Igor Kurchatov - Atom Bomb Project

Atom Bomb Project

In 1941, Germany commenced a large-scale military offensive against Soviet Union under codename Operation Barbarossa. During this time, Kurchatov was leading the research in nuclear physics and was widely known in Soviet Academy of Sciences for his wide research. Because of the war engaged with the Germany and her allies, Soviet Union did not undertake serious initiate to start the scientific research in nuclear weapons until 1942. In April 1942, Georgii Flerov, who would later became a key figure in the nuclear program, directed a secret letter to Joseph Stalin pointing out that nothing was being published in the physics journals by Americans, British, or even Germans, on nuclear fission since the year of its discovery in 1939, and that indeed many of the most prominent physicists in Allied countries seemed not to be publishing at all. This academic silence was high suspicious and Flerov urged Stalin to launch the program on immediate effect as he believed that other nations were already advancing their program clandestinely. In 1943, the NKVD obtained a copy of a secret British report by the MAUD Committee concerning the feasibility of atomic weapons, which led Joseph Stalin to order the commencement of a Soviet nuclear programme (albeit with very limited resources).

Stalin turned to Soviet Academy of Sciences to find the best administrator to lead the program, and as its result, the Soviet Academy of Sciences chose Kurchatov for his wide experience in nuclear physics. Ioffe recommended Kurchatov to Vyacheslav Molotov who advised Stalin to appoint Kurchatov as the formal director of the nascent Soviet nuclear programme and the development of Soviet nuclear weapons began in 1940s. Kurchatov switched his research first to protecting shipping from magnetic mines, and later to tank armour to nuclear physics.

During its formative years, the atomic bomb project remained a relatively low priority until information from spy Klaus Fuchs and later the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki goaded Stalin into action. Stalin ordered Kurchatov to produce a bomb by 1948, and put the ruthless Lavrenty Beria in direct command of the project. The project took over the town of Sarov in the Gorki Oblast (now Nizhny Novgorod Oblast) on the Volga, and renamed it Arzamas-16. The team (which included other prominent Soviet nuclear scientists such as Julii Borisovich Khariton and Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich) was assisted both by public disclosures made by the United States government and by further information supplied by Fuchs, but Kurchatov and Beria (fearing the intelligence was misinformation) insisted his scientists retest everything themselves. Beria in particular would use the intelligence as a third-party check on the conclusions of the teams of scientists.