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The Soviet atomic bomb project was authorized by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union to develop nuclear weapons during and after World War II. [1] [2] Russian physicist Georgy Flyorov suspected that the Allied powers were secretly developing a "superweapon" [2] since 1939. Flyorov urged Stalin to start a nuclear program in 1942.
The UK collaborated closely with the United States and Canada during the Manhattan Project, but had to develop its own method for manufacturing and detonating a bomb as US secrecy grew after 1945. The United Kingdom was the third country in the world, after the United States and the Soviet Union, to develop and test a nuclear weapon.
Theodore Alvin Hall (October 20, 1925 – November 1, 1999) was an American physicist and an atomic spy for the Soviet Union, who, during his work on United States efforts to develop the first and second atomic bombs during World War II (the Manhattan Project), gave a detailed description of the "Fat Man" plutonium bomb, and of several processes for purifying plutonium, to Soviet intelligence.
1947 – January – British Prime Minister Clement Attlee approves the development of an atomic bomb through the High Explosive Research programme led by William Penney, Baron Penney. [6] 1948 – June 19 – The Soviet Union's first plutonium production reactor is activated at Chelyabinsk-40. [6]
After the development of the first nuclear weapons during World War II, though, there was much debate within the political circles and public sphere of the United States about whether or not the country should attempt to maintain a monopoly on nuclear technology, or whether it should undertake a program of information sharing with other nations ...
The Soviet Union developed its first nuclear weapon in 1949 and increased its nuclear stockpile rapidly until it peaked in 1986 under Mikhail Gorbachev. [1] As Cold War tensions decreased, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Soviet and Russian nuclear stockpile decreased by over 80% between 1986 and 2012. [19]
While American experts had predicted that the Soviet Union would not have nuclear weapons until the mid-1950s, the first Soviet bomb was detonated on August 29, 1949. The bomb, named "First Lightning" by the West, was more or less a copy of " Fat Man ", one of the bombs the United States had dropped on Japan in 1945.
Atomic bombs were dropped on Japan on August 6 and 9. The Soviet Union responded by increasing efforts to develop its own atomic bomb. While the American Central Intelligence Agency estimated the Soviets would not succeed until 1950–53, the first Soviet atomic bomb was detonated on August 29, 1949. The initiator for the plutonium bomb was ...