SOVIET UNIONS NUCLEAR WEAPONS

SOVIET UNIONS NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Soviet Unions Nuclear Weapons

The Foundation of Nuclear Weapon

The foundations of the Soviet program of nuclear weapons were the work on the nuclear fission by physicists Yakov Zeldovich and Yuli Jariton , published in 1939. In the 1930's were also carried out fundamental research in radiochemistry , without which it would be impossible to understand these problems, development and especially its implementation. During the Conference of Nuclear Physics of the USSR in 1940, which was attended by national and foreign researchers, and where it was discussed only nuclear physics but also in other related disciplines (geochemistry, physical chemistry, inorganic chemistry, etc. ), Igor Kurchatov presented the research carried out by Soviet scientists on the chain reaction of uranium (Tucker, 2000, 63-99).

Development of the first Soviet nuclear weapons

During the period since the beginning of the program to the test of RDS-1, Soviet physicists, as well as in the United States had made significant theoretical advances that could be applied to improve the designs of the first nuclear weapons. However, within the project there was a climate of fear and pressure introduced by Lavrenti Beria to achieve a bomb on a time limit. This, along with Beria's refusal to implement improvements in the design of the Fat Man (who wanted an exact copy of the design, and suspicious of the information obtained by both the spies as project scientists) led not be planned a project after making the first bomb. Over two years passed until the second Soviet nuclear test (Alexander, 2001, 56-63).

The next step would be to improve the basic designs of nuclear weapons with the progress made in scientific research and incorporate Beria prevented. These improvements were mainly the suspension of the nuclear charge, called charge Levitating, to improve the implosion of this, along with evidence of implosion core of uranium / plutonium and lower layer of explosives, all aimed primarily at creating bombs higher performance and smaller size. The result was the pumps RDS-2 and RDS-3 . RDS-2 was tested on September 24, 1951, at the Semipalatinsk test site. It was detonated on a tower like the RDS-1 and its yield was 38.3 kilotons. RDS-3 was tested on October 18, 1951 in the same place, but the test had a peculiarity was first Soviet nuclear test explosion in air, with the bomb dropped by a bomber Tu-4 (Sargent, 2006, 779-790).

The ...