from west to east ahead of the invading armies began.

Boris L. Vannikov, Peoples Commissar for Armaments from January, 1939 was arrested on June 7, 1941 for ‘exceeding his authority,’ and was sitting in prison when the Germans invaded. He was released on July 25, 1941, and immediately put to work on the evacuation of Soviet industry. This was a complete surprise to him, as he expected the war to be fought on German soil rather than on territory of the USSR.¹³ His boss was Lavrenty P. Beria, Minister of Internal Affairs, and Stalin’s right hand man. Vannikov was arrested again in December, 1941, and released the following January, in an episode told in Chapter 9. Beria as Minister of Internal Affairs had control over the entire country, industry, economy, prison camps, free labor - all resources except the Red Army. Beria and Vannikov played crucial roles in the Soviet Atomic Project after WWII, and we shall meet them again later.

On July 5, 1941, orders were given to evacuate the Leningrad Kirov Plant and the Kharkov Tractor Plant to the Chelyabinsk region. On August 7, the Moscow factories “Hammer and Sickle” and “Electrostal” were ordered to relocate in the Urals.¹⁴ “Electrostal,” when restored to Moscow after the war, will play a role in the Soviet Atomic Project.

Evacuation receiving points were created in Sverdlovsk, Gorky, Kuybyshev, Chelyabinsk, Novosibirsk, Magnitogorsk, Tashkent, and other cities. Wood was used for construction, and a large building could be finished in 15-20 days.

“During the winter, in one of the outskirts of Sverdlovsk, where they were assembling the plant “Bolshevik,” which had been shipped from Kiev, it was possible to observe the following scene. Underneath the pine trees, in which hung electric lamps, the machine tools were working. On a spot nearby, welders cut steel, showering the snow with golden sparks. At the flaming furnace, the blacksmiths forged the burning metal. Thus was born the now famous Ural Order of Red Labor Banner Chemical Machinery Building Plant.”¹⁵

In order to finance the shift of the economy to a war footing, military expenses for the second half of 1941 were increased by 20.6 billion rubles, and civilian branches of the national economy were reduced by a similar amount.¹⁶ Ordinary civilian goods disappeared. If your teapot broke in 1941, you would have to live without it for a while.

Evacuation of electric power involved special challenges, since nothing worked i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Wartime Soviet Industry
• Chapter 2: Development of Nuclear Physics Before the Discovery of Fission
• Chapter 3: The Discovery of Fission of Uranium
• Chapter 4: The Soviet Union and Stalin’s Terror 1937-1939
• Chapter 5: The Soviet Union and Nuclear Research 1934-1942
• Chapter 6: The Manhattan Project Creates Los Alamos
• Chapter 7: The Soviet Union Creates Laboratory #2
• Chapter 8: Soviet Espionage and the Atomic Project
• Chapter 9: Players in the Drama – Stalin, Beria, and Kurchatov
• Chapter 10: Industrial Plants Move to the Urals
• Chapter 11: The Soviet Union Creates Arzamas-16
• Chapter 12: Uranium and Plutonium
• Chapter 13: German Scientists and the Soviet Atomic Project
• Chapter 14: Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Range
• Appendix A: Nuclear Masses
• Appendix B: Controlled Nuclear Chain Reactions
• Appendix C: Isotope Separation
• Appendix D: Charged Particle Accelerators
• Appendix E: Spontaneous Fission of Uranium, K.A. Petrzhak and G.N. Flerov, JETP 10, 1013, (1940)
• Appendix F: Nuclear Weapons
• Appendix G: Encryption and Decryption
• Appendix H: Soviet Intelligence
• Appendix J: Critical Assemblies
• Bibliography
• Index