From the series Atoms and industrialisation of science
On August 6th, 1945, a uranium bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and on August 9th a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki. Contradicting the American military and political leaders’ forecasts of a ten-to-twenty-year delay, the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear bomb just four years later, in 1949. According to the world’s leading nuclear scientists, and in particular Niels Bohr [1885-1962], this was not a surprise. Having worked with Soviet scientists, they understood that their science and technology was no less competent than their own.
The history of Russian nuclear science
For the history of Russian nuclear power, we shall mainly follow David Holloway’s 1994 work Stalin and the Bomb, assisted by Robert Jungk’s still valid Brighter Than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists [1956], and by Helge Kragh’s Quantum Generations [1999].
The value of Jungk’s work lies in his interviews with the nuclear scientists who were, directly or indirectly, involved in the making of the bomb, and still alive in the 1950s. Kragh’s book covers the history of physics from 1895 to 1995. It does not only deal with discoveries but also examines physicists and institutions and their interactions with the rest of society.
David Holloway’s Stalin and the Bomb has the merit of having been written after the collapse of the Soviet empire. The author, professor of international history and political science at Stanford University (California), was able to have access to parts of the Russian archives and to interview scientists, technicians, and politicians who were still alive in the 1990s. His book was chosen by the New York Times Book Review as one of the eleven best in 1994 and has been translated into six languages, the latest into Czech in 2008. Holloway spoke with Russian physicists such as Peter Kapitsa [1894-1984] and Andrei Sakharov [1921-1989], and with respective non-Russian physicists and protagonists of the nuclear enterprise – Sir Rudolf Peierls [1907-1995], Hans Bethe [1906-2005], and Victor Weisskopf [1908-2002]. He interviewed Igor Golovin [1913-1997], the close collaborator with Igor Kurchatov [1903-1960], the head of the Soviet atomic project. Holloway believes that only at the end of the Cold War is it possible to place Soviet nuclear policy in the context of the history of the Soviet Union in international relations.
The Radium Institute is born
The discovery of radioactivity in Paris in 1896 and the first studies regarding it did not go unnoticed in Russia. In a conference at the Academy of Sciences in December 1910, Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky [1863-1945], a mineralogist, geochemist, biogeochemist and radiogeologist, argued that as steam and electricity had changed the structure of human societies, now, with the phenomenon of radioactivity, new forms of atomic energy, with potentials many times superior to all energy sources hitherto conceived of, were opening up. Thus, in Russia, as in Europe, the nuclear age began with an optimistic vision. Vernadsky recommended that all the Russian deposits of radioactive minerals be catalogued.
Vernadsky is one of the most remarkable figures of Russian science. Born in St. Petersburg (from 1914 to 1924 Petrograd; and from 1924 to 1991 Leningrad) into a well-off family, he was the son of an economics professor, an active member of the liberal intelligentsia, the expression of a progressive bourgeoisie. Elected in 1906 to the Academy of Sciences for his mineralogical research, Vernadsky believed in science as a force of civilisation and democracy, and wanted the Russian scientific community to make its voice heard on the important questions of the time. He tried several times, but without success, to organise the Russian equivalent of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
Thanks to Vernadsky, the study of radioactive minerals began in 1911, with the support of the government and public donations. The Academy of Sciences sent expeditions to search for uranium deposits in the Urals, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Deposits were discovered in the Fergana Valley in Central Asia, and Vernadsky concluded that a part of these deposits could be exploited on an industrial scale. But this did not take place during that time.
After the First World War, the Academy of Sciences formed a new department for the study of rare and radioactive minerals. Vernadsky was appointed as the head of this department. One of his protégés, the geologist Aleksandr Fersman [1883-1945], was his deputy, and the radiochemist Vitaly Khlopin [1890-1950] his secretary. With Khlopin and Fersman’s help, Vernadsky succeeded in founding the Petrograd Radium Institute in January 1922. This body played an important role in the development of Soviet nuclear science. Europe’s first cyclotron was activated there in 1937; in the following years the Institute studied the processes of nuclear fission and produced small quantities of plutonium, obtained with the help of the cyclotron.
The Ioffe Institute
A fundamental figure in the development of the Soviet nuclear industry was Abram Fedorovich Ioffe [1880-1960], born into a well-off Jewish family in the small Ukrainian town of Romny. After graduating from the St. Petersburg Institute of Technology in 1902, he went to Germany to work in the laboratory of Wilhelm Röntgen [1845-1923], the discoverer of X-rays. He received his PhD in 1905 for a study on the electric conductivity of dielectric crystals. He returned to Russia the following year, having refused Röntgen’s offer of a place at the University of Munich with the explanation that he intended to contribute to Russia’s scientific development. He always rejected job offers abroad, even when the University of California, Berkeley offered him tenure in 1926.
Ioffe became a close friend of the Viennese physicist Paul Ehrenfest [1880-1933], who lived in St. Petersburg from 1907 to 1912 and contributed to bringing modern theoretical physics to Russia.
In 1913, Ioffe was appointed professor at St. Petersburg’s Polytechnical Institute. He placed great value on his ties to Germany, and almost every year until the First World War he spent some time in Munich working with Röntgen.
In 1916, he organised a seminar on new physics in his laboratory at the Polytechnical Institute. Among its eleven regular members there were two future Nobel prize-winners, Peter Kapitsa and Nikolai Semyonov [1896-1986], and other important physicists such as Yakov Frenkel [1894-1952] and P.I. Lukirsky [1894-1954]. The group formed the nucleus of the future Ioffe Institute.
Despite his opposition to Tsarist autocracy, Ioffe, like most of the Russian scientists, had nothing to do with the Bolshevik Party. Following the events of the October Revolution, however, he decided out of patriotism to link his destiny to that of the new government. In 1919, with the backing of Anatoly Lunacharsky [1875-1933], People’s Commissar of Education, Ioffe founded the State Physical-Technical Institute of Radiology which now bears his name, the Ioffe Institute, one of Russia’s main research centres. Here, such important Soviet Nobel prize-winners as Landau, Kapitsa, Semyonov and Tamm, and the illustrious scientists Kurchatov, Alexandrov, and Khariton received their training. Today, the Ioffe Institute plays an important role in the development of ITER, an international nuclear fusion research and engineering megaproject.
The Bolshevik policy on science
With Lenin’s backing, in February 1921 Ioffe and other scientists went to Western Europe for six months. There they bought books, newspapers and instruments, and established relations with foreign colleagues. His idea was to combine engineering with physics.
On February 3rd, 1923, besides its 60 staff members, representatives of the government and the Academy of Sciences took part in the inauguration of the new Physical-Technical Institute north of Petrograd – a sign of the importance the political and scientific authorities gave to Ioffe’s work. He argued in his speech that physics had played a historic role in the development of industry and that Soviet physics, albeit deeply theoretical, would also make an effective contribution to the country’s technology and economic development.
He also touched on two important themes in the history of Russian science: its link with Western science and industry. Natural science was imported from Europe by Peter the Great [1672-1725] at the beginning of the 18th century, but it was only in the mid-19th century that Russian science gained an international reputation. A scientific community, with its social and intellectual ties, and a network of scientific societies and circles formed in Russia. The bourgeois classes saw science as a rationalising force which would help to defeat superstition and undermine the bases of autocracy, which resisted the diffusion of the scientific spirit.
The viewpoint of the Bolshevik Communist Party in support of science was part of Russia’s 19th-century revolutionary tradition. According to Lenin’s indications, in the new Soviet State it was necessary to appropriate the science and technology developed by the capitalist system, since they were needed for defence and economic development. When, in 1920, Lenin coined the slogan Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country
, the message was that the new socialist society would be based on technological progress combined with social revolution [Robert Lewis, Science and Industrialisation in the USSR, London, 1979]. Russian scientists with a bourgeois education had welcomed the February 1917 Revolution, but they were suspicious of the October one. Nevertheless, the Bolshevik Party carried out a policy backing their scientific work.
In Russia before the Great War science was largely academic, with little government support. Moreover, scientists did not have close ties to industry, mainly controlled by foreign companies which relied on foreign research, while Russian capitalism showed little interest in financing science. In Russia like other countries, the war brought about major changes in the relations between science and industry, because the dependence on industrial imports, such as the chemistry needed for the production of arms, was recognised as a factor of military weakness. The war encouraged closer relations between science and industry and stimulated scientific research.
Science was seen as an important area in the policy of the Soviet government, which backed the founding of research institutes from its first year of life. Ioffe was one of the most important figures in the link between the Soviet government and nuclear-physical science in the process of the industrialisation of science which would help the Soviet Union create the atom bomb in 1949.