Stalin and the Bomb

by David Holloway

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.