Soviet atomic bomb project

The Soviet project to develop an atomic bomb began during World War II in the Soviet Union. They tested their first nuclear weapon in 1949.

Espionage

The project had the benefit of much espionage information gathered from the Manhattan Project in the United States and United Kingdom (which the Russians had code-named Enormoz) by the spies Alan Nunn May, Klaus Fuchs and Theodore Hall, among others. However, the information was not shared freely among the project's scientists, and was used by Beria as a "check" on the accuracy of the scientists. After the United States used its atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945, and published the Smyth Report outlining the basics of their wartime program, Beria had the scientists duplicate the American process as closely as possible in terms of development of resources and factories. The reason was expedience: the goal was to produce a working weapon as soon as possible, and after Hiroshima and Nagasaki they knew that the American design would work.

Related Topics:
Espionage - Manhattan Project - United States - United Kingdom - Alan Nunn May - Klaus Fuchs - Theodore Hall - Used - Hiroshima - Nagasaki - Japan - 1945 - Smyth Report

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Beria largely distrusted the scientists working under him, which was why he rarely gave them direct access to intelligence information after 1945. He was fond of having multiple teams of scientists working on the same problems, who would only find out the existence of the other team of scientists when they were brought together before Beria to explain the differences in their results with one another. Though Beria was not the chief of security at this time, his reputation for ruthlessness was always present, and the Soviet atomic bomb project received status as the highest priority of national security after 1945.

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Scholar Alexei Kojevnikov has estimated, based on newly released Soviet documents, that the primary way in which the espionage may have sped up the Soviet project was that it allowed Khariton to avoid dangerous tests to determine the size of the critical mass ("tickling the dragon's tail," as they were called in the U.S., which consumed a good deal of time and claimed at least two lives).

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