Atomic Weapons Programs

USSR ATOMIC WEAPONS RESEARCH

The Soviet Union, in response to information regarding the Allied Manhattan project in 1943, began an atomic weapons program. After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Soviet Union decided to duplicate as much as possible the design of the Ally atomic bomb. Fueled by espionage, a secret project entitled “Enormoz,” was able to uncover specs on the US atomic Bomb designed in the Manhattan Project. Clearly that bomb worked and the Soviet Union had no time to spare in building a bomb. The program was headed by Lavrentii Beria, Stalin’s former chief of security. He did not trust the reliability of his scientists and would often employ multiple teams of scientists to to work on the same problem. Only when these teams were called together to compare results would each team learn of the others. Under his direction, a few experiments were conducted on different designs acquired from the information received.

The first test in 1949 was known as First Lightening and was based off of the American Fat Man bomb. It packed 22,000 tons of TNT. Another accomplishment was the Joe Four, which was the first hydrogen bomb. The name was actually a nickname given by the Americans, and was not actually a true hydrogen bomb. The first true hydrogen bomb came upon the testing of the RDS-37. It packed explosives in the megaton range, and was a multistage thermonuclear radiation implosion design base off of the US Teller-Ulam.

German Atomic Research

German atomic programs were in the works soon after nuclear fission was discovered. Yet, due to the uncertainty of the leading scientist, Werner Heisenberg, the program eventually became abandoned. In 1941, Heisenberg met with former colleague, Niels Bohr who worked with the Allies. Heisenberg had come to meet with Bohr at his home and it is historically debated what was discussed. Heisenberg says he came to meet with Bohr to discuss his moral objections with development of nuclear weapons. He claimed he was devoting research towards a nuclear reactor. Bohr claimed his feelings were false and that Heisenberg was actually trying to obtain information about Allied bomb research and was contempt in developing nuclear weapons for Germany, and due to Bohr’s Jewish background, this upset him very much. Though when it later became revealed that a conversation between Heisenberg and another German scientist had been secretly recorded, some say Heisenberg did not actually have enough knowledge on how to make the bomb. In reality, financial support for the Nazi atomic weapons program was weak, and the authorities abandoned the program to pursue other weapon development programs.

UK Atomic Research

Much of the UK research on atomic weaponry was conducted after the end of the Second World War. After the war ended, a few groups were implemented in order to regulate advances on atomic programs. Prime Minister Clement Attlee organized a committee of cabinet members titled GEN. 75 and called the “Atom Bomb Committee.” A subset of GEN. 75, termed GEN. 163, was later organized in order to make decisions in relation to the program and an advisory group called “Advisory Committee on Atomic Energy (ACAE),” was also developed. Britain worked complimentary with the US to establish atomic research. In response to calculations collected by Englishmen Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls in 1940, the U.K. established the MAUD committee. The research included studies of nuclear fission and enriched uranium and were relayed to the U.S.. A team of scientists, called the “British Mission,” were sent to Los Alamos to work with the U.S. on the Manhattan project.

The Manhattan Project

In 1942, under the assumption that the Nazi’s were developing research on atomic weaponry, tipped off by a letter Einstein wrote to president Roosevelt, the United States began working on an extensive program of their own under the Army Corps of Engineers: The Manhattan Project. Directed by project manager J. Robert Oppenheimer, and based in Los Alamos, New Mexico, this project would revolutionize the way wars are fought for time to come. The result was a bomb that could destroy an entire city in a matter of a split second.

It was called the Atom Bomb, and it had devastating effects when energy was expelled from the nucleus of an atom in a process called nuclear fission that split an atom into parts. There were two designs, one using uranium and one using plutonium. The design using plutonium was proven to be very difficult. In the uranium bomb, uranium was accumulated into a specific amount needed to sustain a nuclear chain reaction. The idea was to shoot a neutron into the isotope (Uranium’s atomic number is 238, whereas U-235, its isotope, was needed) which split the nucleus into smaller fragments. The original atom then becomes split into a few smaller nuclei with a combined mass of less than the original. The weight loss is converted into energy in the form of heat and gamma radiation.

It had been decided by US officials that this bomb would be dropped on either Germany or Japan in an attempt to end the war abruptly.