Who was the first to create nuclear weapons in the world. A nuclear bomb is a weapon, the possession of which is already a deterrent

Truth in the penultimate instance

There are not many things in the world that are considered indisputable. Well, I think you know that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. And that the Moon revolves around the Earth, too. And about the fact that the Americans were the first to create the atomic bomb, ahead of both the Germans and the Russians.

That’s what I thought too, until about four years ago when an old magazine came into my hands. He left my beliefs about the sun and moon alone, but faith in American leadership has been shaken quite seriously. It was a thick volume in German - a binder of the journal "Theoretical Physics" for 1938. I don’t remember why I went there, but quite unexpectedly I came across an article by Professor Otto Hahn.

The name was familiar to me. It was Hahn, the famous German physicist and radiochemist, who in 1938, together with another prominent scientist, Fritz Straussmann, discovered the fission of the uranium nucleus, essentially giving rise to work on the creation of nuclear weapons. At first I just skimmed the article diagonally, but then completely unexpected phrases forced me to become more attentive. And, ultimately, I even forget about why I initially picked up this magazine.

Gan's article was devoted to a review nuclear development in different countries of the world. Strictly speaking, there was nothing special to see: everywhere except Germany, nuclear research was in the background. They didn't see much point. " This abstract matter has nothing to do with state needs“,” said British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain around the same time, when he was asked to support British atomic research with budget money.

« Let these bespectacled scientists look for money themselves, the state is full of other problems! — this is what most world leaders thought in the 1930s. With the exception, of course, of the Nazis, who financed the nuclear program.
But it was not Chamberlain's passage, carefully quoted by Hahn, that attracted my attention. The author of these lines is not particularly interested in England at all. Much more interesting was what Hahn wrote about the state of nuclear research in the United States. And he literally wrote the following:

If we talk about a country in which the least attention is paid to nuclear fission processes, then we should undoubtedly name the USA. Of course, I'm not considering Brazil or the Vatican right now. However among developed countries, even Italy and communist Russia are significantly ahead of the United States. Little attention is paid to the problems of theoretical physics on the other side of the ocean; priority is given to applied developments that can provide immediate profit. Therefore, I can confidently say that during the next decade the North Americans will not be able to do anything significant for the development of atomic physics.

At first I just laughed. Wow, how wrong my compatriot was! And only then did I think: whatever one may say, Otto Hahn was not a simpleton or an amateur. He was well informed about the state of atomic research, especially since before the outbreak of World War II this topic was freely discussed in scientific circles.

Maybe the Americans misinformed the whole world? But for what purpose? No one had yet thought about atomic weapons in the 1930s. Moreover, most scientists considered its creation impossible in principle. That is why, until 1939, the whole world instantly learned about all new achievements in atomic physics - they were published completely openly in scientific journals. No one hid the fruits of their labor; on the contrary, there was open competition between various groups of scientists (almost exclusively Germans) - who would move forward faster?

Maybe scientists in the States were ahead of the rest of the world and therefore kept their achievements secret? Not a bad guess. To confirm or refute it, we will have to consider the history of the creation of the American atomic bomb - at least as it appears in official publications. We are all accustomed to taking it for granted. However, upon closer examination, there are so many oddities and inconsistencies in it that you are simply amazed.

From the world by thread - Bomb to the States

The year 1942 started well for the British. The German invasion of their small island, which had seemed inevitable, now, as if by magic, retreated into the foggy distance. Last summer, Hitler made the main mistake of his life - he attacked Russia. This was the beginning of the end. The Russians not only survived despite the hopes of Berlin strategists and the pessimistic forecasts of many observers, but also gave the Wehrmacht a good kick in the teeth during the frosty winter. And in December, the large and powerful United States came to the aid of the British, which now became an official ally. In general, there were more than enough reasons for joy.

Only a few high-ranking officials who had information received by British intelligence were not happy. At the end of 1941, the British learned that the Germans were developing their atomic research at a frantic pace.. The final goal of this process also became clear: a nuclear bomb. British atomic scientists were competent enough to imagine the threat posed by the new weapon.

At the same time, the British had no illusions about their capabilities. All the country's resources were aimed at basic survival. Although the Germans and Japanese were up to their necks fighting the Russians and Americans, they occasionally found an opportunity to poke their fists at the crumbling edifice of the British Empire. From each such poke, the rotten building staggered and creaked, threatening to collapse.

Rommel's three divisions were tied down in North Africa almost the entire combat-ready British army. Admiral Dönitz's submarines, like predatory sharks, darted in the Atlantic, threatening to interrupt the vital supply line from overseas. Britain simply did not have the resources to enter into a nuclear race with the Germans. The backlog was already large, and in the very near future it threatened to become hopeless.

It must be said that the Americans were skeptical at first about such a gift. The military department did not understand why it should spend money on some obscure project. What other new weapons are there? Here are aircraft carrier groups and armadas of heavy bombers - yes, this is power. And the nuclear bomb, which scientists themselves imagine very vaguely, is just an abstraction, an old wives’ tale.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had to directly appeal to American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt with a request, literally a plea, not to reject english gift. Roosevelt summoned scientists, looked into the issue and gave the go-ahead.

Usually the creators of the canonical legend of the American bomb use this episode to emphasize the wisdom of Roosevelt. Look, what an insightful president! We will look at this with slightly different eyes: in what kind of pen were the Yankees' atomic research if they refused to cooperate with the British for so long and stubbornly! This means that Hahn was absolutely right in his assessment of the American nuclear scientists - they were nothing solid.

It was only in September 1942 that the decision was made to begin work on an atomic bomb. The organizational period took some more time, and things really got off the ground only with the advent of the new year, 1943. From the army, the work was headed by General Leslie Groves (he would later write memoirs in which he would detail the official version of what happened); the real leader was Professor Robert Oppenheimer. I will talk about it in detail a little later, but for now let’s admire another interesting detail - how the team of scientists who began work on the bomb was formed.

As a matter of fact, when Oppenheimer was asked to recruit specialists, he had very little choice. Good nuclear physicists in the States could be counted on the fingers of a crippled hand. Therefore, the professor made a wise decision - to recruit people whom he knew personally and whom he could trust, regardless of what area of ​​​​physics they had previously worked on. And so it turned out that the lion's share of the places were occupied by Columbia University employees from the Manhattan area (by the way, this is why the project received the name Manhattan).

But even these forces turned out to be not enough. It was necessary to involve British scientists in the work, literally devastating English research centers, and even specialists from Canada. In general, the Manhattan Project turned into a kind of Tower of Babel, with the only difference being that all its participants spoke at least the same language. However, this did not save us from the usual quarrels and squabbles in the scientific community that arose due to the rivalry of different scientific groups. Echoes of these tensions can be found on the pages of Groves’ book, and they look very funny: the general, on the one hand, wants to convince the reader that everything was orderly and decent, and on the other, to brag about how cleverly he managed to reconcile the scientific luminaries who had completely quarreled.

And so they are trying to convince us that in this friendly atmosphere of a large terrarium, the Americans managed to create an atomic bomb in two and a half years. But the Germans, who cheerfully and amicably labored over their nuclear project for five years, failed to do this. Miracles, and that's all.

However, even if there were no squabbles, such record times would still arouse suspicion. The fact is that in the research process you need to go through certain stages, which are almost impossible to shorten. The Americans themselves attribute their success to gigantic funding - ultimately, Over two billion dollars were spent on the Manhattan Project! However, no matter how you feed a pregnant woman, she still will not be able to give birth to a full-term baby before nine months. It’s the same with the nuclear project: it is impossible to significantly speed up, for example, the process of uranium enrichment.

The Germans worked for five years with full effort. Of course, they made mistakes and miscalculations that took away valuable time. But who said that the Americans did not make mistakes and miscalculations? There were, and a lot of them. One of these mistakes was the involvement of the famous physicist Niels Bohr.

Unknown Skorzeny operation

The British intelligence services are very fond of boasting about one of their operations. We are talking about the rescue of the great Danish scientist Niels Bohr from Nazi Germany. The official legend says that after the outbreak of World War II, the outstanding physicist lived quietly and calmly in Denmark, leading a fairly secluded lifestyle. The Nazis offered him cooperation many times, but Bohr invariably refused.

By 1943, the Germans finally decided to arrest him. But, warned in time, Niels Bohr managed to escape to Sweden, from where the British took him away in the bomb bay of a heavy bomber. By the end of the year, the physicist found himself in America and began to work zealously for the benefit of the Manhattan Project.

The legend is beautiful and romantic, but it is sewn with white thread and does not withstand any tests. There is no more reliability in it than in the fairy tales of Charles Perrault. Firstly, because it makes the Nazis look like complete idiots, but they never were. Think carefully! In 1940, the Germans occupy Denmark. They know that a Nobel laureate lives in the country, who can greatly help them in their work on the atomic bomb. The same atomic bomb that is vital for Germany's victory.

And what are they doing? Over the course of three years, they occasionally visit the scientist, politely knock on the door and quietly ask: “ Herr Bohr, don't you want to work for the benefit of the Fuhrer and the Reich? Don't want to? Okay, we'll come back later" No, this was not the style of work of the German intelligence services! Logically, they should have arrested Bohr not in 1943, but back in 1940. If it works, force him (just force him, not beg him!) to work for them, if not, at least make sure that he cannot work for the enemy: put him in a concentration camp or exterminate him. And they leave him to walk around freely, under the noses of the British.

Three years later, the legend says, the Germans finally realize that they should arrest the scientist. But then someone (precisely someone, because I couldn’t find any indication anywhere about who did it) warns Bohr about the impending danger. Who could it be? It was not the habit of the Gestapo to shout at every corner about impending arrests. People were taken quietly, unexpectedly, at night. This means that Bohr’s mysterious patron is one of the rather high-ranking officials.

Let's leave this mysterious savior angel alone for now and continue to analyze the wanderings of Niels Bohr. So, the scientist fled to Sweden. How do you think? On a fishing boat, avoiding German Coast Guard boats in the fog? On a raft made of planks? No matter how it is! Bor sailed to Sweden in the greatest possible comfort on a very ordinary private ship, which officially called at the port of Copenhagen.

For now, let’s not rack our brains over the question of how the Germans released the scientist if they were going to arrest him. Let's think about this better. The flight of a world-famous physicist is an emergency of a very serious scale. An investigation had to inevitably be carried out on this matter - the heads of those who screwed up the physicist, as well as the mysterious patron, would fly. However, no traces of such an investigation were simply found. Maybe because he wasn't there.

Indeed, how important was Niels Bohr to the development of the atomic bomb? Born in 1885 and becoming a Nobel laureate in 1922, Bohr turned to the problems of nuclear physics only in the 1930s. At that time he was already a major, accomplished scientist with fully formed views. Such people rarely succeed in fields that require innovation and out-of-the-box thinking, which is what nuclear physics was. For several years, Bohr failed to make any significant contribution to atomic research.

However, as the ancients said, the first half of a person’s life works for a name, the second - a name for a person. For Niels Bohr, this second half has already begun. Having taken up nuclear physics, he automatically began to be considered a major specialist in this field, regardless of his actual achievements.

But in Germany, where such world-famous nuclear scientists as Hahn and Heisenberg worked, they knew the real value of the Danish scientist. That is why they did not actively try to involve him in the work. If it turns out well, we’ll tell the whole world that Niels Bohr himself is working for us. If it doesn’t work out, that’s also not bad; he won’t get in the way of his authority.

By the way, in the United States, Niels Bohr was largely in the way. The point is that the outstanding physicist did not believe at all in the possibility of creating a nuclear bomb. At the same time, his authority forced his opinion to be taken into account. According to Groves' memoirs, the scientists working on the Manhattan Project treated Bohr as an elder. Now imagine that you are doing something difficult work without any certainty of ultimate success. And then someone comes up to you, whom you consider a great specialist, and says that your lesson is not even worth wasting time on. Will work get easier? Don't think.

In addition, Bohr was a convinced pacifist. In 1945, when the United States already had an atomic bomb, he categorically protested against its use. Accordingly, he treated his work with lukewarmness. Therefore, I urge you to think again: what did Bohr bring more - movement or stagnation in the development of the issue?

It’s a strange picture, isn’t it? It began to clear up a little after I learned one interesting detail, which seemed to have nothing to do with Niels Bohr or the atomic bomb. We are talking about the “chief saboteur of the Third Reich” Otto Skorzeny.

It is believed that Skorzeny's rise began after he freed the imprisoned Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in 1943. Imprisoned in a mountain prison by his former comrades, Mussolini could not, it would seem, hope for release. But Skorzeny, on the direct orders of Hitler, developed a daring plan: to land troops on gliders and then fly away in a small plane. Everything turned out just fine: Mussolini was free, Skorzeny was held in high esteem.

At least that's what the majority thinks. Few well-informed historians know that cause and effect are confused here. Skorzeny was entrusted with an extremely difficult and responsible task precisely because Hitler trusted him. That is, the rise of the “king of special operations” began before the story of the rescue of Mussolini. However, very shortly - in a couple of months. Skorzeny was promoted to rank and position precisely when Niels Bohr fled to England. I couldn't find any reasons for a promotion anywhere.

So we have three facts:
— Firstly, the Germans did not prevent Niels Bohr from leaving for Britain;
— secondly, Boron did more harm than good to Americans;
— thirdly, immediately after the scientist ended up in England, Skorzeny received a promotion.

What if these are parts of the same mosaic? I decided to try to reconstruct the events. Having captured Denmark, the Germans were well aware that Niels Bohr was unlikely to assist in the creation of the atomic bomb. Moreover, it will rather interfere. Therefore, he was left to live quietly in Denmark, under the very nose of the British. Perhaps even then the Germans were counting on the British to kidnap the scientist. However, for three years the British did not dare to do anything.

At the end of 1942, the Germans began to hear vague rumors about the start of a large-scale project to create an American atomic bomb. Even taking into account the secrecy of the project, it was absolutely impossible to keep the lid on: the instant disappearance of hundreds of scientists from different countries, one way or another connected with nuclear research, should have prompted any mentally normal person to similar conclusions.

The Nazis were confident that they were far ahead of the Yankees (and this was true), but this did not stop them from doing nasty things to the enemy. And so, at the beginning of 1943, one of the most secret operations of the German intelligence services was carried out. A certain well-wisher appears on the threshold of Niels Bohr's house, who tells him that they want to arrest him and throw him into a concentration camp, and offers his help. The scientist agrees - he has no other choice, being behind barbed wire is not the best prospect.

At the same time, apparently, the British are being fed a lie about Bohr’s complete irreplaceability and uniqueness in nuclear research. The British are biting - but what can they do if the prey itself goes into their hands, that is, to Sweden? And for complete heroism, they take Bor out of there in the belly of a bomber, although they could have comfortably sent him by ship.

And then the Nobel laureate appears at the epicenter of the Manhattan Project, creating the effect of an exploding bomb. That is, if the Germans had managed to bomb the research center at Los Alamos, the effect would have been approximately the same. Work has slowed down, and quite significantly. Apparently, the Americans did not immediately realize how they had been deceived, and when they realized, it was already too late.
And you still believe that the Yankees themselves built the atomic bomb?

Alsos Mission

Personally, I finally refused to believe in these stories after I studied in detail the activities of the Alsos group. This operation of the American intelligence services was kept secret for many years - until its main participants left for a better world. And only then did information emerge—true, fragmentary and scattered—about how the Americans were hunting for German atomic secrets.

True, if you thoroughly work on this information and compare it with some well-known facts, the picture turns out to be very convincing. But I won't get ahead of myself. So, the Alsos group was formed in 1944, on the eve of the Anglo-American landing in Normandy. Half of the group members are professional intelligence officers, half are nuclear scientists.

At the same time, in order to form Alsos, the Manhattan Project was mercilessly robbed - in fact, the best specialists were taken from there. The mission's objective was to collect information about the German nuclear program. The question is, how desperate are the Americans for the success of their undertaking if they made their main bet on stealing the atomic bomb from the Germans?
They were very desperate, if you remember the little-known letter from one of the nuclear scientists to his colleague. It was written on February 4, 1944 and read:

« It seems we've gotten ourselves into a lost cause. The project is not moving forward one iota. Our leaders, in my opinion, do not believe in the success of the entire undertaking. Yes, and we don’t believe it. If it weren’t for the huge money that we are paid here, I think many would have long ago been doing something more useful».

This letter was cited at one time as evidence of American talent: what great fellows we are, we pulled off a hopeless project in just over a year! Then in the USA they realized that not only fools live around, and they hastened to forget about the piece of paper. With great difficulty I managed to dig up this document in an old scientific journal.

No money or effort was spared to ensure the actions of the Alsos group. It was perfectly equipped with everything necessary. The head of the mission, Colonel Pash, had with him a document from US Secretary of Defense Henry Stimson, which obliged everyone to provide all possible assistance to the group. Even the Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Forces, Dwight Eisenhower, did not have such powers.. By the way, about the commander-in-chief - he was obliged to take into account the interests of the Alsos mission in planning military operations, that is, to capture first of all those areas where there could be German atomic weapons.

At the beginning of August 1944, or to be precise on the 9th, the Alsos group landed in Europe. One of the leading US nuclear scientists, Dr. Samuel Goudsmit, was appointed scientific director of the mission. Before the war, he maintained close ties with his German colleagues, and the Americans hoped that the “international solidarity” of scientists would be stronger than political interests.

Alsos managed to achieve its first results after the Americans occupied Paris in the fall of 1944.. Here Goudsmit met with the famous French scientist Professor Joliot-Curie. It seemed that Curie was sincerely happy about the defeats of the Germans; however, as soon as the conversation turned to the German atomic program, he went into deep “ignorance.” The Frenchman insisted that he knew nothing, did not hear anything, the Germans did not even come close to developing an atomic bomb and their nuclear project is exclusively peaceful.

It was clear that the professor was not saying something. But there was no way to put pressure on him - for collaborating with the Germans in France at that time, people were shot, regardless of scientific merits, and Curie was clearly afraid of death most of all. Therefore, Goudsmit had to leave empty-handed.

Throughout his stay in Paris, he constantly heard vague but threatening rumors: A uranium bomb exploded in Leipzig., in the mountainous regions of Bavaria strange outbreaks have been reported at night. Everything indicated that the Germans were either very close to creating atomic weapons, or had already created them.

What happened next is still shrouded in mystery. They say that Pash and Goudsmit managed to find some valuable information in Paris. Since at least November, Eisenhower has been constantly receiving demands to move forward into German territory at any cost. The initiators of these demands - now it is clear! — in the end there were people associated with the atomic project and who received information directly from the Alsos group. Eisenhower had no real ability to carry out the orders he received, but the demands from Washington became increasingly stringent. It is unknown how all this would have ended if the Germans had not made another unexpected move.

Ardennes mystery

As a matter of fact, by the end of 1944 everyone believed that Germany had lost the war. The only question is how long it will take for the Nazis to be defeated. Only Hitler and his inner circle seemed to hold a different point of view. They tried to delay the moment of disaster until the last moment.

This desire is quite understandable. Hitler was sure that after the war he would be declared a criminal and tried. And if you delay, you can cause a quarrel between the Russians and the Americans and, ultimately, get away with it, that is, out of the war. Not without losses, of course, but without losing power.

Let's think about it: what was needed for this in conditions when Germany had nothing left? Naturally, spend them as sparingly as possible and maintain a flexible defense. And Hitler, at the very end of 1944, threw his army into the very wasteful Ardennes offensive. For what?

The troops are given completely unrealistic tasks - to break through to Amsterdam and throw the Anglo-Americans into the sea. At that time, German tanks were like walking to the Moon from Amsterdam, especially since their tanks had fuel splashing less than half the way. Scare your allies? But what could frighten the well-fed and armed armies, behind which was the industrial power of the United States?

All in all, Until now, not a single historian has been able to clearly explain why Hitler needed this offensive. Usually everyone ends up saying that the Fuhrer was an idiot. But in reality, Hitler was not an idiot; moreover, he thought quite sensibly and realistically until the very end. Those historians who make hasty judgments without even trying to understand something can most likely be called idiots.

But let's look at the other side of the front. Even more amazing things are happening there! And the point is not even that the Germans managed to achieve initial, albeit rather limited, successes. The fact is that the British and Americans were really scared! Moreover, the fear was completely inadequate to the threat. After all, from the very beginning it was clear that the Germans had little strength, that the offensive was local in nature...

But no, Eisenhower, Churchill, and Roosevelt are simply panicking! In 1945, on January 6, when the Germans had already been stopped and even thrown back, British Prime Minister writes panic letter to Russian leader Stalin, which requires immediate assistance. Here is the text of this letter:

« There are very difficult battles going on in the West, and big decisions may be required from the High Command at any time. You yourself know from your own experience how alarming the situation is when you have to defend a very wide front after a temporary loss of initiative.

It is very desirable and necessary for General Eisenhower to know general outline, what do you propose to do, since this, of course, will affect all his and our most important decisions. According to the message received, our emissary, Air Chief Marshal Tedder, was in Cairo last evening, due to weather conditions. His trip was greatly delayed through no fault of yours.

If he has not yet arrived to you, I shall be grateful if you can inform me whether we can count on a major Russian offensive on the Vistula front or elsewhere during January and at any other times that you may be thinking about. , would you like to mention. I will not pass on this highly sensitive information to anyone except Field Marshal Brooke and General Eisenhower, and only on condition that it is kept in the strictest confidence. I consider the matter urgent».

If we translate from diplomatic language into ordinary language: save us, Stalin, they will beat us! Therein lies another mystery. What will they “beat” if the Germans have already been driven back to their original lines? Yes, of course, the American offensive, planned for January, had to be postponed until the spring. And what? We should be glad that the Nazis wasted their strength in senseless attacks!

And one more thing. Churchill was asleep and saw how to prevent the Russians from entering Germany. And now he is literally begging them to begin moving west without delay! To what extent should Sir Winston Churchill have been afraid?! It seems that the slowdown in the Allied advance deep into Germany was interpreted by him as a mortal threat. I wonder why? After all, Churchill was neither a fool nor an alarmist.

And yet, the Anglo-Americans spend the next two months in terrible nervous tension. Subsequently, they will carefully hide this, but the truth will still break to the surface in their memoirs. For example, Eisenhower after the war would call the last war winter “the most alarming time.”

What worried the marshal so much if the war was actually won? Only in March 1945 did the Ruhr Operation begin, during which the Allies occupied West Germany, encircling 300 thousand Germans. The commander of the German troops in this area, Field Marshal Model, shot himself (the only one of the entire German generals, by the way). Only after this did Churchill and Roosevelt more or less calm down.

But let's return to the Alsos group. In the spring of 1945, it became noticeably more active. During the Ruhr operation, scientists and intelligence officers moved forward almost following the vanguard of the advancing troops, collecting valuable crops. In March-April, many scientists involved in German nuclear research fall into their hands. The decisive discovery was made in mid-April - on the 12th, members of the mission write that they came across “a real gold mine” and now they “learn about the project in general” . By May, Heisenberg, Hahn, Osenberg, Diebner, and many other outstanding German physicists were in the hands of the Americans. However, the Alsos group continued active searches in already defeated Germany... until the end of May.

But at the end of May something incomprehensible happens. The search is almost interrupted. Or rather, they continue, but with much less intensity. If earlier they were carried out by major world-famous scientists, now they are carried out by beardless laboratory assistants. And major scientists are packing their bags and leaving for America. Why?

To answer this question, let's look at how events developed further.

At the end of June, the Americans test an atomic bomb - allegedly the first in the world.
And in early August they drop two on Japanese cities.
After this, the Yankees run out of ready-made atomic bombs, and for quite a long time.

Strange situation, isn't it? Let's start with the fact that only a month passes between testing and combat use of a new superweapon. Dear readers, this does not happen. Making an atomic bomb is much more difficult than making a conventional projectile or rocket. This is simply impossible in a month. Then, probably, the Americans made three prototypes at once? Also unlikely.

Making a nuclear bomb is a very expensive procedure. There's no point in doing three if you're not sure you're doing it right. Otherwise, it would be possible to create three nuclear projects, build three scientific centers, and so on. Even the US is not rich enough to be so extravagant.

However, okay, let’s assume that the Americans actually built three prototypes at once. Why didn’t they immediately after successful tests launch nuclear bombs into mass production? After all, immediately after the defeat of Germany, the Americans found themselves faced with a much more powerful and formidable enemy - the Russians. The Russians, of course, did not threaten the United States with war, but they prevented the Americans from becoming masters of the entire planet. And this, from the Yankees’ point of view, is a completely unacceptable crime.

And yet, the United States got new atomic bombs... When do you think? In the fall of 1945? Summer of 1946? No! Only in 1947 did the first nuclear weapons begin to arrive in American arsenals! You will not find this date anywhere, but no one will undertake to refute it. The data that I managed to obtain is absolutely secret. However, they are fully confirmed by the facts we know about the subsequent buildup of the nuclear arsenal. And most importantly - the results of tests in the deserts of Texas, which took place at the end of 1946.

Yes, yes, dear reader, exactly at the end of 1946, and not a month earlier. Information about this was obtained by Russian intelligence and came to me very the hard way, which probably doesn’t make sense to be disclosed on these pages, so as not to expose the people who helped me. On the eve of the new year, 1947, a very interesting report landed on the table of the Soviet leader Stalin, which I will present here verbatim.

According to Agent Felix, in November-December of this year, a series of nuclear explosions were carried out in the area of ​​El Paso, Texas. At the same time, prototypes of nuclear bombs similar to those dropped on the Japanese islands last year were tested.

Over the course of a month and a half, at least four bombs were tested, three of which ended in failure. This series of bombs was created in preparation for the large-scale industrial production of nuclear weapons. Most likely, the start of such production should be expected no earlier than mid-1947.

The Russian agent fully confirmed the information I had. But maybe all this is disinformation on the part of the American intelligence services? Hardly. In those years, the Yankees tried to assure their opponents that they were stronger than anyone in the world, and would not downplay their military potential. Most likely, we are dealing with a carefully hidden truth.

What happens? In 1945, the Americans dropped three bombs - all successfully. The next tests are of the same bombs! - pass a year and a half later, and not very successfully. Serial production begins in another six months, and we do not know - and will never know - how well the atomic bombs that appeared in American army warehouses corresponded to their terrible purpose, that is, how high quality they were.

Such a picture can only be drawn in one case, namely: if the first three atomic bombs - the same ones from 1945 - were not built by the Americans on their own, but received from someone. To put it bluntly - from the Germans. This hypothesis is indirectly confirmed by the reaction of German scientists to the bombing of Japanese cities, which we know about thanks to the book by David Irving.

“Poor Professor Gan!”

In August 1945, ten leading German nuclear physicists, ten protagonists of the Nazi "atomic project", were held captive in the United States. All possible information was extracted from them (I wonder why, if you believe the American version that the Yankees were far ahead of the Germans in atomic research). Accordingly, the scientists were kept in a sort of comfortable prison. There was also a radio in this prison.

On August 6th at seven o'clock in the evening, Otto Hahn and Karl Wirtz found themselves at the radio. It was then that in the next news broadcast they heard that the first atomic bomb had been dropped on Japan. The first reaction of the colleagues to whom they brought this information was unequivocal: this cannot be true. Heisenberg believed that the Americans could not create their own nuclear weapons (and, as we now know, he was right).

« Did the Americans mention the word "uranium" in connection with their new bomb?“he asked Gan. The latter answered negatively. “Then it has nothing to do with the atom,” Heisenberg snapped. The outstanding physicist believed that the Yankees simply used some kind of high-power explosive.

However, the nine o'clock news broadcast dispelled all doubts. Obviously, until then the Germans simply did not imagine that the Americans managed to capture several German atomic bombs. However, now the situation has become clearer, and scientists have begun to be tormented by pangs of conscience. Yes, yes, that's right! Dr. Erich Bagge wrote in his diary: “ Now this bomb was used against Japan. They report that even several hours later, the bombed city is hidden in a cloud of smoke and dust. We are talking about the death of 300 thousand people. Poor Professor Gan!»

Moreover, that evening the scientists were very worried that “poor Gan” would commit suicide. The two physicists kept vigil at his bedside late into the night to prevent him from committing suicide, and retired to their rooms only after they discovered that their colleague was finally fast asleep. Gan himself subsequently described his impressions as follows:

For some time I was obsessed with the idea of ​​​​the need to dump all uranium reserves into the sea in order to avoid a similar catastrophe in the future. Although I felt personally responsible for what had happened, I wondered whether I or anyone else had the right to deprive humanity of all the benefits that a new discovery could bring? And now this terrible bomb has gone off!

I wonder if the Americans are telling the truth, and they really created the bomb that fell on Hiroshima, why on earth would the Germans feel “personally responsible” for what happened? Of course, each of them contributed to nuclear research, but on the same basis one could lay some of the blame on thousands of scientists, including Newton and Archimedes! After all, their discoveries ultimately led to the creation of nuclear weapons!

The mental anguish of German scientists becomes meaningful only in one case. Namely, if they themselves created the bomb that destroyed hundreds of thousands of Japanese. Otherwise, why on earth would they worry about what the Americans did?

However, so far all my conclusions have been nothing more than a hypothesis, confirmed only by indirect evidence. What if I’m wrong and the Americans really achieved the impossible? To answer this question, it was necessary to closely study the German atomic program. And this is not as simple as it seems.

/Hans-Ulrich von Kranz, “The Secret Weapon of the Third Reich”, topwar.ru/

The world of the atom is so fantastic that understanding it requires a radical break in the usual concepts of space and time. Atoms are so small that if a drop of water could be enlarged to the size of the Earth, each atom in that drop would be smaller than an orange. In fact, one drop of water consists of 6000 billion billion (6000000000000000000000) hydrogen and oxygen atoms. And yet, despite its microscopic size, the atom has a structure to some extent similar to the structure of our solar system. In its incomprehensibly small center, the radius of which is less than one trillionth of a centimeter, there is a relatively huge “sun” - the nucleus of the atom.

Tiny “planets” - electrons - revolve around this atomic “sun”. The nucleus consists of the two main building blocks of the Universe - protons and neutrons (they have a unifying name - nucleons). An electron and a proton are charged particles, and the amount of charge in each of them is exactly the same, but the charges differ in sign: the proton is always positively charged, and the electron is negatively charged. The neutron does not carry an electrical charge and, as a result, has a very high permeability.

In the atomic scale of measurements, the mass of a proton and a neutron is taken as unity. Atomic weight of any chemical element therefore depends on the number of protons and neutrons contained in its nucleus. For example, a hydrogen atom, with a nucleus consisting of only one proton, has an atomic mass of 1. A helium atom, with a nucleus of two protons and two neutrons, has an atomic mass of 4.

The nuclei of atoms of the same element always contain the same number of protons, but the number of neutrons may vary. Atoms that have nuclei with the same number of protons, but differ in the number of neutrons and are varieties of the same element are called isotopes. To distinguish them from each other, a number is assigned to the element symbol, equal to the sum all particles in the nucleus of a given isotope.

The question may arise: why does the nucleus of an atom not fall apart? After all, the protons included in it are electrically charged particles with the same charge, which must repel each other with great force. This is explained by the fact that inside the nucleus there are also so-called intranuclear forces that attract nuclear particles to each other. These forces compensate for the repulsive forces of protons and prevent the nucleus from spontaneously flying apart.

Intranuclear forces are very strong, but act only at very close distances. Therefore, the nuclei of heavy elements, consisting of hundreds of nucleons, turn out to be unstable. The particles of the nucleus are in continuous motion here (within the volume of the nucleus), and if you add some additional amount of energy to them, they can overcome the internal forces - the nucleus will split into parts. The amount of this excess energy is called excitation energy. Among the isotopes of heavy elements, there are those that seem to be on the very verge of self-disintegration. Just a small “push” is enough, for example, a simple neutron hitting the nucleus (and it doesn’t even have to accelerate to high speed) for the nuclear fission reaction to occur. Some of these “fissile” isotopes were later learned to be produced artificially. In nature, there is only one such isotope - uranium-235.

Uranus was discovered in 1783 by Klaproth, who isolated it from uranium tar and named it after the recently discovered planet Uranus. As it turned out later, it was, in fact, not uranium itself, but its oxide. Pure uranium, a silvery-white metal, was obtained
only in 1842 Peligo. The new element did not have any remarkable properties and did not attract attention until 1896, when Becquerel discovered the phenomenon of radioactivity in uranium salts. After this, uranium became an object scientific research and experiments, but still had no practical application.

When, in the first third of the 20th century, physicists more or less understood the structure of the atomic nucleus, they first of all tried to fulfill the long-standing dream of alchemists - they tried to transform one chemical element into another. In 1934, French researchers, the spouses Frédéric and Irene Joliot-Curie, reported the following experience to the French Academy of Sciences: when bombarding aluminum plates with alpha particles (nuclei of a helium atom), aluminum atoms turned into phosphorus atoms, but not ordinary ones, but radioactive ones, which in turn became into a stable isotope of silicon. Thus, an aluminum atom, having added one proton and two neutrons, turned into a heavier silicon atom.

This experience suggested that if you “bombard” the nuclei of the heaviest element existing in nature - uranium - with neutrons, you can obtain an element that does not exist in natural conditions. In 1938, German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann repeated in general terms the experience of the Joliot-Curie spouses, using uranium instead of aluminum. The results of the experiment were not at all what they expected - instead of a new superheavy element with a mass number greater than that of uranium, Hahn and Strassmann received light elements from the middle part of the periodic table: barium, krypton, bromine and some others. The experimenters themselves were unable to explain the observed phenomenon. Only the following year, physicist Lise Meitner, to whom Hahn reported his difficulties, found the correct explanation for the observed phenomenon, suggesting that when uranium is bombarded with neutrons, its nucleus splits (fissions). In this case, nuclei of lighter elements should have been formed (that’s where barium, krypton and other substances came from), as well as 2-3 free neutrons should have been released. Further research made it possible to clarify in detail the picture of what was happening.

Natural uranium consists of a mixture of three isotopes with masses 238, 234 and 235. The main amount of uranium is isotope-238, the nucleus of which includes 92 protons and 146 neutrons. Uranium-235 is only 1/140 of natural uranium (0.7% (it has 92 protons and 143 neutrons in its nucleus), and uranium-234 (92 protons, 142 neutrons) is only 1/17500 of total mass uranium (0.006%. The least stable of these isotopes is uranium-235.

From time to time, the nuclei of its atoms spontaneously divide into parts, as a result of which lighter elements of the periodic table are formed. The process is accompanied by the release of two or three free neutrons, which rush at enormous speed - about 10 thousand km/s (they are called fast neutrons). These neutrons can hit other uranium nuclei, causing nuclear reactions. Each isotope behaves differently in this case. Uranium-238 nuclei in most cases simply capture these neutrons without any further transformations. But in approximately one case out of five, when a fast neutron collides with the nucleus of the isotope-238, a curious nuclear reaction occurs: one of the neutrons of uranium-238 emits an electron, turning into a proton, that is, the uranium isotope turns into a more
heavy element - neptunium-239 (93 protons + 146 neutrons). But neptunium is unstable - after a few minutes, one of its neutrons emits an electron, turning into a proton, after which the neptunium isotope turns into the next element in the periodic table - plutonium-239 (94 protons + 145 neutrons). If a neutron hits the nucleus of unstable uranium-235, then fission immediately occurs - the atoms disintegrate with the emission of two or three neutrons. It is clear that in natural uranium, most of the atoms of which belong to the 238 isotope, this reaction has no visible consequences - all free neutrons will eventually be absorbed by this isotope.

Well, what if we imagine a fairly massive piece of uranium consisting entirely of isotope-235?

Here the process will go differently: neutrons released during the fission of several nuclei, in turn, hitting neighboring nuclei, cause their fission. As a result, a new portion of neutrons is released, which splits the next nuclei. Under favorable conditions, this reaction proceeds like an avalanche and is called a chain reaction. To start it, a few bombarding particles may be enough.

Indeed, let uranium-235 be bombarded by only 100 neutrons. They will separate 100 uranium nuclei. In this case, 250 new neutrons of the second generation will be released (on average 2.5 per fission). Second generation neutrons will produce 250 fissions, which will release 625 neutrons. In the next generation it will become 1562, then 3906, then 9670, etc. The number of divisions will increase indefinitely if the process is not stopped.

However, in reality only a small fraction of neutrons reach the nuclei of atoms. The rest, quickly rushing between them, are carried away into the surrounding space. A self-sustaining chain reaction can only occur in a sufficiently large array of uranium-235, which is said to have a critical mass. (This mass under normal conditions is 50 kg.) It is important to note that the fission of each nucleus is accompanied by the release of a huge amount of energy, which turns out to be approximately 300 million times more than the energy spent on fission! (It is estimated that the complete fission of 1 kg of uranium-235 releases the same amount of heat as the combustion of 3 thousand tons of coal.)

This colossal burst of energy, released in a matter of moments, manifests itself as an explosion of monstrous force and underlies the action of nuclear weapons. But in order for this weapon to become a reality, it is necessary that the charge consist not of natural uranium, but of a rare isotope - 235 (such uranium is called enriched). It was later discovered that pure plutonium is also a fissile material and could be used in an atomic charge instead of uranium-235.

All these important discoveries were made on the eve of World War II. Soon, secret work on creating an atomic bomb began in Germany and other countries. In the USA, this problem was addressed in 1941. The entire complex of works was given the name “Manhattan Project”.

Administrative leadership of the project was carried out by General Groves, and scientific leadership was carried out by University of California professor Robert Oppenheimer. Both were well aware of the enormous complexity of the task facing them. Therefore, Oppenheimer's first concern was recruiting a highly intelligent scientific team. In the USA at that time there were many physicists who emigrated from fascist Germany. It was not easy to attract them to create weapons directed against their former homeland. Oppenheimer spoke personally to everyone, using all the power of his charm. Soon he managed to gather a small group of theorists, whom he jokingly called “luminaries.” Indeed, it included the greatest specialists of that time in the field of physics and chemistry. (Among them are 13 Nobel Prize laureates, including Bohr, Fermi, Frank, Chadwick, Lawrence.) Besides them, there were many other specialists of various profiles.

The US government did not skimp on expenses, and the work took on a grand scale from the very beginning. In 1942, the world's largest research laboratory was founded at Los Alamos. The population of this scientific city soon reached 9 thousand people. In terms of the composition of scientists, the scope of scientific experiments, and the number of specialists and workers involved in the work, the Los Alamos laboratory had no equal in world history. The Manhattan Project had its own police, counterintelligence, communications system, warehouses, villages, factories, laboratories, and its own colossal budget.

The main goal of the project was to obtain enough fissile material from which several atomic bombs could be created. In addition to uranium-235, the charge for the bomb, as already mentioned, could be the artificial element plutonium-239, that is, the bomb could be either uranium or plutonium.

Groves and Oppenheimer agreed that work should be carried out simultaneously in two directions, since it was impossible to decide in advance which of them would be more promising. Both methods were fundamentally different from each other: the accumulation of uranium-235 had to be carried out by separating it from the bulk of natural uranium, and plutonium could only be obtained as a result of a controlled nuclear reaction when uranium-238 was irradiated with neutrons. Both paths seemed unusually difficult and did not promise easy solutions.

In fact, how can one separate two isotopes that differ only slightly in weight and chemically behave in exactly the same way? Neither science nor technology has ever faced such a problem. The production of plutonium also seemed very problematic at first. Before this, the entire experience of nuclear transformations was limited to a few laboratory experiments. Now they had to master the production of kilograms of plutonium on an industrial scale, develop and create a special installation for this - a nuclear reactor, and learn to control the course of the nuclear reaction.

Both here and here a whole complex of complex problems had to be solved. Therefore, the Manhattan Project consisted of several subprojects, headed by prominent scientists. Oppenheimer himself was the head of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. Lawrence was in charge of the Radiation Laboratory at the University of California. Fermi conducted research at the University of Chicago to create a nuclear reactor.

At first, the most important problem was obtaining uranium. Before the war, this metal had virtually no use. Now, when it was needed immediately in huge quantities, it turned out that there was no industrial method its production.

The Westinghouse company took up its development and quickly achieved success. After purifying the uranium resin (uranium occurs in nature in this form) and obtaining uranium oxide, it was converted into tetrafluoride (UF4), from which uranium metal was separated by electrolysis. If at the end of 1941 American scientists had only a few grams of uranium metal at their disposal, then already in November 1942 its industrial production at Westinghouse factories reached 6,000 pounds per month.

At the same time, work was underway to create a nuclear reactor. The process of producing plutonium actually boiled down to irradiating uranium rods with neutrons, as a result of which part of the uranium-238 would turn into plutonium. The sources of neutrons in this case could be fissile atoms of uranium-235, scattered in sufficient quantities among atoms of uranium-238. But in order to maintain the constant production of neutrons, a chain reaction of fission of uranium-235 atoms had to begin. Meanwhile, as already mentioned, for every atom of uranium-235 there were 140 atoms of uranium-238. It is clear that neutrons scattering in all directions had a much higher probability of meeting them on their way. That is, a huge number of released neutrons turned out to be absorbed by the main isotope without any benefit. Obviously, under such conditions a chain reaction could not take place. How can this be?

At first it seemed that without the separation of two isotopes, the operation of the reactor was generally impossible, but one important circumstance was soon established: it turned out that uranium-235 and uranium-238 were susceptible to neutrons of different energies. The nucleus of a uranium-235 atom can be split by a neutron of relatively low energy, having a speed of about 22 m/s. Such slow neutrons are not captured by uranium-238 nuclei - for this they must have a speed of the order of hundreds of thousands of meters per second. In other words, uranium-238 is powerless to prevent the beginning and progress of a chain reaction in uranium-235 caused by neutrons slowed down to extremely low speeds - no more than 22 m/s. This phenomenon was discovered by the Italian physicist Fermi, who lived in the USA since 1938 and led the work here to create the first reactor. Fermi decided to use graphite as a neutron moderator. According to his calculations, the neutrons emitted from uranium-235, having passed through a 40 cm layer of graphite, should have reduced their speed to 22 m/s and begun a self-sustaining chain reaction in uranium-235.

Another moderator could be so-called “heavy” water. Since the hydrogen atoms included in it are very similar in size and mass to neutrons, they could best slow them down. (With fast neutrons, approximately the same thing happens as with balls: if a small ball hits a large one, it rolls back, almost without losing speed, but when it meets a small ball, it transfers a significant part of its energy to it - just like a neutron in an elastic collision bounces off a heavy nucleus, slowing down only slightly, and when colliding with the nuclei of hydrogen atoms very quickly loses all its energy.) However, plain water not suitable for moderation since its hydrogen tends to absorb neutrons. That is why deuterium, which is part of “heavy” water, should be used for this purpose.

In early 1942, under Fermi's leadership, construction began on the first nuclear reactor in history in the tennis court area under the west stands of Chicago Stadium. The scientists carried out all the work themselves. The reaction can be controlled in the only way - by adjusting the number of neutrons participating in the chain reaction. Fermi intended to achieve this using rods made of substances such as boron and cadmium, which strongly absorb neutrons. The moderator was graphite bricks, from which the physicists built columns 3 m high and 1.2 m wide. Rectangular blocks with uranium oxide were installed between them. The entire structure required about 46 tons of uranium oxide and 385 tons of graphite. To slow down the reaction, rods of cadmium and boron were introduced into the reactor.

If this were not enough, then for insurance, two scientists stood on a platform located above the reactor with buckets filled with a solution of cadmium salts - they were supposed to pour them onto the reactor if the reaction got out of control. Fortunately, this was not necessary. On December 2, 1942, Fermi ordered all control rods to be extended and the experiment began. After four minutes, the neutron counters began to click louder and louder. With every minute the intensity of the neutron flux became greater. This indicated that a chain reaction was taking place in the reactor. It lasted for 28 minutes. Then Fermi gave the signal, and the lowered rods stopped the process. Thus, for the first time, man freed the energy of the atomic nucleus and proved that he could control it at will. Now there was no longer any doubt that nuclear weapons were a reality.

In 1943, the Fermi reactor was dismantled and transported to the Aragonese National Laboratory (50 km from Chicago). Was here soon
Another nuclear reactor was built in which heavy water was used as a moderator. It consisted of a cylindrical aluminum tank containing 6.5 tons of heavy water, into which were vertically immersed 120 rods of uranium metal, encased in an aluminum shell. The seven control rods were made of cadmium. Around the tank there was a graphite reflector, then a screen made of lead and cadmium alloys. The entire structure was enclosed in a concrete shell with a wall thickness of about 2.5 m.

Experiments at these pilot reactors confirmed the possibility industrial production plutonium

The main center of the Manhattan Project soon became the town of Oak Ridge in the Tennessee River Valley, whose population grew to 79 thousand people in a few months. Here, the first enriched uranium production plant in history was built in a short time. An industrial reactor producing plutonium was launched here in 1943. In February 1944, about 300 kg of uranium was extracted from it daily, from the surface of which plutonium was obtained by chemical separation. (To do this, the plutonium was first dissolved and then precipitated.) The purified uranium was then returned to the reactor. That same year, construction began on the huge Hanford plant in the barren, bleak desert on the south bank of the Columbia River. There were three powerful nuclear reactor, which provided several hundred grams of plutonium daily.

In parallel, research was in full swing to develop an industrial process for uranium enrichment.

Having considered different options, Groves and Oppenheimer decided to focus their efforts on two methods: gaseous diffusion and electromagnetic.

The gas diffusion method was based on a principle known as Graham's law (it was first formulated in 1829 by the Scottish chemist Thomas Graham and developed in 1896 by the English physicist Reilly). According to this law, if two gases, one of which is lighter than the other, are passed through a filter with negligibly small holes, then several more light gas than heavy gas. In November 1942, Urey and Dunning from Columbia University created a gaseous diffusion method for separating uranium isotopes based on the Reilly method.

Since natural uranium is a solid, it was first converted into uranium fluoride (UF6). This gas was then passed through microscopic - on the order of thousandths of a millimeter - holes in the filter partition.

Since the difference in the molar weights of the gases was very small, behind the partition the content of uranium-235 increased by only 1.0002 times.

In order to increase the amount of uranium-235 even more, the resulting mixture is again passed through a partition, and the amount of uranium is again increased by 1.0002 times. Thus, to increase the uranium-235 content to 99%, it was necessary to pass the gas through 4000 filters. This took place at a huge gaseous diffusion plant in Oak Ridge.

In 1940, under the leadership of Ernest Lawrence, research began on the separation of uranium isotopes by the electromagnetic method at the University of California. It was necessary to find such physical processes, which would make it possible to separate isotopes using the difference in their masses. Lawrence attempted to separate isotopes using the principle of a mass spectrograph, an instrument used to determine the masses of atoms.

The principle of its operation was as follows: pre-ionized atoms were accelerated electric field, and then passed through a magnetic field in which they described circles located in a plane perpendicular to the direction of the field. Since the radii of these trajectories were proportional to their mass, light ions ended up on circles of smaller radius than heavy ones. If traps were placed along the path of the atoms, then different isotopes could be collected separately in this way.

That was the method. In laboratory conditions it gave good results. But building a facility where isotope separation could be carried out on an industrial scale proved extremely difficult. However, Lawrence eventually managed to overcome all difficulties. The result of his efforts was the appearance of calutron, which was installed in a giant plant in Oak Ridge.

This electromagnetic plant was built in 1943 and turned out to be perhaps the most expensive brainchild of the Manhattan Project. Lawrence's method required a large number of complex, not yet developed devices associated with high voltage, high vacuum and strong magnetic fields. The scale of the costs turned out to be enormous. Calutron had a giant electromagnet, the length of which reached 75 m and weighed about 4000 tons.

Several thousand tons of silver wire were used for the windings for this electromagnet.

The entire work (not counting the cost of $300 million in silver, which the State Treasury provided only temporarily) cost $400 million. The Ministry of Defense paid 10 million for the electricity consumed by calutron alone. Much of the equipment at the Oak Ridge plant was superior in scale and precision to anything that had ever been developed in this field of technology.

But all these costs were not in vain. Having spent a total of about 2 billion dollars, US scientists by 1944 created a unique technology for uranium enrichment and plutonium production. Meanwhile, at the Los Alamos laboratory they were working on the design of the bomb itself. The principle of its operation was, in general terms, clear for a long time: the fissile substance (plutonium or uranium-235) had to be transferred to a critical state at the moment of the explosion (for a chain reaction to occur, the mass of the charge must be even noticeably greater than the critical one) and irradiated with a beam of neutrons, which entailed is the beginning of a chain reaction.

According to calculations, the critical mass of the charge exceeded 50 kilograms, but they were able to significantly reduce it. In general, the value of the critical mass is strongly influenced by several factors. The larger the surface area of ​​the charge, the more neutrons are uselessly emitted into the surrounding space. A sphere has the smallest surface area. Consequently, spherical charges, other things being equal, have the smallest critical mass. In addition, the value of the critical mass depends on the purity and type of fissile materials. It is inversely proportional to the square of the density of this material, which allows, for example, by doubling the density, reducing the critical mass by four times. The required degree of subcriticality can be obtained, for example, by compacting the fissile material due to the explosion of a charge of a conventional explosive made in the form of a spherical shell surrounding the nuclear charge. The critical mass can also be reduced by surrounding the charge with a screen that reflects neutrons well. Lead, beryllium, tungsten, natural uranium, iron and many others can be used as such a screen.

One possible design of an atomic bomb consists of two pieces of uranium, which, when combined, form a mass greater than critical. In order to cause a bomb explosion, you need to bring them closer together as quickly as possible. The second method is based on the use of an inward converging explosion. In this case, a stream of gases from a conventional explosive was directed at the fissile material located inside and compressed it until it reached a critical mass. Combining a charge and intensely irradiating it with neutrons, as already mentioned, causes a chain reaction, as a result of which in the first second the temperature increases to 1 million degrees. During this time, only about 5% of the critical mass managed to separate. The rest of the charge in early bomb designs evaporated without
any benefit.

The first atomic bomb in history (it was given the name Trinity) was assembled in the summer of 1945. And on June 16, 1945, the first on Earth was produced at the nuclear test site in the Alamogordo desert (New Mexico). atomic explosion. The bomb was placed in the center of the test site on top of a 30-meter steel tower. Recording equipment was placed around it at a great distance. There was an observation post 9 km away, and a command post 16 km away. The atomic explosion made a stunning impression on all witnesses to this event. According to eyewitnesses' descriptions, it felt as if many suns had united into one and illuminated the test site at once. Then a huge fireball appeared over the plain and a round cloud of dust and light began to rise towards it slowly and ominously.

Taking off from the ground, this fireball soared to a height of more than three kilometers in a few seconds. With every moment it grew in size, soon its diameter reached 1.5 km, and it slowly rose into the stratosphere. Then the fireball gave way to a column of billowing smoke, which stretched to a height of 12 km, taking the shape of a giant mushroom. All this was accompanied by a terrible roar, from which the earth shook. The power of the exploding bomb exceeded all expectations.

As soon as the radiation situation allowed, several Sherman tanks, lined with lead plates on the inside, rushed to the area of ​​the explosion. On one of them was Fermi, who was eager to see the results of his work. What appeared before his eyes was a dead, scorched earth, on which all living things had been destroyed within a radius of 1.5 km. The sand had baked into a glassy greenish crust that covered the ground. In a huge crater lay the mangled remains of a steel support tower. The force of the explosion was estimated at 20,000 tons of TNT.

The next step was to be combat use bombs against Japan, which, after the surrender of Nazi Germany, alone continued the war with the United States and its allies. There were no launch vehicles at that time, so the bombing had to be carried out from an airplane. The components of the two bombs were transported with great care by the cruiser Indianapolis to the island of Tinian, where the 509th Combined Air Force Group was based. These bombs differed somewhat from each other in the type of charge and design.

The first bomb - "Baby" - was a large air bomb with an atomic charge of highly enriched uranium-235. Its length was about 3 m, diameter - 62 cm, weight - 4.1 tons.

The second bomb - "Fat Man" - with a charge of plutonium-239 was egg-shaped with a large stabilizer. Its length
was 3.2 m, diameter 1.5 m, weight - 4.5 tons.

On August 6, Colonel Tibbets' B-29 Enola Gay bomber dropped "Little Boy" on the major Japanese city of Hiroshima. The bomb was lowered by parachute and exploded, as planned, at an altitude of 600 m from the ground.

The consequences of the explosion were terrible. Even for the pilots themselves, the sight of a peaceful city destroyed by them in an instant made a depressing impression. Later, one of them admitted that at that second they saw the worst thing a person can see.

For those who were on earth, what was happening resembled true hell. First of all, a heat wave passed over Hiroshima. Its effect lasted only a few moments, but was so powerful that it melted even tiles and quartz crystals in granite slabs, turned telephone poles 4 km away into coal, and finally incinerated human bodies that all that remained of them were shadows on the asphalt of pavements or on the walls of houses. Then a monstrous gust of wind burst out from under the fireball and rushed over the city at a speed of 800 km/h, destroying everything in its path. Houses that could not withstand his furious onslaught collapsed as if they had been knocked down. There is not a single intact building left in the giant circle with a diameter of 4 km. A few minutes after the explosion, black radioactive rain fell over the city - this moisture turned into steam condensed in the high layers of the atmosphere and fell to the ground in the form of large drops mixed with radioactive dust.

After the rain, a new gust of wind hit the city, this time blowing in the direction of the epicenter. It was weaker than the first, but still strong enough to uproot trees. The wind fanned a gigantic fire in which everything that could burn burned. Of the 76 thousand buildings, 55 thousand were completely destroyed and burned. Witnesses of this terrible disaster they remembered torch people, from which burnt clothes fell to the ground along with rags of skin, and about crowds of maddened people, covered with terrible burns, rushing screaming through the streets. There was a suffocating stench of burnt human flesh in the air. There were people lying everywhere, dead and dying. There were many who were blind and deaf and, poking in all directions, could not make out anything in the chaos that reigned around them.

The unfortunate people, who were located at a distance of up to 800 m from the epicenter, literally burned out in a split second - their insides evaporated and their bodies turned into lumps of smoking coals. Those located at a distance of 1 km from the epicenter were affected by radiation sickness in an extremely severe form. Within a few hours, they began to vomit violently, their temperature jumped to 39-40 degrees, and they began to experience shortness of breath and bleeding. Then non-healing ulcers appeared on the skin, the composition of the blood changed dramatically, and hair fell out. After terrible suffering, usually on the second or third day, death occurred.

In total, about 240 thousand people died from the explosion and radiation sickness. About 160 thousand received radiation sickness in a milder form - their painful death was delayed by several months or years. When news of the disaster spread throughout the country, all of Japan was paralyzed with fear. It increased further after Major Sweeney's Box Car dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki on August 9. Several hundred thousand inhabitants were also killed and injured here. Unable to resist the new weapons, the Japanese government capitulated - the atomic bomb ended World War II.

The war is over. It lasted only six years, but managed to change the world and people almost beyond recognition.

Human civilization before 1939 and human civilization after 1945 are strikingly different from each other. There are many reasons for this, but one of the most important is the emergence of nuclear weapons. It can be said without exaggeration that the shadow of Hiroshima lies over the entire second half of the 20th century. It became a deep moral burn for many millions of people, like former contemporaries this catastrophe, and those born decades after it. Modern man can no longer think about the world the way they thought about it before August 6, 1945 - he understands too clearly that this world can turn into nothing in a few moments.

Modern man cannot look at war the way his grandfathers and great-grandfathers did - he knows for certain that this war will be the last, and there will be neither winners nor losers in it. Nuclear weapons have left their mark on all spheres of public life, and modern civilization cannot live by the same laws as sixty or eighty years ago. No one understood this better than the creators of the atomic bomb themselves.

"People of our planet , wrote Robert Oppenheimer, must unite. Terror and destruction sown the last war, dictate this thought to us. The explosions of atomic bombs proved it with all cruelty. Other people at other times have already said similar words - only about other weapons and about other wars. They weren't successful. But anyone who today would say that these words are useless is misled by the vicissitudes of history. We cannot be convinced of this. The results of our work leave humanity no choice but to create a united world. A world based on legality and humanity."

American Robert Oppenheimer and Soviet scientist Igor Kurchatov are officially recognized as the fathers of the atomic bomb. But in parallel, deadly weapons were also being developed in other countries (Italy, Denmark, Hungary), so the discovery rightfully belongs to everyone.

The first to tackle this issue were German physicists Fritz Strassmann and Otto Hahn, who in December 1938 were the first to artificially split the atomic nucleus of uranium. And six months later, the first reactor was already being built at the Kummersdorf test site near Berlin and uranium ore was urgently purchased from the Congo.

“Uranium Project” - the Germans start and lose

In September 1939, the “Uranium Project” was classified. 22 reputable scientific centers were invited to participate in the program, and the research was supervised by Minister of Armaments Albert Speer. The construction of an installation for separating isotopes and the production of uranium to extract the isotope from it that supports the chain reaction was entrusted to the IG Farbenindustry concern.

For two years, a group of the venerable scientist Heisenberg studied the possibility of creating a reactor with and heavy water. A potential explosive (uranium-235 isotope) could be isolated from uranium ore.

But an inhibitor is needed to slow down the reaction - graphite or heavy water. Choosing the latter option created an insurmountable problem.

The only plant for the production of heavy water, which was located in Norway, was disabled by local resistance fighters after the occupation, and small reserves of valuable raw materials were exported to France.

The rapid implementation of the nuclear program was also hindered by the explosion of an experimental nuclear reactor in Leipzig.

Hitler supported the uranium project as long as he hoped to obtain a super-powerful weapon that could influence the outcome of the war he started. After government funding was cut, the work programs continued for some time.

In 1944, Heisenberg managed to create cast uranium plates, and a special bunker was built for the reactor plant in Berlin.

It was planned to complete the experiment to achieve a chain reaction in January 1945, but a month later the equipment was urgently transported to the Swiss border, where it was deployed only a month later. The nuclear reactor contained 664 cubes of uranium weighing 1525 kg. It was surrounded by a graphite neutron reflector weighing 10 tons, and one and a half tons of heavy water were additionally loaded into the core.

On March 23, the reactor finally started working, but the report to Berlin was premature: the reactor did not reach a critical point, and the chain reaction did not occur. Additional calculations showed that the mass of uranium must be increased by at least 750 kg, proportionally adding the amount of heavy water.

But supplies of strategic raw materials were at their limit, as was the fate of the Third Reich. On April 23, the Americans entered the village of Haigerloch, where the tests were carried out. The military dismantled the reactor and transported it to the United States.

The first atomic bombs in the USA

A little later, the Germans began developing the atomic bomb in the USA and Great Britain. It all started with a letter from Albert Einstein and his co-authors, emigrant physicists, sent in September 1939 to US President Franklin Roosevelt.

The appeal emphasized that Nazi Germany was close to creating an atomic bomb.

Stalin first learned about work on nuclear weapons (both allied and adversary) from intelligence officers in 1943. They immediately decided to create a similar project in the USSR. Instructions were issued not only to scientists, but also to intelligence services, for which obtaining any information about nuclear secrets became a top priority.

The invaluable information about the developments of American scientists that Soviet intelligence officers were able to obtain significantly advanced the domestic nuclear project. It helped our scientists avoid ineffective search paths and significantly speed up the time frame for achieving the final goal.

Serov Ivan Aleksandrovich - head of the bomb creation operation

Of course, the Soviet government could not ignore the successes of German nuclear physicists. After the war, a group of Soviet physicists, future academicians, were sent to Germany in the uniform of colonels of the Soviet army.

Ivan Serov, the first deputy people's commissar of internal affairs, was appointed head of the operation, this allowed scientists to open any doors.

In addition to their German colleagues, they found reserves of uranium metal. This, according to Kurchatov, shortened the development time of the Soviet bomb by at least a year. More than one ton of uranium and leading nuclear specialists were taken out of Germany by the American military.

Not only chemists and physicists were sent to the USSR, but also qualified labor - mechanics, electricians, glassblowers. Some of the employees were found in prison camps. In total, about 1,000 German specialists worked on the Soviet nuclear project.

German scientists and laboratories on the territory of the USSR in the post-war years

A uranium centrifuge and other equipment, as well as documents and reagents from the von Ardenne laboratory and the Kaiser Institute of Physics were transported from Berlin. As part of the program, laboratories “A”, “B”, “C”, “D” were created, headed by German scientists.

The head of Laboratory “A” was Baron Manfred von Ardenne, who developed a method for gas diffusion purification and separation of uranium isotopes in a centrifuge.

For the creation of such a centrifuge (only on an industrial scale) in 1947 he received the Stalin Prize. At that time, the laboratory was located in Moscow, on the site of the famous Kurchatov Institute. Each German scientist’s team included 5-6 Soviet specialists.

Later, laboratory “A” was taken to Sukhumi, where a physical and technical institute was created on its basis. In 1953, Baron von Ardenne became a Stalin laureate for the second time.

Laboratory B, which conducted experiments in the field of radiation chemistry in the Urals, was headed by Nikolaus Riehl, a key figure in the project. There, in Snezhinsk, the talented Russian geneticist Timofeev-Resovsky, with whom he had been friends back in Germany, worked with him. The successful test of the atomic bomb brought Riehl the star of the Hero of Socialist Labor and the Stalin Prize.

Research at Laboratory B in Obninsk was led by Professor Rudolf Pose, a pioneer in the field of nuclear testing. His team managed to create fast neutron reactors, the first nuclear power plant in the USSR, and projects for reactors for submarines.

On the basis of the laboratory, the Physics and Energy Institute named after A.I. was later created. Leypunsky. Until 1957, the professor worked in Sukhumi, then in Dubna, at the Joint Institute of Nuclear Technologies.

Laboratory “G”, located in the Sukhumi sanatorium “Agudzery”, was headed by Gustav Hertz. The nephew of the famous 19th century scientist gained fame after a series of experiments that confirmed the ideas of quantum mechanics and the theory of Niels Bohr.

The results of his productive work in Sukhumi were used to create an industrial installation in Novouralsk, where in 1949 they filled the first Soviet bomb RDS-1.

The uranium bomb that the Americans dropped on Hiroshima was a cannon type. When creating the RDS-1, domestic nuclear physicists were guided by the Fat Boy - the “Nagasaki bomb”, made of plutonium according to the implosive principle.

In 1951, Hertz was awarded the Stalin Prize for his fruitful work.

German engineers and scientists lived in comfortable houses; they brought their families, furniture, paintings from Germany, they were provided with decent salaries and special food. Did they have the status of prisoners? According to Academician A.P. Aleksandrov, an active participant in the project, they were all prisoners in such conditions.

Having received permission to return to their homeland, the German specialists signed a non-disclosure agreement about their participation in the Soviet nuclear project for 25 years. In the GDR they continued to work in their specialty. Baron von Ardenne was a two-time winner of the German National Prize.

The professor headed the Physics Institute in Dresden, which was created under the auspices of the Scientific Council for the Peaceful Applications of Atomic Energy. The Scientific Council was headed by Gustav Hertz, who received the National Prize of the GDR for his three-volume textbook on atomic physics. Here in Dresden, in Technical University, Professor Rudolf Pose also worked.

The participation of German specialists in the Soviet atomic project, as well as the achievements of Soviet intelligence, do not diminish the merits of Soviet scientists who, with their heroic work, created domestic atomic weapons. And yet, without the contribution of each participant in the project, the creation of the nuclear industry and the nuclear bomb would have taken an indefinite period.

In the 30s of the last century, many physicists worked on creating an atomic bomb. It is officially believed that the United States was the first to create, test and use the atomic bomb. However, recently I read books by Hans-Ulrich von Kranz, a researcher of the secrets of the Third Reich, where he claims that the Nazis invented the bomb, and the world's first atomic bomb was tested by them in March 1944 in Belarus. The Americans seized all the documents about the atomic bomb, the scientists, and the samples themselves (there were supposedly 13 of them). So the Americans had access to 3 samples, and the Germans transported 10 to a secret base in Antarctica. Krantz confirms his conclusions by the fact that after Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the United States there was no news of testing bombs larger than 1.5, and after that the tests were unsuccessful. This, in his opinion, would have been impossible if the bombs had been created by the United States itself.

We are unlikely to know the truth.

In one thousand nine hundred and forty, Enrico Fermi finished working on a theory called the Nuclear Chain Reaction. After this, the Americans created their first nuclear reactor. In one thousand nine hundred and forty-five, the Americans created three atomic bombs. The first was blown up in New Mexico, and the next two were dropped on Japan.

It is hardly possible to specifically name any person that he is the creator of atomic (nuclear) weapons. Without the discoveries of predecessors there would have been no final result. But many people call Otto Hahn, a German by birth, a nuclear chemist, the father of the atomic bomb. Apparently, it was his discoveries in the field of nuclear fission, together with Fritz Strassmann, that can be considered fundamental in the creation of nuclear weapons.

Igor Kurchatov is considered to be the father of Soviet weapons of mass destruction and Soviet intelligence and personally Klaus Fuchs. However, we should not forget about the discoveries of our scientists in the late 30s. Work on uranium fission was carried out by A.K. Peterzhak and G.N. Flerov.

The atomic bomb is a product that was not invented immediately. It took dozens of years of various studies to reach the result. Before specimens were first invented in 1945, many experiments and discoveries were carried out. All scientists who are related to these works can be counted among the creators of the atomic bomb. Besom speaks directly about the team of inventors of the bomb itself, then there was a whole team, it’s better to read about it on Wikipedia.

Participated in the creation of the atomic bomb large number scientists and engineers from various industries. It would be unfair to name just one. The material from Wikipedia does not mention the French physicist Henri Becquerel, the Russian scientists Pierre Curie and his wife Maria Sklodowska-Curie, who discovered the radioactivity of uranium, and the German theoretical physicist Albert Einstein.

Quite an interesting question.

After reading information on the Internet, I came to the conclusion that the USSR and the USA began working on creating these bombs at the same time.

I think you will read in more detail in the article. Everything is written there in great detail.

Many discoveries have their own parents, but inventions are often the collective result of a common cause, when everyone contributed. In addition, many inventions are, as it were, a product of their era, so work on them is carried out simultaneously in different laboratories. So it is with the atomic bomb, it does not have one single parent.

Quite a difficult task, it is difficult to say who exactly invented the atomic bomb, because many scientists were involved in its appearance, who consistently worked on the study of radioactivity, uranium enrichment, chain reaction of fission of heavy nuclei, etc. Here are the main points of its creation:

By 1945, American scientists had invented two atomic bombs Baby weighed 2722 kg and was equipped with enriched Uranium-235 and Fat man with a charge of Plutonium-239 with a power of more than 20 kt, it had a mass of 3175 kg.

On given time completely different in size and shape

Work on nuclear projects in the USA and USSR began simultaneously. In July 1945, an American atomic bomb (Robert Oppenheimer, head of the laboratory) was exploded at the test site, and then, in August, bombs were also dropped on the notorious Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The first test of a Soviet bomb took place in 1949 (project manager Igor Kurchatov), ​​but as they say, its creation was made possible thanks to excellent intelligence.

There is also information that the creators of the atomic bomb were the Germans. You can, for example, read about this here..

There is simply no clear answer to this question - many talented physicists and chemists worked on the creation of deadly weapons capable of destroying the planet, whose names are listed in this article - as we see, the inventor was far from alone.

On August 6, 1945, at 08:15 local time, the American B-29 Enola Gay bomber, piloted by Paul Tibbetts and bombardier Tom Ferebee, dropped the first atomic bomb, the Baby, on Hiroshima. . On August 9, the bombing was repeated - a second bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki.

According to official history, the Americans were the first in the world to make an atomic bomb and hastened to use it against Japan, so that the Japanese would capitulate faster and America could avoid colossal losses during the landing of soldiers on the islands, for which the admirals were already closely preparing. At the same time, the bomb was a demonstration of its new capabilities to the USSR, because Comrade Dzhugashvili in May 1945 was already thinking of spreading the construction of communism to the English Channel.

Having seen the example of Hiroshima, what will happen to Moscow? Soviet party leaders reduced their ardor and made the right decision to build socialism no further than East Berlin. At the same time, they threw all their efforts into the Soviet atomic project, dug up somewhere the talented academician Kurchatov, and he quickly made an atomic bomb for Dzhugashvili, which the secretaries general then rattled on the UN podium, and Soviet propagandists rattled it in front of the audience - they say, yes, we sew pants bad, but« we made an atomic bomb». This argument is almost the main one for many fans of the Soviet Deputies. However, the time has come to refute these arguments.

Somehow the creation of an atomic bomb did not fit in with the level of Soviet science and technology. It is incredible that the slave system was capable of producing such a complex scientific and technological product on its own. Over time, somehow it wasn’t even denied, that people from Lubyanka also helped Kurchatov, bringing ready-made drawings in their beaks, but academicians completely deny this, minimizing the merit of technological intelligence. In America, the Rosenbergs were executed for transferring atomic secrets to the USSR. The dispute between official historians and citizens who want to revise history has been going on for quite some time, almost openly, however, the true state of affairs is far from both the official version and the ideas of its critics. But things are such that the atomic bomb was the firstand many things in the world were done by the Germans by 1945. And they even tested it at the end of 1944.The Americans prepared the atomic project themselves, but received the main components as a trophy or under an agreement with the top of the Reich, so they did everything much faster. But when the Americans detonated the bomb, the USSR began to look for German scientists, whichand made their contribution. That’s why the USSR created a bomb so quickly, although according to the Americans’ calculations, it could not have made a bomb before1952- 55 years old.

The Americans knew what they were talking about because if von Braun helped them make rocket technology, then their first atomic bomb was completely German. For a long time, they managed to hide the truth, but in the decades after 1945, either someone resigning loosened their tongue, or they accidentally declassified a couple of sheets from secret archives, or journalists sniffed out something. The earth was full of rumors and rumors that the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was actually Germanhave been going since 1945. People whispered in the smoking rooms and scratched their foreheads over theireskyinconsistencies and puzzling questions until one day in the early 2000s, Mr. Joseph Farrell, a renowned theologian and expert on an alternative view of modern "science", brought together all the known facts in one book - Black sun of the Third Reich. The battle for the “weapon of retribution.”

He checked the facts many times and many things about which the author had doubts were not included in the book, nevertheless, these facts are more than enough to balance the debit with the credit. You can argue about each of them (which is what US officials do), try to refute them, but all together the facts are extremely convincing. Some of them, for example the Resolutions of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, are completely irrefutable either by the pundits of the USSR, or even more so by the pundits of the USA. Since Dzhugashvili decided to give "enemies of the people"Stalin'sawards(more about below), so there was a reason.

We will not retell Mr. Farrell’s entire book, we simply recommend it as mandatory reading. Here are just a few excerptskifor example a few quotes, govOshouting that the Germans tested an atomic bomb and people saw it:

A certain man named Zinsser, an anti-aircraft missile specialist, spoke about what he witnessed: “At the beginning of October 1944, I took off from Ludwigslust. (south of Lübeck), located 12 to 15 kilometers from the nuclear test site, and suddenly saw a strong bright glow that illuminated the entire atmosphere, which lasted about two seconds.

A clearly visible shock wave erupted from the cloud formed by the explosion. By the time it became visible, it was about one kilometer in diameter, and the color of the cloud changed frequently. After a short period of darkness, it became covered with many bright spots, which, unlike a normal explosion, had a pale blue color.

Approximately ten seconds after the explosion, the distinct outlines of the explosive cloud disappeared, then the cloud itself began to lighten against the background of a dark gray sky covered with continuous clouds. The diameter of the shock wave, still visible to the naked eye, was at least 9,000 meters; it remained visible for at least 15 seconds. My personal feeling from observing the color of the explosive cloud: it took on a blue-violet hue. During this entire phenomenon, reddish-colored rings were visible, very quickly changing color to dirty shades. From my observation plane, I felt a weak impact in the form of slight jolts and jerks.

About an hour later I took off on the Xe-111 from Ludwigslust airfield and headed east. Shortly after takeoff, I flew through an area of ​​continuous clouds (at an altitude of three to four thousand meters). Above the place where the explosion occurred there was a mushroom cloud with turbulent, vortex layers (at an altitude of approximately 7000 meters), without any visible connections. A strong electromagnetic disturbance manifested itself in the inability to continue radio communication. Since American P-38 fighters were operating in the Wittgenberg-Beersburg area, I had to turn north, but at least I could see the lower part of the cloud above the explosion site better. Note: I don't really understand why these tests were carried out in such a densely populated area."

ARI:Thus, a certain German pilot observed the testing of a device that, in all respects, resembled an atomic bomb. There are dozens of such evidence, but Mr. Farrell cites only officialdocuments. And not only the Germans, but also the Japanese, whom the Germans, according to his version, also helped make a bomb and they tested it at their test site.

Shortly after the end of World War II, American intelligence Pacific Ocean received an amazing report: just before the surrender, the Japanese built and successfully tested an atomic bomb. The work was carried out in the city of Konan or its environs (the Japanese name for the city of Heungnam) in the north of the Korean Peninsula.

The war ended before these weapons saw combat use, and the production facility where they were made is now in Russian hands.

In the summer of 1946, this information was made widely public. David Snell, a member of the Twenty-Fourth Investigative Unit working in Korea... wrote about this in the Atlanta Constitution after his dismissal.

Snell's statement was based on unsubstantiated allegations by a Japanese officer returning to Japan. The officer advised Snell that he was assigned to provide security for the facility. Snell, recounting the testimony of a Japanese officer in his own words in a newspaper article, stated:

In a cave in the mountains near Konan, people were working, racing against time to complete the assembly of the “genzai bakudan” - the Japanese name for the atomic bomb. It was August 10, 1945 (Japan time), just four days after the atomic explosion tore through the sky

ARI: Among the arguments of those who do not believe in the creation of an atomic bomb by the Germans is the following argument: it is not known that significant industrial capacities in Hitler’s empire were allocated to the German atomic project, as was done in the USA. However, this argument is refuted by oneAn extremely interesting fact associated with the concern “I. G. Farben", which, according to official legend, produced syntheticeskyrubber and therefore consumed more electricity than Berlin at that time. But in reality, over the five years of work, EVEN A KILOGRAM of official products was not produced there, and most likely it was the main center for uranium enrichment:

Concern "I. G. Farben took an active part in the atrocities of Nazism, creating a huge plant for the production of synthetic buna rubber in Auschwitz (the German name for the Polish town of Oswiecim) in the Polish part of Silesia during the war.

The concentration camp prisoners, who first worked on the construction of the complex and then served it, were subjected to unheard of cruelties. However, at the hearings of the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal, it turned out that the buna production complex in Auschwitz was one of the greatest mysteries of the war, because despite the personal blessing of Hitler, Himmler, Goering and Keitel, despite the endless source of both qualified civilian personnel and slave labor from Auschwitz, “the work was constantly hampered by disruptions, delays and sabotage... However, despite everything, the construction of a huge complex for the production of synthetic rubber and gasoline was completed. Over three hundred thousand concentration camp prisoners passed through the construction site; Of these, twenty-five thousand died from exhaustion, unable to withstand the grueling labor.

The complex turned out to be gigantic. So huge that “it consumed more electricity than the whole of Berlin.” However, during the war crimes tribunal, the investigators of the victorious powers were not puzzled by this long list creepy details. They were baffled by the fact that, despite such a huge investment of money, materials and human lives, “not a single kilogram of synthetic rubber was ever produced.”

The directors and managers of Farben, who found themselves in the dock, insisted on this, as if possessed. Consume more electricity than all of Berlin - at the time the eighth largest city in the world - to produce absolutely nothing? If this is indeed the case, it means that the unprecedented expenditure of money and labor and the enormous consumption of electricity did not make any significant contribution to the German war effort. Surely something is wrong here.

ARI: Electrical energy in insane quantities is one of the main components of any nuclear project. It is needed for the production of heavy water - it is obtained by evaporating tons of natural water, after which the very water that nuclear scientists need remains at the bottom. Electricity is needed for the electrochemical separation of metals; uranium cannot be extracted any other way. And you also need a lot of it. Based on this, historians argued that since the Germans did not have such energy-intensive plants for enriching uranium and producing heavy water, that means there was no atomic bomb. But as we see, everything was there. Only it was called differently - similar to how in the USSR there was then a secret “sanatorium” for German physicists.

An even more surprising fact is the use by the Germans of an unfinished atomic bomb on... the Kursk Bulge.

As a finale to this chapter and a breathtaking indication of other mysteries that will be explored later in this book, a report declassified by the Agency national security only in 1978. This report appears to be a transcript of an intercepted message transmitted from the Japanese embassy in Stockholm to Tokyo. It is entitled "Report on the Splitting Bomb." It is best to cite this amazing document in its entirety, with the omissions that were made when deciphering the original message.

This bomb, revolutionary in its impact, will completely overturn all established concepts of conventional warfare. I am sending you all the reports collected together on what is called the fission bomb:

It is reliably known that in June 1943, the German army tested a completely new type of weapon against the Russians at a point 150 kilometers southeast of Kursk. Although the entire 19th Russian Infantry Regiment was hit, just a few bombs (each with a combat charge of less than 5 kilograms) were enough to destroy it completely, down to the last man. The following material is given according to the testimony of Lieutenant Colonel Ue (?) Kenji, adviser to the attaché in Hungary and formerly (working?) in this country, who happened to see the consequences of what happened immediately after it happened: “All the people and horses (? in the area? ) the explosion of the shells were charred black, and even all the ammunition detonated.”

ARI:However, even withhowlofficial documents official US pundits are tryingto refute - they say, all these reports, reports and additional protocols are fakeRosovBut the balance still does not add up because by August 1945 the United States did not have enough uranium to produce bothminimummindtwo, and possibly four atomic bombs. Without uranium there will be no bomb, but it takes years to be mined. By 1944, the United States had no more than a quarter of the required uranium, and it would take at least another five years to extract the rest. And suddenly uranium seemed to fall on their heads from the sky:

In December 1944, a very unpleasant report was prepared, which greatly upset those who read it: “An analysis of the supply (of weapons-grade uranium) over the past three months shows the following ...: at the current rate, we will have approximately 10 kilograms of uranium by February 7, and by May 1 - 15 kilograms.” This was indeed very unpleasant news, because to create a uranium-based bomb, according to initial estimates made in 1942, 10 to 100 kilograms of uranium were required, and by the time of this memorandum, more accurate calculations had given the value of the critical mass required to produce uranium atomic bomb, equal to approximately 50 kilograms.

However, it was not only the Manhattan Project that had problems with missing uranium. Germany also seemed to suffer from "missing uranium syndrome" in the days immediately preceding and immediately after the end of the war. But in this case, the volumes of missing uranium were calculated not in tens of kilograms, but in hundreds of tons. It is worthwhile at this point to quote at length from the brilliant work of Carter Hydrick to explore this issue in depth:

From June 1940 until the end of the war, Germany removed three and a half thousand tons of uranium-containing substances from Belgium - almost three times what Groves had at his disposal... and placed them in salt mines near Strassfurt in Germany.

ARI: Leslie Richard Groves (Eng. Leslie Richard Groves; August 17, 1896 - July 13, 1970) - Lieutenant General of the US Army, in 1942-1947 - military director of the nuclear weapons program (Manhattan Project).

Groves states that on April 17, 1945, when the war was already drawing to a close, the Allies managed to capture about 1,100 tons of uranium ore in Strassfurt and another 31 tons in the French port of Toulouse... And he claims that Germany never had more uranium ore, especially thereby showing that Germany never had enough material either to process uranium into raw material for a plutonium reactor, or to enrich it by electromagnetic separation.

Obviously, if at one time 3,500 tons were stored in Strassfurt, and only 1,130 were captured, approximately 2,730 tons remain - and this is still double what the Manhattan Project had throughout the war... The fate of this missing ore unknown to this day...

According to historian Margaret Gowing, by the summer of 1941 Germany had enriched 600 tons of uranium into the oxide form needed to ionize the raw material into a gas in which uranium isotopes could be separated magnetically or thermally. (Italics mine. - D.F.) The oxide can also be converted into a metal for use as a feedstock in a nuclear reactor. In fact, Professor Reichl, who was responsible for all the uranium at Germany's disposal throughout the war, claims that the true figure was much higher...

ARI: So it is clear that without obtaining enriched uranium from somewhere outside, and some detonation technology, the Americans would not have been able to test or detonate their bombs over Japan in August 1945. And they received, as it turns out,missing components from the Germans.

In order to create a uranium or plutonium bomb, uranium-containing raw materials must be converted into metal at a certain stage. For a plutonium bomb, metallic U238 is obtained; for a uranium bomb, U235 is needed. However, due to the treacherous characteristics of uranium, this metallurgical process is extremely complex. The United States took up the problem early, but did not learn to successfully convert uranium into metallic form in large quantities until late 1942. German specialists... by the end of 1940 had already converted 280.6 kilograms, more than a quarter of a ton, into metal."

In any case, these figures clearly indicate that in 1940–1942 the Germans were significantly ahead of the Allies in one very important component of the atomic bomb production process - uranium enrichment, and therefore also leads to the conclusion that they have come far ahead in the race to possess a working atomic bomb. However, these figures also raise one troubling question: where did all that uranium go?

The answer to this question is provided by the mysterious incident with the German submarine U-234, captured by the Americans in 1945.

The story of U-234 is well known to all researchers of the Nazi atomic bomb, and, of course, “Allied legend” has it that the materials aboard the captured submarine were in no way used in the Manhattan Project.

All this is absolutely not true. U-234 was a very large underwater minelayer, capable of carrying large cargo underwater. Consider the supremely strange cargo that was aboard U-234 on that final voyage:

Two Japanese officers.

80 gold-lined cylindrical containers containing 560 kilograms of uranium oxide.

Several wooden barrels filled with “heavy water”.

Infrared proximity fuses.

Dr. Heinz Schlicke, inventor of these fuses.

As U-234 was being loaded in a German port before setting out on its final voyage, the submarine's radio operator, Wolfgang Hirschfeld, noticed that Japanese officers were writing "U235" on the paper in which the containers were wrapped before loading them into the hold of the boat. It hardly needs to be said that this remark caused the whole barrage of revealing criticism with which skeptics usually greet the stories of UFO eyewitnesses: the low position of the sun above the horizon, poor lighting, a large distance that did not allow us to see everything clearly, and the like. And this is not surprising, because if Hirschfeld really saw what he saw, the frightening consequences are obvious.

The use of gold-lined containers is explained by the fact that uranium, a highly corrosive metal, quickly becomes contaminated when it comes into contact with other unstable elements. Gold, which is not inferior to lead in terms of protection from radioactive radiation, unlike lead, is a very pure and extremely stable element; therefore, it is an obvious choice for the storage and long-term transportation of highly enriched and pure uranium. Thus, the uranium oxide on board U-234 was highly enriched uranium, most likely U235, the last stage of the raw material before being converted into weapons-grade or metallic uranium suitable for bomb production (if it was not already weapons-grade uranium) . Indeed, if the inscriptions made by Japanese officers on the containers were true, it is very likely that we were talking about the last stage of refining the raw materials before turning them into metal.

The cargo on board U-234 was so sensitive that when representatives of the US Navy compiled an inventory of it on June 16, 1945, uranium oxide disappeared from the list without a trace.....

Yes, this would be the easiest way, if not for the unexpected confirmation from a certain Pyotr Ivanovich Titarenko, a former military translator from the headquarters of Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, who at the end of the war accepted the surrender of Japan from the Soviet Union. As the German magazine Der Spiegel wrote in 1992, Titarenko wrote a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In it, he reported that in reality three atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, one of which, dropped on Nagasaki before the Fat Man exploded over the city, did not explode. This bomb was subsequently transferred by Japan to the Soviet Union.

Mussolini and the Soviet Marshal's translator are not the only ones who confirm the version of the strange number of bombs dropped on Japan; There may have been a fourth bomb in play at some point, which was being transported to the Far East aboard the US Navy heavy cruiser Indianapolis (hull number CA 35) when it sank in 1945.

This strange evidence again raises questions about the “Allied Legend”, for, as has already been shown, in late 1944 - early 1945 the Manhattan Project faced a critical shortage of weapons-grade uranium, and by that time the problem of fuses for plutonium had not been solved. bombs. So the question is: if these reports were true, where did the additional bomb (or even several bombs) come from? It's hard to believe that three or even four bombs ready for use in Japan were made in such as soon as possible, - unless they were war booty taken from Europe.

ARI: Actually the storyU-234begins in 1944, when after the opening of the 2nd front and failures on the Eastern Front, perhaps on Hitler’s instructions, a decision was made to start trading with the allies - an atomic bomb in exchange for guarantees of immunity for the party elite:

Be that as it may, we are primarily interested in the role that Bormann played in the development and implementation of the plan for the secret strategic evacuation of the Nazis after their military defeat. After the Stalingrad disaster in early 1943, it became obvious to Bormann, like other high-ranking Nazis, that the military collapse of the Third Reich was inevitable if their secret weapons projects did not bear fruit in time. Bormann and representatives of various weapons departments, industrial sectors and, of course, the SS gathered for a secret meeting at which plans were developed for the removal of material assets, qualified personnel, scientific materials and technology from Germany......

First, JIOA director Grun, who was appointed to lead the project, compiled a list of the most qualified German and Austrian scientists that the Americans and British had used for decades. Although journalists and historians have repeatedly mentioned this list, none of them said that Werner Osenberg, who served as head of the scientific department of the Gestapo during the war, took part in its compilation. The decision to involve Ozenberg in this work was made by US Navy Captain Ransom Davis after consultation with the Joint Chiefs of Staff......

Finally, the Osenberg list and the American interest in it seem to support another hypothesis, namely that the knowledge that the Americans had about the nature of the Nazi projects, as evidenced by General Patton's unerring efforts to find Kammler's secret research centers, could come only from Nazi Germany itself. Since Carter Heidrick has proven very convincingly that Bormann personally directed the transfer of German atomic bomb secrets to the Americans, it can be safely argued that he ultimately coordinated the flow of other important information regarding the "Kammler Headquarters" to the American intelligence agencies, since no one knew better about him. the nature, content and personnel of German black projects. Thus, Carter Heidrick's thesis that Borman helped organize the transportation to the United States on the U-234 submarine of not only enriched uranium, but also a ready-to-use atomic bomb, looks very plausible.

ARI: In addition to the uranium itself, a lot more is needed for an atomic bomb, in particular fuses based on red mercury. Unlike a conventional detonator, these devices must explode super-synchronously, collecting the uranium mass into a single whole and starting a nuclear reaction. This technology is extremely complex; the United States did not have it and therefore the fuses were included in the kit. And since the question did not end with fuses, the Americans dragged German nuclear scientists to their place for consultations before loading an atomic bomb on board a plane flying to Japan:

There is another fact that does not fit into the post-war legend of the Allies regarding the impossibility of the Germans creating an atomic bomb: the German physicist Rudolf Fleischmann was flown to the United States for interrogation even before the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Why was there such an urgent need to consult with the German physicist before the atomic bombing of Japan? After all, according to the Allied legend, we had nothing to learn from the Germans in the field of atomic physics......

ARI:Thus, there is no doubt left - Germany had a bomb in May 1945. WhyHitlerdidn't use it? Because one atomic bomb is not a bomb. For a bomb to become a weapon there must be a sufficient number of themquality, multiplied by the means of delivery. Hitler could destroy New York and London, could choose to wipe out a couple of divisions moving towards Berlin. But this would not have decided the outcome of the war in his favor. But the Allies would have come to Germany in a very bad mood. The Germans already suffered in 1945, but if Germany had used nuclear weapons, its population would have suffered much more. Germany could have been wiped off the face of the earth, like Dresden, for example. Therefore, although Mr. Hitler is considered by someWithathe was not a mad politician, but nevertheless he was not a crazy politician, and weigh everything soberlyVquietly leaked the Second World War: we give you a bomb - and you don’t let the USSR reach the English Channel and guarantee a quiet old age for the Nazi elite.

So separate negotiationsOry in April 1945, described in the moviesrAbout 17 moments of spring really took place. But only at such a level that no Pastor Schlag could even dream of over-talkingOThe ry was led by Hitler himself. And physicsRthere was no unge because while Stirlitz was chasing him Manfred von Ardenne

already tested the finished productweapons - at least in 1943onTOthe Ur arc, at most in Norway, no later than 1944.

By byunderstandable???AndTo us, Mr. Farrell’s book is not being promoted either in the West or in Russia; not everyone caught the eye of it. But information is making its way and one day even a stupid person will know how nuclear weapons were made. And there will be a veryicantthe situation will have to be radically reconsideredall officialhistorythe last 70 years.

However, the worst thing will be for official pundits in RussiaIn federation, which for many years repeated the old mAntru: mAour tires may be bad, but we createdwhetheratomic bombbu.But as it turns out, even American engineers were unable to handle nuclear devices, at least in 1945. The USSR is not involved here at all - today the Russian federation would compete with Iran on who can make a bomb faster,if not for one BUT. BUT - these are captured German engineers who made nuclear weapons for Dzhugashvili.

It is reliably known, and academicians of the USSR do not deny it, that 3,000 captured Germans worked on the USSR missile project. That is, they essentially launched Gagarin into space. But as many as 7,000 specialists worked on the Soviet nuclear projectfrom Germany,so it is not surprising that the Soviets made an atomic bomb before they flew into space. If the USA still had its own path in the atomic race, then the USSR simply stupidly reproduced German technology.

In 1945, a group of colonels were searching for specialists in Germany, who in fact were not colonels, but secret physicists - future academicians Artsimovich, Kikoin, Khariton, Shchelkin... The operation was led by First Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Ivan Serov.

Over two hundred of the most prominent German physicists (about half of them were doctors of science), radio engineers and craftsmen were brought to Moscow. In addition to the equipment of the Ardenne laboratory, equipment from the Berlin Kaiser Institute and other German scientific organizations, documentation and reagents, supplies of film and paper for recorders, photo recorders, wire tape recorders for telemetry, optics, powerful electromagnets and even German transformers were later delivered to Moscow. And then the Germans, under pain of death, began to build an atomic bomb for the USSR. They built it from scratch because by 1945 the USA had some of their own developments, the Germans were simply far ahead of them, but in the USSR, in the kingdom of “science” of academicians like Lysenko, there was nothing on the nuclear program. Here's what researchers on this topic managed to dig up:

In 1945, the sanatoriums “Sinop” and “Agudzery”, located in Abkhazia, were placed at the disposal of German physicists. This was the beginning of the Sukhumi Institute of Physics and Technology, which was then part of the system of top-secret facilities of the USSR. “Sinop” was called Object “A” in documents and was headed by Baron Manfred von Ardenne (1907–1997). This personality is legendary in world science: one of the founders of television, developer of electron microscopes and many other devices. During one meeting, Beria wanted to entrust the leadership of the atomic project to von Ardenne. Ardenne himself recalls: “I had no more than ten seconds to think about it. My answer is verbatim: I consider such an important offer as a great honor for me, because... this is an expression of exceptionally great confidence in my abilities. The solution to this problem has two different directions: 1. Development of the atomic bomb itself and 2. Development of methods for producing the fissile isotope of uranium 235U on an industrial scale. The separation of isotopes is a separate and very difficult problem. Therefore, I propose that the separation of isotopes should be the main problem of our institute and German specialists, and that the leading nuclear scientists of the Soviet Union sitting here would do a great job of creating an atomic bomb for their homeland.”

Beria accepted this offer. Many years later, at one government reception, when Manfred von Ardenne was introduced to the Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, Khrushchev, he reacted like this: “Ah, you are the same Ardenne who so skillfully took his neck out of the noose.”

Von Ardenne later assessed his contribution to the development of the atomic problem as “the most important thing to which post-war circumstances led me.” In 1955, the scientist was allowed to travel to the GDR, where he headed a research institute in Dresden.

Sanatorium "Agudzery" received the code name Object "G". It was led by Gustav Hertz (1887–1975), nephew of the famous Heinrich Hertz, known to us from school. Gustav Hertz received the Nobel Prize in 1925 for the discovery of the laws of collision of an electron with an atom - the famous experiment of Frank and Hertz. In 1945, Gustav Hertz became one of the first German physicists brought to the USSR. He was the only foreign Nobel laureate who worked in the USSR. Like other German scientists, he lived without being denied anything in his house on seashore. In 1955, Hertz went to the GDR. There he worked as a professor at the University of Leipzig, and then as director of the Physics Institute at the university.

The main task of von Ardenne and Gustav Hertz was to find different methods for separating uranium isotopes. Thanks to von Ardenne, one of the first mass spectrometers appeared in the USSR. Hertz successfully improved his method of isotope separation, which made it possible to establish this process on an industrial scale.

Other prominent German scientists were also brought to the site in Sukhumi, including physicist and radiochemist Nikolaus Riehl (1901–1991). They called him Nikolai Vasilyevich. He was born in St. Petersburg, in the family of a German - the chief engineer of Siemens and Halske. Nikolaus had a Russian mother, so he spoke German and Russian from childhood. He received an excellent technical education: first in St. Petersburg, and after the family moved to Germany - at the Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin (later Humboldt University). In 1927 he defended his doctoral dissertation on radiochemistry. His scientific supervisors were future scientific luminaries - nuclear physicist Lisa Meitner and radiochemist Otto Hahn. Before the outbreak of World War II, Riehl was in charge of the central radiological laboratory of the Auergesellschaft company, where he proved himself to be an energetic and very capable experimenter. At the beginning of the war, Riel was summoned to War Ministry, where they proposed to engage in uranium production. In May 1945, Riehl voluntarily came to the Soviet emissaries sent to Berlin. The scientist, considered the main expert in the Reich on the production of enriched uranium for reactors, indicated where the equipment needed for this was located. Its fragments (the plant near Berlin was destroyed by bombing) were dismantled and sent to the USSR. The 300 tons of uranium compounds found there were also taken there. It is believed that this saved the Soviet Union a year and a half to create an atomic bomb - until 1945, Igor Kurchatov had only 7 tons of uranium oxide at his disposal. Under Riehl's leadership, the Elektrostal plant in Noginsk near Moscow was converted to produce cast uranium metal.

Trains with equipment went from Germany to Sukhumi. Three out of four German cyclotrons were brought to the USSR, as well as powerful magnets, electron microscopes, oscilloscopes, high-voltage transformers, ultra-precise instruments, etc. Equipment was delivered to the USSR from the Institute of Chemistry and Metallurgy, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics, Siemens electrical laboratories, Institute of Physics of the German Post Office.

Igor Kurchatov was appointed scientific director of the project, who was undoubtedly an outstanding scientist, but he always surprised his employees with his extraordinary “scientific insight” - as it later turned out, he knew most of the secrets from intelligence, but had no right to talk about it. The following episode, told by academician Isaac Kikoin, speaks about leadership methods. At one meeting, Beria asked Soviet physicists how long it would take to solve one problem. They answered him: six months. The answer was: “Either you solve it in one month, or you will deal with this problem in places much more remote.” Of course, the task was completed in one month. But the authorities spared no expense and rewards. Many people, including German scientists, received Stalin Prizes, dachas, cars and other rewards. Nikolaus Riehl, however, the only foreign scientist, even received the title of Hero of Socialist Labor. German scientists played a big role in raising the qualifications of Georgian physicists who worked with them.

ARI: So the Germans didn’t just help the USSR a lot with the creation of the atomic bomb - they did everything. Moreover, this story was like with the “Kalashnikov assault rifle” because even German gunsmiths could not have made such a perfect weapon in a couple of years - while working in captivity in the USSR, they simply completed what was almost ready. It’s the same with the atomic bomb, work on which the Germans began back in 1933, and perhaps much earlier. Official story believes that Hitler annexed the Sudetenland because many Germans lived there. This may be true, but the Sudetenland is the richest uranium deposit in Europe. There is a suspicion that Hitler knew where to start in the first place, because German successors from the time of Peter were in Russia, and in Australia, and even in Africa. But Hitler started with the Sudetenland. Apparently some people knowledgeable in alchemy immediately explained to him what to do and which way to go, so it is not surprising that the Germans were far ahead of everyone and the American intelligence services in Europe in the forties of the last century were already just picking up scraps from the Germans, hunting for medieval alchemical manuscripts.

But the USSR didn’t even have scraps. There was only “academician” Lysenko, according to whose theories weeds growing on a collective farm field, and not on a private farm, had every reason to be imbued with the spirit of socialism and turn into wheat. In medicine, there was a similar “scientific school” that tried to speed up pregnancy from 9 months to nine weeks - so that the wives of the proletarians would not be distracted from work. There were similar theories in nuclear physics, therefore, for the USSR, creating an atomic bomb was as impossible as creating its own computer, because cybernetics in the USSR was officially considered a prostitute of the bourgeoisie. By the way, important scientific decisions in physics (for example, which direction to go and which theories to consider as working) in the USSR were made, at best, by “academicians” from agriculture. Although more often this was done by a party functionary with an education in the “evening workers’ faculty.” What kind of atomic bomb could there be at this base? Only someone else's. In the USSR they could not even assemble it from ready-made components with ready-made drawings. The Germans did everything, and in this regard there is even official recognition of their merits - Stalin Prizes and orders, which were awarded to the engineers:

German specialists are laureates of the Stalin Prize for their work in the field of atomic energy use. Excerpts from the resolutions of the Council of Ministers of the USSR “on awards and bonuses...”.

[From the resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR No. 5070-1944ss/op “On awards and bonuses for outstanding scientific discoveries and technical achievements in the use of atomic energy,” October 29, 1949]

[From the resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR No. 4964-2148ss/op “On awards and bonuses for outstanding scientific work in the field of the use of atomic energy, for the creation of new types of RDS products, achievements in the field of production of plutonium and uranium-235 and the development of the raw material base for the nuclear industry" , December 6, 1951 ]

[From the resolution of the Council of Ministers of the USSR No. 3044-1304ss “On awarding Stalin Prizes to scientific, engineering and technical workers of the Ministry of Medium Engineering and other departments for the creation of a hydrogen bomb and new designs of atomic bombs,” December 31, 1953]

Manfred von Ardenne

1947 - Stalin Prize (electron microscope - "In January 1947, the Chief of the Site presented von Ardenne with the State Prize (a purse full of money) for his microscope work.") "German Scientists in the Soviet Atomic Project", p . 18)

1953 - Stalin Prize, 2nd degree (electromagnetic separation of isotopes, lithium-6).

Heinz Barvich

Gunther Wirtz

Gustav Hertz

1951 - Stalin Prize, 2nd degree (theory of stability of gas diffusion in cascades).

Gerard Jaeger

1953 - Stalin Prize 3rd degree (electromagnetic separation of isotopes, lithium-6).

Reinhold Reichman (Reichman)

1951 - Stalin Prize 1st degree (posthumously) (technology development

production of ceramic tubular filters for diffusion machines).

Nikolaus Riehl

1949 - Hero of Socialist Labor, Stalin Prize 1st degree (development and implementation of industrial technology for the production of pure uranium metal).

Herbert Thieme

1949 - Stalin Prize, 2nd degree (development and implementation of industrial technology for the production of pure uranium metal).

1951 - Stalin Prize, 2nd degree (development of industrial technology for the production of high-purity uranium and the manufacture of products from it).

Peter Thiessen

1956 - State Prize Thyssen,_Peter

Heinz Froehlich

1953 - Stalin Prize, 3rd degree (electromagnetic isotope separation, lithium-6).

Ziehl Ludwig

1951 - Stalin Prize, 1st degree (development of technology for the production of ceramic tubular filters for diffusion machines).

Werner Schütze

1949 - Stalin Prize, 2nd degree (mass spectrometer).

ARI: This is how the story turns out - not a trace remains of the myth that the Volga is a bad car, but we made an atomic bomb. All that remains is the bad Volga car. And it wouldn’t have existed if they hadn’t bought the drawings from Ford. There would be nothing because the Bolshevik state is not capable of creating anything by definition. For the same reason, the Russian state cannot create anything, only sell natural resources.

Mikhail Saltan, Gleb Shcherbatov

For the stupid, just in case, we explain that we are not talking about the intellectual potential of the Russian people, it is quite high, we are talking about the creative possibilities of the Soviet bureaucratic system, which, in principle, cannot allow scientific talents to be revealed.