Russia's First Atomic Bomb: The Greatest Secret Ever Lost

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Pictured: A photo of First Lightning, the first ever Soviet atomic bomb test. The United States assigned it the code-name Joe-1, in reference to Joseph Stalin. It was detonated on 29 August 1949 at 7:00 a.m., at Semipalatinsk, Kazakh SSR, after top-secret research and development as part of the Soviet atomic bomb project.

It was in 1939 that Winston Churchill famously defined Russia as "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” The Soviet Union’s atom bomb project could certainly be considered a riddle, a mystery, and an enigma, such was its secrecy at the time.

Russia had been conducting independent research into radioactive elements as early as 1910, long before it even became the Soviet Union or USSR. By the 1930s Russian scientists had made remarkable efforts towards the advancement of physics research, even with setbacks such as the 1917 October Revolution and civil war of 1922.

Scientists tend to be a sharing community. That’s why Russian physicist, Georgy Flyorov, became suspicious in 1942 that the Allied powers were secretly developing an atomic super-weapon when his literature search showed that no one in the West was writing on nuclear fission. And so he wrote an urgent letter to Joseph Stalin pleading with him to start a Soviet atomic program.

Notable too is a report dated February 28th, 1945, and written for Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s right-hand man and the head of the NKVD, the country’s dreaded secret police. The report was titled “Progress of the Atomic Bomb Abroad” and stated that it was expected the United States would produce an atom bomb by July of that year.

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