Bochvar, and Avraamy Zavenyagin.įollowing the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Stalin called for an all-out crash program in atomic research and development. Vannikov (who has been compared to General Leslie Groves) headed an engineering council that oversaw the project. The Soviet regime immediately stepped up their program. We've got to work on Kurchatov and hurry things up.” While Stalin may have appeared uninterested, he privately told his top advisers to speed up work on the Soviet atomic program: 'They simply want to raise the price. All he said was he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make good use of it against the Japanese.' The Russian Premier showed no special interest. According to Truman, 'I casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force. At the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, Truman told Joseph Stalin about the United States atomic bomb program for the first time. Work on the program sped up quickly in 1945, however, especially after the Soviets learned of the Trinity test.

They also began exploring ways to generate enough pure uranium and graphite, and researched uranium isotope separation methods. They researched the reactions necessary to produce both atomic weapons and nuclear reactors. The Soviet atomic program during the war was puny compared to the Manhattan Project, involving approximately twenty physicists and only a small number of staff.

The Soviet Atomic Bomb during World War II In February 1943, the Soviets began their own program led by nuclear physicist Igor Kurchatov and political director Lavrentiy Beria. Soviet leaders learned that both the United States and Germany had embarked on efforts to build an atomic bomb. Kapitza, a high-ranking physicist, remarked in October 1941 that the recent discovery of nuclear energy could be useful in the war against Germany and that the prospects of a uranium bomb seemed promising. However, a small fraction of physicists continued to explore the possibilities of uranium. Scientists and engineers were drafted or assigned to work on projects, such as radar, that were seen as more pressing. Throughout 1939, leading Soviet physicists attempted to reproduce the fission experiment that Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann had conducted in Berlin and began to make measurements and calculations to determine under exactly what conditions, if any, a nuclear chain reaction would take place.Īfter Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Soviet nuclear physics work largely ceased. Soviet physicists paid close attention to the news of the discovery of fission in Germany in 1938.

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