The Nuclear Page
(watch out for fallout)
The Nuclear Page
(watch out for fallout)
“I remember President Kennedy once stated... that the United States had the nuclear missile capacity to wipe out the Soviet Union two times over, while the Soviet Union had enough atomic weapons to wipe out the Unites States only once... When journalists asked me to comment... I said jokingly, Yes, I know what Kennedy claims, and he's quite right. But I'm not complaining... We're satisfied to be able to finish off the United States first time round. Once is quite enough. What good does it do to annihilate a country twice? We're not a bloodthirsty people."
-Nikita Khrushchev
Between the years of 1939 and 1941, two men named Yakov Zel’dovich and Yuli Khariton published a series of papers that laid the groundwork for future Soviet atomic weapons development. This was the most significant early work on fission in the Soviet Union. In 1943, under the leadership of a Soviet physicist Igor Vasilievich Kurchatov, the Soviet weapons program officially began. The program was started on the basis of several reports collected by Soviet intelligence about the American Manhattan Project. Until the end of the war, the program was essentially an intelligence operation, but a highly successful one. Due to sympathies for the Soviet Union fighting Germany, and the socialist sympathies of others, combined with weak security on the part of the Western nations, Klaus Fuchs, an important physicist at Los Alamos, was the most important contributor of atomic information to the Soviets. After the war ended, the Soviet nuclear program was stepped up tremendously. Lavrenti Beria was appointed to head the entire projects, while Kurchatov remained the scientific director. Using the stolen data available on the American program, and a detailed description of the Fat Man bomb given to the Soviets by Fuchs in 1945, the Soviet program accomplished their first test in nearly four years.
Immediately after the war, the Soviets began a theoretical investigation into fusion energy. This investigation was headed by Zel’dovich, who included Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, Vitali Lazarevich Ginzburg, and Vikto Aleksandrovich Davidenko on his staff. Similar to the American program, the Soviets initially focused on igniting non-equilibrium detonation in a liquid form of deuterium. Furthermore, they attempted to amplify the yield by igniting a limited fusion reaction in a lithium-6 deuteride blanket. However, unlike the Americans, the Soviets eventually developed this into an actual weapon. Originally created by Sakharov and Ginzburg, the first approach to thermonuclear weapons was called the “Sloika” or “layer cake.” This was the idea of heating and compressing a fusion blanket that surrounded a fission trigger. Later, Ginzburg improved this model by adding Li-6 D fuel as opposed to liquid deuterium and tritium.
Later efforts to extend the “Sloika” design to ensure higher yields proved fruitless, and after the test of Joe-4 (the fifth Soviet nuclear test, named Joe-4 in the West after Stalin) the Soviet program wound down. At the time, the United States had already built a 10 megaton bomb in November 1952 with the Ivy Mike test, but the Soviets were unable to duplicate the bomb. IN late 1953 the Soviets were able to produce the breakthrough of separate staging. Typically, this is credited to Davidenko. The separate staging technique uses an atomic trigger to produce high enough temperatures that compress and ignite the thermonuclear secondary stage. Similar to Ulam’s initial concept, it is based on hydrodynamic compression as opposed to radiation implosion. A later breakthrough occurred in early 1954, after the US led test of a lithium deuteride fueled hydrogen bomb detonated successfully in Castle Bravo. This test stimulated Soviet efforts which later led to the discovery of radiation implosion. Sakharov is credited with this discovery after his efforts in working out the theoretical basis for the process. Soviet missiles were often prepared to launch from different platforms, which included submarines, missile silos, and rail-mobile missiles.
