It was the atomic bomb that saved Soviet physics in 1949. Stalin was not so concerned about the condition of agriculture – he tolerated, after all, a desperate famine in the Ukraine in 1947 – and so it may not have mattered very much to him whether Lysenko was a charlatan or not. The nuclear project was more important, however, than the lives of Soviet citizens, so it was crucial to be sure that the scientists in the nuclear project were not frauds.
