The making of the Soviet bomb

Abstract

This brief excerpt from the memoirs of Vastly S. Yemelyanov conveys something of the pressure under which nuclear weapons were developed in the Soviet Union. Yemelyanov, who has been a frequent participant in Pugwash meetings, joined the nuclear project in September 1945, when it was being expanded. He became deputy to Boris L. Vannikov, the people's commissar of munitions, who had just been appointed to head a special directorate under the Council of People's Commissars (later the Council of Ministers) to manage the nuclear program. Yemelyanov also had close ties with Abraamii Zavenyagin, who was deputy to the head of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD, later MVD, predecessor to the KGB), and headed the special administration of the NKVD for the nuclear project. Zavenyagin too had been a major figure in the industrialization drive of the 1930s. The political police played a key role in the nuclear project, and Stalin's deputy Lavrenty P. Berta was in overall charge; camp labor was used i...