Stalin and the Bomb

by David Holloway

Soviet nuclear weapons policy was often presented therefore as the product of the Soviet system, or of Marxist-Leninist ideology, or of an individual leader’s policy goals. Only now, with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, is it becoming possible to write differently about Soviet nuclear weapons policy, to place it more securely in the context of Soviet history and the history of the Cold War.

the book is organized chronologically. It starts with the development of physics in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, before the discovery of nuclear fission. It ends with three closely related events in a crucial six-month period in 1955–6: the Soviet Union’s first test of a superbomb in November 1955; Khrushchev’s renunciation, in February 1956, of Lenin’s thesis that war was inevitable between capitalist states; and the visit of Igor’ Kurchatov, scientific director of the Soviet nuclear project, to Britain in April 1956. The reason for going beyond Stalin’s death in March 1953 is that the Stalin years become more comprehensible when one examines the way in which his successors dealt with his nuclear legacy. Moreover, the changes in 1955–6 marked the end of one phase in nuclear relations between the Soviet Union and the Western powers.

Institute

Vernadskii

With characteristic vision, he was already concerned about the dangers such mastery might bring. In February 1922 he wrote that We are approaching a great revolution in the life of humankind, with which none of those it has experienced before can be compared. The time is not far off when man will get atomic energy in his hands, a source of power that will give him the possibility of building his life as he wishes. This could happen in the coming years, it could happen in a hundred years’ time. But it is clear that it must be. Will man be able to use this power, direct it towards good, and not towards self-destruction? Is he mature enough to be able to use the power that science must inevitably give him? Scientists ought not to close their eyes to the possible consequences of their scientific work, of scientific progress. They ought to feel responsible for all the consequences of their discoveries. They ought to connect their work with the best organization of all mankind. Thought and attention ought to be directed to these questions. And there is nothing in the world more powerful than free scientific thought.17

Soviet interest in nuclear physics was transformed by the annus mirabilis of 1932. Several important discoveries were made in that year.

James Chadwick at the Cavendish Laboratory discovered the neutron. John Cockcroft and E.T.S. Walton, also at the Cavendish Laboratory, split the lithium nucleus into two alpha particles.

At the California Institute of Technology Carl Anderson identified the positive electron, or positron. Harold Urey at Columbia University discovered the hydrogen isotope of mass 2, deuterium.

Everyone knew that vast amounts of energy were locked up inside the nucleus, but nobody knew how, or even whether, this energy could be released and harnessed. In 1930 Ioffe had written that nuclear energy might provide the solution to the energy crisis that would overtake humankind in two or three hundred years’ time, but he could not promise practical results in the short, or even the medium, term.41 “In those years there could be no thought of nuclear weapons or nuclear energy,” Anatolii Aleksandrov, who was then at Ioffe’s institute, has written, “but in the physics of the nucleus great new problems and interesting tasks for researchers had been discovered.”42

Many of UFTI’s leading members were arrested in the Great Purge and accused of fantastic plots against the state.95 The effect on the institute was devastating. Weissberg recalls that in arguments with his cell-mates he assessed the damage in this way: “Listen,” I said. “Our Institute is one of the most important of its kind in Europe. In fact, there is probably no other institute with so many different and well-equipped laboratories. The Soviet Government has spared no expense. Our leading scientists were partly trained abroad. They were constantly being sent to leading physicists all over the world at Government expense to supplement their knowledge and experience. Our Institute had eight departments, each headed by a capable man. And what’s the situation now? The head of the laboratory for crystallology, Obremov, is under arrest, and so is the head of the low-temperatures laboratory, Shubnikov. The head of the second low-temperatures laboratory, Ruhemann, has been deported. The head of the laboratory for atom-splitting, Leipunsky, is under arrest, and so is the head of the X-ray department, Gorsky, the head of the department for theoretical physics, Landau, and the head of the experimental low-temperatures station, myself. As far as I know, Slutski, the head of the ultra-short-wave department, is the only one still at work.”96

Shubnikov, Rozenkevich, and Gorskii were shot in alphabetical order on November 8, 9, and 10, 1937.99 Leipunskii was arrested in July 1938 and released a month later. Obreimov, who was arrested in 1938 was released in May 1941, thanks to Kapitsa’s efforts. Weissberg and Houtermans were handed over to the Gestapo shortly after the Soviet–German Pact of August 1939.100 The effect of the purge on the institute was profound: UFTI was greatly weakened, and very far from being the kind of research center its leading members had hoped, some years earlier, that it would become. On the eve of the discovery of nuclear fission the Soviet authorities had wrecked one of the country’s most important physics institutes.

What drew Soviet physicists to nuclear research in 1932 was not the promise of practical results, but the prospect of interesting physics. They may have hoped that their work would prove useful, but they thought that practical applications, if they ever resulted, were far in the future.

Physics, as was seen in the last chapter, represented a sphere of relative intellectual autonomy in a society dominated by a regime with totalitarian pretensions. This intellectual autonomy was sustained by a set of social relationships – of authority, status, and reward – that were different from those in the society at large. The authority of the Party did not hold sway here, in spite of the efforts of party philosophers; as Frenkel’ had said, “neither Lenin nor Engels is an authority for physicists.” This was a statement not about the attitude of physicists to the regime – those attitudes varied – but about their attitude to the integrity of physics as an intellectual enterprise. The defense of physics implied that there were limits to the Party’s authority, that physicists had the right to decide which physical theories were valid and which problems were interesting, and also to look to the international physics community for recognition. The decision to expand nuclear research after 1932 shows the Soviet physics community acting in this way.

Most Soviet scientists were skeptical about the possibility of utilizing atomic energy. Igor’ Tamm is reported to have said in August 1939, upon hearing of the work of Zel’dovich and Khariton, “Do you know what this new discovery means? It means a bomb can be built that will destroy a city out to a radius of maybe ten kilometers.”31 But this was an exception. Ioffe commented in a report to the Academy of Sciences in December 1939 that it was unlikely that there would be a technological payoff “this time” from nuclear physics.32 Kapitsa remarked at some point in 1939 that nuclear reactions would absorb more energy than they yielded. The isotopes of uranium would have to be separated, and to do this it would be necessary “to expend more energy than one could count on obtaining from nuclear reactions.” It would be very surprising, he said, if the possibility of using atomic energy were to become reality.33

The first person to see that nuclear physicists would have to take account of the military implications of their work was Leo Szilard, a Hungarian physicist who had moved to Britain in 1933 to escape the Nazi persecution of the Jews. Szilard understood at once what fission might mean, for in 1933 he had hit upon the idea of a chain reaction as the way to release the energy bound up in the atomic nucleus. It had not occurred to him that a chain reaction might be possible in uranium, nor did he anticipate the discovery of fission, but he was sufficiently worried by the prospect of a nuclear chain reaction to take out a British patent in order to restrict the use that might be made of his idea.43 In January 1939 Szilard, who was now living in New York, suggested to Enrico Fermi that research on fission should be kept secret.

When this paper appeared on April 22 it had a major impact on research elsewhere, because it showed that a chain reaction might indeed be a possibility. It impelled Professor G.P. Thompson of Imperial College to draw the British government’s attention to the possibility of an atomic bomb, and to the importance of denying to Germany the uranium held by the Union Minière Company in Belgium. Responsibility for the uranium problem was assigned to the Air Ministry’s Committee on the Scientific Survey of Air Defence.

It was in April 1939 too that German scientists alerted their government to the implications of nuclear fission.

The behavior of Soviet scientists was quite different. There is no evidence that they tried to alert their government to the possible implications of nuclear fission before the summer of 1940, and no special organization was created before then to coordinate research on fission.52 Soviet scientists continued to publish freely on fission in 1940; no effort was made, by the government or by the scientists themselves, to restrict publication. The contrast with the response of scientists in other countries is striking and reflects the strategic and political position of the Soviet Union. Unlike Britain, France, and Germany, the Soviet Union had not been drawn into the European war

There is no hint of research on the atomic bomb in the Leningrad physicists’ plan.80 They were aware that nuclear fission might have military applications, but their primary interest at this time was to establish whether a fission chain reaction was indeed possible, rather than to achieve a specific practical goal.

Western physicists took less note of Soviet work. Although some Soviet research – on the number of secondary neutrons emitted per fission, for example – was preempted by publications by other research groups, there were two important Soviet contributions in this period – the discovery of spontaneous fission, and the theory of chain reactions. These did not receive much attention in the West, however.

Even before the creation of this council, research institutes had begun to move to a war footing. Within five days of the German attack 30 of the staff of Ioffe’s institute had either been drafted or had volunteered for military service; a month later that number had risen to 130. The institute was reorganized, with priority now given to the areas of military research in which it had already been engaged: radar, armor, and the demagnetizing of ships.15 This pattern was repeated elsewhere, and ultimately 90 to 95 per cent of research at the physics institutes was devoted to war purposes.16 Kurchatov decided to drop his research on fission, and his laboratory was disbanded.

Most nuclear scientists abandoned their research to work for the war effort.

Only the Radium Institute, which also moved to Kazan’, continued to work on the synthesis of uranium compounds for use in isotope separation, but this research was on a very small scale.

Kapitsa had not forgotten the atomic bomb. “My personal opinion is that the technical difficulties which stand in the way of utilizing intra-atomic energy are still very great,” he said. “This matter is still very doubtful, but it is very probable that there are great possibilities here. We are posing the question of using atomic bombs which possess huge destructive force.”26 A future war would be even more terrible than this one, said Kapitsa, and “therefore scientists should now warn people about this danger, so that all the public figures of the world will strain every nerve to eliminate the possibility of another war, a war of the future.”27 Kapitsa was speaking of the possible effect of science on war, not urging that an effort be made to develop the atomic bomb for use in the war against Germany.

There was, however, one physicist who had a sense of urgency about nuclear research. This was Kurchatov’s twenty-eight-year-old colleague, Georgii Flerov,

Flerov provided calculations for all these conditions. He also provided a sketch of an experimental bomb. He proposed that a rapid transition into the supercritical state be ensured by compressing the active material. In Flerov’s sketch the uranium-235 or protactinium-231 is divided into two hemispheres, and conventional high explosives are used to propel one hemisphere very rapidly into the other in order to form a critical mass. This mechanism is similar to that suggested by Frisch and Peierls; it later came to be known as a “gun-assembly device.”

Early in 1942 Lieutenant Flerov’s unit was stationed in Voronezh, close to the front line. The university in Voronezh had been evacuated, but the library was still there. “The American physics journals, in spite of the war, were in the library, and they above all interested me,” Flerov wrote later. “In them I hoped to look through the latest papers on the fission of uranium, to find references to our work on spontaneous fission.”39 When Flerov looked through the journals he found that not only had there been no response to the discovery that he and Petrzhak had made, but that there were no articles on nuclear fission. Nor did it seem that the leading nuclear physicists had switched to other lines of research, for they too were missing from the journals.40 From “the dogs that did not bark” Flerov deduced that research on fission had now gone secret in the United States. That meant, he concluded, that the Americans were working to build a nuclear weapon. More worrying was the fact that Nazi Germany had “first-class scientists …, significant supplies of uranium ore, a heavy water plant, the technology for obtaining metallic uranium, methods for separating isotopes.”41 Flerov decided to sound the alarm.

When he received no reply from Kaftanov, Flerov decided to make use of the Soviet citizen’s last resort: he wrote to Stalin in April 1942. He felt like a man who was trying to break through a stone wall with his head, he explained. He did not think that he was overestimating the importance of the uranium problem.

“This is the wall of silence which I hope you will help me to break through,” he wrote, since this letter is the last, and after it I will lay down my arms and wait until the problem is solved in Germany, Britain, or the USA. The results will be so huge that there will be no time to decide who was guilty of the fact that we abandoned this work here in the Union. In addition, all this is being done so skillfully that we will not have formal grounds against anyone. Nobody has ever said, anywhere, that a nuclear bomb is not feasible, yet the opinion has been created that this goal belongs in the realm of fantasy.45

The British in 1940 and 1941 faced the prospect of a long war to defeat Germany, and were fearful that the balance of military power might be tipped decisively in Germany’s favor if it acquired this new and terrible weapon. This was the context in which the Maud Committee worked. When the committee concluded that an atomic bomb might be built within two and a half years, it was apparent that the bomb might have an impact on the war, for there was no expectation that Germany would be defeated before then. The same was true for the United States, especially after the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. In Germany, however, the strategic outlook was different. The rapid German victories of 1940 and 1941 held out the promise of a short war, in which an atomic bomb would play no role. By 1942 the situation was less hopeful, but there had been no Maud Committee to provide a reasoned argument that a bomb could be built in less than three years. It did not appear, therefore, that an atomic bomb could affect the outcome of the war.59

Beria’s memorandum was written in March 1942, a month earlier than Flerov’s letter to Stalin. The Maud Report, besides providing the basis for the British decision to build an atomic bomb and leading to a speed-up of American work, also set in motion the consultations that resulted in the initiation of the Soviet nuclear project.

The small project Stalin initiated in 1943 could not lead quickly to a Soviet bomb. It is possible, though improbable, that Stalin believed otherwise in 1942. But certainly by the spring of 1943, when the fortunes of war had turned, it is extremely unlikely that Stalin thought a Soviet bomb could affect the outcome of the war with Germany. Besides, the Soviet Union was receiving intelligence about the German atomic project, doubtless from sources in Germany, but also from its agents in Britain.

Before Fuchs left for the United States at the end of 1943, the information that he transmitted to Moscow had “confirmed,” in the words of the KGB officer who was Fuchs’s control in London after the war, “that, first, the corresponding research in Hitler’s Germany had reached a dead-end; second, that the USA and Britain were already building industrial facilities to make atomic bombs.”105 This suggests that in 1943 Stalin should have known enough about the progress of research in other countries not to regard the Soviet atomic project as crucial to the outcome of the war with Germany. The project he started is best understood as a rather small hedge against future uncertainties.

After writing his March 7 memorandum, Kurchatov gave his rough notes to Pervukhin’s assistant, A.I. Vasin, to be destroyed.7 In the coming years he had to obtain special permission to show any of the intelligence reports from abroad to his fellow scientists. At the same time he had to make use of the information he had acquired, without letting his colleagues know where it had come from. This he did by proposing promising lines of research, and by suggesting ideas in meetings and seminars.

At the end of January 1943 the Soviet government sent a request to the Lend-Lease Administration in Washington, DC for 10 kilograms of uranium metal, and 100 kilograms each of uranium oxide and uranium nitrate. General Groves approved this request, for fear that refusal would alert the Soviet Union to the American project or excite curiosity in Washington. The uranium compounds – but not the metal – were flown to the Soviet Union early in April.41 Early in 1943 the Soviet Purchasing Commission submitted another request, this time for about 220 kilograms each of uranium oxide and uranium nitrate. This order was flown to Alaska for transhipment to the Soviet Union in June 1943.42 In April 1943 General Groves granted the Soviet Purchasing Commission an export license for 10 kilograms of uranium metal.

It is possible that the Soviet government acquired the uranium from the United States for the production of steel alloys for arms, and not for the atomic project.

By the beginning of 1945 Soviet intelligence had a clear general picture of the Manhattan project. In February 1945 V. Merkulov, the People’s Commissar of State Security, wrote to Beria that research by leading British and American scientists had shown that an atomic bomb was feasible, and that there were two main problems to be solved in making it: production of the necessary quantity of fissionable material – uranium-235 or plutonium; and the design of the bomb. An isotope separation plant was being built in Tennessee, and plutonium was being produced at Hanford, in the state of Washington. The bomb itself was being designed and built at Los Alamos, where about 2,000 people were employed. Two methods of detonating the bomb were being developed: the gun-assembly, and implosion. The first test of a bomb could be expected in two or three months.

Kurchatov’s memoranda confirm Fuchs’s importance as a spy. They also reveal that the Soviet Union had other sources of information in the Manhattan project. Anatolii Iatskov, who – under the name of Anatolii Iakovlev – was Harry Gold’s NKGB case officer in New York, has said that at most one half of his network of agents was uncovered by the FBI.84 It is clear, for example, that someone was passing on information about the work of Seaborg and Segrè at Berkeley. But the available evidence suggests that Fuchs was by far the most important informant in the Manhattan project.85

It was not German scientists or laboratory equipment, however, but German uranium that was the most important find for the Soviet mission. Khariton and Kikoin managed, after much detective work, to track down over 100 metric tons of uranium oxide that had been hidden away. Kurchatov later told Khariton that this had saved a year in building the first experimental pile.108 United States intelligence later estimated that the Soviet Union had obtained between 240 and 340 tons of uranium oxide in Germany and Czechoslovakia at the end of the war.

In April 1945 Groves arranged for an Anglo-American group to remove 1,200 tons of uranium ore, the bulk of the German stock, from a salt mine near Stassfurt, which was due to fall within the Soviet zone of occupation.112 This uranium would have been enormously useful to the Soviet project.

Although he showed characteristic suspicion of the scientists, Molotov believed at the end of May 1945 that it would be possible to send physicists to the United States for research in nuclear physics. Molotov’s recommendation appears to reflect the attitude of the Soviet leaders to nuclear research in the summer of 1945. The Soviet project had made slow progress during the war. Kurchatov’s letter to Beria had not produced the desired effect; there is no evidence of any response to it. The problem of uranium supply was still being tackled slowly, and the project was not reorganized. It is true that research was expanding. A new institute, NII–9 (Nauchno-issledovatel’skii institut No. 9: Research Institute No. 9) was set up before the end of the war to work on the metallurgy of uranium and plutonium.131 The occupation of Germany brought new equipment, uranium, and scientists. But the Soviet leadership did not treat the project as an urgent priority.

Stalin, Beria, and Molotov were well informed about the Manhattan project, yet showed no urgency about expanding the Soviet effort. Why not? One explanation, given by the KGB officer Iatskov, is that Beria did not believe the intelligence reports.

AT 5.30 A.M. ON JULY 16, 1945 the United States tested an atomic bomb in the desert at Alamogordo in New Mexico.

Five weeks later, on August 20, the State Defense Committee in Moscow adopted a decree setting up new organizations to direct the Soviet atomic project. It was in this five-week period that Stalin realized the strategic importance of the atomic bomb and launched a crash program to build a Soviet bomb.

Truman did not know of the bomb when he became President, but he soon learned of it from Stimson, and from his friend James F. Byrnes, an adviser of Roosevelt’s. Byrnes, whom Truman was shortly to appoint as Secretary of State, told him that the bomb “might be so powerful as to be potentially capable of wiping out entire cities and killing people on an unprecedented scale.”28 Byrnes held out the prospect that, as Truman later recalled, “the bomb might well put us in a position to dictate our own terms at the end of the war.”29 Quite what Byrnes had in mind is not clear, but his comments foreshadowed his later belief in the efficacy of atomic diplomacy.

The United States had used the bomb to bring the war to an end as quickly as possible. American historians have generally seen the desire to end the war quickly as the primary motive for dropping the atomic bomb, and pressure on the Soviet Union as a secondary, though reinforcing, motive.108 In Soviet minds, however, ending the war quickly could be interpreted as being, in itself, directed against Soviet interests. Stalin had feared that the war with Japan would be over before the Soviet Union could enter and secure its strategic interests in the Far East.

As the most powerful symbol of American economic and technological might, the atomic bomb was ipso facto something the Soviet Union had to have too. Stalin’s decision to make an all-out effort to build a Soviet bomb fell squarely into the pattern of innovation discussed in Chapter 1: the Soviet Union was following the technological path mapped out by the advanced capitalist countries.

Kurchatov organized seminars to explain the uranium problem to the industrial managers. At one of these sessions Kikoin gave a report on isotope separation. When he had finished, Viacheslav Malyshev, one of the industrial managers drawn into the project, turned to Emel’ianov and asked, “Did you understand anything?” Emel’ianov whispered that he had understood a little, whereupon Malyshev sighed and said that he had understood virtually nothing – much to the relief of Emel’ianov, who had understood nothing either.23 Kurchatov evidently sensed this, for he put questions to Kikoin to draw him out in a manner intelligible to the industrial managers.

The task the managers faced was to convert a laboratory project into a whole industry. Uranium had to be found, and isotope separation plants built, as well as reactors for plutonium production. All of this entailed considerable planning and organization.

Apart from one or two men, the scientists and engineers who built the first Soviet bomb did not know that they were producing a copy of the American design.28