Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956

by David Holloway

For forty years the Soviet-American nuclear arms race dominated world politics, yet the Soviet nuclear establishment was shrouded in secrecy. Now that the Cold War is over and the Soviet Union has collapsed, it is possible to answer questions that have intrigued policymakers and the public for years. How did the Soviet Union build its atomic and hydrogen bombs? What role did espionage play? How did the American atomic monopoly affect Stalin's foreign policy? What was the relationship between Soviet nuclear scientists and the country's political leaders? This spellbinding book answers these questions by tracing the history of Soviet nuclear policy from developments in physics in the 1920s to the testing of the hydrogen bomb and the emergence of nuclear deterrence in the mid-1950s.

In engrossing detail, David Holloway tells how Stalin launched a crash atomic program only after the Americans bombed Hiroshima and showed that the bomb could be built; how the information handed over to the Soviets by Klaus Fuchs helped in the creation of their first bomb; how the scientific intelligentsia, which included such men as Andrei Sakharov, interacted with the police apparatus headed by the suspicious and menacing Lavrentii Beria; what steps Stalin took to counter U.S. atomic diplomacy; how the nuclear project saved Soviet physics and enabled it to survive as an island of intellectual autonomy in a totalitarian society; and what happened when, after Stalin's death, Soviet scientists argued that a nuclear war might extinguish all life on earth.

This magisterial history throws light on Soviet policy at the height of the Cold War, illuminates a central but hitherto secret element of the Stalinist system, and puts into perspective the tragic legacy of this program today―environmental damage, a vast network of institutes and factories, and a huge stockpile of unwanted weapons.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Russia, Soviet Union, Russian History, Politics, Science

480 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1994

Reviews

[Max · Rating 4 out of 5]

Massive, well research book about the creation of the nuclear bomb in the Soviet Union. It's very much in depth, which is not something for everyone to read. No casual afternoon of reading with this one! I found it especially interesting to read about the relationship between scientists and the political system and how the nuclear project changed this from scientists being underappreciated to them enjoying respect and authority.

[Isabella · Rating 1 out of 5]

I hated it

[brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bought this book as a companion piece to Richard Rhodes' Dark Sun. While it's not as rich in technological details and character development as Dark Sun, this book does explore in depth the political and idealogical motives surrounding the Soviet atomic program. It falls short of an indictment of Soviet atomic diplomacy, but does lay the blame squarely on Stalin for leading the USSR down the path towards forty years of nuclear tension. In contrast, Soviet scientists are portrayed in a sympathetic light and Kurchatov specifically is heralded with preserving the independent spirit of physics in an oppressive regime during his nearly twenty years as head of the Soviet nuclear effort. Overall, enjoyable and informative.

[Carlos · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is extremely thorough on the topic, delving deeply into the scientists who developed the atomic and subsequent bombs, their relationships with each other and the various Soviet state institutions and officials. It analyzes Stalin's mindset quite a bit with regard with his decisions to variously not pursue the bomb, pursue the bomb, and how to react to American breakthroughs, presenting conclusions as opinions while explaining the evidence. This presentation of things that are unknowable in a concrete sense is appreciated. The book strives to be as narrative as possible, but does not present things in a particularly compelling way, which takes away from its impact. I would give this 3 1/2 stars if possible.

[William Alberque · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent overview of the Russian nuclear program, starting with the breathless excitement of a group of scientists pushing back the frontiers of knowledge, through the dissassoiative nonsense of revolution, through to the grim business of building things that were intended to kill tens of millions of people. A bit aimed at the experts, but still a decent read. Like the Chinese, as they got closer to an actual test, you can feel the steel of the mouth of a pistol at the backs of every scientist who staked their claim on success. It almost makes me root for them. Except that they were idiots who added to the misery of the world.

[Derek Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is intense, in depth, and a massive read. It is good, but it will give you quite a cerebral work out!

[Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

very solid piece of research!

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

This volume perfectly balanced a high-level view of the political history over a tumultuous 30 year period between 1925-1955, along with a just-granular-enough explanation of nuclear physics and weapons manufacturing. I liked the focus on the people: the scientists in charge, the lower level scientists who made essential contributions, and the political leaders such as Khruschev, Beria, and Stalin. An important thread constantly followed was how nuclear weapons affected the mindset and political maneuverings of Stalin/Khruschev and Truman/Eisenhower in the early cold war. Could the arms race have been avoided? Could the Americans and Soviets have trusted each other?

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

An interesting book.

It starts in 1939 because that is when Stalin

A. Got his super powers
B. Stole a secret German plan with the details of the next decade in US atomic research
C. Found out that Superman was a threat to the Soviet Union

From the blurb I assume there is no word about the monstruous regime that built up such a weapon and than unleashed it to the World with the carefully edited consequences. I mean ecologic destruction is there, the inflation of busybodies and bureaucrats like Holloway is omitted.

[Anomander · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a masterpiece. For anyone who wants to learn about security dilemmas, Soviet ideology, and the role of science in society, this is the book. It should be required reading for International Relations courses.

[GreyAtlas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Detailed, nice photos, decent read.

[Ushan · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are two authoritative books on the Soviet atomic project in English, which came out at about the same time; I have already read Richard Rhodes's Dark Sun, which also has the American hydrogen bomb as the main subject, and this is the other one. There is a dramatic story about young Soviet nuclear physicist Georgy Flyorov, who was a lieutenant in the Red Army during World War II, coming upon the abandoned science library of a university evacuated to the rear, reading American scientific journals and discovering that all the American nuclear physicists have suddenly stopped publishing. He concluded from this dog that didn't bark that the United States was working on an atomic bomb, and wrote a letter to Stalin proposing that the Soviet Union do the same. This story is actually true, but his letter was not why the Soviet Union launched an atomic project. The real reason was that an intelligence source, most likely John Cairncross, one of the Cambridge Five spy ring, indicated that the United Kingdom was doing it. Holloway says that in Stalin's Soviet Union, priority was only given to high-technology projects if it was known that capitalist Western countries were working on the same; in addition to the atomic project, Holloway cites examples from rocketry, jet engines and radar. If scientists set their own goals, they were potential spies or wreckers; Georgy Langemak, the rocket engineer who designed the Katyusha rocket launcher used with great success during World War II, was executed during the Great Purge on a trumped-up charge of "wrecking the adoption of new weaponry." This was the Communist version of the Confucian dictum, "a gentleman is not an implement."

It took about the same time for the Soviet atomic project headed by Igor Kurchatov to build the atomic bomb that it did for the American project headed by J. Robert Oppenheimer. Unlike the American project, the Soviet one took place in a country devastated by war, where around 27 million citizens had been killed; also unlike it, the Soviet atomic project could rely on as much prisoner (effectively, slave) labor as it needed, in particular for construction and for mining uranium. It also utilized the intelligence provided by atomic spies such as Klaus Fuchs and Alan Nunn May, although Holloway cites estimates that this only shaved a year or two off the schedule. The American project made use of scientists who fled Nazi-dominated Europe; the Soviet one employed German prisoners of war, but Holloway says that with one exception, they were not important for building the first Soviet atomic bomb. The first Soviet nuclear test, of a clone of the Nagasaki bomb, took place on August 29, 1949 at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in Kazakhstan. There is an urban legend that those who would have been shot had the test failed became Heroes of Socialist Labor, receiving the Soviet Union's highest civilian award, those who would have received maximum prison terms got Order of Lenin instead, and so on. Thus was the American nuclear monopoly broken. In September 1951 a bomb of indigenous Soviet design was tested; in August 1953 a bomb that may or may not be called the world's first hydrogen bomb, since the thermonuclear device exploded by the United States a year earlier was not a bomb; in November 1955 the first indubitably true hydrogen bomb, using a version of the Teller-Ulam design independently invented by Andrei Sakharov. The calculations for these were made on the Soviet Union's first electronic digital computers.

We now think of nuclear weapons as horrible things capable of destroying civilization. This only became true with the invention of the hydrogen bomb. Many American scientists opposed its development on these grounds; Holloway thinks that if the United States had abstained from developing it, the Soviet Union would have done so anyway, but the Americans would have quickly caught up. Many people in the Soviet leadership did not think of the atomic war as a no-no; Anastas Mikoyan declared in a speech at the 20th CPSU Congress that "a hydrogen and atomic war could lead to great destruction, but it could not lead to the annihilation of humankind or its civilization. It will annihilate an obsolete and pernicious system - capitalism in its imperialist stage." The world is so lucky it didn't come to that.

[Jordan Schneider · Rating 5 out of 5]

masterful

[Reshma]

Stalin and the bomb