Who created the first nuclear rocket. Who invented the atomic bomb? The history of the invention and creation of the Soviet atomic bomb

The one who invented the atomic bomb could not even imagine what tragic consequences this miracle invention of the 20th century could lead to. Before this superweapon was experienced by the inhabitants of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a very long way had been done.

A start

In April 1903, the famous French physicist Paul Langevin gathered his friends in the Paris Garden. The reason was the defense of the dissertation of the young and talented scientist Marie Curie. Among the distinguished guests was the famous English physicist Sir Ernest Rutherford. In the midst of the fun, the lights were put out. Marie Curie announced to everyone that there would now be a surprise.

With a solemn air, Pierre Curie brought in a small tube of radium salts, which shone with a green light, causing extraordinary delight among those present. In the future, the guests heatedly discussed the future of this phenomenon. Everyone agreed that thanks to radium, the acute problem of lack of energy would be solved. This inspired everyone to new research and further perspectives.

If they had been told then that laboratory work with radioactive elements would lay the foundation for a terrible weapon of the 20th century, it is not known what their reaction would have been. It was then that the story of the atomic bomb began, which claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians.

Game ahead of the curve

On December 17, 1938, the German scientist Otto Gann obtained irrefutable evidence of the decay of uranium into smaller elementary particles. In fact, he managed to split the atom. In the scientific world, this was regarded as a new milestone in the history of mankind. Otto Gunn did not share the political views of the Third Reich.

Therefore, in the same year, 1938, the scientist was forced to move to Stockholm, where, together with Friedrich Strassmann, he continued his scientific research. Fearing that fascist Germany will be the first to receive a terrible weapon, he writes a letter to the President of America with a warning about this.

The news of a possible lead greatly alarmed the US government. The Americans began to act quickly and decisively.

Who created the atomic bomb? American project

Even before the outbreak of World War II, a group of American scientists, many of whom were refugees from the Nazi regime in Europe, were tasked with developing nuclear weapons. The initial research, it is worth noting, was carried out in Nazi Germany. In 1940, the government of the United States of America began funding its own program to develop atomic weapons. An incredible amount of two and a half billion dollars was allocated for the implementation of the project.

Outstanding physicists of the 20th century were invited to carry out this secret project, including more than ten Nobel laureates. In total, about 130 thousand employees were involved, among whom were not only the military, but also civilians. The development team was led by Colonel Leslie Richard Groves, with Robert Oppenheimer as supervisor. He is the man who invented the atomic bomb.

A special secret engineering building was built in the Manhattan area, which is known to us under the code name "Manhattan Project". Over the next few years, the scientists of the secret project worked on the problem of nuclear fission of uranium and plutonium.

Non-peaceful atom by Igor Kurchatov

Today, every schoolchild will be able to answer the question of who invented the atomic bomb in the Soviet Union. And then, in the early 30s of the last century, no one knew this.

In 1932, Academician Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov was one of the first in the world to start studying the atomic nucleus. Gathering like-minded people around him, Igor Vasilievich in 1937 created the first cyclotron in Europe. In the same year, he and his like-minded people create the first artificial nuclei.

In 1939, I. V. Kurchatov began to study a new direction - nuclear physics. After several laboratory successes in studying this phenomenon, the scientist gets at his disposal a secret research center, which was named "Laboratory No. 2". Today, this secret object is called "Arzamas-16".

The target direction of this center was a serious research and development of nuclear weapons. Now it becomes obvious who created the atomic bomb in the Soviet Union. There were only ten people on his team then.

atomic bomb to be

By the end of 1945, Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov managed to assemble a serious team of scientists numbering more than a hundred people. The best minds of various scientific specializations came to the laboratory from all over the country to create atomic weapons. After the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Soviet scientists realized that this could also be done with the Soviet Union. "Laboratory No. 2" receives a sharp increase in funding from the country's leadership and a large influx of qualified personnel. Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria is appointed responsible for such an important project. The enormous labors of Soviet scientists have borne fruit.

Semipalatinsk test site

The atomic bomb in the USSR was first tested at the test site in Semipalatinsk (Kazakhstan). On August 29, 1949, a 22 kiloton nuclear device shook the Kazakh land. Nobel laureate physicist Otto Hanz said: “This is good news. If Russia has atomic weapons, then there will be no war.” It was this atomic bomb in the USSR, encrypted as product number 501, or RDS-1, that eliminated the US monopoly on nuclear weapons.

Atomic bomb. Year 1945

In the early morning of July 16, the Manhattan Project conducted its first successful test of an atomic device - a plutonium bomb - at the Alamogordo test site in New Mexico, USA.

The money invested in the project was well spent. The first atomic explosion in the history of mankind was carried out at 5:30 in the morning.

“We have done the work of the devil,” said later Robert Oppenheimer, the one who invented the atomic bomb in the United States, later called the “father of the atomic bomb.”

Japan does not capitulate

By the time of the final and successful testing of the atomic bomb, Soviet troops and allies had finally defeated Nazi Germany. However, there was one state that promised to fight to the end for dominance in the Pacific Ocean. From mid-April to mid-July 1945, the Japanese army repeatedly carried out air strikes against allied forces, thereby inflicting heavy losses on the US army. At the end of July 1945, the militarist government of Japan rejected the Allied demand for surrender in accordance with the Potsdam Declaration. In it, in particular, it was said that in case of disobedience, the Japanese army would face rapid and complete destruction.

President agrees

The American government kept its word and began targeted bombing of Japanese military positions. Air strikes did not bring the desired result, and US President Harry Truman decides on the invasion of American troops into Japan. However, the military command dissuades its president from such a decision, citing the fact that the American invasion would entail a large number of victims.

At the suggestion of Henry Lewis Stimson and Dwight David Eisenhower, it was decided to use a more effective way to end the war. A big supporter of the atomic bomb, US Presidential Secretary James Francis Byrnes, believed that the bombing of Japanese territories would finally end the war and put the US in a dominant position, which would positively affect the future course of events in the post-war world. Thus, US President Harry Truman was convinced that this was the only correct option.

Atomic bomb. Hiroshima

The small Japanese city of Hiroshima, with a population of just over 350,000, was chosen as the first target, located five hundred miles from the capital of Japan, Tokyo. After the modified Enola Gay B-29 bomber arrived at the US naval base on Tinian Island, an atomic bomb was installed on board the aircraft. Hiroshima was supposed to experience the effects of 9,000 pounds of uranium-235.
This hitherto unseen weapon was intended for civilians in a small Japanese town. The bomber commander was Colonel Paul Warfield Tibbets, Jr. The US atomic bomb bore the cynical name "Baby". On the morning of August 6, 1945, at about 8:15 am, the American "Baby" was dropped on the Japanese Hiroshima. About 15 thousand tons of TNT destroyed all life within a radius of five square miles. One hundred and forty thousand inhabitants of the city died in a matter of seconds. The surviving Japanese died a painful death from radiation sickness.

They were destroyed by the American atomic "Kid". However, the devastation of Hiroshima did not cause the immediate surrender of Japan, as everyone expected. Then it was decided to another bombardment of Japanese territory.

Nagasaki. Sky on fire

The American atomic bomb "Fat Man" was installed on board the B-29 aircraft on August 9, 1945, all in the same place, at the US naval base in Tinian. This time the aircraft commander was Major Charles Sweeney. Initially, the strategic target was the city of Kokura.

However, the weather conditions did not allow to carry out the plan, a lot of clouds interfered. Charles Sweeney went into the second round. At 11:02 am, the American nuclear-powered Fat Man swallowed up Nagasaki. It was a more powerful destructive air strike, which, in its strength, was several times higher than the bombing in Hiroshima. Nagasaki tested an atomic weapon weighing about 10,000 pounds and 22 kilotons of TNT.

The geographical location of the Japanese city reduced the expected effect. The thing is that the city is located in a narrow valley between the mountains. Therefore, the destruction of 2.6 square miles did not reveal the full potential of American weapons. The Nagasaki atomic bomb test is considered the failed "Manhattan Project".

Japan surrendered

On the afternoon of August 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito announced his country's surrender in a radio address to the people of Japan. This news quickly spread around the world. In the United States of America, celebrations began on the occasion of the victory over Japan. The people rejoiced.
On September 2, 1945, a formal agreement to end the war was signed aboard the USS Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay. Thus ended the most brutal and bloody war in the history of mankind.

For six long years, the world community has been moving towards this significant date - since September 1, 1939, when the first shots of Nazi Germany were fired on the territory of Poland.

Peaceful atom

A total of 124 nuclear explosions were carried out in the Soviet Union. It is characteristic that all of them were carried out for the benefit of the national economy. Only three of them were accidents involving the release of radioactive elements.

Programs for the use of peaceful atom were implemented only in two countries - the United States and the Soviet Union. The peaceful nuclear power industry also knows an example of a global catastrophe, when on April 26, 1986, a reactor exploded at the fourth power unit of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

The investigation took place in April-May 1954 in Washington and was called, in the American manner, "hearings."
Physicists participated in the hearings (with a capital P!), but for the scientific world of America the conflict was unprecedented: not a dispute about priority, not an undercover struggle of scientific schools, and not even the traditional confrontation between a forward-looking genius and a crowd of mediocre envious people. In the proceedings, the keyword "loyalty" sounded imperiously. The accusation of "disloyalty", which acquired a negative, formidable meaning, entailed punishment: deprivation of access to works of the highest secrecy. The action took place in the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Main characters:

Robert Oppenheimer, native of New York, pioneer of quantum physics in the USA, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, "father of the atomic bomb", successful scientific manager and refined intellectual, after 1945 a national hero of America ...

“I am not the simplest person,” the American physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi once remarked. "But compared to Oppenheimer, I'm very, very simple." Robert Oppenheimer was one of the central figures of the 20th century, whose very "complexity" absorbed the country's political and ethical contradictions.

During World War II, the brilliant physicist Ajulius Robert Oppenheimer led the development of American nuclear scientists to create the first atomic bomb in human history. The scientist led a secluded and secluded life, and this gave rise to suspicions of treason.

Atomic weapons are the result of all previous developments in science and technology. Discoveries that are directly related to its occurrence were made at the end of the 19th century. A huge role in revealing the secrets of the atom was played by the studies of A. Becquerel, Pierre Curie and Marie Sklodowska-Curie, E. Rutherford and others.

In early 1939, the French physicist Joliot-Curie concluded that a chain reaction was possible that would lead to an explosion of monstrous destructive power and that uranium could become an energy source, like an ordinary explosive. This conclusion was the impetus for the development of nuclear weapons.

Europe was on the eve of World War II, and the potential possession of such a powerful weapon pushed militaristic circles to create it as soon as possible, but the problem of the availability of a large amount of uranium ore for large-scale research was a brake. The physicists of Germany, England, the USA, and Japan worked on the creation of atomic weapons, realizing that it was impossible to work without a sufficient amount of uranium ore, the USA in September 1940 purchased a large amount of the required ore under false documents from Belgium, which allowed them to work on the creation nuclear weapons in full swing.

From 1939 to 1945, more than two billion dollars were spent on the Manhattan Project. A huge uranium refinery was built at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. H.C. Urey and Ernest O. Lawrence (inventor of the cyclotron) proposed a purification method based on the principle of gaseous diffusion followed by magnetic separation of two isotopes. A gas centrifuge separated the light Uranium-235 from the heavier Uranium-238.

On the territory of the United States, in Los Alamos, in the desert expanses of the state of New Mexico, in 1942, an American nuclear center was established. Many scientists worked on the project, but the main one was Robert Oppenheimer. Under his leadership, the best minds of that time were gathered not only from the USA and England, but from almost all of Western Europe. A huge team worked on the creation of nuclear weapons, including 12 Nobel Prize winners. Work in Los Alamos, where the laboratory was located, did not stop for a minute. In Europe, meanwhile, the Second World War was going on, and Germany carried out mass bombing of the cities of England, which endangered the English atomic project “Tub Alloys”, and England voluntarily transferred its developments and leading scientists of the project to the USA, which allowed the USA to take a leading position in the development of nuclear physics (creation of nuclear weapons).

"The father of the atomic bomb", he was at the same time an ardent opponent of American nuclear policy. Bearing the title of one of the most outstanding physicists of his time, he studied with pleasure the mysticism of ancient Indian books. A communist, traveler and staunch American patriot, a very spiritual person, he was nevertheless willing to betray his friends in order to defend himself against the attacks of anti-communists. The scientist who devised a plan to cause the most damage to Hiroshima and Nagasaki cursed himself for "innocent blood on his hands."

Writing about this controversial man is not an easy task, but an interesting one, and the 20th century was marked by a number of books about him. However, the rich life of the scientist continues to attract biographers.

Oppenheimer was born in New York in 1903 to wealthy and educated Jewish parents. Oppenheimer was brought up in love for painting, music, in an atmosphere of intellectual curiosity. In 1922, he entered Harvard University and in just three years received an honors degree, his main subject was chemistry. In the next few years, the precocious young man traveled to several countries in Europe, where he worked with physicists who dealt with the problems of investigating atomic phenomena in the light of new theories. Just a year after graduating from university, Oppenheimer published a scientific paper that showed how deeply he understood new methods. Soon he, together with the famous Max Born, developed the most important part of quantum theory, known as the Born-Oppenheimer method. In 1927, his outstanding doctoral dissertation brought him worldwide fame.

In 1928 he worked at the Zurich and Leiden universities. In the same year he returned to the USA. From 1929 to 1947 Oppenheimer taught at the University of California and the California Institute of Technology. From 1939 to 1945 he actively participated in the work on the creation of an atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project; heading the specially created Los Alamos laboratory.

In 1929, Oppenheimer, a rising star in science, accepted offers from two of several universities that were vying for the right to invite him. He taught during the spring semester at the vibrant, fledgling Caltech in Pasadena, and during the fall and winter semesters at the University of California at Berkeley, where he became the first lecturer in quantum mechanics. In fact, the erudite scholar had to adjust for some time, gradually reducing the level of discussion to the capabilities of his students. In 1936 he fell in love with Jean Tatlock, a restless and moody young woman whose passionate idealism found expression in communist activities. Like many thoughtful people of the time, Oppenheimer explored the ideas of the left movement as one of the possible alternatives, although he did not join the Communist Party, which his younger brother, sister-in-law and many of his friends did. His interest in politics, as well as his ability to read Sanskrit, was the natural result of a constant pursuit of knowledge. In his own words, he was also deeply disturbed by the explosion of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany and Spain and invested $1,000 a year from his $15,000 annual salary in projects related to the activities of communist groups. After meeting Kitty Harrison, who became his wife in 1940, Oppenheimer parted ways with Jean Tetlock and moved away from her circle of leftist friends.

In 1939, the United States learned that in preparation for a global war, Nazi Germany had discovered the fission of the atomic nucleus. Oppenheimer and other scientists immediately guessed that the German physicists would try to create a controlled chain reaction that could be the key to creating a weapon far more destructive than any that existed at that time. Enlisting the support of the great scientific genius, Albert Einstein, concerned scientists warned President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the danger in a famous letter. In authorizing funding for projects aimed at creating untested weapons, the president acted in strict secrecy. Ironically, many of the world's leading scientists, forced to flee their homeland, worked together with American scientists in laboratories scattered throughout the country. One part of the university groups explored the possibility of creating a nuclear reactor, others took up the solution of the problem of separating the uranium isotopes necessary for the release of energy in a chain reaction. Oppenheimer, who had previously been occupied with theoretical problems, was offered to organize a wide front of work only at the beginning of 1942.

The US Army's atomic bomb program was codenamed Project Manhattan and was led by Colonel Leslie R. Groves, 46, a professional military man. Groves, who described the scientists working on the atomic bomb as "a costly bunch of lunatics," however, acknowledged that Oppenheimer had an ability, hitherto untapped, to control his fellow debaters when the heat was on. The physicist proposed that all scientists be united in one laboratory in the quiet provincial town of Los Alamos, New Mexico, in an area that he knew well. By March 1943, the boarding house for boys had been turned into a tightly guarded secret center, of which Oppenheimer became scientific director. By insisting on the free exchange of information between scientists, who were strictly forbidden to leave the center, Oppenheimer created an atmosphere of trust and mutual respect, which contributed to the amazing success in his work. Not sparing himself, he remained the head of all areas of this complex project, although his personal life suffered greatly from this. But for a mixed group of scientists - among whom there were more than a dozen then or future Nobel laureates and of whom a rare person did not have a pronounced individuality - Oppenheimer was an unusually dedicated leader and subtle diplomat. Most of them would agree that the lion's share of the credit for the project's eventual success belongs to him. By December 30, 1944, Groves, who by that time had become a general, could confidently say that the two billion dollars spent would be ready for action by August 1 of the next year. But when Germany admitted defeat in May 1945, many of the researchers working at Los Alamos began to think about using new weapons. After all, probably, Japan would have capitulated soon without the atomic bombing. Should the United States be the first country in the world to use such a terrible device? Harry S. Truman, who became president after Roosevelt's death, appointed a committee to study the possible consequences of using the atomic bomb, which included Oppenheimer. Experts decided to recommend dropping an atomic bomb without warning on a major Japanese military facility. Oppenheimer's consent was also obtained.
All these worries would, of course, be moot if the bomb had not gone off. The test of the world's first atomic bomb was carried out on July 16, 1945, about 80 kilometers from the air base in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The device under test, named "Fat Man" for its convex shape, was attached to a steel tower set up in a desert area. At precisely 5:30 a.m., a remote-controlled detonator set off the bomb. With an echoing roar across a 1.6 kilometer diameter area, a gigantic purple-green-orange fireball shot up into the sky. The earth shook from the explosion, the tower disappeared. A white column of smoke rapidly rose to the sky and began to gradually expand, taking on an awesome mushroom shape at an altitude of about 11 kilometers. The first nuclear explosion startled scientific and military observers near the test site and turned their heads. But Oppenheimer remembered the lines from the Indian epic poem Bhagavad Gita: "I will become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Until the end of his life, satisfaction from scientific success was always mixed with a sense of responsibility for the consequences.
On the morning of August 6, 1945, there was a clear, cloudless sky over Hiroshima. As before, the approach from the east of two American aircraft (one of them was called Enola Gay) at an altitude of 10-13 km did not cause alarm (because every day they appeared in the sky of Hiroshima). One of the planes dived and dropped something, and then both planes turned and flew away. The dropped object on a parachute slowly descended and suddenly exploded at an altitude of 600 m above the ground. It was the "Baby" bomb.

Three days after the "Kid" was blown up in Hiroshima, an exact copy of the first "Fat Man" was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. On August 15, Japan, whose resolve had finally been broken by this new weapon, signed an unconditional surrender. However, the voices of skeptics were already being heard, and Oppenheimer himself predicted two months after Hiroshima that "mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima."

The whole world was shocked by the explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tellingly, Oppenheimer managed to combine the excitement of testing a bomb on civilians and the joy that the weapon had finally been tested.

Nevertheless, the following year he accepted an appointment as chairman of the scientific council of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), thus becoming the most influential adviser to the government and the military on nuclear issues. While the West and the Stalin-led Soviet Union were seriously preparing for the Cold War, each side focused its attention on the arms race. Although many of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project did not support the idea of ​​creating a new weapon, former Oppenheimer employees Edward Teller and Ernest Lawrence felt that US national security required the rapid development of a hydrogen bomb. Oppenheimer was horrified. From his point of view, the two nuclear powers were already opposed to each other, like "two scorpions in a jar, each able to kill the other, but only at the risk of his own life." With the proliferation of new weapons in wars, there would no longer be winners and losers - only victims. And the "father of the atomic bomb" made a public statement that he was against the development of the hydrogen bomb. Always out of place under Oppenheimer and clearly envious of his achievements, Teller began to make an effort to head the new project, implying that Oppenheimer should no longer be involved in the work. He told FBI investigators that his rival was keeping scientists from working on the hydrogen bomb with his authority, and revealed the secret that Oppenheimer suffered bouts of severe depression in his youth. When President Truman agreed in 1950 to finance the development of the hydrogen bomb, Teller could celebrate victory.

In 1954, Oppenheimer's enemies launched a campaign to remove him from power, which they succeeded after a month-long search for "black spots" in his personal biography. As a result, a show case was organized in which Oppenheimer was opposed by many influential political and scientific figures. As Albert Einstein later put it: "Oppenheimer's problem was that he loved a woman who didn't love him: the US government."

By allowing Oppenheimer's talent to flourish, America doomed him to death.

Oppenheimer is known not only as the creator of the American atomic bomb. He owns many works on quantum mechanics, relativity theory, elementary particle physics, theoretical astrophysics. In 1927 he developed the theory of the interaction of free electrons with atoms. Together with Born, he created the theory of the structure of diatomic molecules. In 1931, he and P. Ehrenfest formulated a theorem, the application of which to the nitrogen nucleus showed that the proton-electron hypothesis of the structure of nuclei leads to a number of contradictions with the known properties of nitrogen. Investigated the internal conversion of g-rays. In 1937 he developed the cascade theory of cosmic showers, in 1938 he made the first calculation of the neutron star model, in 1939 he predicted the existence of "black holes".

Oppenheimer owns a number of popular books, including Science and the Common Understanding (Science and the Common Understanding, 1954), The Open Mind (The Open Mind, 1955), Some Reflections on Science and Culture (Some Reflections on Science and Culture, 1960) . Oppenheimer died in Princeton on February 18, 1967.

Work on nuclear projects in the USSR and the USA began simultaneously. In August 1942, a secret "Laboratory No. 2" began to work in one of the buildings in the courtyard of Kazan University. Igor Kurchatov was appointed its leader.

In Soviet times, it was claimed that the USSR solved its atomic problem completely independently, and Kurchatov was considered the "father" of the domestic atomic bomb. Although there were rumors about some secrets stolen from the Americans. And only in the 90s, 50 years later, one of the main actors of that time, Yuli Khariton, spoke about the essential role of intelligence in accelerating the backward Soviet project. And American scientific and technical results were obtained by Klaus Fuchs, who arrived in the English group.

Information from abroad helped the country's leadership to make a difficult decision - to start work on nuclear weapons during the most difficult war. Intelligence allowed our physicists to save time, helped to avoid a "misfire" during the first atomic test, which was of great political importance.

In 1939, a chain reaction of fission of uranium-235 nuclei was discovered, accompanied by the release of colossal energy. Shortly thereafter, articles on nuclear physics began to disappear from the pages of scientific journals. This could indicate a real prospect of creating an atomic explosive and weapons based on it.

After the discovery by Soviet physicists of spontaneous fission of uranium-235 nuclei and the determination of the critical mass, a corresponding directive was sent to the residency at the initiative of the head of the scientific and technological revolution L. Kvasnikov.

In the FSB of Russia (the former KGB of the USSR), 17 volumes of archival file No. 13676, which documented who and how attracted US citizens to work for Soviet intelligence, lie under the heading "keep forever" under the heading "keep forever". Only a few of the top leadership of the KGB of the USSR had access to the materials of this case, the classification of which was removed only recently. Soviet intelligence received the first information about the work on the creation of the American atomic bomb in the fall of 1941. And already in March 1942, extensive information about the ongoing research in the United States and England fell on the table of I.V. Stalin. According to Yu. B. Khariton, in that dramatic period it was more reliable to use the bomb scheme already tested by the Americans for our first explosion. “Given the interests of the state, any other decision was then unacceptable. The merit of Fuchs and our other assistants abroad is undeniable. However, we implemented the American scheme in the first test not so much from technical as from political considerations.

The announcement that the Soviet Union had mastered the secret of nuclear weapons aroused in the US ruling circles a desire to unleash a preventive war as soon as possible. The Troyan plan was developed, which provided for the start of hostilities on January 1, 1950. At that time, the United States had 840 strategic bombers in combat units, 1350 in reserve and over 300 atomic bombs.

A test site was built near the city of Semipalatinsk. Exactly at 7:00 am on August 29, 1949, the first Soviet nuclear device under the code name "RDS-1" was blown up at this test site.

The Troyan plan, according to which atomic bombs were to be dropped on 70 cities of the USSR, was thwarted due to the threat of a retaliatory strike. The event that took place at the Semipalatinsk test site informed the world about the creation of nuclear weapons in the USSR.

Foreign intelligence not only drew the attention of the country's leadership to the problem of creating atomic weapons in the West and thereby initiated similar work in our country. Thanks to information from foreign intelligence, according to academicians A. Aleksandrov, Yu. Khariton and others, I. Kurchatov did not make big mistakes, we managed to avoid dead ends in the creation of atomic weapons and create an atomic bomb in the USSR in a shorter time, in just three years , while the United States spent four years on it, spending five billion dollars on its creation.
As noted in an interview with the Izvestiya newspaper on December 8, 1992, the first Soviet atomic charge was made according to the American model with the help of information received from K. Fuchs. According to the academician, when government awards were presented to participants in the Soviet atomic project, Stalin, satisfied that there was no American monopoly in this area, remarked: “If we were late for one to a year and a half, then we would probably try this charge on ourselves.” ".

On August days 68 years ago, namely, on August 6, 1945 at 08:15 local time, the American B-29 "Enola Gay" bomber, piloted by Paul Tibbets and bombardier Tom Fereby, dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima called "Baby" . On August 9, the bombing was repeated - the second bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki.

According to official history, the Americans were the first in the world to make an atomic bomb and hastened to use it against Japan., so that the Japanese capitulate faster and America could avoid colossal losses during the landing of soldiers on the islands, for which the admirals were already preparing closely. At the same time, the bomb was a demonstration of its new capabilities to the USSR, for Comrade Dzhugashvili in May 1945 was already thinking of extending the construction of communism to the English Channel.

Seeing the example of Hiroshima, what will happen to Moscow, the Soviet party leaders reduced their ardor and made the right decision to build socialism no further than East Berlin. At the same time, they threw all their efforts into the Soviet atomic project, dug up the talented academician Kurchatov somewhere, and he quickly made an atomic bomb for Dzhugashvili, which the general secretaries then rattled on the UN rostrum, and Soviet propagandists rattled it in front of the audience - they say, yes, our pants are sewn bad, but« we made the atomic bomb». This argument is almost the main one for many fans of the Soviet of Deputies. However, the time has come to refute these arguments.

Somehow, the creation of the atomic bomb did not fit with the level of Soviet science and technology. It is unbelievable that a slave-owning system could produce such a complex scientific and technological product on its own. Over time somehow not even denied, that people from Lubyanka also helped Kurchatov, bringing ready-made drawings in their beaks, but academicians completely deny this, minimizing the merit of technological intelligence. In America, the Rosenbergs were executed for transferring atomic secrets to the USSR. The dispute between official historians and citizens who want to revise history has been going on for a long time, almost openly, however, the true state of affairs is far from both the official version and the views of its critics. And things are such that the first atomic bomb, likeand many things in the world were done by the Germans by 1945. And they even tested it at the end of 1944.The Americans were preparing the nuclear project themselves, as it were, but they received the main components as a trophy or under an agreement with the top of the Reich, and therefore they did everything much faster. But when the Americans detonated the bomb, the USSR began to look for German scientists, whichand made their contribution. That is why they created a bomb so quickly in the USSR, although according to the calculation of the Americans, he could not make a bomb before1952- 55 years old.

The Americans knew what they were talking about, because if von Braun helped them make rocket technology, then their first atomic bomb was completely German. For a long time it was possible to hide the truth, but in the decades after 1945, then someone resigning unleashed his tongue, then accidentally declassified a couple of sheets from secret archives, then journalists sniffed something out. The earth was filled with rumors and rumors that the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was actually Germanhave been going since 1945. People whispered in the smoking rooms and scratched their foreheads over the logicaleskiminconsistencies and puzzling questions until one day in the early 2000s, Mr. Joseph Farrell, a well-known theologian and specialist in an alternative view of modern "science" combined all the known facts in one book - Black sun of the Third Reich. The battle for the "weapon of vengeance".

The facts were repeatedly checked by him and much that the author had doubts was not included in the book, nevertheless, these facts are more than enough to reduce the debit to the credit. One can argue about each of them (which the official men of the United States do), try to refute, but all together the facts are super convincing. Some of them, for example, the Decrees of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, are completely irrefutable neither by the pundits of the USSR, nor even by pundits of the United States. Since Dzhugashvili decided to give "enemies of the people"Stalinistprizes(more on that below), so it was for what.

We will not retell the entire book of Mr. Farrell, we simply recommend it for mandatory reading. Here are just a few quoteskifor example, some quotesabouttalking about the fact that the Germans tested the atomic bomb and people saw it:

A man named Zinsser, an anti-aircraft missile specialist, recounted what he witnessed: “In early October 1944, I took off from Ludwigslust. (south of Lübeck), located 12 to 15 kilometers from the nuclear test site, and suddenly saw a strong bright glow that illuminated the entire atmosphere, which lasted about two seconds.

A clearly visible shock wave erupted from the cloud formed by the explosion. By the time it became visible, it had a diameter of about one kilometer, and the color of the cloud changed frequently. After a short period of darkness, it was covered with many bright spots, which, unlike the usual explosion, had a pale blue color.

Approximately ten seconds after the explosion, the distinct outlines of the explosive cloud disappeared, then the cloud itself began to brighten against a dark gray sky covered with solid clouds. The diameter of the shock wave still visible to the naked eye was at least 9000 meters; it remained visible for at least 15 seconds. My personal feeling from observing the color of the explosive cloud: it took on a blue-violet color. Throughout this phenomenon, reddish-colored rings were visible, very quickly changing color to dirty shades. From my observation plane, I felt a slight impact in the form of light jolts and jerks.

About an hour later I took off in a Xe-111 from the Ludwigslust airfield and headed east. Shortly after takeoff, I flew through a zone of continuous cloud cover (at an altitude of three to four thousand meters). Above the place where the explosion occurred, there was a mushroom cloud with turbulent, eddy layers (at an altitude of approximately 7000 meters), without any visible connections. A strong electromagnetic disturbance manifested itself in the inability to continue radio communication. Since American P-38 fighters were operating in the Wittenberg-Bersburg area, I had to turn north, but I got a better view of the lower part of the cloud above the explosion site. Side note: I don't really understand why these tests were conducted in such a densely populated area."

ARI:Thus, a certain German pilot observed the testing of a device that, by all indications, is suitable for the characteristics of an atomic bomb. There are dozens of such testimonies, but Mr. Farrell cites only officialdocumentation. And not only the Germans, but also the Japanese, whom the Germans, according to his version, also helped to make a bomb, and they tested it at their training ground.

Shortly after the end of World War II, American intelligence in the Pacific received a startling report: the Japanese had built and successfully tested an atomic bomb just before their surrender. The work was carried out in the city of Konan or its environs (Japanese name for the city of Heungnam) in the north of the Korean Peninsula.

The war ended before these weapons saw combat use, and the production where they were made is now in the hands of the Russians.

In the summer of 1946, this information was widely publicized. David Snell of Korea's 24th Investigation Division... wrote about it in the Atlanta Constitution after he was fired.

Snell's statement was based on the allegations of a Japanese officer returning to Japan. This officer informed Snell that he was tasked with securing the facility. Snell, recounting in his own words in a newspaper article the testimony of a Japanese officer, argued:

In a cave in the mountains near Konan, people were working, racing against time to complete the assembly of the "genzai bakudan" - the Japanese name for an atomic bomb. It was August 10, 1945 (Japanese time), just four days after the atomic explosion tore the sky apart.

ARI: Among the arguments of those who do not believe in the creation of the atomic bomb by the Germans, such an argument that it is not known about the significant industrial capacity in the Hitlerite district, which was directed to the German atomic project, as was done in the United States. However, this argument is refuted byextremely curious fact connected with the concern "I. G. Farben", which, according to the official legend, produced syntheticesskyrubber and therefore consumed more electricity than Berlin at that time. But in reality, in five years of work, EVEN A KILOGRAM of official products was produced there, and most likely it was the main center for uranium enrichment:

Concern "I. G. Farben took an active part in the atrocities of Nazism, creating during the war years a huge plant for the production of Buna synthetic rubber in Auschwitz (the German name for the Polish town of Auschwitz) in the Polish part of Silesia.

The prisoners of the concentration camp, who first worked on the construction of the complex, and then served it, were subjected to unheard of cruelties. However, at the hearings of the Nuremberg Tribunal for war criminals, it turned out that the Auschwitz buna complex was one of the great mysteries of the war, for despite the personal blessing of Hitler, Himmler, Goering and Keitel, despite the endless source of both qualified civilian personnel and slave labor from Auschwitz, “work was constantly hampered by failures, delays and sabotage ... However, in spite of everything, the construction of a huge complex for the production of synthetic rubber and gasoline was completed. More than three hundred thousand concentration camp prisoners passed through the construction site; of these, twenty-five thousand died of exhaustion, unable to bear the exhausting labor.

The complex is gigantic. So huge that "it consumed more electricity than all of Berlin." However, during the war criminals tribunal, it was not this long list of macabre details that puzzled the investigators of the victorious powers. They were perplexed by the fact that, despite such a huge investment of money, materials and human lives, "never a single kilogram of synthetic rubber was produced."

On this, as if obsessed, the directors and managers of Farben, who found themselves in the dock, insisted. Consume more electricity than all of Berlin - at the time the eighth largest city in the world - to produce absolutely nothing? If this is true, then the unprecedented expenditure of money and labor and the huge consumption of electricity did not make any significant contribution to the German war effort. Surely something is wrong here.

ARI: Electrical energy in insane amounts is one of the main components of any nuclear project. It is needed for the production of heavy water - it is obtained by evaporating tons of natural water, after which the same water that nuclear scientists need remains at the bottom. Electricity is needed for the electrochemical separation of metals; uranium cannot be obtained in any other way. And it also needs a lot. Based on this, historians argued that since the Germans did not have such energy-intensive plants for the enrichment of uranium and the production of heavy water, it means that there was no atomic bomb. But as you can see, everything was there. Only it was called differently - like in the USSR then there was a secret "sanatorium" for German physicists.

An even more surprising fact is the use by the Germans of an unfinished atomic bomb on ... the Kursk Bulge.

The final chord of this chapter, and a breathtaking indication of other mysteries that will be explored later in this book, is a report declassified by the National Security Agency only in 1978. This report appears to be the transcript of an intercepted message transmitted from the Japanese embassy in Stockholm to Tokyo. It is entitled "Report on the bomb based on the splitting of the atom". It is best to quote this astounding document in its entirety, with the omissions resulting from the decipherment of the original message.

This bomb, revolutionary in its effects, will completely overturn all established concepts of conventional warfare. I am sending you all the reports collected together about what is called the bomb based on the splitting of the atom:

It is authentically known that in June 1943 the German army at a point 150 kilometers southeast of Kursk tested a completely new type of weapon against the Russians. Although the entire 19th Russian Rifle Regiment was hit, just a few bombs (each with a live charge of less than 5 kilograms) were enough to destroy it completely, down to the last man. The following material is given according to the testimony of Lieutenant Colonel Ue (?) Kendzi, an adviser to the attaché in Hungary and in the past (worked?) in this country, who accidentally saw the consequences of what happened immediately after it happened: “All the people and horses (? in the area? ) shell explosions were charred to blackness, and even detonated all the ammunition.

ARI:However, even withhowlofficial documents official US pundits are tryingrefute - they say, all these reports, reports and protocols are fakedew.But the balance still does not converge, because by August 1945, the United States did not have enough uranium to produce bothminimmindtwo, and possibly four atomic bombs. There will be no bomb without uranium, and it has been mined for years. By 1944, the United States had no more than a quarter of the required uranium, and it took at least another five years to extract the rest. And suddenly uranium seemed to fall on their heads from the sky:

In December 1944, a very unpleasant report was prepared, which greatly upset those who read it: by May 1 - 15 kilograms. This was indeed very unfortunate news, for according to initial estimates made in 1942, between 10 and 100 kilograms of uranium was required to make a uranium-based bomb, and by the time this memorandum was written, more accurate calculations had given the critical mass needed to produce uranium an atomic bomb, equal to approximately 50 kilograms.

However, it was not only the Manhattan Project that had problems with the missing uranium. Germany also seems to have suffered from "missing uranium syndrome" in the days immediately preceding and immediately after the end of the war. But in this case, the volumes of missing uranium were calculated not in tens of kilograms, but in hundreds of tons. At this point, it makes sense to quote a lengthy excerpt from the brilliant work of Carter Hydrick in order to comprehensively explore this problem:

From June 1940 until the end of the war, Germany removed from Belgium three and a half thousand tons of uranium-containing substances - almost three times more than what Groves had at his disposal ... and placed them in salt mines near Strassfurt in Germany.

ARI: Leslie Richard Groves (eng. Leslie Richard Groves; August 17, 1896 - July 13, 1970) - lieutenant general of the US Army, in 1942-1947 - military head of the nuclear weapons program (Manhattan Project).

Groves states that on April 17, 1945, when the war was already drawing to a close, the Allies managed to seize about 1,100 tons of uranium ore in Strassfurt and another 31 tons in the French port of Toulouse ... And he claims that Germany never had more uranium ore, so thus showing that Germany never had enough material either to process uranium into feedstock for a plutonium reactor, or to enrich it by electromagnetic separation.

Obviously, if at one time 3,500 tons were stored in Strassfurt, and only 1,130 were captured, there are still approximately 2,730 tons left - and this is still twice as much as the Manhattan Project had throughout the war ... The fate of this missing ore unknown to this day...

According to historian Margaret Gowing, by the summer of 1941, Germany had enriched 600 tons of uranium to the oxide form needed to ionize the raw material into a gaseous form in which uranium isotopes can be separated magnetically or thermally. (Italics mine. - D. F.) Also, the oxide can be converted into a metal for use as a raw material in a nuclear reactor. In fact, Professor Reichl, who during the war was in charge of all the uranium at the disposal of Germany, claims that the true figure was much higher ...

ARI: So it's clear that without getting enriched uranium from somewhere else, and some detonation technology, the Americans would not have been able to test or detonate their bombs over Japan in August 1945. And they got, as it turns out,missing components from the Germans.

In order to create a uranium or plutonium bomb, uranium-containing raw materials must be converted into metal at a certain stage. For a plutonium bomb, you get metallic U238; for a uranium bomb, you need U235. However, due to the insidious characteristics of uranium, this metallurgical process is extremely complex. The United States tackled this problem early, but did not succeed in converting uranium into a metallic form in large quantities until late in 1942. German specialists ... by the end of 1940 had already converted 280.6 kilograms into metal, more than a quarter of a ton ......

In any case, these figures unequivocally indicate that in 1940-1942 the Germans were significantly ahead of the Allies in one very important component of the atomic bomb production process - in uranium enrichment, and, therefore, this also allows us to conclude that they were at that time pulled far ahead in the race for possession of a working atomic bomb. However, these numbers also raise one troubling question: where did all that uranium go?

The answer to this question is given by the mysterious incident with the German submarine U-234, captured by the Americans in 1945.

The history of U-234 is well known to all researchers involved in the history of the Nazi atomic bomb, and, of course, the "Allied legend" says that the materials that were on board the captured submarine were in no way used in the "Manhattan Project".

All this is absolutely not true. The U-234 was a very large underwater minelayer capable of carrying a large load underwater. Consider what a most bizarre cargo was on board U-234 on that last flight:

Two Japanese officers.

80 gold-plated cylindrical containers containing 560 kilograms of uranium oxide.

Several wooden barrels filled with "heavy water".

Infrared proximity fuses.

Dr. Heinz Schlicke, inventor of these fuses.

When U-234 was loading in a German port before leaving for her last voyage, the submarine's radio operator Wolfgang Hirschfeld noticed that Japanese officers wrote "U235" on the paper in which the containers were wrapped before loading them into the hold of the boat. Needless to say, this remark provoked all the barrage of debunking criticism with which skeptics usually meet UFO eyewitness accounts: the low position of the sun above the horizon, poor lighting, a large distance that did not allow to see everything clearly, and the like. And this is not surprising, because if Hirschfeld really saw what he saw, the frightening consequences of this are obvious.

The use of containers coated with gold on the inside is explained by the fact that uranium, a highly corrosive metal, quickly becomes contaminated when it comes into contact with other unstable elements. Gold, which is not inferior to lead in terms of protection against radioactive radiation, unlike lead, is a very pure and extremely stable element; therefore, its choice for the storage and long-term transportation of highly enriched and pure uranium is obvious. Thus, the uranium oxide on board U-234 was highly enriched uranium, and most likely U235, the last stage of raw material before turning it into weapons-grade or bomb-usable uranium (if it was not already weapons-grade uranium) . And indeed, if the inscriptions made by Japanese officers on the containers were true, it is very likely that this was the last stage of purification of raw materials before turning into metal.

The cargo aboard U-234 was so sensitive that when the U.S. Navy officials compiled an inventory on June 16, 1945, the uranium oxide disappeared from the list without a trace.....

Yes, it would have been the easiest if not for an unexpected confirmation from a certain Pyotr Ivanovich Titarenko, a former military translator from the headquarters of Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, who at the end of the war accepted the surrender of Japan from the Soviet Union. As the German magazine Der Spiegel wrote in 1992, Titarenko wrote a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In it, he reported that in reality three atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, one of which, dropped on Nagasaki before the Fat Man exploded over the city, did not explode. Subsequently, this bomb was transferred by Japan to the Soviet Union.

Mussolini and the Soviet marshal's interpreter are not the only ones who confirm the strange number of bombs dropped on Japan; it is possible that at some point a fourth bomb was also in play, being transported to the Far East aboard the US Navy heavy cruiser Indianapolis (tail number CA 35) when it sank in 1945.

This strange evidence again raises questions about the "Allied legend", for, as has already been shown, in late 1944 and early 1945, the "Manhattan Project" faced a critical shortage of weapons-grade uranium, and by that time the problem of plutonium fuses had not been solved. bombs. So the question is: if these reports were true, where did the extra bomb (or even more bombs) come from? It is hard to believe that three or even four bombs ready for use in Japan were made in such a short time - unless they were war booty taken from Europe.

ARI: Actually a storyU-234begins in 1944, when, after the opening of the 2nd front and failures on the Eastern Front, possibly on behalf of Hitler, it was decided to start trading with the allies - an atomic bomb in exchange for guarantees of immunity for the party elite:

Be that as it may, we are primarily interested in the role that Bormann played in the development and implementation of the plan for the secret strategic evacuation of the Nazis after their military defeat. After the Stalingrad disaster in early 1943, it became obvious to Bormann, like other high-ranking Nazis, that the military collapse of the Third Reich was inevitable if their secret weapons projects did not bear fruit in time. Bormann and representatives of various armaments departments, industries and, of course, the SS gathered for a secret meeting at which plans were developed for the export of material assets, qualified personnel, scientific materials and technologies from Germany ......

First of all, JIOA director Grun, appointed as project manager, compiled a list of the most qualified German and Austrian scientists that the Americans and British used for decades. Although journalists and historians repeatedly mentioned this list, none of them said that Werner Ozenberg, who during the war served as head of the scientific department of the Gestapo, took part in its compilation. The decision to involve Ozenbsrg in this work was made by US Navy Captain Ransom Davis after consultations with the Joint Chiefs of Staff......

Finally, the Ozenberg list and the interest shown by the Americans in it seems to support another hypothesis, namely that the Americans' knowledge of the nature of the Nazi projects, as evidenced by General Patton's unerring actions in finding Kammler's secret research centers, could come only from Nazi Germany itself. Since Carter Heidrick proved quite convincingly that Bormann personally supervised the transfer of the secrets of the German atomic bomb to the Americans, it can be safely argued that he ultimately coordinated the flow of other important information regarding the "Kammler headquarters" to the American intelligence services, since no one knew better than he the nature, content and personnel of the German black projects. Thus, Carter Heidrick's thesis that Bormann helped organize the transportation to the United States on the submarine "U-234" of not only enriched uranium, but also a ready-to-use atomic bomb, looks very plausible.

ARI: In addition to uranium itself, a lot more things are needed for an atomic bomb, in particular, fuses based on red mercury. Unlike a conventional detonator, these devices must detonate supersynchronously, gathering the uranium mass into a single whole and starting a nuclear reaction. This technology is extremely complex, the United States did not have it, and therefore the fuses were included. And since the question did not end with the fuses, the Americans dragged German nuclear scientists to their consultations before loading the atomic bomb on board the aircraft flying to Japan:

There is another fact that does not fit into the post-war legend of the Allies regarding the impossibility of the Germans creating an atomic bomb: the German physicist Rudolf Fleischmann was brought to the United States by plane for interrogation even before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Why was there such an urgent need to consult with a German physicist before the atomic bombing of Japan? After all, according to the legend of the Allies, we had nothing to learn from the Germans in the field of atomic physics ......

ARI:Thus, there is no doubt that Germany had a bomb in May 1945. WhyHitlerdidn't apply it? Because one atomic bomb is not a bomb. For a bomb to become a weapon, there must be a sufficient number of them.identitymultiplied by means of delivery. Hitler could destroy New York and London, could choose to wipe out a couple of divisions moving towards Berlin. But the outcome of the war would not have been decided in his favor. But the Allies would have come to Germany in a very bad mood. The Germans already got it in 1945, but if Germany used nuclear weapons, its population would have got much more. Germany could be wiped off the face of the earth, like, for example, Dresden. Therefore, although Mr. Hitler is considered by somewithathe was not a masshed, nevertheless insane politician, and soberly weigh everythinginquietly leaked World War II: we give you a bomb - and you do not allow the USSR to reach the English Channel and guarantee a quiet old age for the Nazi elite.

So separate negotiationsaboutry in April 1945, described in the movie pRabout 17 moments of spring, really took place. But only at such a level that no pastor Schlag ever dreamed of negotiatingaboutry was led by Hitler himself. And physicsRthere was no unge because while Stirlitz was chasing him Manfred von Ardenne

already tested itweapons - as a minimum in 1943on theTothe Ur arc, as a maximum - in Norway, no later than 1944.

By ByintelligiblemoreoverandTo us, Mr. Farrell's book is not promoted either in the West or in Russia, not everyone has caught the eye of it. But the information makes its way and one day even the dumb will know about how the nuclear weapon was made. And there will be a veryicantthe situation because it will have to be radically reconsideredall officialhistorythe last 70 years.

However, official pundits in Russia will be worst of all.Insk federation, who for many years repeated the old mantr: maour tires may be bad, but we createdwhetheratomic bombby.But as it turns out, even American engineers were too tough for a nuclear device, at least in 1945. The USSR is not involved at all here - today the Russian federation would compete with Iran on the subject of who will make the bomb faster,if not for one BUT. BUT - these are captured German engineers who made nuclear weapons for Dzhugashvili.

It is authentically known, and academicians of the USSR do not deny it, that 3,000 captured Germans worked on the USSR missile project. That is, they essentially launched Gagarin into space. But as many as 7,000 specialists worked on the Soviet nuclear projectfrom Germany,so it's not surprising that the Soviets made the atomic bomb before they flew into space. If the United States still had its own way in the atomic race, then in the USSR they simply stupidly reproduced German technology.

In 1945, a group of colonels, who in fact were not colonels, but secret physicists, were looking for specialists in Germany - the future academicians Artsimovich, Kikoin, Khariton, Shchelkin ... The operation was led by First Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Ivan Serov.

More than two hundred of the most prominent German physicists (about half of them were doctors of science), radio engineers and craftsmen were brought to Moscow. In addition to the equipment of the Ardenne laboratory, later equipment from the Berlin Kaiser Institute and other German scientific organizations, documentation and reagents, stocks of film and paper for recorders, photo recorders, wire tape recorders for telemetry, optics, powerful electromagnets and even German transformers were delivered to Moscow. And then the Germans, under pain of death, began to build an atomic bomb for the USSR. They built from scratch, because by 1945 the United States had some of its own developments, the Germans were simply far ahead of them, but in the USSR, in the realm of "science" of academicians like Lysenko, there was nothing on the nuclear program. Here is what the researchers of this topic managed to dig up:

In 1945, the sanatoriums "Sinop" and "Agudzery", located in Abkhazia, were transferred to the disposal of German physicists. Thus, the foundation was laid for the Sukhumi Institute of Physics and Technology, which was then part of the system of top-secret objects of the USSR. "Sinop" was referred to in the documents as Object "A", headed by Baron Manfred von Ardenne (1907-1997). This person is legendary in world science: one of the founders of television, the developer of electron microscopes and many other devices. During one meeting, Beria wanted to entrust the leadership of the atomic project to von Ardenne. Ardenne himself recalls: “I had no more than ten seconds to think. My answer is verbatim: I consider such an important proposal as a great honor for me, because. it is an expression of exceptionally great confidence in my abilities. The solution to this problem has two different directions: 1. The development of the atomic bomb itself and 2. The development of methods for obtaining the fissile isotope of uranium 235U on an industrial scale. The separation of isotopes is a separate and very difficult problem. Therefore, I propose that the separation of isotopes be the main problem of our institute and German specialists, and that the leading nuclear scientists of the Soviet Union sitting here would do a great job of creating an atomic bomb for their homeland.

Beria accepted this offer. Many years later, at a government reception, when Manfred von Ardenne was introduced to the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR Khrushchev, he reacted like this: “Ah, you are the same Ardenne who so skillfully pulled his neck out of the noose.”

Von Ardenne later assessed his contribution to the development of the atomic problem as "the most important thing to which post-war circumstances led me." In 1955, the scientist was allowed to travel to the GDR, where he headed a research institute in Dresden.

Sanatorium "Agudzery" received the code name Object "G". It was led by Gustav Hertz (1887–1975), nephew of the famous Heinrich Hertz, known to us from school. Gustav Hertz received the Nobel Prize in 1925 for discovering the laws of the collision of an electron with an atom - the well-known experience of Frank and Hertz. In 1945, Gustav Hertz became one of the first German physicists brought to the USSR. He was the only foreign Nobel laureate who worked in the USSR. Like other German scientists, he lived, knowing no refusal, in his house on the seashore. In 1955 Hertz left for the GDR. There he worked as a professor at the University of Leipzig, and then as director of the Physics Institute at the university.

The main task of von Ardenne and Gustav Hertz was to find different methods for separating uranium isotopes. Thanks to von Ardenne, one of the first mass spectrometers appeared in the USSR. Hertz successfully improved his isotope separation method, which made it possible to establish this process on an industrial scale.

Other prominent German scientists were also brought to the facility in Sukhumi, including the physicist and radiochemist Nikolaus Riehl (1901–1991). They called him Nikolai Vasilyevich. He was born in St. Petersburg, in the family of a German - the chief engineer of Siemens and Halske. Nikolaus' mother was Russian, so he spoke German and Russian from childhood. He received an excellent technical education: first in St. Petersburg, and after the family moved to Germany, at the Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin (later Humboldt University). In 1927 he defended his doctoral dissertation in radiochemistry. His supervisors were future scientific luminaries - nuclear physicist Lisa Meitner and radiochemist Otto Hahn. Before the outbreak of World War II, Riehl was in charge of the central radiological laboratory of the Auergesellschaft company, where he proved to be an energetic and very capable experimenter. At the beginning of the war, Riel was summoned to the War Ministry, where he was offered to start producing uranium. In May 1945, Riehl voluntarily came to the Soviet emissaries sent to Berlin. The scientist, who was considered the Reich's chief expert on the production of enriched uranium for reactors, pointed out where the equipment needed for this was located. Its fragments (a plant near Berlin was destroyed by bombing) were dismantled and sent to the USSR. 300 tons of uranium compounds found there were also taken there. It is believed that this saved the Soviet Union a year and a half to create an atomic bomb - until 1945, Igor Kurchatov had only 7 tons of uranium oxide at his disposal. Under the leadership of Riel, the Elektrostal plant in Noginsk near Moscow was reequipped to produce cast uranium metal.

Echelons with equipment were going from Germany to Sukhumi. Three of the four German cyclotrons were brought to the USSR, as well as powerful magnets, electron microscopes, oscilloscopes, high-voltage transformers, ultra-precise instruments, etc. Equipment was delivered to the USSR from the Institute of Chemistry and Metallurgy, the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute, Siemens electrical laboratories, Physical Institute of the German Post Office.

Igor Kurchatov was appointed scientific director of the project, who was undoubtedly an outstanding scientist, but he always surprised his employees with extraordinary "scientific insight" - as it turned out later, he knew most of the secrets from intelligence, but had no right to talk about it. The following episode, which was told by academician Isaac Kikoin, speaks about leadership methods. At one meeting, Beria asked Soviet physicists how long it would take to solve one problem. They answered him: six months. The answer was: "Either you will solve it in one month, or you will deal with this problem in places much more remote." Of course, the task was completed in one month. But the authorities spared no expense and rewards. Very many, including German scientists, received Stalin Prizes, dachas, cars and other rewards. Nikolaus Riehl, however, the only foreign scientist, even received the title of Hero of Socialist Labor. German scientists played a big role in raising the qualifications of the Georgian physicists who worked with them.

ARI: So the Germans didn't just help the USSR a lot with the creation of the atomic bomb - they did everything. Moreover, this story was like with the "Kalashnikov assault rifle" because even German gunsmiths could not have made such a perfect weapon in a couple of years - while working in captivity in the USSR, they simply completed what was already almost ready. Similarly, with the atomic bomb, work on which the Germans began as early as a year in 1933, and possibly much earlier. Official history holds that Hitler annexed the Sudetenland because there were many Germans living there. It may be so, but the Sudetenland is the richest uranium deposit in Europe. There is a suspicion that Hitler knew where to start in the first place, because the German legacy since the time of Peter was in Russia, and in Australia, and even in Africa. But Hitler started with the Sudetenland. Apparently, some people knowledgeable in alchemy immediately explained to him what to do and which way to go, so it is not surprising that the Germans were far ahead of everyone and the American intelligence services in Europe in the forties of the last century were only picking up leftovers for the Germans, hunting for medieval alchemical manuscripts.

But the USSR did not even have leftovers. There was only the "academician" Lysenko, according to whose theories the weeds growing on a collective farm field, and not on a private farm, had every reason to be imbued with the spirit of socialism and turn into wheat. In medicine, there was a similar "scientific school" that tried to speed up the duration of pregnancy from 9 months to nine weeks - so that the wives of the proletarians would not be distracted from work. There were similar theories in nuclear physics, therefore, for the USSR, the creation of an atomic bomb was just as impossible as the creation of its own computer, because cybernetics in the USSR was officially considered a prostitute of the bourgeoisie. By the way, important scientific decisions in the same physics (for example, in which direction to go and which theories to consider working) in the USSR were made at best by "academicians" from agriculture. Although more often this was done by a party functionary with an education in the "evening working faculty". What kind of atomic bomb could there be on this base? Only a stranger. In the USSR, they could not even assemble it from ready-made components with ready-made drawings. The Germans did everything, and on this score there is even an official recognition of their merits - the Stalin Prizes and orders that were awarded to the engineers:

German specialists are laureates of the Stalin Prize for their work in the field of the use of atomic energy. Excerpts from the resolutions of the Council of Ministers of the USSR "on rewarding and bonuses ...".

[From the Decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR No. 5070-1944ss / op "On awarding and bonuses for outstanding scientific discoveries and technical achievements in the use of atomic energy", October 29, 1949]

[From the Decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR No. 4964-2148ss / op "On awarding and bonuses for outstanding scientific work in the field of the use of atomic energy, for the creation of new types of RDS products, achievements in the production of plutonium and uranium-235 and the development of a raw material base for the nuclear industry" , December 6, 1951]

[From the Decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR No. 3044-1304ss "On the award of Stalin Prizes to scientific and engineering workers of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building and other departments for the creation of a hydrogen bomb and new designs of atomic bombs", December 31, 1953]

Manfred von Ardenne

1947 - Stalin Prize (electron microscope - "In January 1947, the Chief of the Site presented von Ardenne with the State Prize (a purse full of money) for his microscope work.") "German Scientists in the Soviet Atomic Project", p . eighteen)

1953 - Stalin Prize, 2nd class (electromagnetic isotope separation, lithium-6).

Heinz Barwich

Günther Wirtz

Gustav Hertz

1951 - Stalin Prize of the 2nd degree (the theory of the stability of gas diffusion in cascades).

Gerard Jaeger

1953 - Stalin Prize of the 3rd degree (electromagnetic separation of isotopes, lithium-6).

Reinhold Reichmann (Reichmann)

1951 - Stalin Prize of the 1st degree (posthumously) (development of technology

production of ceramic tubular filters for diffusion machines).

Nikolaus Riehl

1949 - Hero of Socialist Labor, Stalin Prize of the 1st degree (development and implementation of industrial technology for the production of pure metallic uranium).

Herbert Thieme

1949 - Stalin Prize of the 2nd degree (development and implementation of industrial technology for the production of pure metallic uranium).

1951 - Stalin Prize of the 2nd degree (development of industrial technology for the production of high purity uranium and the manufacture of products from it).

Peter Thiessen

1956 - Thyssen State Prize,_Peter

Heinz Freulich

1953 - Stalin Prize 3rd degree (electromagnetic isotope separation, lithium-6).

Ziel Ludwig

1951 - Stalin Prize 1st degree (development of technology for the production of ceramic tubular filters for diffusion machines).

Werner Schütze

1949 - Stalin Prize of the 2nd degree (mass spectrometer).

ARI: This is how the story turns out - there is no trace of the myth that the Volga is a bad car, but we made an atomic bomb. All that remains is the bad Volga car. And it would not have been if it had not been bought drawings from Ford. There would be nothing because the Bolshevik state is not capable of creating anything by definition. For the same reason, nothing can create a Russian state, only to sell natural resources.

Mikhail Saltan, Gleb Shcherbatov

For the stupid, just in case, we explain that we are not talking about the intellectual potential of the Russian people, it is just quite high, we are talking about the creative possibilities of the Soviet bureaucratic system, which, in principle, cannot allow scientific talents to be revealed.

Hundreds of thousands of famous and forgotten gunsmiths of antiquity fought in search of the ideal weapon capable of vaporizing the enemy army with one click. Periodically, a trace of these searches can be found in fairy tales, more or less plausibly describing a miracle sword or bow that hits without a miss.

Fortunately, technological progress moved so slowly for a long time that the real embodiment of crushing weapons remained in dreams and oral stories, and later on the pages of books. The scientific and technological leap of the 19th century provided the conditions for the creation of the main phobia of the 20th century. The nuclear bomb, created and tested in real conditions, revolutionized both military affairs and politics.

The history of the creation of weapons

For a long time, it was believed that the most powerful weapons could only be created using explosives. The discoveries of scientists who worked with the smallest particles provided a scientific justification for the fact that with the help of elementary particles one can generate enormous energy. The first in a series of researchers can be called Becquerel, who in 1896 discovered the radioactivity of uranium salts.

Uranium itself has been known since 1786, but at that time no one suspected its radioactivity. The work of scientists at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries revealed not only special physical properties, but also the possibility of obtaining energy from radioactive substances.

The option of making weapons based on uranium was first described in detail, published and patented by French physicists, the Joliot-Curie spouses in 1939.

Despite the value for weapons, the scientists themselves were strongly opposed to the creation of such a devastating weapon.

Having gone through the Second World War in the Resistance, in the 1950s, the spouses (Frederick and Irene), realizing the destructive power of war, are in favor of general disarmament. They are supported by Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein and other prominent physicists of the time.

Meanwhile, while the Joliot-Curies were busy with the problem of the Nazis in Paris, on the other side of the planet, in America, the world's first nuclear charge was being developed. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the work, was given the broadest powers and huge resources. The end of 1941 was marked by the beginning of the Manhattan project, which eventually led to the creation of the first combat nuclear charge.

In the town of Los Alamos, New Mexico, the first production facilities for the production of weapons-grade uranium were erected. In the future, the same nuclear centers appear throughout the country, for example, in Chicago, in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, research was also carried out in California. The best forces of the professors of American universities, as well as physicists who fled from Germany, were thrown into the creation of the bomb.

In the "Third Reich" itself, work on the creation of a new type of weapon was launched in a manner characteristic of the Fuhrer.

Since the Possessed was more interested in tanks and planes, and the more the better, he did not see much need for a new miracle bomb.

Accordingly, projects not supported by Hitler, at best, moved at a snail's pace.

When it began to bake, and it turned out that the tanks and planes were swallowed up by the Eastern Front, the new miracle weapon received support. But it was too late, in the conditions of bombing and the constant fear of Soviet tank wedges, it was not possible to create a device with a nuclear component.

The Soviet Union was more attentive to the possibility of creating a new type of destructive weapon. In the pre-war period, physicists collected and summarized general knowledge about nuclear energy and the possibility of creating nuclear weapons. Intelligence worked hard during the entire period of the creation of the nuclear bomb both in the USSR and in the USA. The war played a significant role in curbing the pace of development, as huge resources went to the front.

True, Academician Kurchatov Igor Vasilyevich, with his characteristic persistence, promoted the work of all subordinate units in this direction as well. Looking ahead a little, it will be he who will be instructed to accelerate the development of weapons in the face of the threat of an American strike on the cities of the USSR. It was he, who stood in the gravel of a huge machine of hundreds and thousands of scientists and workers, who would be awarded the honorary title of the father of the Soviet nuclear bomb.

World's first test

But back to the American nuclear program. By the summer of 1945, American scientists had succeeded in creating the world's first nuclear bomb. Any boy who has made himself or bought a powerful firecracker in a store experiences extraordinary torment, wanting to blow it up as soon as possible. In 1945, hundreds of US military and scientists experienced the same thing.

On June 16, 1945, in the Alamogordo Desert, New Mexico, the first nuclear weapons tests in history and one of the most powerful explosions at that time were carried out.

Eyewitnesses watching the detonation from the bunker were struck by the force with which the charge exploded at the top of a 30-meter steel tower. At first everything was flooded with light, several times stronger than the sun. Then a fireball rose into the sky, turning into a column of smoke, which took shape in the famous mushroom.

As soon as the dust settled, researchers and bomb makers rushed to the site of the explosion. They watched the consequences from lead-lined Sherman tanks. What they saw startled them, no weapon would do such damage. The sand melted to glass in places.

Tiny remains of the tower were also found, in a funnel of huge diameter, mutilated and fragmented structures clearly illustrated the destructive power.

Affecting factors

This explosion gave the first information about the power of the new weapon, about how it can destroy the enemy. These are several factors:

• light radiation, a flash that can blind even protected organs of vision;
• shock wave, a dense stream of air moving from the center, destroying most buildings;
• an electromagnetic pulse that disables most of the equipment and does not allow the use of communications for the first time after the explosion;
• penetrating radiation, the most dangerous factor for those who have taken refuge from other damaging factors, is divided into alpha-beta-gamma radiation;
• radioactive contamination that can adversely affect health and life for tens or even hundreds of years.

The further use of nuclear weapons, including in combat, showed all the features of the impact on living organisms and on nature. August 6, 1945 was the last day for tens of thousands of residents of the small city of Hiroshima, then famous for several important military installations.

The outcome of the war in the Pacific was a foregone conclusion, but the Pentagon considered that the operation in the Japanese archipelago would cost more than a million lives of US Marines. It was decided to kill several birds with one stone, withdraw Japan from the war, saving on the landing operation, test new weapons in action and declare it to the whole world, and, above all, to the USSR.

At one o'clock in the morning, the plane, on board of which the nuclear bomb "Kid" was located, took off on a mission.

A bomb dropped over the city exploded at an altitude of about 600 meters at 8.15 am. All buildings located at a distance of 800 meters from the epicenter were destroyed. The walls of only a few buildings survived, designed for a 9-point earthquake.

Of every ten people who were at the time of the explosion within a radius of 600 meters, only one could survive. Light radiation turned people into coal, leaving traces of a shadow on the stone, a dark imprint of the place where the person was. The ensuing blast wave was so strong that it was able to knock out glass at a distance of 19 kilometers from the explosion site.

A dense stream of air knocked one teenager out of the house through the window, landing, the guy saw how the walls of the house were folding like cards. The blast wave was followed by a fiery whirlwind that destroyed those few residents who survived the explosion and did not have time to leave the fire zone. Those who were at a distance from the explosion began to experience severe indisposition, the cause of which was initially unclear to the doctors.

Much later, a few weeks later, the term "radiation poisoning" was coined, now known as radiation sickness.

More than 280 thousand people became victims of just one bomb, both directly from the explosion and from subsequent diseases.

The bombing of Japan with nuclear weapons did not end there. According to the plan, only four to six cities were supposed to be hit, but weather conditions made it possible to hit only Nagasaki. In this city, more than 150 thousand people became victims of the Fat Man bomb.

Promises by the American government to carry out such strikes before Japan surrendered led to a truce, and then to the signing of an agreement that ended the World War. But for nuclear weapons, this was only the beginning.

The most powerful bomb in the world

The post-war period was marked by the confrontation between the bloc of the USSR and its allies with the USA and NATO. In the 1940s, the Americans seriously considered attacking the Soviet Union. To contain the former ally, it was necessary to speed up the work on creating a bomb, and already in 1949, on August 29, the US monopoly in nuclear weapons was over. During the arms race, two tests of nuclear warheads deserve the most attention.

Bikini Atoll, known primarily for frivolous swimsuits, in 1954 literally thundered all over the world in connection with tests of a nuclear charge of special power.

The Americans, having decided to test a new design of atomic weapons, did not calculate the charge. As a result, the explosion turned out to be 2.5 times more powerful than planned. Residents of nearby islands, as well as the ubiquitous Japanese fishermen, were under attack.

But it was not the most powerful American bomb. In 1960, the B41 nuclear bomb was put into service, which did not pass full-fledged tests because of its power. The strength of the charge was calculated theoretically, fearing to blow up such a dangerous weapon at the training ground.

The Soviet Union, which loved to be the first in everything, experienced in 1961, nicknamed differently "Kuzkin's mother."

In response to America's nuclear blackmail, Soviet scientists created the most powerful bomb in the world. Tested on Novaya Zemlya, it has left its mark in almost every corner of the globe. According to memoirs, a light earthquake was felt in the most remote corners at the time of the explosion.

The blast wave, of course, having lost all its destructive power, was able to go around the Earth. To date, this is the most powerful nuclear bomb in the world, created and tested by mankind. Of course, if his hands were untied, Kim Jong-un's nuclear bomb would be more powerful, but he does not have New Earth to test it.

Atomic bomb device

Consider a very primitive, purely for understanding, device of the atomic bomb. There are many classes of atomic bombs, but consider the three main ones:

• uranium, based on uranium 235 for the first time exploded over Hiroshima;
• plutonium, based on plutonium 239, first detonated over Nagasaki;
• thermonuclear, sometimes called hydrogen, based on heavy water with deuterium and tritium, fortunately, it was not used against the population.

The first two bombs are based on the effect of fission of heavy nuclei into smaller ones by an uncontrolled nuclear reaction with the release of a huge amount of energy. The third is based on the fusion of hydrogen nuclei (or rather, its isotopes of deuterium and tritium) with the formation of helium, which is heavier in relation to hydrogen. With the same weight of a bomb, the destructive potential of a hydrogen bomb is 20 times greater.

If for uranium and plutonium it is enough to bring together a mass greater than the critical one (at which a chain reaction begins), then for hydrogen this is not enough.

To reliably connect several pieces of uranium into one, the gun effect is used, in which smaller pieces of uranium are fired at larger ones. Gunpowder can also be used, but low-power explosives are used for reliability.

In a plutonium bomb, explosives are placed around plutonium ingots to create the necessary conditions for a chain reaction. Due to the cumulative effect, as well as the neutron initiator located in the very center (beryllium with a few milligrams of polonium), the necessary conditions are achieved.

It has a main charge, which cannot explode by itself, and a fuse. To create conditions for the fusion of deuterium and tritium nuclei, pressures and temperatures unimaginable for us are needed at least at one point. What happens next is a chain reaction.

To create such parameters, the bomb includes a conventional, but low-power, nuclear charge, which is the fuse. Its undermining creates the conditions for the start of a thermonuclear reaction.

To assess the power of an atomic bomb, the so-called "TNT equivalent" is used. An explosion is the release of energy, the most famous explosive in the world is TNT (TNT - trinitrotoluene), and all new types of explosives are equated to it. Bomb "Kid" - 13 kilotons of TNT. That is equivalent to 13000 .

Bomb "Fat Man" - 21 kilotons, "Tsar Bomba" - 58 megatons of TNT. It's scary to think of 58 million tons of explosives concentrated in a mass of 26.5 tons, that's how much fun this bomb is.

The danger of nuclear war and catastrophes associated with the atom

Appearing in the midst of the most terrible war of the twentieth century, nuclear weapons have become the greatest danger to humanity. Immediately after the Second World War, the Cold War began, several times almost escalating into a full-fledged nuclear conflict. The threat of the use of nuclear bombs and missiles by at least one side began to be discussed as early as the 1950s.

Everyone understood and understands that there can be no winners in this war.

For containment, the efforts of many scientists and politicians have been and are being made. The University of Chicago, using the opinion of invited nuclear scientists, including Nobel laureates, sets the doomsday clock a few minutes before midnight. Midnight denotes a nuclear cataclysm, the beginning of a new World War and the destruction of the old world. In different years, the hands of the clock fluctuated from 17 to 2 minutes to midnight.

There are also several major accidents that have occurred at nuclear power plants. These catastrophes have an indirect relation to weapons, nuclear power plants are still different from nuclear bombs, but they perfectly show the results of using the atom for military purposes. The largest of them:

• 1957, Kyshtym accident, due to a failure in the storage system, an explosion occurred near Kyshtym;
• 1957, Britain, in the northwest of England, security was not checked;
• 1979, USA, due to an untimely discovered leak, an explosion and a release from a nuclear power plant occurred;
• 1986, tragedy in Chernobyl, explosion of the 4th power unit;
• 2011, accident at the Fukushima station, Japan.

Each of these tragedies left a heavy seal on the fate of hundreds of thousands of people and turned entire regions into non-residential zones with special control.

There were incidents that almost cost the start of a nuclear disaster. Soviet nuclear submarines have repeatedly had reactor-related accidents on board. The Americans dropped the Superfortress bomber with two Mark 39 nuclear bombs on board, with a capacity of 3.8 megatons. But the “security system” that worked did not allow the charges to detonate and the catastrophe was avoided.

Nuclear weapons past and present

Today it is clear to anyone that a nuclear war will destroy modern humanity. Meanwhile, the desire to possess nuclear weapons and enter the nuclear club, or rather tumble into it by kicking down the door, still haunts the minds of some state leaders.

India and Pakistan arbitrarily created nuclear weapons, the Israelis hide the presence of the bomb.

For some, the possession of a nuclear bomb is a way to prove their importance in the international arena. For others, it is a guarantee of non-interference by winged democracy or other factors from outside. But the main thing is that these stocks do not go into business, for which they were really created.

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In the USA and the USSR, work began simultaneously on atomic bomb projects. In 1942, in August, the secret Laboratory No. 2 began to operate in one of the buildings located in the courtyard of Kazan University. Igor Kurchatov, the Russian "father" of the atomic bomb, became the head of this facility. At the same time in August, not far from Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the building of the former local school, the Metallurgical Laboratory, also secret, began to work. It was led by Robert Oppenheimer, the "father" of the atomic bomb from America.

It took a total of three years to complete the task. The first US was blown up at the test site in July 1945. Two more were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August. It took seven years for the birth of the atomic bomb in the USSR. The first explosion took place in 1949.

Igor Kurchatov: short biography

The "father" of the atomic bomb in the USSR was born in 1903, on January 12. This event took place in the Ufa province, in today's city of Sim. Kurchatov is considered one of the founders of peaceful purposes.

He graduated with honors from the Simferopol Men's Gymnasium, as well as a craft school. Kurchatov in 1920 entered the Taurida University, in the department of physics and mathematics. After 3 years, he successfully graduated from this university ahead of schedule. The "father" of the atomic bomb in 1930 began working at the Physico-Technical Institute of Leningrad, where he headed the physics department.

The era before Kurchatov

Back in the 1930s, work related to atomic energy began in the USSR. Chemists and physicists from various scientific centers, as well as specialists from other states, took part in all-Union conferences organized by the USSR Academy of Sciences.

Radium samples were obtained in 1932. And in 1939 the chain reaction of fission of heavy atoms was calculated. The year 1940 became a landmark in the nuclear field: the design of the atomic bomb was created, and methods for the production of uranium-235 were also proposed. Conventional explosives were first proposed to be used as a fuse to initiate a chain reaction. Also in 1940, Kurchatov presented his report on the fission of heavy nuclei.

Research during the Great Patriotic War

After the Germans attacked the USSR in 1941, nuclear research was suspended. The main Leningrad and Moscow institutes that dealt with the problems of nuclear physics were urgently evacuated.

The head of strategic intelligence, Beria, knew that Western physicists considered atomic weapons an achievable reality. According to historical data, back in September 1939, incognito Robert Oppenheimer, the head of work on the creation of an atomic bomb in America, came to the USSR. The Soviet leadership could have learned about the possibility of obtaining these weapons from the information provided by this "father" of the atomic bomb.

In 1941, intelligence data from the UK and the USA began to arrive in the USSR. According to this information, intensive work has been launched in the West, the purpose of which is the creation of nuclear weapons.

In the spring of 1943, Laboratory No. 2 was established to produce the first atomic bomb in the USSR. The question arose as to whom to entrust the leadership of it. The list of candidates initially included about 50 names. Beria, however, stopped his choice on Kurchatov. He was called in October 1943 to the bride in Moscow. Today, the scientific center that grew out of this laboratory bears his name - "Kurchatov Institute".

In 1946, on April 9, a decree was issued on the creation of a design bureau at Laboratory No. 2. It was only at the beginning of 1947 that the first production buildings were ready, which were located in the zone of the Mordovian Reserve. Some of the laboratories were located in monastic buildings.

RDS-1, the first Russian atomic bomb

They called the Soviet prototype RDS-1, which, according to one version, meant special. "After some time, this abbreviation began to be deciphered a little differently -" Stalin's Jet Engine ". In documents to ensure secrecy, the Soviet bomb was called "rocket engine."

It was a device whose power was 22 kilotons. The development of atomic weapons was carried out in the USSR, but the need to catch up with the United States, which had gone ahead during the war, forced domestic science to use data obtained by intelligence. The basis of the first Russian atomic bomb was taken "Fat Man", developed by the Americans (pictured below).

It was on August 9, 1945 that the United States dropped it on Nagasaki. "Fat Man" worked on the decay of plutonium-239. The detonation scheme was implosive: the charges exploded along the perimeter of the fissile material and created an explosive wave that "compressed" the substance located in the center and caused a chain reaction. This scheme was subsequently recognized as ineffective.

The Soviet RDS-1 was made in the form of a large diameter and mass of a free-falling bomb. Plutonium was used to make an explosive atomic device. Electrical equipment, as well as the RDS-1 ballistic body, were domestically developed. The bomb consisted of a ballistic body, a nuclear charge, an explosive device, as well as equipment for automatic charge detonation systems.

Uranium deficiency

Soviet physics, taking the plutonium bomb of the Americans as a basis, faced a problem that had to be solved in the shortest possible time: the production of plutonium at the time of development had not yet begun in the USSR. Therefore, captured uranium was originally used. However, the reactor required at least 150 tons of this substance. In 1945, mines in East Germany and Czechoslovakia resumed their work. Uranium deposits in the Chita region, Kolyma, Kazakhstan, Central Asia, the North Caucasus and Ukraine were found in 1946.

In the Urals, near the city of Kyshtym (not far from Chelyabinsk), they began to build "Mayak" - a radiochemical plant, and the first industrial reactor in the USSR. Kurchatov personally supervised the laying of uranium. Construction was launched in 1947 in three more places: two in the Middle Urals and one in the Gorky region.

Construction work proceeded at a fast pace, but uranium was still not enough. The first industrial reactor could not be launched even by 1948. Only on June 7 of this year was the uranium loaded.

Nuclear reactor start-up experiment

The "father" of the Soviet atomic bomb personally took over the duties of the chief operator at the nuclear reactor control panel. On June 7, between 11 and 12 am, Kurchatov began an experiment to launch it. The reactor on June 8 reached a capacity of 100 kilowatts. After that, the "father" of the Soviet atomic bomb drowned out the chain reaction that had begun. The next stage of preparation of the nuclear reactor continued for two days. After the cooling water was supplied, it became clear that the uranium available was not enough to carry out the experiment. The reactor reached a critical state only after loading the fifth portion of the substance. The chain reaction has become possible again. It happened at 8 am on June 10.

On the 17th of the same month, Kurchatov, the creator of the atomic bomb in the USSR, made an entry in the journal of shift supervisors in which he warned that the water supply should not be stopped in any case, otherwise an explosion would occur. On June 19, 1938, at 12:45, an industrial start-up of a nuclear reactor, the first in Eurasia, took place.

Successful bomb tests

In 1949, in June, 10 kg of plutonium was accumulated in the USSR - the amount that was put into the bomb by the Americans. Kurchatov, the creator of the atomic bomb in the USSR, following the decree of Beria, ordered the test of the RDS-1 to be scheduled for August 29.

A section of the Irtysh waterless steppe, located in Kazakhstan, not far from Semipalatinsk, was set aside for a test site. In the center of this experimental field, whose diameter was about 20 km, a metal tower 37.5 meters high was constructed. RDS-1 was installed on it.

The charge used in the bomb was a multi-layered construction. In it, the transition to the critical state of the active substance was carried out by compressing it using a spherical converging detonation wave, which was formed in the explosive.

Consequences of the explosion

The tower was completely destroyed after the explosion. A crater appeared in its place. However, the main damage was caused by the shock wave. According to the description of eyewitnesses, when a trip to the explosion site took place on August 30, the experimental field was a terrible picture. Highway and railway bridges were thrown back to a distance of 20-30 m and mangled. Cars and wagons were scattered at a distance of 50-80 m from the place where they were located, residential buildings were completely destroyed. The tanks used to test the strength of the blow lay on their sides with their turrets knocked down, and the guns were a pile of mangled metal. Also, 10 Pobeda vehicles, specially brought here for the experiment, burned down.

In total, 5 RDS-1 bombs were made. They were not transferred to the Air Force, but were stored in Arzamas-16. Today in Sarov, which was formerly Arzamas-16 (the laboratory is shown in the photo below), a mock-up bomb is on display. It is in the local nuclear weapons museum.

"Fathers" of the atomic bomb

Only 12 Nobel laureates, future and present, participated in the creation of the American atomic bomb. In addition, they were assisted by a group of scientists from Great Britain, which was sent to Los Alamos in 1943.

In Soviet times, it was believed that the USSR solved the atomic problem completely independently. Everywhere it was said that Kurchatov, the creator of the atomic bomb in the USSR, was her "father". Although rumors of secrets stolen from the Americans occasionally leaked out. And only in the 1990s, 50 years later, Yuli Khariton - one of the main participants in the events of that time - spoke about the great role of intelligence in the creation of the Soviet project. The technical and scientific results of the Americans were mined by Klaus Fuchs, who arrived in the English group.

Therefore, Oppenheimer can be considered the "father" of bombs that were created on both sides of the ocean. We can say that he was the creator of the first atomic bomb in the USSR. Both projects, American and Russian, were based on his ideas. It is wrong to consider Kurchatov and Oppenheimer only outstanding organizers. We have already talked about the Soviet scientist, as well as about the contribution made by the creator of the first atomic bomb to the USSR. Oppenheimer's main achievements were scientific. It was thanks to them that he turned out to be the head of the atomic project, just like the creator of the atomic bomb in the USSR.

Short biography of Robert Oppenheimer

This scientist was born in 1904, April 22, in New York. in 1925 he graduated from Harvard University. The future creator of the first atomic bomb was trained for a year at the Cavendish Laboratory at Rutherford. A year later, the scientist moved to the University of Göttingen. Here, under the guidance of M. Born, he defended his doctoral dissertation. In 1928 the scientist returned to the USA. The "father" of the American atomic bomb from 1929 to 1947 taught at two universities in this country - the California Institute of Technology and the University of California.

On July 16, 1945, the first bomb was successfully tested in the United States, and soon after that, Oppenheimer, along with other members of the Provisional Committee created under President Truman, was forced to choose targets for future atomic bombing. Many of his colleagues by that time were actively opposed to the use of dangerous nuclear weapons, which was not necessary, since the surrender of Japan was a foregone conclusion. Oppenheimer did not join them.

Explaining his behavior later, he said that he relied on politicians and the military, who were better acquainted with the real situation. In October 1945, Oppenheimer ceased to be director of the Los Alamos Laboratory. He began work in Preston, heading the local research institute. His fame in the United States, as well as outside this country, reached its climax. New York newspapers wrote about him more and more often. President Truman presented Oppenheimer with the Medal of Merit, which was the highest decoration in America.

He wrote, in addition to scientific works, several "Open Mind", "Science and Everyday Knowledge" and others.

This scientist died in 1967, on February 18. Oppenheimer has been a heavy smoker since his youth. In 1965 he was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx. At the end of 1966, after an operation that did not bring results, he underwent chemotherapy and radiotherapy. However, the treatment had no effect, and on February 18 the scientist died.

So, Kurchatov is the "father" of the atomic bomb in the USSR, Oppenheimer - in the USA. Now you know the names of those who were the first to work on the development of nuclear weapons. Having answered the question: "Who is called the father of the atomic bomb?", we told only about the initial stages of the history of this dangerous weapon. It continues to this day. Moreover, new developments are being actively carried out in this area today. The "father" of the atomic bomb - the American Robert Oppenheimer, as well as the Russian scientist Igor Kurchatov were only pioneers in this matter.