What year was the nuclear bomb invented? Who invented the atomic bomb

The development of Soviet nuclear weapons began with the extraction of samples of radium in the early 1930s. In 1939, Soviet physicists Yuli Khariton and Yakov Zel'dovich calculated the chain reaction of nuclear fission of heavy atoms. The following year, scientists from the Ukrainian Institute of Physics and Technology submitted applications for the creation of an atomic bomb, as well as methods for producing uranium-235. For the first time, researchers proposed using conventional explosives as a means to ignite the charge, which would create a critical mass and start a chain reaction.

However, the invention of the Kharkov physicists had its shortcomings, and therefore their application, having managed to visit various authorities, was ultimately rejected. The decisive word was left to the director of the Radium Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Academician Vitaly Khlopin: “... the application has no real basis. In addition, there is in fact a lot of fantastic in it ... Even if it were possible to realize a chain reaction, then the energy that is released is better used to drive engines, for example, aircraft.

The appeals of scientists on the eve of the Great Patriotic War to the people's commissar for defense, Sergei Timoshenko, also turned out to be fruitless. As a result, the project of the invention was buried on a shelf labeled "top secret".

• Vladimir Semyonovich Spinel
• Wikimedia Commons

In 1990, journalists asked Vladimir Shpinel, one of the authors of the bomb project: “If your proposals in 1939-1940 were duly appreciated at the government level and you were given support, when could the USSR have atomic weapons?”

“I think that with such opportunities that Igor Kurchatov later had, we would have received it in 1945,” Spinel replied.

However, it was Kurchatov who managed to use in his developments the successful American schemes for creating a plutonium bomb obtained by Soviet intelligence.

nuclear race

With the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, nuclear research was temporarily stopped. The main scientific institutes of the two capitals were evacuated to remote regions.

The head of strategic intelligence, Lavrenty Beria, was aware of the developments of Western physicists in the field of nuclear weapons. For the first time, the Soviet leadership learned about the possibility of creating a superweapon from the "father" of the American atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer, who visited the Soviet Union in September 1939. In the early 1940s, both politicians and scientists realized the reality of obtaining a nuclear bomb, as well as the fact that its appearance in the arsenal of the enemy would endanger the security of other powers.

In 1941, the Soviet government received the first intelligence from the United States and Great Britain, where active work had already begun on the creation of a superweapon. The main informant was the Soviet "atomic spy" Klaus Fuchs, a German physicist involved in the US and British nuclear programs.

• Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, physicist Pyotr Kapitsa
• RIA News
• V. Noskov

Academician Pyotr Kapitsa, speaking on October 12, 1941 at an anti-fascist rally of scientists, stated: “One of the important means modern war are explosives. Science indicates the fundamental possibility of increasing the explosive force by 1.5-2 times ... Theoretical calculations show that if a modern powerful bomb can, for example, destroy an entire quarter, then an atomic bomb of even a small size, if it is feasible, could easily destroy a major metropolitan city with several million inhabitants. My personal opinion is that the technical difficulties that stand in the way of using intra-atomic energy are still very great. So far, this case is still doubtful, but it is very likely that there are great opportunities here.

In September 1942, the Soviet government adopted a resolution "On the organization of work on uranium". In the spring of the following year, Laboratory No. 2 of the USSR Academy of Sciences was created to produce the first Soviet bomb. Finally, on February 11, 1943, Stalin signed the decision of the GKO on the program of work to create an atomic bomb. Lead at first important task instructed the Deputy Chairman of the GKO Vyacheslav Molotov. It was he who had to find the scientific director of the new laboratory.

Molotov himself, in a note dated July 9, 1971, recalls his decision as follows: “We have been working on this topic since 1943. I was instructed to answer for them, to find such a person who could carry out the creation of an atomic bomb. The Chekists gave me a list of reliable physicists who could be relied upon, and I chose. He summoned Kapitsa to himself, an academician. He said that we were not ready for this and that the atomic bomb was not a weapon of this war, but a matter for the future. Ioffe was asked - he, too, somehow vaguely reacted to this. In short, I had the youngest and still unknown Kurchatov, he was not given a go. I called him, we talked, he made a good impression on me. But he said he still had a lot of ambiguities. Then I decided to give him the materials of our intelligence - the intelligence officers did a very important job. Kurchatov spent several days in the Kremlin, with me, over these materials.

Over the next couple of weeks, Kurchatov thoroughly studied the data obtained by intelligence and drew up an expert opinion: “The materials are of tremendous, invaluable importance for our state and science ... The totality of information indicates the technical possibility of solving the entire uranium problem in a much shorter time than our scientists think who are not familiar with the progress of work on this problem abroad.

In mid-March, Igor Kurchatov took over as scientific director of Laboratory No. 2. In April 1946, for the needs of this laboratory, it was decided to create a design bureau KB-11. The top-secret object was located on the territory of the former Sarov Monastery, a few tens of kilometers from Arzamas.

• Igor Kurchatov (right) with a group of employees of the Leningrad Institute of Physics and Technology
• RIA News

KB-11 specialists were supposed to create an atomic bomb using plutonium as a working substance. At the same time, in the process of creating the first nuclear weapon in the USSR, domestic scientists relied on the schemes of the US plutonium bomb, which was successfully tested in 1945. However, since the production of plutonium in the Soviet Union was not yet involved, physicists at the initial stage used uranium mined in Czechoslovak mines, as well as in the territories East Germany, Kazakhstan and Kolyma.

The first Soviet atomic bomb was named RDS-1 ("Special Jet Engine"). A group of specialists led by Kurchatov managed to load a sufficient amount of uranium into it and start a chain reaction in the reactor on June 10, 1948. The next step was to use plutonium.

"This is atomic lightning"

In the plutonium "Fat Man", dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, American scientists laid 10 kilograms of radioactive metal. The USSR managed to accumulate such a quantity of substance by June 1949. The head of the experiment, Kurchatov, informed the curator of the atomic project, Lavrenty Beria, that he was ready to test the RDS-1 on August 29.

A part of the Kazakh steppe with an area of ​​about 20 kilometers was chosen as a testing ground. In its central part, experts built a metal tower almost 40 meters high. It was on it that the RDS-1 was installed, the mass of which was 4.7 tons.

The Soviet physicist Igor Golovin describes the situation that prevailed at the test site a few minutes before the start of the tests: “Everything is fine. And suddenly, with a general silence, ten minutes before “one”, Beria’s voice is heard: “But nothing will work out for you, Igor Vasilyevich!” - “What are you, Lavrenty Pavlovich! It will definitely work!" - exclaims Kurchatov and continues to watch, only his neck turned purple and his face became gloomy and concentrated.

To Abram Ioyrysh, a prominent scientist in the field of atomic law, Kurchatov’s condition seems similar to a religious experience: “Kurchatov rushed out of the casemate, ran up an earthen rampart and shouted “She!” waved his arms widely, repeating: “She, she!” and a gleam spread over his face. The pillar of the explosion swirled and went into the stratosphere. A shock wave was approaching the command post, clearly visible on the grass. Kurchatov rushed towards her. Flerov rushed after him, grabbed him by the arm, forcibly dragged him into the casemate and closed the door. The author of the biography of Kurchatov, Pyotr Astashenkov, endows his hero with the following words: “This is atomic lightning. Now she is in our hands ... "

Immediately after the explosion, the metal tower collapsed to the ground, and only a funnel remained in its place. A powerful shock wave threw highway bridges a couple of tens of meters away, and the cars that were nearby scattered across the open spaces almost 70 meters from the explosion site.

• Nuclear mushroom ground explosion RDS-1 August 29, 1949
• Archive RFNC-VNIIEF

Once, after another test, Kurchatov was asked: “Are you not worried about the moral side of this invention?”

“You asked a legitimate question,” he replied. But I think it's misdirected. It is better to address it not to us, but to those who unleashed these forces... It is not physics that is terrible, but an adventurous game, not science, but the use of it by scoundrels... When science makes a breakthrough and opens up the possibility for actions that affect millions of people, the need arises to rethink the norms of morality in order to bring these actions under control. But nothing of the sort happened. Rather the opposite. Just think about it - Churchill's speech in Fulton, military bases, bombers along our borders. The intentions are very clear. Science has been turned into an instrument of blackmail and the main determinant of politics. Do you think morality will stop them? And if this is the case, and this is the case, you have to talk to them in their language. Yes, I know that the weapon we have created is an instrument of violence, but we were forced to create it in order to avoid more heinous violence!” - the answer of the scientist in the book of Abram Ioyrysh and nuclear physicist Igor Morokhov "A-bomb" is described.

A total of five RDS-1 bombs were manufactured. All of them were stored in the closed city of Arzamas-16. Now you can see the model of the bomb in the nuclear weapons museum in Sarov (former Arzamas-16).

After the end of World War II, the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition rapidly tried to get ahead of each other in the development of a more powerful nuclear bomb.

The first test, conducted by the Americans on real objects in Japan, heated up the situation between the USSR and the USA to the limit. The powerful explosions that thundered in Japanese cities and practically destroyed all life in them forced Stalin to abandon many claims on the world stage. Most of the Soviet physicists were urgently "thrown" to the development of nuclear weapons.

When and how did nuclear weapons appear

1896 can be considered the year of birth of the atomic bomb. It was then that French chemist A. Becquerel discovered that uranium is radioactive. The chain reaction of uranium forms a powerful energy that serves as the basis for a terrible explosion. It is unlikely that Becquerel imagined that his discovery would lead to the creation of nuclear weapons - the very terrible weapon worldwide.

The end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century was a turning point in the history of the invention of nuclear weapons. It was in this time period that scientists from various countries of the world were able to discover the following laws, rays and elements:

• Alpha, gamma and beta rays;
• Many isotopes of chemical elements with radioactive properties have been discovered;
• The law of radioactive decay was discovered, which determines the time and quantitative dependence of the intensity of radioactive decay, depending on the number of radioactive atoms in the test sample;
• Nuclear isometry was born.

In the 1930s, for the first time, they were able to split the atomic nucleus of uranium by absorbing neutrons. At the same time, positrons and neurons were discovered. All this gave powerful push to the development of weapons that used atomic energy. In 1939, the world's first atomic bomb design was patented. This was done by French physicist Frederic Joliot-Curie.

As a result of further research and development in this area, a nuclear bomb was born. The power and range of destruction of modern atomic bombs is so great that a country that has nuclear potential practically does not need a powerful army, since one atomic bomb is capable of destroying an entire state.

How an atomic bomb works

An atomic bomb consists of many elements, the main of which are:

• Atomic Bomb Corps;
• Automation system that controls the explosion process;
• Nuclear charge or warhead.

The automation system is located in the body of an atomic bomb, along with a nuclear charge. The hull design must be sufficiently reliable to protect the warhead from various external factors and influences. For example, various mechanical, thermal or similar influences, which can lead to an unplanned explosion of great power, capable of destroying everything around.

The task of automation includes complete control over the fact that the explosion occurs in right time, so the system consists of the following elements:

• Device responsible for emergency detonation;
• Power supply of the automation system;
• Undermining sensor system;
• cocking device;
• Safety device.

When the first tests were carried out, nuclear bombs were delivered by planes that had time to leave the affected area. Modern atomic bombs are so powerful that they can only be delivered using cruise, ballistic, or even anti-aircraft missiles.

Atomic bombs use a variety of detonation systems. The simplest of these is a simple device that is triggered when a projectile hits a target.

One of the main characteristics of nuclear bombs and missiles is their division into calibers, which are of three types:

• Small, the power of atomic bombs of this caliber is equivalent to several thousand tons of TNT;
• Medium (explosion power - several tens of thousands of tons of TNT);
• Large, the charge power of which is measured in millions of tons of TNT.

It is interesting that most often the power of all nuclear bombs is measured precisely in TNT equivalent, since there is no scale for measuring the power of an explosion for atomic weapons.

Algorithms for the operation of nuclear bombs

Any atomic bomb operates on the principle of using nuclear energy, which is released during nuclear reaction. This procedure is based on either the fission of heavy nuclei or the synthesis of lungs. Since this reaction releases great amount energy, and in the shortest possible time, the radius of destruction of a nuclear bomb is very impressive. Because of this feature, nuclear weapons are classified as weapons of mass destruction.

There are two main points in the process that starts with the explosion of an atomic bomb:

• This is the immediate center of the explosion, where the nuclear reaction takes place;
• The epicenter of the explosion, which is located at the site where the bomb exploded.

The nuclear energy released during the explosion of an atomic bomb is so strong that seismic tremors begin on the earth. At the same time, these shocks bring direct destruction only at a distance of several hundred meters (although, given the force of the explosion of the bomb itself, these shocks no longer affect anything).

Damage factors in a nuclear explosion

The explosion of a nuclear bomb brings not only terrible instantaneous destruction. The consequences of this explosion will be felt not only by people who fell into the affected area, but also by their children, who were born after the atomic explosion. Types of destruction by atomic weapons are divided into the following groups:

• Light radiation that occurs directly during the explosion;
• The shock wave propagated by a bomb immediately after the explosion;
• Electromagnetic pulse;
• penetrating radiation;
• A radioactive contamination that can last for decades.

Although at first glance, a flash of light poses the least threat, in fact, it is formed as a result of the release of a huge amount of thermal and light energy. Its power and strength far exceeds the power of the rays of the sun, so the defeat of light and heat can be fatal at a distance of several kilometers.

The radiation that is released during the explosion is also very dangerous. Although it does not last long, it manages to infect everything around, since its penetrating ability is incredibly high.

The shock wave in an atomic explosion acts like the same wave in conventional explosions, only its power and radius of destruction are much larger. In a few seconds, it causes irreparable damage not only to people, but also to equipment, buildings and the surrounding nature.

Penetrating radiation provokes the development of radiation sickness, and an electromagnetic pulse is dangerous only for equipment. The combination of all these factors, plus the power of the explosion, makes the atomic bomb the most dangerous weapon in the world.

The world's first nuclear weapons test

The first country to develop and test nuclear weapons was the United States of America. It was the US government that allocated huge cash subsidies for the development of promising new weapons. By the end of 1941, many outstanding scientists in the field of atomic research were invited to the United States, who by 1945 were able to present prototype atomic bomb, suitable for testing.

The world's first test of an atomic bomb equipped with an explosive device was carried out in the desert in the state of New Mexico. A bomb called "Gadget" was detonated on July 16, 1945. The test result was positive, although the military demanded to test a nuclear bomb in real combat conditions.

Seeing that there was only one step left before victory in the Nazi coalition, and there might not be more such an opportunity, the Pentagon decided to launch a nuclear strike on the last ally of Nazi Germany - Japan. In addition, the use of a nuclear bomb was supposed to solve several problems at once:

• To avoid the unnecessary bloodshed that would inevitably occur if US troops set foot on Imperial Japanese territory;
• To bring the uncompromising Japanese to their knees in one blow, forcing them to agree to conditions favorable to the United States;
• Show the USSR (as a possible rival in the future) that the US Army has a unique weapon that can wipe out any city from the face of the earth;
• And, of course, to see in practice what nuclear weapons are capable of in real combat conditions.

On August 6, 1945, the world's first atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, which was used in military operations. This bomb was called "Baby", as its weight was 4 tons. The bomb drop was carefully planned, and it hit exactly where it was planned. Those houses that were not destroyed by the blast burned down, as the stoves that fell in the houses provoked fires, and the whole city was engulfed in flames.

After a bright flash, a heat wave followed, which burned all life within a radius of 4 kilometers, and the shock wave that followed it destroyed most of the buildings.

Those who were hit by heatstroke within a radius of 800 meters were burned alive. The blast wave tore off the burnt skin of many. A couple of minutes later, a strange black rain fell, which consisted of steam and ash. Those who fell under the black rain, the skin received incurable burns.

Those few who were lucky enough to survive fell ill with radiation sickness, which at that time was not only not studied, but also completely unknown. People began to develop fever, vomiting, nausea and bouts of weakness.

On August 9, 1945, the second American bomb, called "Fat Man", was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. This bomb had about the same power as the first, and the consequences of its explosion were just as devastating, although people died half as much.

Two atomic bombs dropped on Japanese cities turned out to be the first and only case in the world of the use of atomic weapons. More than 300,000 people died in the first days after the bombing. About 150 thousand more died from radiation sickness.

After nuclear bombing Japanese cities, Stalin received a real shock. It became clear to him that the issue of developing nuclear weapons in Soviet Russia was a security issue for the entire country. Already on August 20, 1945, a special committee on atomic energy began to work, which was urgently created by I. Stalin.

Although research in nuclear physics was carried out by a group of enthusiasts back in Tsarist Russia, in Soviet time she wasn't getting enough attention. In 1938, all research in this area was completely stopped, and many nuclear scientists were repressed as enemies of the people. After the nuclear explosions in Japan, the Soviet government abruptly began to restore the nuclear industry in the country.

There is evidence that the development of nuclear weapons was carried out in Nazi Germany, and it was German scientists who finalized the “crude” American atomic bomb, so the US government removed all nuclear specialists and all documents related to the development of nuclear weapons from Germany.

The Soviet intelligence school, which during the war was able to bypass all foreign intelligence services, back in 1943 transferred secret documents related to the development of nuclear weapons to the USSR. At the same time, Soviet agents were introduced into all major American nuclear research centers.

As a result of all these measures, already in 1946, the terms of reference for the manufacture of two Soviet-made nuclear bombs were ready:

• RDS-1 (with plutonium charge);
• RDS-2 (with two parts of the uranium charge).

The abbreviation "RDS" was deciphered as "Russia does itself", which almost completely corresponded to reality.

The news that the USSR was ready to release its nuclear weapons forced the US government to take drastic measures. In 1949, the Troyan plan was developed, according to which it was planned to drop atomic bombs on 70 largest cities in the USSR. Only the fear of a retaliatory strike prevented this plan from being realized.

This alarming information coming from Soviet intelligence officers forced scientists to work in an emergency mode. Already in August 1949, the first atomic bomb produced in the USSR was tested. When the US found out about these tests, the Trojan plan was postponed indefinitely. The era of confrontation between the two superpowers, known in history as the Cold War, began.

The most powerful nuclear bomb in the world, known as the Tsar Bomby, belongs precisely to the Cold War period. Soviet scientists have created the most powerful bomb in the history of mankind. Its capacity was 60 megatons, although it was planned to create a bomb with a capacity of 100 kilotons. This bomb was tested in October 1961. Diameter fireball during the explosion was 10 kilometers, and the blast wave circled the globe three times. It was this test that forced most of the countries of the world to sign an agreement to end nuclear testing not only in the earth's atmosphere, but even in space.

Although atomic weapons are an excellent means of intimidating aggressive countries, on the other hand, they are capable of extinguishing any military conflicts in the bud, since all parties to the conflict can be destroyed in an atomic explosion.

On August days 68 years ago, namely, on August 6, 1945 at 08:15 local time, the American B-29 "Enola Gay" bomber, piloted by Paul Tibbets and bombardier Tom Ferebi, dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima called "Baby" . On August 9, the bombing was repeated - the second bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki.

According to official history, the Americans were the first in the world to make an atomic bomb and hastened to use it against Japan., so that the Japanese capitulate faster and America could avoid colossal losses during the landing of soldiers on the islands, for which the admirals were already preparing closely. At the same time, the bomb was a demonstration of its new capabilities to the USSR, because in May 1945 Comrade Dzhugashvili was already thinking of extending the construction of communism to the English Channel.

Seeing the example of Hiroshima, what will happen to Moscow, the Soviet party leaders reduced their ardor and made the right decision to build socialism no further than East Berlin. At the same time, they threw all their efforts into the Soviet atomic project, dug out a talented academician Kurchatov somewhere, and he quickly made an atomic bomb for Dzhugashvili, which the secretaries general then rattled on the UN tribune, and Soviet propagandists rattled it in front of the audience - they say, yes, our pants are sewn bad, but« we made the atomic bomb». This argument is almost the main one for many fans of the Soviet of Deputies. However, the time has come to refute these arguments.

Somehow, the creation of the atomic bomb did not fit with the level of Soviet science and technology. It is unbelievable that a slave-owning system could produce such a complex scientific and technological product on its own. Over time somehow not even denied, that people from Lubyanka also helped Kurchatov, bringing ready-made drawings in their beaks, but academicians completely deny this, minimizing the merit of technological intelligence. In America, the Rosenbergs were executed for transferring atomic secrets to the USSR. The dispute between official historians and citizens who want to revise history has been going on for a long time, almost openly, however, the true state of affairs is far from both the official version and the views of its critics. And things are such that the first atomic bomb, likeand many things in the world were done by the Germans by 1945. And they even tested it at the end of 1944.The Americans were preparing the nuclear project themselves, as it were, but they received the main components as a trophy or under an agreement with the top of the Reich, and therefore they did everything much faster. But when the Americans detonated the bomb, the USSR began to look for German scientists, whichand made their contribution. That is why they created a bomb so quickly in the USSR, although according to the calculation of the Americans, he could not make a bomb before1952- 55 years old.

The Americans knew what they were talking about, because if von Braun helped them make rocket technology, then their first atomic bomb was completely German. For a long time it was possible to hide the truth, but in the decades after 1945, then someone retiring unleashed his tongue, then accidentally declassified a couple of sheets from secret archives, then journalists sniffed something out. The earth was filled with rumors and rumors that the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was actually Germanhave been going since 1945. People whispered in the smoking rooms and scratched their foreheads over the logicaleskiminconsistencies and puzzling questions until one day in the early 2000s, Mr. Joseph Farrell, a well-known theologian and specialist in an alternative view of modern known facts in one book Black sun of the Third Reich. The battle for the "weapon of vengeance".

The facts were repeatedly checked by him and much that the author had doubts was not included in the book, nevertheless, these facts are more than enough to reduce the debit to the credit. One can argue about each of them (which the official men of the United States do), try to refute, but all together the facts are super convincing. Some of them, for example, the Decrees of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, are completely irrefutable, neither by the pundits of the USSR, nor even by the pundits of the United States. Since Dzhugashvili decided to give "enemies of the people"Stalinistprizes(more on that below), so it was for what.

We will not retell the entire book of Mr. Farrell, we simply recommend it for mandatory reading. Here are just a few quoteskifor example, some quotesabouttalking about the fact that the Germans tested the atomic bomb and people saw it:

A man named Zinsser, an anti-aircraft missile specialist, recounted what he witnessed: “In early October 1944, I took off from Ludwigslust. (south of Lübeck), located 12 to 15 kilometers from the nuclear test site, and suddenly saw a strong bright glow that illuminated the entire atmosphere, which lasted about two seconds.

A clearly visible shock wave erupted from the cloud formed by the explosion. By the time it became visible, it had a diameter of about one kilometer, and the color of the cloud changed frequently. After a short period of darkness, it was covered with many bright spots, which, unlike the usual explosion, had a pale blue color.

Approximately ten seconds after the explosion, the distinct outlines of the explosive cloud disappeared, then the cloud itself began to brighten against a dark gray sky covered with solid clouds. The diameter of the shock wave still visible to the naked eye was at least 9000 meters; it remained visible for at least 15 seconds. My personal feeling from observing the color of the explosive cloud: it took on a blue-violet color. Throughout this phenomenon, reddish-colored rings were visible, very quickly changing color to dirty shades. From my observation plane, I felt a slight impact in the form of light jolts and jerks.

About an hour later I took off in a Xe-111 from the Ludwigslust airfield and headed east. Shortly after takeoff, I flew through a zone of continuous cloud cover (at an altitude of three to four thousand meters). Above the place where the explosion occurred, there was a mushroom cloud with turbulent, eddy layers (at an altitude of approximately 7000 meters), without any visible connections. A strong electromagnetic disturbance manifested itself in the inability to continue radio communication. Since American P-38 fighters were operating in the Wittenberg-Bersburg area, I had to turn north, but I got a better view of the lower part of the cloud above the explosion site. Side note: I don't really understand why these tests were conducted in such a densely populated area."

ARI:Thus, a certain German pilot observed the testing of a device that, by all indications, is suitable for the characteristics of an atomic bomb. There are dozens of such testimonies, but Mr. Farrell cites only officialthe documents. And not only the Germans, but also the Japanese, whom the Germans, according to his version, also helped to make a bomb, and they tested it at their training ground.

Shortly after the end of World War II, American intelligence in the Pacific received a startling report that the Japanese had built and successfully tested an atomic bomb just before their surrender. The work was carried out in the city of Konan or its environs (Japanese name for the city of Heungnam) in the north of the Korean Peninsula.

The war ended before these weapons saw combat use, and the production where they were made is now in the hands of the Russians.

In the summer of 1946, this information was widely publicized. David Snell of Korea's 24th Investigation Division... wrote about it in the Atlanta Constitution after he was fired.

Snell's statement was based on the allegations of a Japanese officer returning to Japan. This officer informed Snell that he was tasked with securing the facility. Snell, recounting in his own words in a newspaper article the testimony of a Japanese officer, argued:

In a cave in the mountains near Konan, people worked, racing against time to complete the assembly of the "genzai bakudan" - the Japanese name for an atomic bomb. It was August 10, 1945 (Japanese time), just four days after the atomic explosion tore the sky apart.

ARI: Among the arguments of those who do not believe in the creation of the atomic bomb by the Germans, such an argument that it is not known about the significant industrial capacity in the Hitlerite district, which was directed to the German atomic project, as was done in the United States. However, this argument is refuted byextremely curious fact connected with the concern "I. G. Farben", which, according to the official legend, produced syntheticesskyrubber and therefore consumed more electricity than Berlin at that time. That's just really for five years of work there was not produced EVEN KILOGRAM official products and most likely it was main center for uranium enrichment:

Concern "I. G. Farben took an active part in the atrocities of Nazism, creating during the war years a huge plant for the production of Buna synthetic rubber in Auschwitz (the German name for the Polish town of Auschwitz) in the Polish part of Silesia.

The prisoners of the concentration camp, who first worked on the construction of the complex, and then served it, were subjected to unheard of cruelties. However, at the hearing Nuremberg Tribunal over war criminals, it turned out that the Auschwitz buna complex was one of the great mysteries of the war, for despite the personal blessing of Hitler, Himmler, Göring and Keitel, despite the endless source of both qualified civilian personnel and slave labor from Auschwitz, “the work failures, delays and sabotage constantly interfered ... However, in spite of everything, the construction of a huge complex for the production of synthetic rubber and gasoline was completed. More than three hundred thousand concentration camp prisoners passed through the construction site; of these, twenty-five thousand died of exhaustion, unable to bear the exhausting labor.

The complex is gigantic. So huge that "it consumed more electricity than all of Berlin." creepy details. They were perplexed by the fact that, despite such a huge investment of money, materials and human lives, "never a single kilogram of synthetic rubber was produced."

On this, as if obsessed, the directors and managers of Farben, who found themselves in the dock, insisted. Consume more electricity than all of Berlin - at the time the eighth largest city in the world - to produce absolutely nothing? If this is true, then the unprecedented expenditure of money and labor and the huge consumption of electricity did not make any significant contribution to the German war effort. Surely something is wrong here.

ARI: Electric Energy in insane amounts - one of the main components of any nuclear project. It is needed for the production of heavy water - it is obtained by evaporating tons of natural water, after which the same water that nuclear scientists need remains at the bottom. Electricity is needed for the electrochemical separation of metals; uranium cannot be obtained in any other way. And it also needs a lot. Based on this, historians argued that since the Germans did not have such energy-intensive plants for the enrichment of uranium and the production of heavy water, it means that there was no atomic bomb. But as you can see, everything was there. Only it was called differently - like in the USSR then there was a secret "sanatorium" for German physicists.

An even more surprising fact is the use by the Germans of an unfinished atomic bomb on ... the Kursk Bulge.

The final chord of this chapter, and a breathtaking indication of other mysteries that will be explored later in this book, is a report declassified by the National Security Agency only in 1978. This report appears to be the transcript of an intercepted message transmitted from the Japanese embassy in Stockholm to Tokyo. It is entitled "Report on the bomb based on the splitting of the atom". It is best to quote this astounding document in its entirety, with the omissions resulting from the decipherment of the original message.

This bomb, revolutionary in its effects, will completely overturn all established concepts of conventional warfare. I am sending you all the reports collected together about what is called the bomb based on the splitting of the atom:

It is authentically known that in June 1943 the German army at a point 150 kilometers southeast of Kursk tested a completely new type of weapon against the Russians. Although the entire 19th Russian Rifle Regiment was hit, just a few bombs (each with a live charge of less than 5 kilograms) were enough to destroy it completely, down to the last man. The following material is given according to the testimony of Lieutenant Colonel Ue (?) Kendzi, an adviser to the attache in Hungary and in the past (worked?) in this country, who accidentally saw the consequences of what happened immediately after it happened: “All the people and horses (? in the area? ) shell explosions were charred to blackness, and even detonated all the ammunition.

ARI:However, even withhowlofficial documents official US pundits are tryingrefute - they say, all these reports, reports and protocols are fakedew.But the balance still does not converge, because by August 1945, the United States did not have enough uranium to produce bothminimmindtwo, and possibly four atomic bombs. There will be no bomb without uranium, and it has been mined for years. By 1944, the United States had no more than a quarter of the required uranium, and it took at least another five years to extract the rest. And suddenly uranium seemed to fall on their heads from the sky:

In December 1944, a very unpleasant report was prepared, which greatly upset those who read it: by May 1 - 15 kilograms. This was indeed very unfortunate news, for according to initial estimates made in 1942, between 10 and 100 kilograms of uranium was required to build a uranium-based bomb, and by the time this memorandum was written, more accurate calculations had given the critical mass needed to produce uranium an atomic bomb, equal to approximately 50 kilograms.

However, it was not only the Manhattan Project that had problems with the missing uranium. Germany also seems to have suffered from "missing uranium syndrome" in the days immediately preceding and immediately after the end of the war. But in this case, the volumes of missing uranium were calculated not in tens of kilograms, but in hundreds of tons. At this point, it makes sense to quote a lengthy excerpt from the brilliant work of Carter Hydrick in order to comprehensively explore this problem:

From June 1940 until the end of the war, Germany removed from Belgium three and a half thousand tons of uranium-containing substances - almost three times more than what Groves had at his disposal ... and placed them in salt mines near Strassfurt in Germany.

ARI: Leslie Richard Groves (eng. Leslie Richard Groves; August 17, 1896 - July 13, 1970) - lieutenant general of the US Army, in 1942-1947 - military head of the nuclear weapons program (Manhattan Project).

Groves states that on April 17, 1945, when the war was already drawing to a close, the Allies managed to seize about 1,100 tons of uranium ore in Strassfurt and another 31 tons in the French port of Toulouse ... And he claims that Germany never had more uranium ore, so thus showing that Germany never had enough material either to process uranium into feedstock for a plutonium reactor, or to enrich it by electromagnetic separation.

Obviously, if at one time 3,500 tons were stored in Strassfurt, and only 1,130 were captured, there are still approximately 2,730 tons left - and this is still twice as much as the Manhattan Project had throughout the war ... The fate of this missing ore unknown to this day...

According to historian Margaret Gowing, by the summer of 1941, Germany had enriched 600 tons of uranium into the oxide form needed to ionize the feedstock into a gaseous form in which uranium isotopes can be separated magnetically or thermally. (Italics mine. - D. F.) Also, the oxide can be converted into a metal for use as a raw material in a nuclear reactor. In fact, Professor Reichl, who during the war was in charge of all the uranium at the disposal of Germany, claims that the true figure was much higher ...

ARI: So it's clear that without getting enriched uranium from somewhere else, and some detonation technology, the Americans would not have been able to test or detonate their bombs over Japan in August 1945. And they got, as it turns out,missing components from the Germans.

In order to create a uranium or plutonium bomb, uranium-containing raw materials must be converted into metal at a certain stage. For a plutonium bomb, they get metallic U238, for uranium bomb need U235. However, due to the insidious characteristics of uranium, this metallurgical process is extremely complex. The United States tackled this problem early, but did not succeed in converting uranium into a metallic form in large quantities until late in 1942. German specialists ... by the end of 1940 had already converted 280.6 kilograms into metal, more than a quarter of a ton ......

In any case, these figures clearly indicate that in 1940-1942 the Germans were significantly ahead of the Allies in one very important component of the atomic bomb production process - in uranium enrichment, and, therefore, this also allows us to conclude that they were at that time pulled far ahead in the race for possession of a working atomic bomb. However, these numbers also raise one troubling question: where did all that uranium go?

The answer to this question is given by the mysterious incident with the German submarine U-234, captured by the Americans in 1945.

The history of U-234 is well known to all researchers involved in the history of the Nazi atomic bomb, and, of course, the "Allied legend" says that the materials that were on board the captured submarine were in no way used in the "Manhattan Project".

All this is absolutely not true. The U-234 was a very large underwater minelayer capable of carrying a large load underwater. Think about what is the highest degree strange cargo was aboard U-234 on that last flight:

Two Japanese officers.

80 gold-plated cylindrical containers containing 560 kilograms of uranium oxide.

Several wooden barrels filled with "heavy water".

Infrared proximity fuses.

Dr. Heinz Schlicke, inventor of these fuses.

When U-234 was loading in a German port before leaving for her last voyage, the submarine's radio operator Wolfgang Hirschfeld noticed that Japanese officers wrote "U235" on the paper in which the containers were wrapped before loading them into the hold of the boat. Needless to say, this remark provoked all the barrage of debunking criticism with which skeptics usually meet UFO eyewitness accounts: the low position of the sun above the horizon, poor lighting, a long distance that did not allow to see everything clearly, and the like. And this is not surprising, because if Hirschfeld really saw what he saw, the frightening consequences of this are obvious.

The use of containers coated with gold on the inside is explained by the fact that uranium, a highly corrosive metal, quickly becomes contaminated when it comes into contact with other unstable elements. Gold, in terms of protection against radioactive radiation not inferior to lead, unlike lead, it is a very pure and extremely stable element; therefore, its choice for the storage and long-term transportation of highly enriched and pure uranium is obvious. Thus, the uranium oxide on board U-234 was highly enriched uranium, and most likely U235, the last stage of raw material before turning it into weapons-grade or bomb-usable uranium (if it was not already weapons-grade uranium) . And indeed, if the inscriptions made by Japanese officers on the containers were true, it is very likely that this was the last stage of purification of raw materials before turning into metal.

The cargo aboard U-234 was so sensitive that when, on June 16, 1945, representatives navy The United States compiled its inventory, uranium oxide disappeared without a trace from the list .....

Yes, it would have been the easiest if not for an unexpected confirmation from a certain Pyotr Ivanovich Titarenko, a former military translator from the headquarters of Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, who at the end of the war accepted the surrender of Japan from the Soviet Union. As the German magazine Der Spiegel wrote in 1992, Titarenko wrote a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In it, he reported that in reality three atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, one of which, dropped on Nagasaki before the Fat Man exploded over the city, did not explode. Subsequently, this bomb was transferred by Japan to the Soviet Union.

Mussolini and the Soviet marshal's interpreter are not the only ones who confirm the strange number of bombs dropped on Japan; it is possible that at some point a fourth bomb was also involved in the game, which was transported on Far East aboard the US Navy heavy cruiser Indianapolis (tail number CA 35) when it sank in 1945.

This strange evidence again raises questions about the "Allied legend", for, as has already been shown, in late 1944 - early 1945, the "Manhattan Project" faced a critical shortage of weapons-grade uranium, and by that time the problem of plutonium fuses had not been solved. bombs. So the question is: if these reports were true, where did the extra bomb (or even more bombs) come from? It is hard to believe that three or even four bombs ready for use in Japan were made in such as soon as possible, - unless they were war booty taken out of Europe.

ARI: Actually a storyU-234begins back in 1944, when, after the opening of the 2nd front and failures on Eastern Front perhaps on behalf of Hitler, it was decided to start trading with the allies - an atomic bomb in exchange for immunity guarantees for the party elite:

Be that as it may, we are primarily interested in the role that Bormann played in the development and implementation of the plan for the secret strategic evacuation of the Nazis after their military defeat. After the Stalingrad disaster in early 1943, it became obvious to Bormann, like other high-ranking Nazis, that the military collapse of the Third Reich was inevitable if their secret weapons projects did not bear fruit in time. Bormann and representatives of various armaments departments, industries and, of course, the SS gathered for a secret meeting at which plans were developed to export material assets, qualified personnel, scientific materials and technology......

First of all, JIOA director Grun, appointed as project manager, compiled a list of the most qualified German and Austrian scientists that the Americans and British used for decades. Although journalists and historians repeatedly mentioned this list, none of them said that Werner Ozenberg, who during the war served as head of the scientific department of the Gestapo, took part in its compilation. The decision to involve Ozenbsrg in this work was made by US Navy Captain Ransom Davis after consultations with the Joint Chiefs of Staff......

Finally, the Ozenberg list and the American interest in it seems to support another hypothesis, namely that the Americans' knowledge of the nature of the Nazi projects, as evidenced by General Patton's unerring actions in finding Kammler's secret research centers, could come only from Nazi Germany itself. Since Carter Heidrick quite convincingly proved that Bormann personally supervised the transfer of the secrets of the German atomic bomb to the Americans, it can be safely argued that he ultimately coordinated the flow of other important information regarding the “Kammler headquarters” to the American intelligence services, since no one knew better than him about the nature, content and personnel of the German black projects. Thus, Carter Heidrick's thesis that Bormann helped organize the transportation to the United States on the submarine "U-234" of not only enriched uranium, but also a ready-to-use atomic bomb, looks very plausible.

ARI: In addition to uranium itself, a lot more things are needed for an atomic bomb, in particular, fuses based on red mercury. Unlike a conventional detonator, these devices must detonate supersynchronously, gathering the uranium mass into a single whole and starting a nuclear reaction. This technology is extremely complex, the United States did not have it, and therefore the fuses were included. And since the question did not end with the fuses, the Americans dragged German nuclear scientists to their consultations before loading the atomic bomb on board the aircraft flying to Japan:

There is another fact that does not fit into the post-war legend of the Allies regarding the impossibility of the Germans creating an atomic bomb: the German physicist Rudolf Fleischmann was brought to the United States by plane for interrogation even before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Why was there such an urgent need to consult with a German physicist before the atomic bombing of Japan? After all, according to the legend of the Allies, we had nothing to learn from the Germans in the field of atomic physics ......

ARI:Thus, there is no doubt that Germany had a bomb in May 1945. WhyHitlerdidn't apply it? Because one atomic bomb is not a bomb. For a bomb to become a weapon, there must be a sufficient number of them.identitymultiplied by means of delivery. Hitler could destroy New York and London, could choose to wipe out a couple of divisions moving towards Berlin. But the outcome of the war would not have been decided in his favor. But the Allies would have come to Germany in a very bad mood. The Germans already got it in 1945, but if Germany used nuclear weapons, its population would have got much more. Germany could be wiped off the face of the earth, like, for example, Dresden. Therefore, although Mr. Hitler is considered by someWithathe was not a masshed, nevertheless insane politician, and soberly weigh everythinginquietly leaked World War II: we give you a bomb - and you do not allow the USSR to reach the English Channel and guarantee a quiet old age for the Nazi elite.

So separate negotiationsaboutry in April 1945, described in the movie pRabout 17 moments of spring, really took place. But only at such a level that no pastor Schlag ever dreamed of negotiatingaboutry was led by Hitler himself. And physicsRthere was no unge because while Stirlitz was chasing him Manfred von Ardenne

already tested itweapons - as a minimum in 1943on theTothe Ur arc, as a maximum - in Norway, no later than 1944.

By ByintelligiblemoreoverandTo us, Mr. Farrell's book is not promoted either in the West or in Russia, not everyone has caught the eye of it. But the information makes its way and one day even the dumb will know about how the nuclear weapon was made. And there will be a veryicantthe situation because it will have to be radically reconsideredall officialhistorythe last 70 years.

However, official pundits in Russia will be worst of all.Insk federation, who for many years repeated the old mantr: maour tires may be bad, but we createdwhetheratomic bombby.But as it turns out, even American engineers were too tough for a nuclear device, at least in 1945. The USSR is not involved at all here - today the Russian federation would compete with Iran on the subject of who will make the bomb faster,if not for one BUT. BUT - these are captured German engineers who made nuclear weapons for Dzhugashvili.

It is authentically known and the academicians of the USSR do not deny that over rocket project The USSR employed 3,000 captured Germans. That is, they essentially launched Gagarin into space. But as many as 7,000 specialists worked on the Soviet nuclear projectfrom Germany,so it's not surprising that the Soviets made the atomic bomb before they flew into space. If the United States still had its own way in the atomic race, then in the USSR they simply stupidly reproduced German technology.

In 1945, a group of colonels, who in fact were not colonels, but secret physicists, were looking for specialists in Germany - the future academicians Artsimovich, Kikoin, Khariton, Shchelkin ... The operation was led by First Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Ivan Serov.

More than two hundred of the most prominent German physicists (about half of them were doctors of science), radio engineers and craftsmen were brought to Moscow. In addition to the equipment of the Ardenne laboratory, later equipment from the Berlin Kaiser Institute and other German scientific organizations, documentation and reagents, stocks of film and paper for recorders, photo recorders, wire tape recorders for telemetry, optics, powerful electromagnets and even German transformers were delivered to Moscow. And then the Germans, under pain of death, began to build an atomic bomb for the USSR. They built it from scratch, because by 1945 the United States had some of its own developments, the Germans were simply far ahead of them, but in the USSR, in the realm of "science" academicians like Lysenko nuclear program there was nothing. Here is what the researchers of this topic managed to dig up:

In 1945, the sanatoriums "Sinop" and "Agudzery", located in Abkhazia, were transferred to the disposal of German physicists. Thus, the foundation was laid for the Sukhumi Institute of Physics and Technology, which was then part of the system of top-secret objects of the USSR. "Sinop" was referred to in the documents as Object "A", headed by Baron Manfred von Ardenne (1907-1997). This person is legendary in world science: one of the founders of television, the developer of electron microscopes and many other devices. During one meeting, Beria wanted to entrust the leadership of the atomic project to von Ardenne. Ardenne himself recalls: “I had no more than ten seconds to think. My answer is verbatim: the most important proposal I consider it a great honor for me, because it is an expression of exceptionally great confidence in my abilities. The solution to this problem has two different directions: 1. The development of the atomic bomb itself and 2. The development of methods for obtaining the fissile isotope of uranium 235U on an industrial scale. The separation of isotopes is a separate and very difficult problem. Therefore, I propose that the separation of isotopes be the main problem of our institute and German specialists, and that the leading nuclear scientists of the Soviet Union sitting here would do a great job of creating an atomic bomb for their homeland.

Beria accepted this offer. Many years later, at a government reception, when Manfred von Ardenne was introduced to the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR Khrushchev, he reacted like this: “Ah, you are the same Ardenne who so skillfully pulled his neck out of the noose.”

Von Ardenne later assessed his contribution to the development of the atomic problem as "the most important thing to which post-war circumstances led me." In 1955, the scientist was allowed to travel to the GDR, where he headed a research institute in Dresden.

Sanatorium "Agudzery" received the code name Object "G". It was led by Gustav Hertz (1887–1975), nephew of the famous Heinrich Hertz, known to us from school. Gustav Hertz received the Nobel Prize in 1925 for discovering the laws of the collision of an electron with an atom - the well-known experience of Frank and Hertz. In 1945, Gustav Hertz became one of the first German physicists brought to the USSR. He was the only foreign Nobel laureate who worked in the USSR. Like other German scientists, he lived, knowing no refusal, in his house on the seashore. In 1955 Hertz left for the GDR. There he worked as a professor at the University of Leipzig, and then as director of the Physics Institute at the university.

The main task of von Ardenne and Gustav Hertz was to find different methods for separating uranium isotopes. Thanks to von Ardenne, one of the first mass spectrometers appeared in the USSR. Hertz successfully improved his isotope separation method, which made it possible to establish this process on an industrial scale.

Other prominent German scientists were also brought to the facility in Sukhumi, including the physicist and radiochemist Nikolaus Riehl (1901–1991). They called him Nikolai Vasilyevich. He was born in St. Petersburg, in the family of a German - the chief engineer of Siemens and Halske. Nikolaus' mother was Russian, so he spoke German and Russian from childhood. He got great technical education: first in St. Petersburg, and after the family moved to Germany - at the Berlin University of Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm (later Humboldt University). In 1927 he defended his doctoral dissertation in radiochemistry. His supervisors were future scientific luminaries - nuclear physicist Lisa Meitner and radiochemist Otto Hahn. Before the outbreak of World War II, Riehl was in charge of the central radiological laboratory of the Auergesellschaft company, where he proved to be an energetic and very capable experimenter. At the beginning of the war, Riel was summoned to the War Ministry, where he was offered to start producing uranium. In May 1945, Riehl voluntarily came to the Soviet emissaries sent to Berlin. The scientist, who was considered the Reich's chief expert on the production of enriched uranium for reactors, pointed out where the equipment needed for this was located. Its fragments (a plant near Berlin was destroyed by bombing) were dismantled and sent to the USSR. 300 tons of uranium compounds found there were also taken there. It is believed that this saved the Soviet Union a year and a half to create an atomic bomb - until 1945, Igor Kurchatov had only 7 tons of uranium oxide at his disposal. Under the leadership of Riel, the Elektrostal plant in Noginsk near Moscow was reequipped to produce cast uranium metal.

Echelons with equipment were going from Germany to Sukhumi. Three out of four German cyclotrons were brought to the USSR, as well as powerful magnets, electron microscopes, oscilloscopes, high-voltage transformers, ultra-precise instruments, etc. Equipment was delivered to the USSR from the Institute of Chemistry and Metallurgy, the Kaiser Wilhelm Physical Institute, Siemens electrical laboratories, Physical Institute of the German Post Office.

Igor Kurchatov was appointed scientific director of the project, who was undoubtedly an outstanding scientist, but he always surprised his employees with extraordinary "scientific insight" - as it turned out later, he knew most of the secrets from intelligence, but had no right to talk about it. The following episode, which was told by academician Isaac Kikoin, speaks about leadership methods. At one meeting, Beria asked Soviet physicists how long it would take to solve one problem. They answered him: six months. The answer was: "Either you will solve it in one month, or you will deal with this problem in places much more remote." Of course, the task was completed in one month. But the authorities spared no expense and rewards. Very many, including German scientists, received Stalin Prizes, dachas, cars and other rewards. Nikolaus Riehl, however, the only foreign scientist, even received the title of Hero of Socialist Labor. German scientists played a big role in raising the qualifications of the Georgian physicists who worked with them.

ARI: So the Germans didn't just help the USSR a lot with the creation of the atomic bomb - they did everything. Moreover, this story was like with the "Kalashnikov assault rifle" because even German gunsmiths could not have made such a perfect weapon in a couple of years - while working in captivity in the USSR, they simply completed what was already almost ready. Similarly, with the atomic bomb, work on which the Germans began as early as a year in 1933, and possibly much earlier. Official history holds that Hitler annexed the Sudetenland because there were many Germans living there. It may be so, but the Sudetenland is the richest uranium deposit in Europe. There is a suspicion that Hitler knew where to start in the first place, because the German legacy since the time of Peter was in Russia, and in Australia, and even in Africa. But Hitler started with the Sudetenland. Apparently, some people knowledgeable in alchemy immediately explained to him what to do and which way to go, so it is not surprising that the Germans were far ahead of everyone and the American special services in Europe in the forties of the last century were only picking up leftovers for the Germans, hunting for medieval alchemical manuscripts.

But the USSR did not even have leftovers. There was only the "academician" Lysenko, according to whose theories the weeds growing on a collective farm field, and not on a private farm, had every reason to be imbued with the spirit of socialism and turn into wheat. In medicine there was a similar " scientific school", who tried to speed up the pregnancy from 9 months to nine weeks - so that the wives of the proletarians would not be distracted from work. There were similar theories in nuclear physics, so for the USSR the creation of an atomic bomb was just as impossible as the creation of its own computer for cybernetics in the USSR was officially considered a prostitute of the bourgeoisie.By the way, important scientific decisions in the same physics (for example, in which direction to go and which theories to consider working) in the USSR were made at best by "academicians" from Agriculture. Although more often this was done by a party functionary with an education in the "evening working faculty". What kind of atomic bomb could there be on this base? Only a stranger. In the USSR, they could not even assemble it from ready-made components with ready-made drawings. The Germans did everything, and on this score there is even an official recognition of their merits - the Stalin Prizes and orders that were awarded to the engineers:

German specialists are laureates of the Stalin Prize for their work in the field of the use of atomic energy. Excerpts from the resolutions of the Council of Ministers of the USSR "on rewarding and bonuses ...".

[From the resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR No. 5070-1944ss / op “On awarding and bonuses for outstanding scientific discoveries and technical advances in the use of atomic energy, October 29, 1949]

[From the Decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR No. 4964-2148ss / op "On awarding and bonuses for outstanding scientific work in the field of the use of atomic energy, for the creation of new types of RDS products, achievements in the production of plutonium and uranium-235 and the development of a raw material base for the nuclear industry" , December 6, 1951]

[From Decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR No. 3044-1304ss "On the award of Stalin Prizes to scientific and engineering workers of the Ministry of Medium Machine Building and other departments for the creation of a hydrogen bomb and new designs of atomic bombs", December 31, 1953]

Manfred von Ardenne

1947 - Stalin Prize (electron microscope - "In January 1947, the Chief of the Site presented von Ardenne with the State Prize (a purse full of money) for his microscope work.") "German Scientists in the Soviet Atomic Project", p . eighteen)

1953 - Stalin Prize, 2nd class (electromagnetic isotope separation, lithium-6).

Heinz Barwich

Günther Wirtz

Gustav Hertz

1951 - Stalin Prize of the 2nd degree (the theory of the stability of gas diffusion in cascades).

Gerard Jaeger

1953 - Stalin Prize of the 3rd degree (electromagnetic separation of isotopes, lithium-6).

Reinhold Reichmann (Reichmann)

1951 - Stalin Prize of the 1st degree (posthumously) (development of technology

production of ceramic tubular filters for diffusion machines).

Nikolaus Riehl

1949 - Hero of Socialist Labor, Stalin Prize of the 1st degree (development and implementation of industrial technology for the production of pure metallic uranium).

Herbert Thieme

1949 - Stalin Prize of the 2nd degree (development and implementation of industrial technology for the production of pure metallic uranium).

1951 - Stalin Prize of the 2nd degree (development of industrial technology for the production of high purity uranium and the manufacture of products from it).

Peter Thiessen

1956 - Thyssen State Prize,_Peter

Heinz Freulich

1953 - Stalin Prize 3rd degree (electromagnetic isotope separation, lithium-6).

Ziel Ludwig

1951 - Stalin Prize 1st degree (development of technology for the production of ceramic tubular filters for diffusion machines).

Werner Schütze

1949 - Stalin Prize of the 2nd degree (mass spectrometer).

ARI: This is how the story turns out - there is no trace of the myth that the Volga is a bad car, but we made an atomic bomb. All that remains is the bad Volga car. And it would not have been if it had not been bought drawings from Ford. There would be nothing because the Bolshevik state is not capable of creating anything by definition. For the same reason, nothing can create a Russian state, only to sell natural resources.

Mikhail Saltan, Gleb Shcherbatov

For the stupid, just in case, we explain that we are not talking about the intellectual potential of the Russian people, it is just quite high, we are talking about the creative possibilities of the Soviet bureaucratic system, which, in principle, cannot allow scientific talents to be revealed.

Nuclear (or atomic) weapons are explosive weapons based on unguided chain reaction fission of heavy nuclei and thermonuclear fusion reactions. Either uranium-235 or plutonium-239 or, in some cases, uranium-233 is used to carry out a fission chain reaction. Refers to weapons of mass destruction along with biological and chemical weapons. The power of a nuclear charge is measured in TNT equivalent, usually expressed in kilotons and megatons.

Nuclear weapons were first tested on July 16, 1945 in the United States at the Trinity test site near Alamogordo, New Mexico. In the same year, the United States used it in Japan during the bombing of the cities of Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9.

In the USSR, the first test of an atomic bomb - the RDS-1 product - was carried out on August 29, 1949 at the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan. RDS-1 was a "drop-shaped" airborne atomic bomb, weighing 4.6 tons, 1.5 m in diameter and 3.7 m long. Plutonium was used as a fissile material. The bomb was detonated at 07:00 local time (4:00 Moscow time) on a mounted metal lattice tower 37.5 m high, located in the center of the experimental field with a diameter of about 20 km. The power of the explosion was 20 kilotons of TNT.

The RDS-1 product (the documents indicated the decoding "jet engine "C") was created at Design Bureau No. 11 (now the Russian Federal Nuclear Center - All-Russian Research Institute of Experimental Physics, RFNC-VNIIEF, Sarov), which was organized for the creation of an atomic bomb in April 1946. Work on the creation of the bomb was led by Igor Kurchatov (scientific supervisor of work on the atomic problem since 1943; organizer of the bomb test) and Julius Khariton (chief designer of KB-11 in 1946-1959).

Research on atomic energy was carried out in Russia (later the USSR) as early as the 1920s and 1930s. In 1932, a group on the nucleus was formed at the Leningrad Institute of Physics and Technology, headed by the director of the institute, Abram Ioffe, with the participation of Igor Kurchatov (deputy head of the group). In 1940, the Uranium Commission was established at the USSR Academy of Sciences, which in September of the same year approved the work program for the first Soviet uranium project. However, with the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, most of the research on the use of atomic energy in the USSR was curtailed or discontinued.

Research on the use of atomic energy was resumed in 1942 after receiving intelligence about the deployment by the Americans of work on the creation of an atomic bomb ("Manhattan Project"): on September 28, the State Defense Committee (GKO) issued an order "On the organization of work on uranium."

On November 8, 1944, the GKO decided to create in Central Asia a large uranium mining enterprise based on deposits in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. In May 1945, the first enterprise in the USSR for the extraction and processing of uranium ores, Combine No. 6 (later the Leninabad Mining and Metallurgical Combine), began operating in Tajikistan.

After the explosions of American atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by a GKO decree of August 20, 1945, a Special Committee was created under the GKO, headed by Lavrenty Beria, to "lead all work on the use of intra-atomic energy of uranium", including the production of an atomic bomb.

In accordance with the decree of the Council of Ministers of the USSR of June 21, 1946, Khariton prepared a "tactical and technical assignment for an atomic bomb", which marked the beginning of full-scale work on the first domestic atomic charge.

In 1947, 170 km west of Semipalatinsk, "Object-905" was created for testing nuclear charges (in 1948 it was transformed into training ground No. 2 of the USSR Ministry of Defense, later it became known as Semipalatinsk; in August 1991 it was closed). The construction of the test site was completed by August 1949 for the bomb test.

The first test of the Soviet atomic bomb broke the US nuclear monopoly. The Soviet Union became the second nuclear power peace.

A report on the testing of nuclear weapons in the USSR was published by TASS on September 25, 1949. And on October 29, a closed resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR "On awarding and bonuses for outstanding scientific discoveries and technical achievements in the use of atomic energy" was issued. For the development and testing of the first Soviet atomic bomb, six employees of KB-11 were awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labor: Pavel Zernov (design bureau director), Yuli Khariton, Kirill Shchelkin, Yakov Zeldovich, Vladimir Alferov, Georgy Flerov. Deputy Chief Designer Nikolai Dukhov received the second Gold Star of the Hero of Socialist Labor. 29 employees of the bureau were awarded the Order of Lenin, 15 - the Order of the Red Banner of Labor, 28 became laureates of the Stalin Prize.

Today, the mock-up of the bomb (its body, the RDS-1 charge, and the remote control used to detonate the charge) is kept at the RFNC-VNIIEF Museum of Nuclear Weapons.

In 2009, the UN General Assembly declared 29 August as the International Day against Nuclear Tests.

A total of 2,062 nuclear weapons tests have been conducted in the world, which eight states have. The US accounts for 1032 explosions (1945-1992). The United States of America is the only country to have used this weapon. The USSR conducted 715 tests (1949-1990). The last explosion took place on October 24, 1990 at the Novaya Zemlya test site. In addition to the USA and the USSR, nuclear weapons were created and tested in Great Britain - 45 (1952-1991), France - 210 (1960-1996), China - 45 (1964-1996), India - 6 (1974, 1998), Pakistan - 6 (1998) and North Korea - 3 (2006, 2009, 2013).

In 1970, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) entered into force. Currently, 188 countries of the world are its participants. The document was not signed by India (in 1998 it introduced a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing and agreed to put its nuclear facilities under the control of the IAEA) and Pakistan (in 1998 it introduced a unilateral moratorium on nuclear testing). North Korea, having signed the treaty in 1985, withdrew from it in 2003.

In 1996, the universal cessation of nuclear testing was enshrined in the framework of the international Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT). Thereafter nuclear explosions carried out only by three countries - India, Pakistan and the DPRK.

Ancient Indian and Greek scientists assumed that matter consists of the smallest indivisible particles; they wrote about this in their treatises long before the beginning of our era. In the 5th century BC e. the Greek scientist Leucippus from Miletus and his student Democritus formulated the concept of an atom (Greek atomos "indivisible"). For many centuries this theory remained rather philosophical, and only in 1803 the English chemist John Dalton proposed a scientific theory of the atom, confirmed by experiments.

In the end XIX early 20th century this theory was developed in the writings of Joseph Thomson, and then Ernest Rutherford, called the father of nuclear physics. It was found that the atom, contrary to its name, is not an indivisible finite particle, as previously stated. In 1911, physicists adopted Rutherford Bohr's "planetary" system, according to which an atom consists of a positively charged nucleus and negatively charged electrons revolving around it. Later it was found that the nucleus is also not indivisible; it consists of positively charged protons and chargeless neutrons, which, in turn, consist of elementary particles.

As soon as the structure of the atomic nucleus became more or less clear to scientists, they tried to realize the old dream of alchemists - the transformation of one substance into another. In 1934, French scientists Frederic and Irene Joliot-Curie, when bombarding aluminum with alpha particles (helium atom nuclei), obtained radioactive phosphorus atoms, which, in turn, turned into a stable silicon isotope of a heavier element than aluminum. The idea arose to conduct a similar experiment with the heaviest natural element, uranium, discovered in 1789 by Martin Klaproth. After Henri Becquerel discovered the radioactivity of uranium salts in 1896, scientists were seriously interested in this element.

E. Rutherford.

Mushroom nuclear explosion.

In 1938, the German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann conducted an experiment similar to the Joliot-Curie experiment, however, taking uranium instead of aluminum, they hoped to obtain a new superheavy element. However, the result was unexpected: instead of superheavy, light elements from the middle part of the periodic table were obtained. Some time later, the physicist Lisa Meitner suggested that the bombardment of uranium with neutrons leads to the splitting (fission) of its nucleus, resulting in the nuclei of light elements and a certain number of free neutrons.

Further studies have shown that natural uranium consists of a mixture of three isotopes, with uranium-235 being the least stable of them. From time to time, the nuclei of its atoms spontaneously divide into parts, this process is accompanied by the release of two or three free neutrons, which rush at a speed of about 10 thousand kms. The nuclei of the most common isotope-238 in most cases simply capture these neutrons, less often uranium is converted into neptunium and then into plutonium-239. When a neutron hits the nucleus of uranium-2 3 5, its new fission immediately occurs.

It was obvious: if you take a large enough piece of pure (enriched) uranium-235, the nuclear fission reaction in it will go like an avalanche, this reaction was called a chain reaction. Each nuclear fission releases a huge amount of energy. It was calculated that with the complete fission of 1 kg of uranium-235, the same amount of heat is released as when burning 3 thousand tons of coal. This colossal release of energy, released in a matter of moments, was to manifest itself as an explosion of monstrous force, which, of course, immediately interested the military departments.

The Joliot-Curies. 1940s

L. Meitner and O. Hahn. 1925

Before the outbreak of World War II, Germany and some other countries carried out highly classified work on the creation of nuclear weapons. In the United States, research designated as the "Manhattan Project" started in 1941; a year later, the world's largest research laboratory was founded in Los Alamos. The project was administratively subordinated to General Groves, scientific leadership was carried out by University of California professor Robert Oppenheimer. The project was attended by the largest authorities in the field of physics and chemistry, including 13 laureates Nobel Prize People: Enrico Fermi, James Frank, Niels Bohr, Ernest Lawrence and others.

The main task was to obtain a sufficient amount of uranium-235. It was found that plutonium-2 39 could also serve as a charge for the bomb, so work was carried out in two directions at once. The accumulation of uranium-235 was to be carried out by separating it from the bulk of natural uranium, and plutonium could only be obtained as a result of a controlled nuclear reaction by irradiating uranium-238 with neutrons. Enrichment of natural uranium was carried out at the plants of the Westinghouse company, and for the production of plutonium it was necessary to build a nuclear reactor.

It was in the reactor that the process of irradiating uranium rods with neutrons took place, as a result of which part of the uranium-238 was supposed to turn into plutonium. The sources of neutrons were fissile atoms of uranium-235, but the capture of neutrons by uranium-238 prevented the chain reaction from starting. The discovery of Enrico Fermi, who discovered that neutrons slowed down to a speed of 22 ms, caused a chain reaction of uranium-235, but were not captured by uranium-238, helped solve the problem. As a moderator, Fermi proposed a 40-cm layer of graphite or heavy water, which includes the hydrogen isotope deuterium.

R. Oppenheimer and Lieutenant General L. Groves. 1945

Calutron at Oak Ridge.

An experimental reactor was built in 1942 under the stands of the Chicago stadium. On December 2, its successful experimental launch took place. A year later, a new enrichment plant was built in the city of Oak Ridge and a reactor for the industrial production of plutonium was launched, as well as a calutron device for the electromagnetic separation of uranium isotopes. The total cost of the project was about $2 billion. Meanwhile, at Los Alamos, work was going on directly on the device of the bomb and methods for detonating the charge.

On June 16, 1945, near the city of Alamogordo in New Mexico, during tests code-named Trinity (“Trinity”), the world's first nuclear device with a plutonium charge and an implosive (using chemical explosives for detonation) detonation scheme was detonated. The power of the explosion was equivalent to an explosion of 20 kilotons of TNT.

The next step was the combat use of nuclear weapons against Japan, which, after the surrender of Germany, alone continued the war against the United States and its allies. On August 6, an Enola Gay B-29 bomber, under the command of Colonel Tibbets, dropped a Little Boy (“baby”) bomb on Hiroshima with a uranium charge and a cannon (using the connection of two blocks to create a critical mass) detonation scheme. The bomb was parachuted down and exploded at an altitude of 600 m from the ground. On August 9, Major Sweeney's Box Car aircraft dropped the Fat Man plutonium bomb on Nagasaki. The consequences of the explosions were terrible. Both cities were almost completely destroyed, more than 200 thousand people died in Hiroshima, about 80 thousand in Nagasaki. Later, one of the pilots admitted that they saw at that moment the most terrible thing that a person can see. Unable to resist the new weapons, the Japanese government capitulated.

Hiroshima after the atomic bombing.

The explosion of the atomic bomb put an end to World War II, but actually began new war"cold", accompanied by an unbridled nuclear arms race. Soviet scientists had to catch up with the Americans. In 1943, a secret "laboratory No. 2" was created, which was headed by famous physicist Igor Vasilievich Kurchatov. Later, the laboratory was transformed into the Institute of Atomic Energy. In December 1946, the first chain reaction was carried out at the experimental nuclear uranium-graphite reactor F1. Two years later, the first plutonium plant with several industrial reactors was built in the Soviet Union, and in August 1949, a test explosion of the first Soviet atomic bomb with a plutonium charge RDS-1 with a capacity of 22 kilotons was carried out at the Semipalatinsk test site.

In November 1952, on the Enewetok Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, the United States detonated the first thermonuclear charge, the destructive power of which arose due to the energy released during the nuclear fusion of light elements into heavier ones. Nine months later, at the Semipalatinsk test site, Soviet scientists tested the RDS-6 thermonuclear, or hydrogen, 400-kiloton bomb developed by a group of scientists led by Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov and Yuli Borisovich Khariton. In October 1961, a 50-megaton Tsar Bomba, the most powerful H-bomb of all that have ever been experienced.

I. V. Kurchatov.

At the end of the 2000s, the United States had approximately 5,000 and Russia 2,800 nuclear weapons on deployed strategic launchers, as well as a significant number of tactical nuclear weapons. This reserve is enough to destroy the entire planet several times. Just one thermonuclear bomb average power (about 25 megatons) is equal to 1500 Hiroshima.

In the late 1970s, research was underway to create a neutron weapon, a type of low-yield nuclear bomb. neutron bomb differs from conventional nuclear in that it artificially increases the fraction of the explosion energy that is released in the form of neutron radiation. This radiation affects the manpower of the enemy, affects his weapons and creates radioactive contamination of the area, while the impact of the shock wave and light radiation is limited. However, not a single army in the world has taken neutron charges into service.

Although the use of atomic energy has brought the world to the brink of destruction, it also has a peaceful side, although it is extremely dangerous when it gets out of control, this was clearly shown by the accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear power plants. The world's first nuclear power plant with a capacity of only 5 MW was launched on June 27, 1954 in the village of Obninskoye, Kaluga Region (now the city of Obninsk). To date, more than 400 nuclear power plants are in operation in the world, 10 of them in Russia. They generate about 17% of the world's electricity, and this figure is likely to only increase. At present, the world cannot do without the use of nuclear energy, but we want to believe that in the future, humanity will find a safer source of energy supply.

Control panel of the nuclear power plant in Obninsk.

Chernobyl after the disaster.