page_title: Igor Kurchatov
section_title: Atom bomb project
hierarchical_section_title: Igor Kurchatov / Atom bomb project
caption_attribution_description: Igor Kurchatov
context_page_description: Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov, was a Soviet nuclear physicist who is widely known as the director of the Soviet atomic bomb project. Along with Georgy Flyorov and Andrei Sakharov, Kurchatov is known as the "father of the Soviet atomic bomb" and, later, "the father of the Soviet Nuclear Missile" for his directorial role in a clandestine Soviet nuclear program formed during World War II in the wake of the USSR's discovery of the Western Allied efforts to develop nuclear weapons. After nine years of covert development, as well as Soviet spies successfully infiltrating the Manhattan Project, the Soviet Union successfully tested its first nuclear weapon, codenamed First Lightning at the Semipalatinsk Test Range in 1949. In 1954 he was awarded the USSR State Prize in physics.
  From 1940 onward, Kurchatov worked on and contributed to the advancement of the nuclear weapons program, and later advocated for the peaceful development of nuclear technology. In 1950, Kurchatov contributed in the development of the Hydrogen bomb with Andrei Sakharov who originated this development as Sakharov's Third Idea.
context_section_description: In 1941, Germany commenced a large-scale military offensive against the Soviet Union under codename Operation Barbarossa. During this time, Kurchatov was leading research in nuclear physics and was widely known in the Soviet Academy of Sciences for his wide research. Because of the war with Germany and her allies, the Soviet Union did not undertake any serious initiative to start scientific research into nuclear weapons until 1942. In April 1942, Georgii Flerov, who would later become a key figure in the nuclear program, addressed a secret letter to Joseph Stalin pointing out that nothing was being published in the physics journals by Americans, British, or even Germans, on nuclear fission since the year of its discovery in 1939, and that indeed many of the most prominent physicists in Allied countries seemed not to be publishing at all. This academic silence was highly suspicious and Flerov urged Stalin to launch the program with immediate effect as he believed that other nations were already secretly advancing their programmes. In 1943, the NKVD obtained a copy of a secret British report by the MAUD Committee concerning the feasibility of atomic weapons, which led Joseph Stalin to order the commencement of a Soviet nuclear programme (albeit with very limited resources).
  Stalin turned to the Soviet Academy of Sciences to find the best administrator to lead the program, and as a result, the Soviet Academy of Sciences chose Kurchatov for his wide experience in nuclear physics. Ioffe recommended Kurchatov to Vyacheslav Molotov who advised Stalin to appoint Kurchatov as the formal director of the nascent Soviet nuclear programme and the development of Soviet nuclear weapons began in the 1940s. Kurchatov switched his research first to protecting shipping from magnetic mines, and later to tank armour, and finally to nuclear physics.
  During its formative years, the atomic bomb project remained a relatively low priority until information from spy Klaus Fuchs and later the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki goaded Stalin into action. Stalin ordered Kurchatov to produce a bomb by 1948, and put the ruthless Lavrenty Beria in direct command of the project. The project took over the town of Sarov in the Gorki Oblast (now Nizhny Novgorod Oblast) on the Volga, and renamed it Arzamas-16. The team (which included other prominent Soviet nuclear scientists such as Julii Borisovich Khariton and Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich) was assisted both by public disclosures made by the United States government and by further information supplied by Fuchs, but Kurchatov and Beria (fearing the intelligence was misinformation) insisted his scientists retest everything themselves. Beria in particular would use the intelligence as a third-party check on the conclusions of the teams of scientists.
caption: Kurchatov in 1940