August 29, 1949: The First Soviet Atomic Test

Today marks the fifty-seventh anniversary of the Soviet Union's first atomic explosion. On August 29, 1949, an atomic bomb was detonated at the Semipalatinks Test Site in northeastern Kazakhstan, a semi-arid land that was then part of Soviet central Asia. The explosion made the U.S.S.R. the second member of the world's nuclear club and both surprised and alarmed the United States, the club's first member. Physicists at Arzamas-16, a super-secret weapons facility near Sarov, Russia, had designed an implosion-style atomic bomb using fissionable material from the F-1 nuclear reactor at the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow. Like the F-1 reactor's design, the plans for the RDS-1 atomic bomb were obtained largely through espionage. During World War II, spies inside the Manhattan Project, the United States' top-secret atomic program, provided their Soviet handlers with detailed descriptions of the "Fat Man" plutonium bomb that was detonated over Nagasaki, Japan on August 9, 1945.

The U.S.S.R's atomic program was directed by Lavrenti Beria, a confidante of Joseph Stalin who later became head of the NKVD, the state security and police agency. The scientific effort was led by Igor Kurchatov, the renowned physicist after whom the Kurchatov Institute was named. Although Kurchatov pledged that he would not cut his beard until the atomic program was successful, the political leadership remained wary of his promises. According to documents released after the fall of the Soviet Union, Stalin and Beria trusted neither the intellect of the nation's scientists nor the authenticity of espionage obtained from Western sources. Soviet physicists were prevented from communicating with one another directly and were assigned to small, narrowly-focused teams that duplicated critical tasks. Major decisions required the direct involvement of Beria, who withheld information as matter of course. In many respects, the work of physicists such as Igor Kurchatov was devoted to proving or disproving parts of the "Fat Man" design obtained from Manhattan Project scientist Karl Fuchs.

Although the Soviet Union did not immediately announce the success of its 22-kiloton atomic blast, a specially-equipped U.S. weather plane detected very high levels of radioactivity near Siberia on September 3, 1949. American scientists who analyzed the data correctly identified the date of the atomic explosion as August 29th. According to one American physicist, President Harry S. Truman waited to tell the American public about the Soviet test until members of a special detection committee could personally sign a statement attesting to the U.S.S.R.'s atomic success. On September 23, 1949, Truman announced that "ever since atomic energy was first released by man, the eventual development of this new force by other nations was to be expected." Although many scientists concurred, much of the world was shocked by this latest development in the Cold War. Less than five years after the Trinity Test, the Soviets now had the Bomb.

Resources

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_atomic_bomb_pr oject
http://www.atomicarchive.com/History/coldwar/page0 3.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semipalatinsk_Test_Si te
http://www.mbe.doe.gov/me70/manhattan/espionage.ht m
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Russia/Sovwpnprog. html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Man
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_Kurchatov
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/filmmore/referen ce/primary/trumanstatement.html