The Soviet Union Acquires the Bomb

In September 1949 the Western world learned that the Soviet Union had exploded an atomic bomb. U.S. government officials had predicted that it would take the Soviet Union as long as a decade to develop atomic weapons. The speed with which the Soviets produced a bomb led to charges that development of the device was a product of Soviet espionage. People spoke of the Russians having used German scientists or having stolen secrets. Indeed, a German scientist, Klaus Fuchs, had provided the Russians a detailed description of the plutonium implosion bomb in June 1945, while he was working at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Russia's leading scientist on the bomb project, Igor Kurchatov, and his close associate, Yuli Khariton, had not been sure that Fuch's information was completely reliable. Khariton and his team were assigned the task of verifying everything. Another working on the atomic bomb for the Soviet Union was Andrei Sakharov, aged 27 in 1948, and that year he had already been thinking about the creation of a hydrogen bomb.

The Soviet Union gave its scientists massive resources and privileged living conditions, while those taking part in the project believed that the Soviet Union needed its own bomb in order to defend itself, and they welcomed the challenge of proving the worth of Soviet science.

People in the West saw it differently. For them the prospect of war was now more frightening. In November it was announced in the U.S. that scientists had already created a bomb "six times the effectiveness" of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And in January, 1950, President Truman revealed that he had ordered the Atomic Energy Commission to develop the hydrogen bomb.