Main articles: Timeline of Russian inventions and technology records and History of the periodic tableĪs early as 1910 in Russia, independent research was being conducted on radioactive elements by several Russian scientists.
Early efforts Background origins and roots A nuclear-armed Soviet Union escalated the Cold War with the United States to the possibility of nuclear war and ushered in the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. In total, the Soviet Union conducted 715 nuclear weapon tests throughout the course of the Cold War. : 840 Its nuclear capabilities served as an important role on its global status.
From 1949 onwards the Soviet Union manufactured and tested nuclear weapons on a large scale.
A nuclear armed Soviet Union sent its rival Western neighbors, and particularly the United States into a state of unprecedented trepidation. Stalin alongside Soviet political officials and scientists were elated at the successful test. On 29 August 1949, the Soviet Union secretly conducted its first successful weapon test ( First Lightning, based on the American " Fat Man" design) at the Semipalatinsk-21 in Kazakhstan. The Soviet efforts also rounded up captured German scientists to join their program, and relied on knowledge passed by spies to Soviet intelligence agencies. Īfter Stalin learned of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the program was pursued aggressively and accelerated through effective intelligence gathering about the German nuclear weapon project and the American Manhattan Project. : 78–79 Initial efforts were slowed due to the German invasion of the Soviet Union and remained largely composed of the intelligence gathering from the Soviet spy rings working in the U.S. Flyorov wrote a letter to Stalin urging him to start this program in 1942. Īlthough the Soviet scientific community discussed the possibility of an atomic bomb throughout the 1930s, going as far as making a concrete proposal to develop such a weapon in 1940, the full-scale program was not initiated and prioritized until Operation Barbarossa.īecause of the conspicuous silence of the scientific publications on the subject of nuclear fission by German, American, and British scientists, Russian physicist Georgy Flyorov suspected that the Allied powers had secretly been developing a " superweapon" since 1939. The Soviet atomic bomb project was the classified research and development program that was authorized by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union to develop nuclear weapons during and after World War II.
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