prisoners had vacated, with three levels of wooden berths in four rows. “In the morning,” the soldier remembers, “after a light breakfast of oat or millet porridge and tea, we were formed up into teams and marched through the forest to work. Our job was to dig trenches for pipelines and cables. The norm per person was established at 2.5 cubic meters of hard and frozen soil to be cut with sledgehammer and chisel. We were organized in teams so that one member could hold the chisel and the other swing the sledgehammer. Only after fulfilling our norms could we get a meal. After such hard work we were subjected to humiliating drills, goose-stepping or crawling on our bellies in the snow. People were exhausted and unhappy.”
The soldier's regiment comprised some seven hundred men; there were four such regiments in the central zone at Chelyabinsk-40 as well as four prison camps (including one for political prisoners and one for women). They were helping build B installation, the vast remote-controlled chemical plant that would dissolve the irradiated uranium discharged from the A reactor and chemically separate the kopek's-weight of plutonium contained in each ton. “We worked in three shifts,” the soldier says. “There was no shortage of manpower.” After blasting into the bedrock, the
We were wakened by an alarm signal and ran to the pit. It was all on fire, vast flames shooting out. We were ordered to shovel gravel into the pit to contain the fire, but it was so hot we were unable to approach the edge. So we returned to our barracks. The next day, Lavrenti Pavlovich Beria himself flew in with his staff — to investigate the circumstances of this sabotage, so we were told. Of course, nobody ever told us the results of this investigation.
Damage from the B installation fire was quickly repaired; by December 1948 the plant was built and operating. Soviet health officials had established radiation standards for A and B installation workers, but Russian nuclear experts report that “during the start-up period the radiation conditions at both facilities were very hard.” It was impossible to work at the plutonium separation plant without dangerous radiation exposure. Sixty-six percent of B installation workers received subclinical but excessive doses in the first year of operation of up to 100 rem; an unlucky 7 percent received above 100 rem where clinical signs such as vomiting and blood changes begin to appear. (For comparison, the average lifetime dose of workers in the US and British nuclear-weapons industry has been estimated at from 3 to 11 rem.) “The first cases of radiation sickness [showed] up as early as the beginning of 1949,” the Russian experts write. Workers as well as managers recognized the danger, the experts add, but claim “they realized that the country needed nuclear arms desperately and often put their safety at risk.” One manager at least supports the experts’ claim of patriotic sacrifice. “We used to wake up every morning and cup an ear toward the west,” Boris Brokhovich, one of the first engineers on site at Chelyabinsk-40 and later its director, told an American physicist in retirement. “We expected to hear your B-29s coming over the Urals. We couldn't believe you would allow us to build this place and make a bomb.” But safety in Berialand was a secondary consideration at best; B installation, by design, discharged its intensely radioactive fission wastes directly into the Techa River. By 1951, radioactivity from Chelyabinsk-40 had been measured in river water discharging into the Arctic Ocean more than a thousand miles north.
New Year's Eve. “We were strictly forbidden any access to the ‘Techa’ settlement where the scientists lived,” the conscript soldier reports. “In our zone there was only one shop, selling odds and ends, including Troynoi [“Triple”] brand eau-de-Cologne. We bought some and saved it to [drink to] celebrate the New Year, sitting on our berths and wondering why we had been sent to such a place. Up on the third level of the wooden berths, three Georgians were also drinking Troynoi and singing sad Georgian songs. Such ‘festivals’ were very rare, life was mostly routine.”
But life was far worse for the
[Looking] out the [factory] window… I saw some observation posts with guards on them. A bit to the left, I saw some people, but I couldn't tell what kind of people they were. They were not human beings, but heaps of rags… They were wearing some sort of torn padded shirts and skirts made of khaki-colored shreds. Some of them were wearing old clogs on their feet; others had old ankle-boots tied with string. The women had shaved, dirty heads. The director [of the factory] said one could not go near these people because they stank so. They were rotting away…
The women slept fifty to a barrack, on litters, without mattresses or blankets; they had only the rags they worked in during the day to cover themselves with and put under their heads. The walls were red, as though covered with blood. The reason was that, though they worked during the day, they spent their nights crushing bedbugs. It was impossible to talk with these women, and whenever the manager tried to start a conversation with them, he got nowhere, as these people were so degraded that they had almost lost the use of their tongues. They answered all questions with oaths. Why had they become what they were? They said frankly that they had lost their entire past and had nothing more to hope from the future.
The first plutonium nitrate solution from B installation went to a temporary purification facility, “Shop No. 9,” on February 27, 1949. By late spring, Anatoli Alexandrov, who was responsible for plutonium separation, was nickel-plating two hemispheres of plutonium — the first Soviet bomb core — when Pervukhin arrived with a platoon of generals:
They asked what I was doing. I explained, and then they asked a strange question: “Why do you think it is plutonium?” I said that I knew the whole technical process for obtaining it and was therefore sure that it was plutonium and could not be anything else! “But why are you sure that some piece of iron hasn't been substituted for it?” I held up a piece to the alpha counter and it began to crackle at once. “Look,” I said, “it's alpha-active.” “But perhaps it has just been rubbed with plutonium on the outside and that is why it crackles,” said someone. I grew angry, took that piece and held it out to them: “Feel it, it's hot!” One of them said that it did not take long to heat a piece of iron. Then I responded that he could sit and look till morning and check whether the plutonium remained hot. But I would go to bed. This apparently convinced them, and they went away.
From Chelyabinsk-40, Kurchatov had the bomb core carried to Sarov for criticality tests. Andrei Sakharov heard a whispered conversation about it between Boris Vannikov and a senior manager when he visited the research station for the first time in late June. (“Is it here?” “Yes.” “Where?” “In the storehouse.”) “Zeldovich later told me,” writes Sakharov, “that when he saw those ordinary-looking pieces of metal, he couldn't help feeling that a multitude of human lives had been compressed into each gram: he had in mind not only the prisoners who worked in the uranium mines and at the nuclear installations, but also the potential victims of atomic war.”
Yuli Khariton recalled one criticality test that was inadvertent but convincing. To test a core for criticality, physicists build a shell around it with material that reflects neutrons, measuring the increasing neutron multiplication from fission as they go. Any light-element material will do for a reflector — cubes of beryllium, blocks of paraffin, even body fat. “Vannikov appeared at one of the final tests,” says Khariton. “He came closer and began to read the gauges. He was a large man, very fat. He went back and forth and read the gauges… So during this episode we understood: the bomb would definitely work.”
The first Soviet bomb core never traveled to Moscow for Stalin to touch, as Soviet-era myths purport, but the project leaders were called there that spring to report. “The specialists were invited to Stalin's office one by one, and Stalin attentively listened to each,” Khariton and Smirnov write. “The first report was delivered by Kurchatov, followed by Khariton and the others. This was Khariton's only meeting with Stalin. Stalin asked Khariton: ‘Couldn't two less powerful bombs be made from the plutonium that is available, so that one bomb could remain in reserve?’ Khariton, who knew that only the precise amount of plutonium required for the American-designed weapon was available… responded negatively.” Another source reports Stalin complaining, “We may bully the Americans while having nothing in reserve in the warehouse. What if they press on with their atomic bombs, and we have nothing to contain them?”
Stalin's concern that the first Soviet test of an atomic bomb might challenge the United States while leaving
