Soviet Union Tests First Atomic Bomb
The Soviet Union tested its first atomic device in August 1949, several years earlier than American estimates. The programme had begun in 1943 on the strength of intelligence rather than physics — Soviet scientists noticed that western journals had stopped publishing on fission, which is what a secret programme looks like from outside — and was accelerated enormously after Hiroshima. Beria was put in charge of it, which meant unlimited resources and a labour force including prisoners. Espionage supplied the design. Klaus Fuchs, a German-born physicist at Los Alamos, passed detailed drawings of the plutonium implosion device, and Theodore Hall, aged nineteen, passed material independently; the first Soviet bomb was a copy of the American one, tested that way deliberately because Beria wanted no risk of failure. Kurchatov's team had a better design ready and were not permitted to test it first. RDS-1 was detonated at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan on 29 August, and an American weather reconnaissance flight detected the fallout over the Pacific a few days later. Truman announced it in September. The consequences were immediate and general: the hydrogen bomb programme authorised in January 1950, the assumption in Washington that the Soviets were now behind everything, the trials of the Rosenbergs, and the strategic doctrine of deterrence that governed the following forty years. The estimate before the test had been that it would take until 1953 at the earliest. Beria's method is worth stating. He had the scientists watched, told them that success meant everything and failure meant the camps, and prepared two sets of decrees for the morning after the test — one of honours and one of arrests.
- Year: 1949 CE
- Category: Military
