Soviet atom

In 1945, the United States created the atomic bomb and immediately used it against Japan.

In March 1946, former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, while in the United States at Westminster College in the city of Fulton in the southern United States, delivered his famous speech, which marked the beginning of the Cold War. He is accompanied on the trip by current US President Harry Truman. In his speech, Churchill used many terms borrowed from Nazi propaganda. One of Churchill's conclusions was a new racial theory, according to which nations speaking English, as the only full-fledged ones, should dominate other nations of the world. In March 1949, the draft North Atlantic Treaty was published, which was signed on April 4, 1949 by 12 countries (USA, Canada, Iceland, Great Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Norway, Denmark, Italy, Portugal).

The USSR had to solve the problem of ensuring its security in the new post-war conditions as quickly as possible. The scientific director of the atomic project in the USSR was the outstanding scientist and organizer of science Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov.

At the end of 1941 and in 1942, information began to arrive from Soviet intelligence that work was underway in the United States and Germany to create new weapons of colossal destructive power. This marked the beginning of the official start of the nuclear project in the USSR. On December 25, 1946, the first Soviet nuclear reactor was launched. In 1948, the first industrial reactor was launched, which was supposed to produce weapons-grade plutonium for a bomb. By the summer of 1949, work on the creation of the first Soviet atomic bomb was completed and on August 29, 1949, successful tests were carried out at the test site. The first bomb was called RDS, which Kurchatov himself deciphered as “Russia makes it itself.” The very effective work of Soviet foreign intelligence contributed to such a rapid success of the project.

In August 1953, the Soviet Union tested the world's first hydrogen bomb, in the creation of which, together with Kurchatov, scientists Mstislav Vsevolodovich Keldysh, Yuliy Borisovich Khariton, Yakov Borisovich Zeldovich, Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov took part.

Kurchatov, while solving the problems of the country's defense, was actively involved in work on the peaceful use of atomic energy. In 1954, the world's first industrial nuclear power plant was launched in Obninsk, and in 1959 the reactor of the world's first nuclear icebreaker, Lenin, began operation.

In 1956, Kurchatov, as part of the Soviet delegation headed by the country's leader N.S. Khrushchev, visited Great Britain, where he spoke about the need for international cooperation in the use of atomic energy and the limitation of nuclear weapons.