Nuclear security

First Soviet Nuclear Bomb Test: How It Happened

 On Thursday, the world marks 70 years since the test of the first Soviet nuclear bomb at the Semipalatinsk test site.

On 29 August 1949, the Soviet Union successfully tested its first atomic bomb, RDS-1.

This historic event was the culmination of long and difficult work. Soviet physics started working on nuclear fission in the 1920s. Since the 1930s, nuclear physics became one of the main directions of Russian physical science, and, in October 1940, for the first time in the Soviet Union, a group of scientists came forward with a proposal to use atomic energy for weapons purposes, submitting a request to the Red Army’s department for inventions "about using uranium as an explosive and toxic agent."

The war that broke out in June 1941 and the evacuation of scientific institutes, which dealt with the problems of nuclear physics, interrupted the work on atomic weapons in the country. But in the fall of 1941, the obtained intelligence information revealed that the United Kingdom and the United States carried out intensive scientific research seeking to develop methods for using atomic energy for military purposes and to produce explosives of enormously destructive power.

This information forced the Soviet Union to resume work on uranium. On 28 September 1942, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin approved the resolution of the State Defence Committee on the organisation of work on uranium, according to which the research on the use of atomic energy was resumed.