Soviet Book

[Arleen Smelko]

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Official Soviet interest in a reusable space plane revived in the 1950s. For 30 years several programs overlapped. Designers and managers believed that such a craft ultimately would provide more reliable and efficient access to space than single-use rockets. Their first effort, known as the Burya, was developed by engineers in at the Mikoyan Gurevich aircraft design plant. Also known as the MiG-105, the craft employed a ramjet engine that required an assisted launch to gain orbit. After the dawn of the space age, Soviet rocket designers and cosmonauts continued work on a space plane then called Spiral, during the 1960s. Among test pilots was the second man to orbit the Earth, German Titov, who left his career as a cosmonaut to become a test pilot for the program. At the time of the early US space shuttle launches, the soviet Ministry of Defense took a renewed interest in the project and began testing an unpiloted scale model of the Buran, called the Bor. This was a series of 1:3 and 1:2 scale models of the planned spacecraft. Although the program had been secret, Australian fishermen caught sight of a Soviet ship pulling a small scale model form the ocean. These reports began speculation that the Soviet Union was trying to build a shuttle to match the U.S. one. Amid much international speculation and after many delays, the Soviet Union launched the Buran (Snowstorm), its first full-scale reusable space shuttle, on November 15, 1988. Although they tested the Buran extensively in the Earth's atmosphere with trained pilots, the maiden, and only, orbital launch was made without a crew. The Buran launched strapped onto the Energia launch vehicle, the largest among Soviet launch vehicles. It resembled the American shuttle quite closely -- not by coincidence. Through espionage, the Soviets obtained the design specifications of the US shuttle.

The Soviets called their first atomic test "First Lightning." A train belching black smoke, shipped the bomb components 2,000 miles from Arzamas, the weapons laboratory in Russia to the test site at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan. Like the Americans, the Soviets constructed a tower from which to test their weapon. They assembled the device in an adjacent concrete hall which had railway trucks running down its entire length. The bomb components came in one end and the completed device was wheeled out the other end to be hoisted to the top of the tower.

The Soviets wanted to learn about the effects of nuclear weapons. So in addition to instruments that would measure the size of the shock wave and the intensity of the radiation, they constructed wooden and brick houses, bridges, tunnels and water towers in the vicinity of the tower. They also put caged animals nearby so that they could study the effects of nuclear radiation.

Igor Kurchatov, the scientific director of the soviet nuclear bomb program who was in charge of the test, arrived at the site in May of 1949. In the weeks leading up to the blast he organized two rehearsals so everyone would know exactly what to do on shot day. The chair of the Special Committee on the atomic bomb, Lavrentii Beria, arrived in the middle of August. He observed the assembly work and reported back to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.

At 2 am on August 29, 1949 the assembled bomb was wheeled to the tower. The blast was scheduled for 6 am. Kurchatov and a handful of other scientists gathered in the command post with Beria and his entourage. They left the door open so they could watch the blast go off . They knew that they would have time to close the door because it would take 30 seconds for the shock wave to reach them. Kurchatov gave the order for the detonation.

An observer from a northern post about nine miles from the blast had one of the best views: "On top of the tower an unbearably bright light blazed up. For a moment or so it dimmed and then with new force began to grow quickly. The white fireball engulfed the tower and the workshop and expanding rapidly, changing color it rushed upwards. The blast wave at the base, sweeping in its path structures, stone houses, machines, rolled like a billow from the center, mixing up stones, logs of wood, pieces of metal and dust into one chaotic mass. The fireball, rising and revolving, turned orange, red. Then dark streaks appeared. Streams of dust, fragments of brick and board were drawn in after it, as into a funnel."

The relief and euphoria in the room was overwhelming. Kurchatov cried out, "It works! It works!" And Iulii Khariton, the scientific director of Arzamas, remembers Beria hugging him. All of the scientists knew that their own personal fates depended on the success of the bomb. One of them later said that if it had failed they would have all been shot. But besides being thankful for their own lives, many of the scientists felt they had contributed to the Soviet Union's security. Khariton later said, "when we succeeded in solving this problem, we felt relief, even happiness -- for in possessing such a weapon we had removed the possibility of its being used against the USSR with impunity."

Beria's own joy temporarily dissipated when his suspicions got the better of him. He put a call through to an observer at the north post who had also witnessed an American test in 1946. "Is it the same as the American one?" Beria wanted to know. "It is," the observer assured him. The bomb had in fact yielded 20 kilotons, making it about the same size as Trinity, the first U.S. atomic test.

Two months later the scientists principally responsible for designing the bomb won honors for their roles on the project. As the story goes, Beria adopted a simple rule in deciding who should get what prize. Those who would have been shot if the bomb had failed, became Heroes of Socialist Labor; those who would have been imprisoned were awarded the less prestigious honor, the Order of Lenin.

Initial Soviet research into the H-bomb followed closely the path the U.S. scientists were pursuing. The work was conducted by a group in Leningrad led by Iakov Zel'dovich that had been given access to information provided by atomic spy Klaus Fuchs. This included a detailed description of the "classical super" design, physicist Edward Teller's original idea for a super bomb. Zel'dovich's team began calculations on the basis of this information. But in 1948, Igor Kurchatov, director of the Soviet nuclear program, set up a second team to investigate the feasibility of the H-bomb. Its assignment was to check the Zel'dovich group's calculations.

Andrei Sakharov was a member of this second team. Before long, he had come up with an innovative new scheme. He suggested a "Layer Cake" design, which would consist of alternating layers of hydrogen fuel and uranium. High explosives surrounding the "Layer Cake" would be used to implode and ignite an atomic bomb at the center of the device. The atomic explosion would heat and compress the hydrogen fuel sufficiently to cause a fusion reaction. The fusion reaction in the hydrogen would lead to the emission of high energy neutrons which would in turn create further fissioning in the uranium.

Another talented young physicist Vitalii Ginzburg's came up with what Sakharov called the "Second Idea." Initially Sakharov suggested that the hydrogen fuel should consist of a mixture of deuterium and tritium, both of which are isotopes of hydrogen. Ginzburg suggested using lithium deuteride instead, a compound of lithium and deuterium, which has the advantage of being a solid at room temperature. In addition, it would produce tritium during the course of the explosion. Kurchatov understood immediately that Ginzburg's idea was a breakthrough and he arranged to have lithium deuteride produced on an industrial scale.

The first test of the "Layer Cake" took place on August 12, 1953. Four days earlier, one of the Soviet leaders, Georgii Malenkov announced to the Supreme Soviet that the U.S. no longer had a monopoly in hydrogen weapons. The scientists, who were already at the test site heard the speech on the radio. And in his memoirs, Sakharov noted that Malenkov's announcement would have "raised the tension if we had not already been keyed up to the maximum."

Just a few days before the detonation, the scientists realized that fallout from the blast might seriously injure people living in the surrounding area. At the last minute, the military commander organized an evacuation; some of those removed from their homes couldn't return for 18 months.

Kurchatov was in charge of the test and gave the order for the countdown. A witness gave this account of the blast: "The earth trembled beneath us, and our faces were struck, like the lash of a whip, by the dull, strong sound of the rolling explosion. From the jolt of the shock wave it was difficult to stand on one's feet. A cloud of dust rose to a height of eight kilometers (five miles). The top of the atomic mushroom reached a height of twelve kilometers (seven and a half miles), while the diameter of the dust of the cloud column was approximately six kilometers (almost four miles). For those who observed the explosion from the west, day was replaced by night."

In the spring of 1954, three years after U.S. scientists Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam came up with a solution for building a superbomb, their Soviet counterparts hit upon the same idea: radiation implosion. According to physicist Andrei Sakharov, several scientists came up with the answer at the same time. And they all recognized that this was the way to build a weapon of virtually unlimited explosive force. Almost immediately the team abandoned Sakharov's "Layer Cake" design which they had been working on for several years.

A test of the new design was scheduled for November 20, 1955. By early October the device had been loaded onto a military train and sent the 2,000 miles from the weapons lab in Russia to the test site in Kazakhstan. In an effort to minimize the fallout from the blast, the bomb was to be dropped from a plane and detonated at an altitude sufficiently high to ensure that dust would not be drawn up into the radioactive cloud. To reduce the risk that the bomber would be ignited by the heat of the blast, it was painted with white reflective paint.

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