Soviet Atomic Bomb Project - Espionage

Espionage

The Soviet atomic project benefited from highly successful espionage efforts on the part of the Glavnoye Razvedyvatel'noye Upravleniye (GRU) as well as the foreign intelligence department of the Narodnyy komissariat vnutrennikh del (NKVD). Evidence from intelligence sources in the United Kingdom had a role to play in the decision of the Soviet State Defense Council (Gosudarstvennyj komitet oborony (GKO)), in September 1942, to approve resolution 2352, which signaled the beginning of the Soviet atom bomb project.

Through sources in the Manhattan Project, notably Klaus Fuchs, the Soviet intelligence obtained important information on the progress of the United States atomic bomb effort. Intelligence reports were shown to the head of the Soviet atomic project director Igor Kurchatov and had a significant impact on the direction of his own team's research.

For example, Soviet work on methods of uranium isotope separation was altered when it transpired, to Kurchatov's surprise, that the Americans had opted for the Gaseous diffusion method. Whilst research on other separation methods continued throughout the war years, the emphasis was placed on replicating U.S. success with gaseous diffusion. Another important breakthrough, attributed to intelligence, was the possibility of using plutonium, instead of uranium, in a fission weapon. Extraction of plutonium in the so-called "uranium pile" allowed the bypass of the difficult process of uranium separation altogether — something that Kurchatov had learned from intelligence from the Manhattan project.

In 1945, the Soviet intelligence obtained rough "blueprints" of the first U.S. atomic device, which may have contributed to the Soviet bomb project. Scholar Alexei Kojevnikov has estimated, based on newly released Soviet documents, that the primary way in which the espionage may have sped up the Soviet project was that it allowed Khariton to avoid dangerous tests to determine the size of the critical mass: "tickling the dragon's tail", as it was called in the U.S., consumed a good deal of time and claimed at least two lives; see Harry K. Daghlian, Jr. and Louis Slotin.

One of the key pieces of information, which Soviet intelligence obtained from Fuchs, was a cross-section for D-T fusion. This data was available to top Soviet officials roughly three years before it was openly published in the Physical Review in 1949. However, this data was not forwarded to Vitaly Ginzburg or Andrei Sakharov until very late, practically months before publication. Initially both Ginzburg and Sakharov, while working on the Sloika design, estimated such a cross-section to be similar to the D-D reaction. Once the actual cross-section become known to Ginzburg and Sakharov, the Sloika design become a priority, which resulted in successful test in 1953.

In the 1990s, with the declassification of Soviet intelligence materials, which showed the extent and the type of the information obtained by the Soviets from US sources, a heated debate ensued in Russia and abroad as to the relative importance of espionage, as opposed to the Soviet scientists' own efforts, in the making of the Soviet bomb. The vast majority of scholars agree that whereas the Soviet atomic project was first and foremost a product of local expertise and scientific talent, it is clear that espionage efforts contributed to the project in various ways and most certainly shortened the time needed to develop the atomic bomb.

Comparing the timelines of H-bomb development, some researchers came to a conclusion that Soviets had a gap in access to classified information regarding the H-bomb at least between late 1950 and some time in 1953. Earlier, e.g. in 1948, Fuchs gave to the Soviets a detailed update of the classical super progress, including an idea to use lithium, but did not specify it was specifically lithium-6. Teller accepted the fact that "classical super" scheme was infeasible by 1951, following results obtained by various researches (including Stanislaw Ulam) and calculations performed by John von Neumann in late 1950.

Yet the research for the Soviet analogue of "classical super" continued until December 1953, when the researchers were reallocated to a new project working on what later became a true H-bomb design, based on radiation implosion. It remains an open topic for research, whether the Soviet intelligence was able to obtain any specific data on Teller-Ulam design in 1953 or early 1954. Yet, Soviet officials directed the scientists to work on a new scheme, and the entire process took less than two years, commencing around January 1954 and producing a successful test in November 1955. It also took just several months before the idea of radiation implosion was conceived, and there is no documented evidence claiming priority. It is also possible that Soviets were able to obtain a document lost by John Wheeler on a train in 1953, which reportedly contained key information about thermonuclear weapon design.