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Title: Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy 1939-1956 by David Holloway ISBN: 0-300-06664-3 Publisher: Yale Univ Pr Pub. Date: March, 1996 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.33 (3 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: An Excellent Overview of the Entire Period
Comment: Stalin and the Bomb is an excellent overview not only of the Soviet atomic project but of the entire Stalin period. Holloway discusses some of the disastorous policies Stalin pursued in the scientific arena (for example, when it came to biology) and shows how Stalin was able to control his ideological impulses when it came to a project that would net him real power.
Stalin and the Bomb is extremely readable and provides some nice detail on Kurchatov, the father of the Soviet A-bomb. A little more on Sakharov and the H-bomb project would have been nice, but was not central to the thrust of the book. Significantly, this book delves into significant technical detail about the research and construction of nuclear weapons, but the author does a superb job of making the science accessable to people without PhDs in physics.
Rating: 4
Summary: Plenty of characters, with just a few plots.
Comment: I was most interested in who had the first hydrogen bomb (the first real plan, the ideal materials, a way to make it, and a test device) and I didn't mind reading about "some radioactive indicator which is formed with the participation of fast deuterons" (p. 304) to find out. Sorting out the physics, which can be revealed to those who care to know, with a comparison of alternate paths to the same result, reveals something far more substantial than the usual plot, based on the politics of world domination, the main concern of Stalin and the author of this book. Stalin gets some sympathy for facing a stark post-war reality, based on his comparison of what World War II did to Russia and Germany, compared to the damage which the few atomic bombs which existed in his lifetime could produce, and it might be said that he acted accordingly in attempting to maintain countervailing threats whenever he was pressured. Any notion of absolute justice, or even feasible military advantage, seems to be as elusive for the superpowers (and one still exists today) as for the petty despots and warlords that often become characters in this book about how such weapons came to be. I didn't mind the revelations about certain events: a war in Korea at a critical point in this book even makes the question of when Mao ordered the Chinese divisions into Korea an interesting question to be considered. In most of these books, I like the events which influenced Sakharov most, the best. The description of the shock wave from the November 1955 test on pages 316-7 includes, "All of this triggers an irrational yet very strong emotional impact."
Rating: 4
Summary: Intriguing Analysis of a Hidden Episode
Comment: David Holloway, a professor at Stanford, has published an intriguing history of Soviet nuclear weapons development in _Stalin_and_the_Bomb_. This volume interweaves two main themes--the technical difficulties in designing and fabricating nuclear weapons, and the political motivations commanding these efforts along with their strategic implications.
Many of the major participants are familiar to readers of Soviet history, such as Stalin, Beria, Molotov and Khrushchev. However, the important actors in this drama were the technical experts who created these engines of destruction on behalf of their masters. Many prominent scientists labored to provide the theoretical and experimental support demanded by Stalin for rapid industrialization, laying the groundwork for the tremendous infrastructure needed to duplicate the achievements of the Manhattan Project years later. Research in radioactivity eventually led to the first spontaneous fission experiment in 1940, but this did not attract attention in the West, where restrictions began for publication on nuclear physics.
Work on fission continued during the war, but the lack of uranium prevented much advancement. Holloway, in examining the directives during this period, found priorities unchanged following the Potsdam meeting, in contrast to the subsequent demand for uranium production after Hiroshima. He attributes Stalin's casual reaction to Truman's mention of a new weapon to skepticism regarding its importance. But the bomb as a colossal reality, not merely as an intelligence phantom, presented Stalin with a new strategic contention. His response was to show resolve in the face of anticipated intimidation coupled with orders to develop this technology independently. However, he only recognized the bomb as an instrument of Anglo-American policy, and refused to consider it militarily decisive in any potential conflict. When challenging US policy over Berlin, for example, Stalin carefully applied pressure while keeping his options open and took care not to escalate tensions beyond retraction.
The achievement of creating an atomic bomb, given the devastating post-war depravation of the Soviet Union can be credited primarily to Igor Kurchatov, the scientific director of the nuclear project from 1942 until his death in 1960. Kurchatov was a well respected figure in Soviet physics, but he also provided a methodical and systematic orchestration to a project with many difficult sundry en-gineering obstacles to overcome, not to mention the menacing oversight by Beria, head of the NKVD. Although awarded privileged status in the post-war Soviet Union, the scientists recognized their position as predicated on successful completion of this task.
The primary obstacle remained the inadequate supply of uranium metal until 1948 when the first production reactor was built. Uranium isotope separation and plutonium precipitation were tackled with indus-trial vigor. The gaseous diffusion facility, modeled on the Oak Ridge plant involved particular engineering difficulties to be solved before uranium enrichment could proceed. Yulii Khariton, director of the secret nu-clear research laboratory Arzamas-16, led the study on the physics of detonation. Implosion was needed to compress the plutonium a few microseconds in order to start the chain reaction. Their first atom bomb was exploded August 1949 at Semipalatinsk with a yield of 20 kilotons of TNT. Thus the Soviet Union joined the nuclear club.
While espionage yielded useful information at the West's expense, Holloway argues that Klaus Fuchs saved the Soviets only about a year or two by giving dimensions of the plutonium implosion design. He compares the first Soviet atom bomb explosion in 1949 with the first British demonstration in 1952 despite much closer collaboration with the Americans than anything obtained clandestinely by their Soviet counterparts. Holloway also contends that the contribution by captured Germans was comparatively minor and sped the project by only a few weeks or months--principally in the area of processing uranium.
While the bomb was being developed, Stalin initiated orders on delivery systems--bombers by Vladimir Myasishchev and rockets by Sergei Korolev. In Stalin's view, another war was inevitable within two decades, and the atomic bomb would serve as merely another policy instrument. After he died in March 1953, his successors embarked on a less confrontational rapproachement with the West.
After the Soviets demonstrated their ability to create weapons based on nuclear fission, Truman decided to pursue the hydrogen bomb, because there was no indication that Stalin would reciprocate a policy of restraint. After some false starts, a method to use X-ray compression from fission to implode the thermonuclear charge was discovered, enabling a yield limited only by the quantity of nuclear fuel. The Mike test in November 1952 verified this concept with an ungainly 60-ton refrigerated assembly. Meanwhile, the Russians embarked on fusion independently. A young physicist, Andrei Sakarov began work in 1948 and joined the Arzamas-16 facility, developing the "Layer Cake" which resembled the boosted fission weapon, before advancing on the two-stage Super. The first thermonuclear bomb was exploded in August 1953, and apparently alarmed Kurchatov, being 20 times more power-ful than the first Soviet fission bomb four years earlier. In November 1955, the first two-stage thermonuclear bomb with a yield of 1.6 megatons was exploded.
The first Soviet fusion explosion produced a profound change in the attitudes of politburo members about the same time that Americans realized that this new weapon represented a far more potent destructive force than the fission variety. In the aftermath of this revelation, a more conciliatory "peaceful coexistence" doctrine began to develop. Khrushchev's increased dialog with western leaders also facilitated long dormant communication between Soviet physicists and their colleagues beyond the Iron Curtain. Kurchatov's visit in 1956 was well received at Harwell, the British power station. From this small privileged enclave, a civilizing influence was nurtured within a totalitarian society. Eventually, Sakarov went beyond the usual misgivings of Soviet society to become a dissident and human rights advocate.
_Stalin_ concludes that the arms race between the two blocks was contingent solely on Stalin's intentions. Holloway believes that in the post-war years the bomb probably restrained the use of force but also made Stalin less cooperative to avoid seeming weak.
The book is not without flaws--some identifications to the KGB presumably belong to NKVD, the American arsenal in June 1946 lists a grossly exces-sive nine atom bombs taken from the _Bulletin of_Atomic_Scientists_ compared to _The Winning_Weapon_ by Gregg Herken which identified a single partially disassembled weapon in the inventory in January 1947, and an annoying transliteration of two Cyrillic characters as "ia" and "iu" instead of "ya" and "yu" as more conventionally employed. Otherwise, _Stalin_ is a tremendous addition to our knowledge of Russian capabilities in physics instigated by a repressive regime at the dawn of the nuclear age.
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