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USSR's Nuclear Weapon Program
The Soviet Union tested its first nuclear device codenamed 'First Lightning' on September 29 1949, and became the world's second nuclear power.
The Soviet nuclear weapons program was officially initiated in April 1942, when Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin received a letter from nuclear physicist Georgy Flyorov about the lack of published physics journals by the US, UK, and Germany on nuclear fission. The letter also pointed out the lack of
published papers on the subject by prominent Western nuclear physicists since the discovery of nuclear fission in 1939. This lack of activity became suspicious to the Soviet leadership, and as a result the Soviet Union began research on nuclear fission for military purposes.
Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov
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In 1941, a year before Stalin initiated the nuclear weapons program, a Soviet spy named Vladimir Barkovski obtained a copy of the MAUD Report, a top secret summary of the U.K.'s plans to build atomic weapons, as well as parallel efforts conducted in the United States. Barkovski obtained the report from
an operative working at the Soviet Embassy in London. However, this valuable resource was ignored by the Soviet leadership, no steps were taken, and the document was virtually forgotten about.
A large scale research effort could not be conducted due to the ongoing Great Patriotic War. Despite this, Lavrentiy Beria was appointed as the administrative leader of the project, and physicist Igor Kurchatov was appointed as head of scientific research. One of the first steps taken by Kurchatov was to recruit his friend and colleague Yuli Khariton, a physicist who studied at Cambridge. The entire project at that time was crowded into a small laboratory in Moscow, named Laboratory No. 2. Kurchatov
was only able to recruit five scientists to work on the project in its early stages. As research progressed, the project was given a new underground laboratory on the outskirts of Moscow. The entrance to the laboratory was covered by a large tent, the entire complex was surrounded by a barbed wire fence and heavily guarded by the Soviet military.
Espionage
Since the conception of the project, thousands of stolen documents poured into the hands of Soviet intelligence courtesy of Communist sympathizing spies working in England and the United States. The most famous atomic spy was Klaus Fuchs, who worked as a nuclear physicist on Britain's atomic bomb project. Through a contact called 'Red Sonja', he passed on vast amounts of information to the Soviet Union. Stalin had learned about the U.S. Manhattan Project from a telegram sent by a Soviet spy working in the United States in 1943. This steady supply of information helped the Soviet nuclear weapons project make up valuable time lost due to a low budget, lack of resources, and lack of scientists.
Klaus Emil Julius Fuchs
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Kurchatov was given the task of interpreting the vast amounts of information gathered by spies working in the Manhattan project. Despite the thousands of papers stored in the secret Soviet archives, Beria only allowed Kurchatov access to them in an effort to hide how dependent Soviet research was on the stolen documents.
During this time, the United States and Great Britain joined efforts in nuclear weapons research. Britain's scientists went to Los Alamos to work in the Manhattan Project. This was an important event for the Soviet project because they now had a spy, Klaus Fuchs, working at Los Alamos. Up until this time, the details of the Manhattan Project were unknown to Kurchatov and his team. The information they did have about it was gathered from various universities around the United States such as Berkeley, Yale, and Princeton.
With Fuchs's access to Los Alamos, the spy operation was stepped up. At one point information was falling into the hands of the Soviets faster than it reached some of the scientists at Los Alamos. A Soviet agent known to the FBI as Anatoli Yakovlev coordinated the large web of spies working in the
United States through the Soviet consulate in New York City. This network of spying was called 'Operation Enormous' and would become one of the most successful espionage efforts in history.
On July 16, 1945, the United States detonated the first atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert, code named Trinity. The following day, President Truman told Stalin about a new 'super weapon' possessed by the United States; Stalin's reaction was indifferent. A month later, two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, bringing an end to World War II.
The news of the atomic bombings of Japan shocked and enraged Stalin. Despite knowing about the Manhattan Project, he was still appalled at the damage caused by the weapons and that the United States actually would actually use such a weapon. Shortly after, Stalin issued an ultimatum to Beria, ordering an atomic bomb to be built within five years.
Development
The Lubyanka - KGB Headquarters
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A special department was set up at the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs , called 'Department S' (also known as Bureau #2). The purpose of 'Department S' was to consolidate the research efforts and organize the tens of thousands of documents gathered about America's atomic bomb project. Another objective assigned to 'Department S' was to find scientists capable of assisting Kurchatov in interpreting the stolen documents held in the vaults in Moscow. The NKVD was put in charge of the recruiting. Two young scientists were chosen to assist Kurchatov, Arkady Rylov and Yakov Torletsky.
One of the most important documents obtained was a detailed diagram of the Trinity implosion device, stolen from Los Alamos by Klaus Fuchs. This diagram was obtained by Fuchs in July 1945, when he passed it on to one of his contacts working for 'Operation Enormous'.
Work proceeded at a frantic pace, with the scientists working around the clock with very few breaks. Scientists worked closely with translators as the thousands of documents needed to be translated into Russian from English. These documents were passed on under strict security protocols. Transfers would be supervised closely by military guards and armed NKVD agents. Other then the few people with access to the vaults containing the stolen documents, no one within the project knew their actual source. Under
Beria's instructions, the scientists were led to believe the documents came from rival teams working elsewhere.
The project scientists later acquired a book titled 'Atomic Energy for Military Purposes' written by Henry Smyth and published in the West. The book was given to the Soviet scientists courtesy of Niels Bohr, a famous nuclear theoretician and advocate of open exchanges and nuclear cooperation between the United States and Soviet Union. The purpose of the book was to define what was public and what was secret about the atomic bomb program, to give the scientists at Los Alamos a clear idea of what could be discussed freely. Despite opposition from Great Britain, President Truman gave permission for the book to be published. This book gave the Soviet team a significant boost needed after hitting several developmental walls. While the book did not necessarily reveal crucial data about the design of an atomic bomb, it
provided the Soviet scientists with good data about design elements not worth pursuing.
Yulii Khariton
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A few months after the Niels Bohr incident, Yuli Khariton was put in charge of finding a suitable location for conducting advanced nuclear research. The town of Sarov, located in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast in Russia, was chosen as the home for Design Bureau No. 11 (KB-11). Over the next few years, an entire town devoted to nuclear weapons research was established called Arzamas-16. Built by thousands of prisoners from Siberian Gulags, this was one of the most secret cities in the Soviet Union. The city was closed off to all outsiders; only authorized personnel were allowed access, and all work conducted inside the city was directed towards nuclear weapon research.
Beria created a climate of fear within the city. Everyone working there was under constant surveillance at all times, even the top scientists. The head of one of the departments at Arzamas-16 was sentenced to eight years in prison for reportedly boasting to his family about the work being conducted in the city. Another worker committed suicide after misplacing several papers, choosing to avoid state punishment.
Yuli Khariton later wrote about Beria: "Beria quickly heartened all work on the project with necessary scope and dynamism. This man, who impersonated evil in the country's modern history, possessed at the same time tremendous vigor and efficiency... It was impossible not to admit his intellect, willpower,
and purposefulness. He was a first class manager, who was able to bring every job to its conclusion".
Fissile Material
At the time, no uranium deposits were known in Russia. The developmental team got a break after hearing rumors about large quantities of uranium being stored near the American zone in East Germany, left there by the Nazis during World War II. Uranium was found in an abandoned factory near the border and was quickly snatched by the Soviets. The United States was unaware of the presence of this uranium. This discovery saved at least a year of developmental work.
The first Soviet reactor went critical on Christmas Day 1946 at 6:01 PM local time at the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow. The uranium confiscated from Eastern Germany was used for the reactor, which was called F-1. Beria was on hand for the first startup of the reactor. Soon after additional uranium
deposits were discovered in Czechoslovakia.
Two years after Stalin's ultimatum, a full scale nuclear reactor was built in the Urals, Chelyabinsk-40. This reactor would make the plutonium that would be used for the first Soviet atomic nuclear bomb as well as hundreds of other weapons that would be produced later on. The reactor went critical one year and eight months after construction first began. The plutonium went into an atomic device designed by Khariton, it was an exact copy of the U.S. Trinity 'Gadget'.
First Lightning
In 1949, three trains left Arzamas-16 bound for Semipalatinsk in the Republic of Kazakhstan. One train had scientists and members of the Politburo, the other train carried soldiers, and the third train contained the Soviet Union's first atomic device. Located in the isolated steppes of eastern Kazakhstan,
the test site was chosen by Beria in 1947.
At 7:00 AM local time, on August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union successfully detonated a nuclear bomb. The test was called First Lightning by the Soviets and referred to as Joe-1 in the United States. It came as a complete shock to the West, which had not predicted the Soviet Union building an atomic bomb in such a short time. The reason the United States was caught off guard was thats its intelligence sources were unaware of the uranium deposits discovered by Soviet scientists in Eastern Germany and in
Czechoslovakia. General Leslie R. Groves, former head of the Manhattan Project, testified before the U.S. Senate several years earlier that the Soviet Union had no uranium at all, when in reality a working nuclear reactor was online in Moscow. The Joe-1 atomic device, which had a yield of 22 kilotons, would
later be weaponized in the Soviet Union's first nuclear weapon, RDS-1.
Nuclear Testing
The Soviet Union conducted a nuclear testing series second to only that of the United States' in terms of size, length, and scope. For over 40 years the Soviet Union had conducted 718 nuclear tests, involving 969 detonations. 213 of these tests were conducted in the atmosphere, mostly at the test sites
in present day Kazakhstan and at the Northern Test Site in Novaya Zemlya.
The slow pace of the Soviet nuclear weapons program following the Joe-1 test was a great contrast to the accelerated nature it had been conducted under prior to that test. The program was geared toward developing a single nuclear device in the quickest time possible and little effort was made to engineer the program to remain efficient and productive in the long run. Two years were needed following the Joe-1 test to ensure the program became a productive weapons industry. By the time the program got back on its feet the United States had already begun thermonuclear experiments in the Pacific, which culminated in the Ivy Mike shot in 1952.
Soviet scientists had been researching thermonuclear capabilities since the late 1940s, but were not allowed to pursue them during that time. The successful detonation of a hydrogen bomb by the United States spurred thermonuclear research in the Soviet Union, which conducted its first thermonuclear test
in 1953. In 1955, the Soviet Union successfully airdropped a two-stage hydrogen bomb and acquired a short lived monopoly on thermonuclear weapons.
It was also during this time that a new nuclear weapons research facility was founded at Chelyabinsk-70. The creation of this new research facility was a result of the rapid expansion occurring in the Soviet nuclear weapons program. Approximately one third of Arzamas-16's staff was moved to this new facility which was referred to as Scientific Research Institute 1011. The primary goals of Chelyabinsk-70 were to develop gravity bombs and all SLBMs, as well as low-fission nuclear devices to be used for peaceful purposes. In the 1960s, the main function of the facility was the miniaturization of nuclear warheads.
The team at Arzamas-16 led by Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov, would later on develop the most powerful nuclear weapon ever created or tested. The Tsar Bomba (code name: Ivan or Vanya), was an air-deliverable, parachute retarded three-stage weapon that detonated with the equivalence of 50 million tons of TNT over the Novaya Zemlya testing grounds at 8:33 UTC 30/10/1961. It initially created a 6.5km wide fireball, light from the detonation was visible 1,000 km away.
Nuclear Arsenal
The state of Russia's arsenal is a closely guarded state secret, so only estimates are possible. As of 2025, the Federation of American Scientists estimates that Russia possesses 5,459 nuclear weapons. Russia has six nuclear missile fields in Kozelsk, Tatishchevo, Uzhur, Dombarovsky, Kartalay, and Aleysk; nuclear missile submarines patrolling from three naval bases at Nerpich'ya, Yagel'Naya, and Rybachiy; and nuclear bombers at Ukrainka and Engels air bases. As of 2024, Russia operates 12 nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines, comprising five Delta-class and seven Borei-class vessels.
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