Soviet Atomic Bomb Project - Nuclear Physics in The Soviet Union

Nuclear Physics in The Soviet Union

In early 1930s, the Soviets were the instrumental contributors made to the advancement of nuclear physics and its related sciences, such as nuclear chemistry. The initial Soviet interest in nuclear physics had begun in the early 1930s through the Soviet Academy of Sciences, an era in which a variety of important nuclear discoveries and achievements were made (the identification of the neutron and proton as fundamental particles, the operation of the first cyclotron to energies of over 1 MeV, and the first "splitting" of the atomic nucleus by John Cockcroft and Ernest Walton). Even before the Russian revolution and the followed by the February Revolution, the mineralogist Vladimir Vernadsky had made a number of public calls for a survey of Soviet Union's uranium deposits. The main motivation for nuclear research at the time was radium, which had scientific as well as medical uses, and could be retrieved from borehole water from the Ukhta oilfields.

After the discovery of nuclear fission in the late 1930s, scientists in the Soviet Union, like scientists all over the world, realized that nuclear reactions could, in theory, be used to release large amounts of binding energy from the atomic nucleus of uranium. As in the West, the news of fission created great excitement amongst Soviet scientists and many physicists switched their lines of research to those involving nuclear physics in particular, as it was considered a promising field of research. Few scientists thought it would be possible to harness the power of nuclear energy for human purposes within the span of many decades. Soviet nuclear research was not far behind Western scientists: Yakov Frenkel did the first theoretical work on fission in the Soviet Union in 1940, and Georgii Flerov and Lev Rusinov concluded that 3±1 neutrons were emitted per fission only days after similar conclusions had been reached by the team of Frédéric Joliot-Curie.