Kurchatov Institute told about the creation of Soviet nuclear weapons

The decision to resume "work on uranium" in the midst of the war was the first major step toward the creation of Soviet nuclear weapons.

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"The country's leadership and a group of scientists, based on intelligence reports on the ongoing work in Germany, Britain, the United States to create a new superpower weapon, thereby made a strategically correct choice, at a time when the success of this endeavor was far from obvious," - said Deputy Director for Scientific Work SIC "Kurchatov Institute" Ekaterina Yatsishina.

Only six years passed from the beginning of work in Laboratory No. 2 to the first bomb test. However, fundamental research in the field of nuclear physics in our country began long before that. An important role here was played by the outstanding scientist-encyclopedist, biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky. He initiated the first expeditions to search for uranium back in the Russian Empire, and in 1922 he created and headed the Radium Institute, where the first radium preparations were obtained in the USSR and the first cyclotron was built.

The Physics and Technology Department of the Radium Institute was later transformed into LFTI (Leningrad Physics and Technology Institute) headed by Abram Ioffe, who "educated" a whole pleiad of outstanding Soviet scientists. In the 1930s, LFTI began to develop a new scientific direction - nuclear physics, which, thanks to the outstanding scientific intuition of A.F.Ioffe, soon became the main one. In 1933, Igor Kurchatov was appointed head of the Department of Nuclear Physics.

Despite the research on nuclear physics that was carried out in the USSR and abroad, no one at that time could imagine the possibility of creating a new destructive weapon. However, already at the turn of the 1930s, the idea of the military prospects of using the energy of the atom began to take shape. During this period, all work on nuclear issues disappeared from the scientific press, they classified those countries where the development of new weapons.

Read more in this exclusive Izvestia article:

The kernel of truth: how the Soviet nuclear project achieved success in just six years