Stalin’s bomb: how the Soviet Union went nuclear 

How did the Soviet Union under Stalin first manage to create nuclear weapons? I shall first briefly review the scientific results, theoretical and experimental, that taken together made it possible to think of an atom  bomb, of any atom bomb, irrespective of the nationality of the scientists who worked on it. 

The first stage may have been Leo Szilard’s patent of 1934. He claimed that a nuclear reaction in which an incident neutron creates more than one outgoing neutron would lead to a chain reaction. He assigned the patent to the British Admiralty. The next important development was the experiments of Hahn and Strassman in December 1938. According to the account of Frisch and Meitner, they showed the splitting of an Uranium atom into two elements from the middle of the periodic table. 

Then the race started between Germany and the Allies to produce an atom bomb of enormous power. Germany fell out of the race, having neither the manpower nor the resources. After Pearl Harbor, with help from the British and vast resources, the American Manhattan Project managed to produce the atom bomb in time to drop two of them to devastate the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, forcing Japan to surrender and bring the Second World War to an end. Meanwhile the wartime alliance of the British Empire, the US and the Soviet Union had defeated Germany. There remained in the world two superpowers: Stalin’s Soviet Union and the United States.

Soviet authorities learned about the Manhattan project early on from the spy network they ran in America. When these reports reached the Kremlin, Stalin was initially not much interested, and his intelligence chief Beria simply did not believe it. He was convinced that this was an American misinformation project aiming to  trick the Soviet Union into expensive and entirely useless research.

To be fair to Beria, he was not the only one who thought that any application of nuclear science was very much in the future. The head of nuclear research at the world-famous Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, Ernest Rutherford, was also sceptical. He is known to have said that “while nuclear phenomena promise to release large amounts of energy, any application, whether for military or peaceful purposes, is moonshine .”  

The Soviet Union did not need to start from scratch on nuclear research. Thanks to the efforts of Abram Ioffe, an Institute named after him was set up as early as 1918, to keep physics research alive. Ioffe was particularly keen on training young scientists. Both friends and enemies called his institute a kindergarten where the intricacies of the science of physics were taught to young, talented and ambitious physicists. Ambitious they were, resilient they had to be. Sometimes as many as a dozen young scientists had to sleep in the same rat-infested room. 

The Russian project to produce an atom bomb, which began after Hiroshima, started slowly. Originally, Ioffe was chosen to lead it. He declined, saying that he was too old to bring such a challenging project to a successful conclusion. Instead of himself he recommended Igor Kurchatov for the job. Kurchatov, like his American counterpart Robert Oppenheimer, had the ability to manage a bevy of recalcitrant scientists. Overall responsibility rested with Lavrentiy Beria, whose day-job was to run the Soviet Secret Service, then known by its initials as NKVD. Beria was an excellent organiser. Part of that organisational skill was to have an air of ill-defined menace. Every scientist knew that failure to produce the bomb would mean a collective death sentence for all those working on the project.

There were two ways at the time to proceed. Kurchatov was in favour of a home-made design by his own team of young physicists. He assured Stalin that that would be the cheaper option. Stalin said to him: “Money is not a problem, you can have anything you want.” The quickest option, they decided, was to copy the design of the plutonium bomb that the Americans had dropped on Nagasaki. A description of that bomb was available to Stalin, thanks to the services of Klaus Fuchs, a German Communist sympathiser and spy, who had been working on the Manhattan Project. Molotov showed selections from those spy reports to Kurchatov on the strict condition that he kept that information to himself. This is a further example of Stalin’s paranoia and his distrust of Soviet scientists. 

Kurchatov delivered the atom bomb for Stalin in August 1949, four years after Hiroshima. Those four years were full of danger for the Soviet Union.  America had the bomb, the Soviet  Union was on the way to becoming a nuclear power, but was very vulnerable to a nuclear  attack by the US during that period. To the credit of President Truman and the US administration, they never considered such a scenario. 

But Bertrand Russell, who divided his interest between philosophy and mathematics, did. His arguments were logical. Universal peace can only happen if there was a single world authority that had a monopoly of armed power. That authority should be the nuclear-armed United States. In particular, if the Soviet Union occupied any other country it should be threatened with nuclear annihilation, and if it ignored the threat it should be bombed.  Whether this policy could have been put in practice is rather doubtful. Russell’s views in this crucial period were clearly described  in his book, Unpopular Essays, published in 1950. Let me quote from that book:

“There are now only two really independent states, America and Russia. The next step in this long historical process should reduce the two to one and thus put an end to the period of organised wars.” Russell makes it clear that he wants America as the state to survive and have monopoly of power. Russia, if necessary, was to be forced  into submission to stop being an aggressive state. He gives examples for his choice: “One can hardly imagine the American army seizing the dons of Oxford and Cambridge and sending them to hard labour in Alaska, nor do I think that they would accuse Mr Attlee of plotting and compel him to fly to Moscow. Yet these are strict analogues to the things the Russians have done in Poland.”   In our time, when Putin threatens the West with nuclear weapons, the future of mankind is far from assured. Still, I do not think that any responsible American politician now regrets that no preventive war was ever considered.

Overall responsibility for building the atom bomb rested with Beria, but of course Stalin was the boss. How did the two mass murderers get on? Like a house on fire. Beria was the only head of the Secret Service who survived Stalin. Maybe because both of them originated in Georgia. More likely because both of them liked bloodbaths. Of the two of them, Stalin was the more pragmatic one. He knew that he needed the scientists. Whenever Beria wanted to arrest a few of them,  Stalin did not allow it.  “Don’t be so disappointed,” he reputedly told Beria. “We can always shoot them later.”

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