Soviet Union successfully tested its first atomic bomb on this day in 1949; Know more

On this day, i.e. August 29, in 1949, the USSR successfully tested its first atomic bomb, code-named ‘First lighting’, in Kazakhstan. USSR detonated the atomic bomb at a remote site at Semipalatinsk and on September 3, a US spy plane flying off the coast of Siberia picked up the first evidence of radioactivity from the explosion. In a bid to measure the effects of the blast, the Soviet scientist even constructed buildings, bridges and other civilian structures in the vicinity of the bomb. 

According to anecdotes, the device had a yield of 22 kilotons. The 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had prompted the then leader Joseph Stalin to order the development of nuclear weapons within five years. The young nuclear physicist Igor Kurchatov was charged with leading the project. 

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The ‘First lightening’, also known as ‘RDS-1’, bore a close resemblance to the US ‘Fat Man’ bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki. It is believed that Soviet espionage had managed to obtain details about the US Manhattan Project and the ‘Trinity’ test on July 16, 1945. USSR’s device was also a plutonium-based implosion device. 

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Soviet Union espionage 

Klaus Fuchs, a German-born physicist who had helped the United States build its first atomic bombs, was later arrested for passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets. As per anecdotes, while stationed at US atomic development headquarters during World War II, Fuchs had given the Soviets precise information about the US atomic program, including a blueprint of the “Fat Man” atomic bomb. He had also given everything the Los Alamos scientists knew about the hypothesized hydrogen bomb. 

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The revelation of the soviet espionage, coupled with the loss of US atomic supremacy, led to the then US President Harry S Truman to order developments of the hydrogen bomb, which was a weapon theorised to be hundred times more powerful that the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. Within a few years, the Cold War nuclear arms race was at full stream. In 1951, the US exploded the first thermonuclear device in the ‘George’ test, to be followed two more years later by the USSR with the RDS-6 test. 

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As per reports, until the end of the Cold War, the US had conducted nearly 1,032 nuclear tests, and the Soviet Union 715. The USSR also conducted 456 test at the Semipalatinsk test site, with severe consequences for the local population, including high cancer rates, genetic defects and deformations in babies. After its independence from the USSR, Kazakhstan, however, closed its test site, exactly after 42 years of RDS-1 testing. 

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