Hi,
I’ve tried to figure out what precisely the Soviet Union did right, despite it repressive policies and its paranoid leadership to beat out both Germany and Japan in developing the A bomb (admittedly after WWII). What I would like to know is what factors favored the USSR versus Germany or Japan. I look forward to your feedback.
In 1934, Tohoku University professor Hikosaka Tadayoshi’s “atomic physics theory” was released. Hikosaka pointed out the huge energy contained by nuclei and the possibility that both nuclear power generation and weapons could be created.[3] In December 1938, the German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann sent a manuscript to Naturwissenschaften reporting that they had detected the element barium after bombarding uranium with neutrons;[4] simultaneously, they communicated these results to Lise Meitner. Meitner, and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, correctly interpreted these results as being nuclear fission[5] and Frisch confirmed this experimentally on 13 January 1939.[6] Physicists around the world immediately realized that chain reactions could be produced and notified their governments of the possibility of developing nuclear weapons.
Canaris’s Abwehr had information about the US’s Manhattan Project via their operatives in Moscow. As to whether Canaris passed this information along is another question. And that explains the deals the post war OSS/CIA made with General Gehlen of the Abwehr.
After the war. The Soviets detonated their first bomb in August 1949. By that stage both Germany and Japan had been out of the running, as far as nuclear weapons development programs go, for some years.
The decisive factor that allowed the Soviet Union to beat Germany to the development of their own atom bomb was that, before they beat Germany in developing a bomb, they beat Germany, period.
The decisive factor that allowed the Soviet Union to beat Japan to the development of their own atom bomb was that the US beat both countries in developing their own atom bomb and, having developed it, they dropped it on Japan.
The Soviet Union, Germany and Japan already had nuclear programs in place before the end of WWII. They were all at different stages. My question is simply what allowed the Soviets to advance further. Espionage and the fact that the Axis powers were beaten naturally helped. But you also need the necessary framework and expertise to develop an atomic bomb. Below is the answer.
When most people think about the Atomic Bomb Project they do not realize that it has roots all the way back to the 1910s. This is when Russia began researching radioactive materials. The research being done was not officially institutionalized until 1922 when the Radium Institute in Petrograd opened. Through the thirties there were various other institutions opened across the nation. It is important to acknowledge that the research and institutions were all a part of civil society. This meant that the military did not directly control the progress being made.
I don’t know what you are saying. The decisive factor was the Soviet Union being an ally of the United States during WWI instead of it’s enemy. While WWII destroyed Germany and Japan it turned the Soviet Union into an industrial powerhouse, with our money and technology.
Even if the Soviet Union had not been an industrial powerhouse, it would still have been better positioned than Germany and Japan.
What you’re really asking is “how come the Soviet Union developed its own atom bomb faster than two countries whose programs to develop their own atom bombs had come to a permanent halt?”. If it had taken the Soviet Union 50 years to develop its own bomb, they would still have beaten Germany and Japan, since neither of those countries have yet developed their own atom bombs.
No doubt technology transfer from the US (some of it very much against the will of the US) helped the Soviets develop their bomb, but bear in mind that the British had their own bomb by 1952, the French by 1960, the Chinese by 1964, the Indians by 1974. All these countries (and more) have beaten Germany and Japan to the post, and I don’t think we can claim that this is due to US money and technology turning them into industrial powerhouses. Hell, North Korea has beaten Germany and Japan; does US money and technology account for that?
A more relevant question would be, why did the USSR beat the UK? Or France? And perhaps you could make the case - I don’t know very much about this - that US money and technology gave the USSR a competitive edge in that particular race. But we need no such explanation for why they beat German and Japan; both countries dropped out of the race - to the extent that they were ever in it - in 1945. After that, it wasn’t difficult to beat them.
Plenty of others have pointed out the obvious factor: nobody was going to let Germany or Japan build a bomb after 1945.
As for why the Soviet Union was able to build a bomb so quickly after the war, I’d point out that they had an advantage the Americans hadn’t had: they knew a working bomb could be build. Once somebody else has proven something can be done, it’s a lot easier to do it the second time.
Yes, I know. We could say the same about the UK. In fact, if we wanted to, we could say the same about the US. But so what? The answer to the OP is that the Soviets beat the Germans, and not the other way around.
With the exception of North Korea and the debatable exception of Israel, all of the countries which have (or have had) their own bombs were either victor states in the Second World War or are successor states to victor states. Not a single country that was defeated in that war has developed its own bomb. But that’s hardly surprising; “defeat” in that war involved unconditional surrender, and one of the first things occupation governments did was to put a permanent stop to any nuclear weapons programmes being conducted in the defeated states. I don’t think we need look to technology transfer from the US to explain that.
Did technology transfer from the US enable the Soviet Union to develop a bomb earlier than it would otherwise have done? I’m no expert, but my fairly confident guess would be yes, it did. Does that explain why they beat Germany and Japan to the post? No; they would have beaten Germany and Japan in any event.
Agreed naita. I think the differences in the stages of development can be attribute government agendas. The Nazi regime/Hitler and Stalin didn’t push their atomic bomb projects to the extent that the US did. Nazi racial attitudes to nuclear physics as a Jewish science was also a setback in terms of what Germany could have achieved in terms of creating an atomic bomb.
" Flyorov deduced that this meant such research had been classified, and wrote to Stalin in April 1942. He cited the lack of response he had himself encountered trying to generate interest in similar research, and warned Stalin of the consequences of the development of atomic weapons: “…the results will be so overriding [that] it won’t be necessary to determine who is to blame for the fact that this work has been neglected in our country.” By September 1942, Stalin, who had already been presented with evidence of the Western nuclear programs in the MAUD Report of 1940, decided to launch a Soviet program to develop an atomic bomb headed by Igor Kurchatov. Creation in 1943 of Laboratory No. 2 under the Academy of Sciences of the USSR was the first stage of the Soviet atomic bomb project.
Two factors which had deleterious effects on the nuclear weapon project were the politicization of the education system under National Socialism and the rise of the Deutsche Physik movement, which was anti-Semitic and had a bias against theoretical physics, especially quantum mechanics.[37]
Adolf Hitler took power on 30 January 1933. On 7 April, the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was enacted; this law, and its subsequent related ordinances, politicized the education system in Germany. This had immediate deleterious effects on the physics capabilities of Germany. Furthermore, combined with the Deutsche Physik movement, the deleterious effects were intensified and prolonged. The consequences to physics in Germany and its subfield of nuclear physics were multifaceted.
Sure. It has long been noted that many of the figures who made signficant contributions to the US nuclear weapons programme were refugees from Naziism, so Nazi policies had the dual effect of (a) degrading the Nazis own capacities in this regard, and (b) enhancing, or at least giving the US the opportunity (which they took) of enhancing, US capacities.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the Soviet purges also degraded Soviet capacities in this regard, though I think without enhancing US capacities. And by the time the Soviet government became seriously interested in a nuclear weapons programme, they had already been invaded by the Germans. This made it difficult properly to resource a serious weapons research programme - there were more pressing claims on resources - and also meant that, even if it could have been well-resourced, it was never a priority; it was not going to deliver usable weapons in the timescale required to make a contribution to responding to the Nazi invasion. In fact I don’t think it was until after the defeat of at least Germany that the Soviets really started to put effort and resources into their nuclear weapons programme.
The Americans, of course, did not directly aid the Soviet programme; by the time the Soviet programme got seriously under way the Cold War was already breaking out. But the Americans had transferred considerable resources to the Soviets during the war to enable them to prosecute the war, and no doubt this did mean that the Soviets were better positioned than they otherwise would have been. But it plays no role in explaining how the Soviets built a bomb before the Germans and the Japanese did; that is fully explained by the fact that the Germans and the Japanese were defeated in the war - pretty much, before the Soviet programme had really got into its stride. By the time the Soviets got serious about developing a bomb, there was no prospect whatsoever that either Germany or Japan would do so.
I don’t think that’s true. The Soviets pretty much stopped their nuclear weapons program after Germany invaded. The reasons they were able to develop the bomb after the war were, first, they captured German records and scientists (the Alsos project), and second, they had spies who gave them information about the US and British nuclear projects (Fuchs, Greenglass, May, Koval, Cohen, Rosenburg, etc.)
Alsos was the American program of capturing German atomic researchers.
Of course what the Americans ended up finding was that the Germans were far behind where the Americans were. There’s amusing accounts of how the Germans didn’t realize this. The Germans had been assuming they were at the forefront of atomic research while acknowledging they were still several years away from building a bomb. When they were initially heavily interrogated by the Americans but then put to the side, they assumed this was an American acknowledgement that the United States was too far away from building a bomb for it to be worth the effort. So it was a double shock a few weeks later when the United States used its own bomb and the Germans realized they had been dismissed not for being too far ahead but for being too far behind to be of any use.