Russian Alsos

Russian Alsos

The Soviet Alsos was an operation which took place in early 1945 in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, and whose objectives were the exploitation of German atomic related facilities, intellectual materials, materiel resources, and scientific personnel for the benefit of the Soviet atomic bomb project.

Soviet scientists, aided greatly by Soviet espionage within the U.S. Manhattan Project, would have been able to eventually build their first atomic bomb without exploitation of German technology and scientists. However, the contributions of the German scientists is borne out by the many State Prizes and other prestigious awards given in the wake of the second Soviet atomic bomb test, a uranium-based atomic bomb; awards for uranium production and isotope separation were prevalent. Also significant in both the first Soviet atomic bomb test – a plutonium-based atomic bomb which required a uranium reactor for plutonium generation – and the second test, was the Soviet acquisition of a significant amount of uranium immediately before and shortly after the close of World War II. This saved them a year by their own admission.