Tuesday, May 07, 2013

The First Soviet Atomic Bomb...the details


Archival documents contain all kind of interesting information, especially when they are published in full. A while ago, someone discovered that the Russian Federal Archival Agency published a collection of documents on the early days of the Soviet nuclear weapon project as part of their project "Archives - to schools." The collection itself is very interesting, but one document definitely stands out. It is the draft of a Council of Ministers decree "On conducting a test of the atomic bomb." The draft was handwritten by Igor Kurchatov and dated 18 August 1949. The test of the bomb, known as RDS-1, was conducted some days later, on 29 August 1949, at the Semipalatinsk test site.

Among other things, the copy that was published there at some point contained previously unpublished data on the details of the first Soviet atomic device. Here is the translation of the relevant parts...

Go.  Read.

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