SakshiPutting An End
The bombs were dropped on August 6, 1945, two weeks before the World War officially ended. The war had caught the U.S a lot of attention and that was one of the reasons why despite lots of attention Soviet Union’s mission remained a mystery. However, the nuclear attack did give the Soviet Union a wake-up call and they began accelerating the process.
Ignited Spirit
The communist country indeed had been stirred by U.S act. They immediately constituted a team of experts spearheaded by Lavrentiy Beria, People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs. The team was equipped with a heavy budget and were tasked to do whatever they could to achieve the aim of developing nuclear weapons that would compete with the U.S.
Operation On
The Soviet Union did not want to lag behind the United States on any front. The southern Ural mountains were going to be the venue where USSR was going to construct a plutonium-production complex. Russia’s Mayak Chemical Combine had taken up the command of operating the military-industrial community. So what was the secret city going to be called? It’s Chelyabinsk-40.
Stepping Stone
It was in 1949, the Soviet Union carried out its first nuclear test. It was a success. Moreover, the RDS-1-device had a striking resemblance with “Fat Man,” explosive dropped on Nagasaki. The reason behind it was that the Soviet’s espionage had successfully fetched all the details regarding the U.S. Manhattan Project along with the Trinity test conducted on 16 July 1945. The device used by Soviet was also a plutonium-based implosion device too. From thereon August 29 was celebrated as the day when this remarkable test took place.
CIA Statement
CIA later admitted that if the information had not been flown from insiders to outsiders, USSR would not have been able to crack the nuclear formulae so easily. Unlike the US who achieved the correct formulae after using many other methods, they followed the right method and saved themselves a lot of time from doing research.
Launched Off
The bomb was launched off from a steel tower that had a height of 50 m(160feet). The bomb was code-named as Pervaya Molniya that means “first lightening.” The device had a yield of twenty-two kilotonnes. As mentioned earlier, the test was kept a secret from the world. However, U.S. did manage to get a clue about it.