Soviet Atomic Research Articles

Staff Policy and Personnel Practices. Review of the Monograph “The Soviet Atomic Project: An Experience of Human Resourcing” by N. V. Melnikova

The monograph presents a comprehensive analysis of the staffing of the Soviet nuclear project: its principles, forms, methods, mechanisms, as well as organizational, managerial, educational, economic and social measures in the context of the Soviet economic system. The review highlights that in the book, for the first time, the author presents an analysis of previously unpublished materials and sources of a personal nature. This allows to cover various aspects – from the institutional frameworks for the formation of personnel to internal “atomic” social practices. The significance of the presented research lies in the fact that it shows the role of the human factor in the transformation of the USSR into a nuclear power.

Towards the History of the Soviet Atomic Project: A. M. Marinov’s Memorandum on the Problems of Modernization of the Urals Power Systems to Meet the Needs of the Nuclear Complex

This article introduces for scientific use the materials from the communications of the Sverdlovsk Oblast Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (“Obkom of VKP(b)”), concerned with the construction of new, and modernization of the existing, powers stations and electrical power networks in the Oblast to meet the needs of the nuclear industry facilities of the First Principal Directorate (“PGU”) under the Council of People’s Commissars (the Council of Ministers) of the USSR that were being erected in the Urals. In 1945–1947, the construction of three power-consuming facilities specializing in the production of fissile materials for atomic bombs (plutonium-239, highly enriched uranium-235) was launched in the Middle and Southern Urals. At the time, the Urals industry was severely lacking electric power, which threatened normal operation of even the existing production facilities. To remedy this situation, the Soviet Government undertook a number of measures to modernize power systems in the Urals. The implementation of these measures met with some obstacles. A. M. Marinov, managing director of the Sverdlovenergo, submitted a memorandum on this problem to the Sverdlovsk Obkom of VKP(b). This document was used by the Obkom for preparing the draft government resolution to be submitted to the Council of Ministers of the USSR. The documents published here reveal the organizational problems associated with the development of electric power infrastructure required for successful operation of the enterprises producing fissile materials in the Urals. These documents may be of interest for the specialists in the history of the Soviet Atomic Project, the history of Soviet power industry, and the economic history of the USSR in the 1940s and 1950s.

Components of Success of the Soviet Atomic Bomb Project

September 28, 2017, marked the 75th anniversary of the issuance of the Resolution of the State Defense Committee (SDC) On Uranium Mining, which laid the foundation for the Atomic Project, one of the most ambitious projects in the history of the Soviet Union. This article is dedicated to reconstruction of the factors that ensured its successful implementation. The completion of the project is attributed to the late 1950s, but the author focuses on the period from 1945 through 1953. On the one hand, it was then that the scientific, technical, material, and organizational prerequisites for the production of nuclear weapons were created, and, on the other, that time can be called the “golden age of the command economy,” when its capabilities manifested themselves to the full. Turning to it allows one to understand better how the command economy in its classical, Stalinist, version achieved success and what limitations it had.

TRAINING OF SPECIALISTS FOR THE SOVIET ATOMIC INDUSTRY IN THE MEMOIRS OF CONTEMPORARIES

The article considers the training of specialists, who worked in the Soviet atomic industry, covering the period from 1945 to the 1960s — from the initiation of the Soviet Atomic Project until the establishment of atomic energy as one of the leading branches of the Soviet industry. The present study is based on published memoirs of students majoring in atomic physics and biographical narrative interviews of atomic scientists who studied at the Lomonosov Moscow State University and the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute in the 1940s–1960s, conducted by one of the authors of the article. The training of atomic scientists consisted in the development of theoretical knowledge, as well as engineering and practical skills. The training was provided at various universities of the country, among which a prominent place was occupied by the Moscow State University, the Saint Petersburg State University, the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute and the Ural State Technical University along with the specialised faculties of other Soviet universities. The public mood (onset of the Cold War, romanticised image of an atomic scientist) and personal aptitudes of applicants (engineering and technical aptitudes) influenced the career choice. When selecting future atomic specialists, a number of «filters» were used, narrowing down the number of prospective candidates. Ideology, latent anti-Semitism and gender influenced student selection. The training of atomic scientists was conducted in secrecy, which was offset by various financial (high scholarship and, later, high salaries) and non-financial (being trained by outstanding scientists, professional fulfilment, patriotic feelings) incentives. The involvement of students during training in scientific and industrial activities resulted in an effective corps of atomic specialists. Following graduation, they worked in restricted-access cities (Arzamas-16, Chelyabinsk-70, etc.), as well as at research institutes exploring atomic issues.

Some Lessons from History of the Soviet Atomic Project

The article considers the history of the Soviet atomic project and analyses the reasons of its successful realization. It permits to learn some important historical lessons that can be useful in preparation and development of the big modern scientific technical projects.

Академик Сергей Львович Соболев в советском атомном проекте

Академик Сергей Львович Соболев в советском атомном проекте

The Soviet Atomic Project: Ingredients of Success

The Soviet Atomic Project: Ingredients of Success

Tales of the Soviet hydrogen bomb

I was one of a very few non-Russian and non-US participants at the fascinating History of the Soviet Atomic Project conference held in May 1996 at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, north of Moscow. The article “The secret of the Soviet hydrogen bomb” by Alex Wellerstein and Edward Geist (Physics Today, April 2017, page 40) brings up many memories from that meeting.After arriving home from the conference, I wrote an article about it for my institute’s magazine. I think a few details and reflections from that article are worth adding to the international record. They mainly derive from my discussions with Arnold Kramish, a Manhattan Project veteran whom I got to know well during the Dubna meeting and through letters exchanged in the years before his death.After the war Kramish had worked for the US Atomic Energy Commission as a liaison to the Central Intelligence Agency; he provided intelligence estimates on Soviet nuclear capabilities. Shortly before the Teller–Ulam idea was born in early 1951, he had passed on to Stanislaw Ulam intelligence material about Soviet experiments in which extremely strong magnetic fields had been used to compress fusion materials. That information had come from repatriated Austrian physicist Josef Schintlmeister, who, as a victim of the Soviet Alsos operation, was forced to work on the Soviet atomic bomb project and then got insight into work by Peter Kapitza and Andrei Sakharov. Kramish strongly believed that the information Schintlmeister had gathered was the seed of Ulam’s idea of arranging extreme compression of thermonuclear fuel by a physically distinct primary fission charge. Add to that Edward Teller’s idea to employ radiation implosion and the now classical hydrogen bomb was conceived.However, as mentioned in the Wellerstein and Geist article, the concept of radiation implosion stems from a patent filed by Klaus Fuchs and John von Neumann at Los Alamos in May 1946. Fuchs then, like all other British participants in the Manhattan Project, had to go back to the UK in June 1946.Did Fuchs provide the radiation implosion idea to the Soviets? Yes he did, according to former Soviet intelligence chief Vladimir Barkovsky, who spoke at the Dubna meeting. He had collected the documents from Fuchs in London on 13 March 1948; during his talk Barkovsky even showed sketches of the patent. In conversation during the conference banquet, he also said that he thought Fuchs, back in Washington, DC, in 1947 or 1948 for a meeting about UK and US cooperation on nuclear weapons, had gotten new material from an unknown messenger.It is ironic that the development of the H-bomb actually proceeded in a kind of behind-the-scenes de facto cooperation between the two nuclear powers at the time, the US and the Soviet Union. While both nations were struggling to develop thermonuclear weapons, they didn’t realize that the three most important components—compression, staging, and radiation implosion—were already available to be put together. The breakthrough was delayed in the US by Teller’s long inability to give up his belief in his baby, the Classical Super; and in the Soviet Union, by Sakharov’s preoccupation with his baby at the time, the Sloika.A final note on the inflamed relationship between Stan Ulam and Teller: Kramish told me that right after the new H-bomb idea had been conceived, Teller called for a meeting to discuss it. He asked Kramish to take part, and then, after a short pause, Teller added, “Don’t tell Stan!” Section:ChooseTop of page <<CITING ARTICLES© 2018 American Institute of Physics.

Special Tasks and Sacred Secrets on Soviet Atomic Espionage

A careful review of the depiction of Soviet atomic espionage provided in Pavel Sudoplatov's Special Tasks and Sacred Secrets by Jerrold and Leona Schecter demonstrates how faulty memories, Soviet intelligence agency disinformation, sloppy citations, misplaced trust in documents provided by unidentified sources under unexplained circumstances, and egregious lapses in logic and judgment can lead to conclusions unsupported by evidence. The accounts of Soviet atomic espionage in both books are neither reliable nor credible. In particular, the assertions that Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard consciously cooperated with and assisted Soviet atomic intelligence are without credibility.

History of Highly Enriched Uranium Production in Russia

Between 1949–1963, the Soviet Union built four large industrial uranium-enrichment plants. All initially used gaseous diffusion for isotope separation. Starting in 1964, however, the Soviet Union b...

The physics of a thermonuclear explosion of a normal-density liquefied deuterium sphere (On the impossibility of a spherically symmetric thermonuclear explosion in liquid deuterium at normal density)

The hydrodynamic problem of a thermonuclear explosion in a sphere of normal-density liquid deuterium was solved (Institute for Physics and Power Engineering, Obninsk) in 1952–1954 in the framework of the Soviet Atomic Project. The principal result was that the explosion shockwave in deuterium strongly decayed because of radiation energy loss and nonlocal energy release by fast neutrons. At that time, this negative result implied in essence that the straightforward approach to creating a thermonuclear weapon was in fact a blind alley. This paper describes a numerical solution to the stated problem, obtained with the modern DEIRA code developed for numerical modeling of inertially confined fusion. Detailed numerical calculations have confirmed the above 'historic' result and shed additional light on the physical causes of the detonation wave decay. The most pernicious factor is the radiation energy loss due to the combined effect of bremsstrahlung and the inverse Compton scattering of the emitted photons on the hot electrons. The impact of energy transfer by fast neutrons — which was already quite adequately accounted for in the above-cited historical work — is less significant. We present a more rigorous (compared to that of the 1950s) study of the role of inverse Compton scattering for which, in particular, an independent analytic estimate is obtained.

L D Landau in the Soviet Atomic Project: a documentary study

The article presents information about the participation of Academician L D Landau in the Soviet Atomic Project and is based on a study of archive documents of the First Main Directorate. Their analysis points to L D Landau's important contribution to the development of the theory of heterogeneous nuclear reactors and to the computational justification of the first designs of atomic and hydrogen bombs. Many of the quoted documents have never been published before.

Ispravlenie opechatok, popravki i dopolneniya k stat'e G.V. Kiseleva "Uchastie L.D. Landau v sovetskom Atomnom proekte (v dokumentakh)" (UFN , sentyabr' 2008 g., &lt;b&gt;178&lt;/b&gt;, №9, s. 947 – 990)

Исправление опечаток, поправки и дополнения к статье Г.В.&nbsp;Киселева "Участие Л.Д.&nbsp;Ландау в советском Атомном проекте (в документах)" (УФН , сентябрь 2008 г., <b>178</b>, №9, с. 947&nbsp;&ndash;&nbsp;990), Киселев Г.В.

History of the realization of the thorium regime in the Soviet Atomic Project

Archival materials are presented which outline the history of the world's first realization of the thorium regime in the industrial heavy-water reactor OK-180 in the Soviet Union. Computational and experimental results that enter into the treatment of the thorium regime in various versions of theheavy-water nuclear reactor, including homogenous and gas (helium)-cooled reactors, are briefly discussed. Information on the relevant governmental resolutions and on the basic stages in the research and development work on the OK-180 reactor for operating in the thorium regime is presented. No information on the realization of the thorium regime in the industrial heavy-water reactor OK-180 was published in the past.

История реализации ториевого режима в советском Атомном проекте

История реализации ториевого режима в советском Атомном проекте

Moscow State University physics alumni and the Soviet Atomic Project

In this paper, two closely related themes are addressed: (1) the role that M V Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU) played in training specialists in physics for the Soviet Atomic Project, and (2) what its alumni contributed to the development of thermonuclear weapons. In its earlier stages, the Soviet Atomic Project was in acute need of qualified personnel, without whom building nuclear and thermonuclear weapons would be an impossible task, and MSU became a key higher educational institution grappled with the training problem. The first part of the paper discusses the efforts of the leading Soviet scientists and leaders of FMD (First Main Directorate) to organize the training of specialists in nuclear physics at the MSU Physics Department and, on the other hand, to create a new Physics and Technology Department at the university. As a result, a number of Soviet Government's resolutions were prepared and issued, part of which are presented in the paper and give an idea of the large-scale challenges this sphere of education was facing at the time. Information is presented for the first time on the early MSU Physics Department graduates in the structure of matter, being employed in the FMD organizations and enterprises from 1948 to 1951. The second part discusses the contribution to the development of thermonuclear weapons by the teams of scientists led by Academicians I E Tamm, A N Tikhonov, and I M Frank, and including MSU physics alumni. The paper will be useful to anyone interested in the history of Russian physics.

Fiziki — vypuskniki Moskovskogo universiteta i sovetskii Atomnyi proekt

Fiziki — vypuskniki Moskovskogo universiteta i sovetskii Atomnyi proekt

Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956. David Holloway

Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956. David Holloway

Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956

Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956

Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956

Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956