From the series Atom and industrialisation of science
It was only after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in August 1945, that the Soviet Union became fully committed to the project of acquiring the atomic bomb.
The alliance of the US, the UK, and the USSR
Producing U-235 accounted for 64% of the total cost of the Manhattan Project, while plutonium production made up another 20%; in total, 84% of the expense went toward producing material for the atomic bombs, as against only 4% spent on research and development [Lotta Comunista, July-August 2018]. In 1945, the most urgent problems to be resolved for Russian imperialism were not tied to the scientific knowledge required for the atomic bomb, but to uranium and its processing.
During the Second World War, under the Lend-Lease Act passed on March 11th, 1941, the United States gave its allies food, oil, and supplies worth $46 billion in 1940s dollars. More than one-fifth of the total, $11 billion (about $200-250 billion in today's currency), went to the Soviet Union in the form of $9.5 billion in ammunition, more than 400,000 vehicles, 14,000 aircraft, 13,000 tanks, millions of tons of food and petroleum products, great quantities of raw materials such as cotton, steel, and aluminium, medical supplies, radar equipment, and even a tyre factory [Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun. The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, 1996; National WWII Museum of New Orleans].
Military aid to the USSR cost five times the $2 billion of the Manhattan Project. In the war against German imperialism, each country put forward what it had at its disposal: American imperialism supplied technology and capital, and Russian imperialism its demography.
With Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia which began in 1941, the German strategy of Blitzkrieg, which aimed at a rapid victory, turned into a long, exhausting war of attrition on the Eastern front, characterised by huge human losses on both sides. The decision to attack Russia was fatal for Berlin. Until the Anglo-American landings in Normandy in June 1944, the Soviet Union had been alone in the war against Germany on the European continent. The interests of the Anglo-Americans and of Stalin's government coincided: a Soviet defeat would have allowed the shift of German forces to the Western front. The Russian victory at Stalingrad in February 1943 was one of the conditions for the Normandy landings in June 1944.
In October 1941, Averell Harriman, the US president's special envoy to Europe, clarified the American position on aid to the USSR: Whatever the cost may be for keeping the war far from our coasts will be a small price to pay
. In the agreement between American and Russian imperialism, the US paid with arms and food, the USSR with human lives. There is no doubt, Rhodes writes, that this was to the advantage of the US.
From the Soviet viewpoint, Lend-Lease was the least the US could do while Russians were dying. According to the National WWII Museum of New Orleans, the USSR suffered 24 million casualties (8-10 million military), the US 418,000 (417,000 military), Germany 8.8 million (5.5 million military), Great Britain 450,000 (383,000 military), Japan about 3 million (2 million military), and China 20 million (3-4 million military). In the war on the European continent, the US had 170,000 casualties, a human cost equal to 0.7% of the Soviet toll.
It was the deaths of millions of Russians that wore Germany down and made the following partition of Europe among the victors possible. Sometimes imperialists speak clearly amongst themselves. In Moscow in October 1944, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill proposed to Stalin to settle our business in the Balkans
: Let’s not quarrel over small things. As regards Great Britain and Russia, for us 90% of supremacy in Romania, for us 90% in Greece, and 50-50% in Yugoslavia
. Churchill wrote these percentages down and added Hungary 50-50%
, then offered Stalin 75% of Bulgaria
and passed the slip of paper under the table. Stalin passed it back to Churchill, and things seemed to be settled in a short time. The document, quoted by Rhodes, is now in the British National Archives.
For American imperialism, the Second World War was big business. While the conflict was destroying the European continent, between 1939 and 1944, the 75% increase in the US's Gross National Product bankrolled both the war and the Manhattan Project. The USSR had no such means, and the head of the Soviet atomic project, Igor Kurchatov [1903-1960], found himself without resources. At the end of the war, one-tenth of the Soviet population was dead and 1,700 cities, 70,000 villages, and 31,000 industrial enterprises had been destroyed. While the war had doubled American industrial production, it had halved Soviet production. With the USSR seriously wounded by the war, before Hiroshima [August 6th, 1945], the Soviet government did not consider nuclear development a priority compared with the reconstruction of the country's economy.
Soviet nuclear science
David Holloway writes in Stalin and the Bomb [1994] that between November 20th and 26th, 1940, a conference of Soviet nuclear physicists was held, with the participation of 200 scientists. Kurchatov presented a document on fission and the possibility of a chain reaction, demonstrating that the Soviet Union's scientific level was not inferior to that of the West. He maintained that the chain reaction could be obtained with a mixture of water and U-235 or a mixture of natural uranium and heavy water. Holloway observes that, on the evidence of the documents made available after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is striking how similar these results were to those of the Frisch-Peierls memorandum written at the University of Birmingham in March 1940, even though this report had not been published. The Soviets had also calculated the critical mass of fissile material needed to achieve a chain reaction.
The level of Soviet science did not escape the notice of Danish physicist Niels Bohr [1885-1962]. His evaluation of its capabilities, and not a generic pacifism, probably motivated his proposals for international cooperation to avoid a global nuclear arms race. Bohr knew that once the war was over the USSR would have been able to produce the atomic bomb, but the American and British leaders thought otherwise. Robert Jungk writes in Brighter Than a Thousand Suns [1956] that in the opinion of the head of the Manhattan Project, General Leslie Groves [1896-1970], it would take ten, twenty, or even 60 years before the Soviets could build the atomic bomb.
Kurchatov put together a group of young talents to study the feasibility of the nuclear project: the theoretical physicists Georgy Flerov [1913-1990], Yulii Khariton [1904-1996], and Yakov Zeldovich [1914-1987]; the experimental physicists Isaac Konstantinovich Kikoin [1908-1984] and Abram Alikhanov [1904-1970]. The oldest, at 40 years old, was Kurchatov himself and the youngest was 29. In April 1944, in Laboratory No. 2, the initial core group of the Soviet nuclear project was composed of 25 scientists: in the miserable living conditions of the war, Kurchatov's first concern was to give them food, clothing, and lodgings.
Russian-American contention for uranium
According to Holloway, information about the Anglo-American nuclear project gained through espionage saved the Soviet scientists a year, though they would still have been able to build the atomic bomb without it. Their main problem was getting the raw material and developing the industry to produce it. The most serious problem for Kurchatov was to obtain uranium and graphite, and only at the end of the summer of 1945 did pure graphite begin to be available, produced by the Moscow Electrode Plant.
The uranium of Central Europe was part of Russian imperialism's spoils of war. At the end of March 1945, the Czech government in exile, under the command of President Edvard Beneš [1884-1948], moved from London to Moscow. There, it signed a secret agreement which gave the USSR the right to exploit the Jáchymov (Joachimsthal) uranium mine, which had supplied Maria Curie with the raw material for the discovery of radium. The Beneš government was probably unaware of the importance of uranium. Other supplies came from the occupation of East Germany.
In May, a special Soviet mission went to Germany to study the German nuclear project, but it soon discovered it had little to learn from German science. During the war, Germany had been unable to build the atomic bomb, undoubtedly for the same reasons as the USSR — the huge war effort for Operation Barbarossa. The Soviets were more interested in German uranium than in German scientists. The Americans, too, were focused on Germany's deposits of natural uranium and semi-finished metal — and preventing them from ending up in Soviet hands.
General Groves asked the American Air Force to bomb the Auer factory in Oranienburg, north of Berlin. The site had thorium and uranium in metallic form and had already been occupied by the Soviets. The bombing — a military operation against an ally and not against an enemy — took place on March 15th; twelve Flying Fortresses dropped 150 tons of explosives on the Auer plant and destroyed it. However, the Russians had already taken 100 tons of fairly pure uranium oxide, and Kurchatov's deputy, Khariton, said that the uranium they found saved the USSR about a year in its atomic bomb project.
According to a CIA estimate, at the end of 1945, 45% of Soviet uranium came from East Germany, 33% from the USSR, 15% from Czechoslovakia, 4% from Bulgaria, and 1% from Poland. Again, according to the CIA, the Soviet and East European mines produced 70-110 tons of uranium a year in 1946 and 1947.
To give an order of magnitude, the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki contained 6.2 kg of plutonium, which required 25 tons of natural uranium to be produced [figures from the US Department of Energy]. In the early postwar years, there was enough Soviet and East European uranium to potentially produce three plutonium bombs each year. Before Hiroshima, Soviet leaders doubted the veracity of espionage reports, fearing that the information was false. These doubts were swept away by Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The destruction of a city with a single bomb showed Stalin the real power of this new weapon, and on August 20th, 1945, the Defence Committee made the Soviet nuclear program a priority. Stalin entrusted the responsibility for the project to Lavrentiy Beria, the people's commissar for internal affairs.
On December 25th, 1946, the Soviets created their first chain reaction in a graphite atomic pile, similar to the one built by Fermi in Chicago. The scientists detonated their first atomic bomb on August 29th, 1949.