In the summer of 1949,
three trains left a secret
Soviet city called Azemas 16.
One carried scientists,
one carried soldiers,
and one carried an atomic b*mb.
{an8}It hardly needs to be said that
{an8}the whole operation took place
in the greatest secrecy.
{an8}Along the whole route,
not a single signal
was against the special trains.
All the points were
switched in their favor.
They were on their way
to Kazakhstan,
where they would test
the first red b*mb.
Everything was down
according to a strict plan,
in case anyone tried to ambush
the train on its journey.
At a Politburo meeting
a few days before,
someone had asked,
what will we do
if the b*mb doesn't work?
Stalin replied,
we can sh**t the scientists.
At the end of the track
lay a moment of truth
for the post-w*r world.
In September 1945,
two men from the FBI
followed a suspected Russian agent
called Anatoly Yakovlev
into a New York cinema.
On the screen was Russian news footage
of triumphant Soviet troops
marching through Moscow
to celebrate the end of the w*r.
Yakovlev went in and
sat down in a very good seat,
about halfway down.
The theater was maybe 25-30% full.
We settled in a few minutes later,
four or five rows
in back of Yakovlev.
And both of us got
very much interested
in the film
that was being shown.
And the next thing I looked up
in Yakovlev was God.
And I thought, oh God.
We hurriedly looked around the theater
and here he was,
way down front,
way off to one side,
in a very poor seat.
The senior of the two FBI men
was Bob Lamphere.
He continued to watch his suspect.
Though he saw nothing specific,
he left the cinema feeling
he'd witnessed something important.
That in all likelihood
{an8}we had seen the servicing
of a dead drop.
{an8}In other words,
somebody had come in
{an8}and put something
under that seat.
Yakovlev had spotted
where they were,
number three seat over, row eight.
And they'd gone down and
reached under darkened theater
and retrieved the message.
Soviet espionage in America
was then in full swing.
And Yakovlev was the man
who, that autumn,
engineered the greatest
coup of the atomic spy w*r
between East and West.
Nearly 50 years on,
KGB officers from those days
still have reunions to celebrate
the end of the w*r.
But one of their top men,
General Pavel Sudaplatov,
remembers that time
for a different reason.
A few months before
that incident in the cinema,
he'd been given
an important new job.
I was instructed to set up
a special department
at the People's Commissariat
for Internal Affairs
to develop the atomic project.
That department was
known as Department S.
The Commissariat,
or secret police,
was housed in the Lubyanka,
then the most feared
building in Russia.
Sudaplatov knew the corridors
and staff of the Commissariat well.
Trained as an assassin,
he'd been in charge of
guerrilla action during the w*r.
But his new job was
potentially even more lethal.
Department S was to be
the secret information center
of the Soviet
b*mb-building program.
In the Lubyanka vaults
were some 10,000 documents
relating to the building
of America's b*mb,
the product of years
of wartime espionage
under the direction of
Lavrentiy Beria.
Beria was Stalin's right-hand man.
By reputation, the most ruthless
schemer in the Kremlin.
By habit, someone
obsessed with secrecy.
When the documents
first started coming in,
he allowed only one scientist
to know they even existed.
Igor Kurchatov,
the brilliant physicist
who ran the Soviet b*mb program.
Kurchatov did his best to keep up
with the flood of incoming information.
But Beria's taste for secrecy
gave him an impossible task.
Just how impossible
became painfully clear
when the Americans
dropped their bombs
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
When Stalin realized how far
the Soviet Union had fallen behind,
he was furious.
He was convinced that Russia
would soon come under attack
from the United States.
And it was made clear
to Pavel Sudaplatov
that he had to sort
the problem out fast.
Sudaplatov's first requirement
was people who knew enough science
to understand what was in the vaults,
but had enough discretion
not to tell anyone it was there.
Since the job was
to be located in the Lubyanka,
the secret police
did the recruiting.
The first person to get a visit
was Yakov Teletsky.
I was suddenly summoned to the
NKVD headquarters on Lubyanka Street,
{an8}as summons to the Lubyanka was
{an8}always regarded as something
very unpleasant.
Next to get a visit from
Sudaplatov's recruiting team
was Arkady Rylov.
One of the older men said,
you have to go to Lubyanka Street.
That was too much for me.
And I said, what have I done?
{an8}They burst out laughing.
{an8}I thought they were taking me
to the Lubyanka for a different purpose.
That was just a practical joke
they pulled at me.
They said,
we are not sending you to jail.
You are to be offered a job.
I informed Beria of my choice.
He asked me
to check those two men out,
to find if they drank,
talk too much and so on.
I told him I didn't know them
that well as yet.
Beria replied,
this is what you should do.
Organize a dinner party in your flat
and invite Terletsky and Rylov.
Make sure you have as many bottles
of brandy, vodka and wine as possible
on the table during dinner.
And prepare several kinds
of hors d 'oeuvres.
I asked him where
I would find all that.
He replied,
don't worry about a thing.
We'll deliver it all
straight to your flat.
It was a posh party,
a staggering party for the time.
There were wines
and all kinds of appetizers.
I noticed that Sudoplatov
drank very little.
He just sipped.
I noticed the others
were also drinking little,
so I followed their example.
Torts were raised,
Stalin's health was drunk,
then barriers and
all kinds of toasts,
and then we parted company.
The two scientists
had passed the test
and joined Department S
in the Lubyanka.
They soon realized
how far they had to go.
It's quite clear that
this very valuable,
super valuable information
was put on ice for four years.
It's a fact.
This is why Department S
wasn't set up until after
the two bombs exploded in Japan.
Then everyone remembered,
so to speak.
Oi, didn't we get
information about this
as much as four years ago?
Department S had inherited
the wartime spoils
of a Soviet spy ring codenamed
Operation Enormous.
Operation Enormous
was based in New York,
and it was now being run
by the man the FBI had been
watching in that cinema,
Anatoly Yatskov,
otherwise known as Yakovlev.
The single most
important focus of his work
was America's b*mb.
The prototype,
codenamed Trinity,
had been built by some of the best
scientific brains in the world,
many of them emigres
from Hitler's Germany.
At least one of them was
a spy working for Yakovlev,
the German-born scientist
Klaus Fuchs.
Sometime in September 1945,
Fuchs smuggled a package out
for delivery via a courier
to Yakovlev in New York
and from there to Moscow.
We have obtained the translation
that Department S
made from those documents
as soon as they arrived in Moscow.
Top secret to this day,
only selected parts
can safely be shown,
because what they give are
the critical dimensions and details
of materials required
to build a plutonium atom b*mb.
From the core to the shell casing,
every single component is laid bare.
Particularly sensitive even today
is the special device
which sets off the chain reaction.
On advice from senior
nuclear scientists,
we have removed
parts of the diagram
from the document
in our possession.
What we can show clearly
is the word at the top of the page.
Trinity.
The Russians had stolen a blueprint
of America's first b*mb.
It was a triumph
for Department S
and a triumph for the
Soviet spy ring in America.
But Moscow in those days
was no place
in which to celebrate.
The Soviet Union was still suffering
from the ravages and
deprivations of w*r.
But with coups like that
behind it,
Department S prospered.
New recruits found themselves
in a world of unknown luxury.
Department S enjoyed
the special status
and the personnel had perks.
{an8}We had food coupons and
other coupons for consumer goods shops.
Also we had breakfast
brought to us every day
by the char lady
or whatever you'd call her.
There was a room where
they sliced good bread loaves,
fillet of sturgeon or sausages.
In any case, that kind of food
was very scarce at the time
and unavailable to ordinary people.
We didn't eat up the food right away.
We would hoard it in our desks
and try to take it home.
Of course there were
lots of c*ck
and mice running about.
We started work
at ten in the morning
{an8}and worked until five
o'clock in the afternoon.
{an8}There was a break from
five o'clock to eight o'clock
and then we worked
until midnight at the earliest
but sometimes
until two in the morning.
There were two large steel safes
which contained the materials.
{an8}There were around
ten thousand various items.
{an8}There were photocopies of documents,
{an8}US documents,
super-secret US documents.
A stamp on each document said
it was secret and its disclosure was
punishable as espionage.
When these files with
translations were prepared,
we were told,
get this or that file ready
for a session of the Scientific
and Technical Council.
And we consulted
the procedures manual
to keep to the rules for
transferring classified materials.
The scientists,
Rylov and Tirliatsky,
took them from us and went
to report at Kirov Street.
Kirov Street was only three hundred
yards away from the Lubyanka.
But Rylov and Tirliatsky
would make the short trip by car
under military guard.
Lieutenant accompanied me.
He kept a Walter handgun
in his pocket.
It was so secret.
The car headed for number 20
where the so-called
Scientific and Technical Council,
brain center of the b*mb project,
met under the chairmanship of
the armaments minister, Vanikov.
We came and were invited
into the reception room
and were asked
to make our reports.
After Tirliatsky or I
gave our report,
Vanikov would say, Comrades,
{an8}those who need this information
raise your hands.
{an8}They did.
The scientists in Kirov Street
were hungry for information.
Meetings would go on
night and day with few breaks.
For example,
three persons would want one work
or ten would want another
or as many as fifteen
would want a third one.
No one talked about Department S.
If the scientists asked,
they were led to believe
the papers came from a rival team.
Vanikov said these were materials
produced by Bureau Number 2.
This raised suspicions.
What was Bureau Number 2?
No one knew what it was.
But Vanikov tactfully
parried all questions.
He said, Bureau Number 2,
you will know what it is
in due course.
No one could complain about
the quantity of information.
But NKVD boss Lavrentiy Beria
knew only too well the dangers
of deliberate disinformation.
An important breakthrough came
in the autumn of 1945.
Beria came into Kurchatov's office
with an astonishing piece of news.
Niels Bohr, one of the guiding
lights behind America's b*mb,
was willing to meet discreetly
with Russian scientists
to discuss the problems they were
having building their own b*mb.
{an8}Niels Bohr was somebody
who had done
{an8}as much, probably
more than anyone else,
to create this international
community of physicists
who had a great belief in what
this internationalism of science
could do for the human race.
He thought if people could realise
the common danger
that faced the human race,
then people would be led to cooperate
and to avoid an arms race.
Bohr had agreed
to this crucial meeting
after an approach from
the Danish communists.
What we can reveal
for the first time
is how the Russians then
turned the opportunity
into a major operation
for Sudaplatov's Department S.
{an8}We needed a meeting with Bohr.
{an8}I don't need to explain to you
who Bohr is.
You probably know
he was a great man.
At that point,
we had come to a deadlock in
the development of the atom b*mb
in certain aspects,
and we didn't know what to do.
It was decided
to send Terletsky to Bohr.
Sudaplatov summoned me and said,
Beria wants to talk to you.
We waited in the
anteroom for some time
and finally Beria received us.
He made a very depressing
impression on me.
He was a man of medium height,
so to speak,
not even a suggestion of smile.
A very forbidden face.
A very forbidden look.
No hint of goodwill.
He said, hello, and then
began asking questions.
How are you going to travel there?
What kind of questions
will you ask?
What about the language barrier?
The truth was that scientifically,
Terletsky was not
the best qualified for the job.
He was chosen simply
because Beria didn't trust
any of the leading physicists.
So Kachatov and his colleagues
hurriedly had to tutor him
in the basics of nuclear science.
I could understand
the general principle,
but how was the expl*sive prepared
and what exactly is plutonium?
They'd begun
to explain things to me.
It was a veritable lecture.
Kachatov was the chief lecturer.
I could write, record everything,
and he told me everything
from the very beginning.
Terletsky set up by train,
accompanied by a translator
and one of Beria's security chiefs,
called Colonel Vasilevsky.
They crossed the border into Finland
and then went by sea to Copenhagen,
where Bohr lived.
The meeting was so important to them.
Everyone was
living on their nerves.
I sensed already that
we were being watched en route
and Vasilevsky said,
look, this man here is
a US intelligence man
and that one,
the Finnish intelligence agent.
They were watching us all the time.
Finally, we reached the embassy.
At first, I wasn't even
allowed to leave the embassy.
I was under lock and key.
After an agonizing wait
of two weeks,
they got the signal
to make the 200-yard drive
to the Niels Bohr Institute.
They were told to leave
their notebooks behind.
We weren't allowed
to carry any papers
because the idea was
that by carrying a paper,
we might leave behind a document.
We had to memorize everything,
both the questions and the answers,
and keep everything in our heads.
Niels Bohr gave us
a fairly reserved welcome.
When he shook hands with me,
I noticed his hands were shaking.
The meeting was
only a partial success.
Bohr was unhappy to find
Teletsky had not come on his own,
and he didn't come up with the
practical detail the Russians wanted.
Bohr's answers weren't enthusiastic
because many of the
questions were such that
there were things he didn't know.
We asked about the
design of the atomic b*mb,
or separation facilities,
which Bohr didn't know.
He was a theoretician.
The scientists back in Moscow
had given Teletsky one
particular dilemma to resolve.
Should they concentrate
on building a uranium b*mb,
like the one dropped on Hiroshima,
or a plutonium one,
like Nagasaki?
Teletsky knew he had not got enough
to satisfy them on this point.
But two days later,
he had another meeting.
And this one turned out
to be more productive.
At the second meeting,
Bohr handed over
a mimeographed copy
of a book about the
building of America's bombs,
written by a consultant
to the Manhattan Project,
called Henry Smythe.
All the things done
in the United States
were outlined
in that book by Smythe.
The extraordinary thing
about the book
is that it had been published against
the advice of Robert Oppenheimer,
the scientist who ran
the project to build the b*mb,
but with an approving forward
by General Leslie Groves,
the man responsible for
security at Los Alamos.
Groves had badly miscalculated
how far the Soviets had got
and how useful
it would be to them.
Groves used to say
it would take them 20 years,
but almost everyone else said
three to four years.
{an8}I think there's another
totally different lesson
{an8}to be learned out of this,
{an8}and that is
there really are no secrets.
That is, if one person
can figure something out,
then it's likely another person's
going to be figuring it out
about the same time, and
it doesn't take much information
to get up on the right track.
There really are no secrets.
Publication proved one of the major
security blunders of the Cold w*r.
Within days of the meeting,
Department S would be
hard at work on Smythe's book.
A copy was brought over.
It was translated, processed,
and edited very fast,
and a small number of copies
were printed.
I even had a copy myself,
but I lost it somewhere.
At first, the book carried either
the stamp, secret, or a copy number.
So probably without realizing it,
Bohr had given Terlewski
the crucial bit of information
that he'd come for.
Put alongside the top-secret
diagram sent back by Fuchs,
it gave the Soviet scientists
the breakthrough they needed.
Plutonium was
the fastest route to take.
Terlewski, being a theoretician,
was able to talk to Bohr about
possible solutions to our deadlock,
without disclosing our difficulties
with the building of the atom b*mb.
But we got what we wanted.
The point is,
Bohr was very friendly
towards the Soviet Union.
Bohr's own explanation,
according to Terlewski,
was somewhat different.
Every country should know about
the design of the atomic b*mb,
and possess the atomic b*mb itself.
And of these other countries,
the first to obtain the atomic b*mb
should be Russia.
Niels Bohr was not a spy.
But the meetings were
useful to catch up.
In the Soviet archives,
we found a cryptic memo
Kurchatov wrote
after debriefing Terlewski.
Niels Bohr made an important remark
concerning the efficient use of
uranium in the atomic b*mb.
This remark should be subjected
to theoretical analysis.
More by luck than ingenuity,
they had acquired the vital
information their scientists needed
to accelerate progress
towards the first red b*mb.
A few months after
the meeting with Niels Bohr,
one of the top men in the
Soviet Union's atomic team
was sent on a journey
across the country.
Yuli Hariton, now 90,
was then an expert in expl*sives.
In his youth, he'd studied
at Cambridge, England,
where a number of the scientists
who'd later been involved
in building America's b*mb
had also studied.
What he was looking for now
was somewhere remote
in which to build a Russian one.
What was needed was
an open space
with a populated area nearby,
where work with explosions
could be carried out.
These days
he travels in some style
with his own personal housekeeper,
Plodya Yekorova.
After 40 years,
she's acquired
the habit of secrecy
about her boss's work.
Back in 1946,
Hariton visited
a series of possible sites
before settling on one
just 400 miles outside Moscow.
And this is the place he chose.
The town of Sarov,
where a 19th century hermit called
Saint Seraphim once preached,
and where tsars once came to pray.
Over the next few years,
Sarov sprouted a mighty suburb,
cloaked in secrecy
and devoted entirely to the
production of an atomic weapon.
It was called Arzamas 16.
Thousands of prisoners
from the Gulag camps
were herded together to carry out
the construction work.
I was struck by the fact
{an8}that the construction work
was being done by prisoners,
{an8}who at the time
all lived in secure zones.
{an8}So morning and night
{an8}columns of these prisoners
went by under guard.
No one was immune
from Stalin's oppression.
Hariton took a realistic view
of his new workforce.
It was very unpleasant,
but what were we to do?
{an8}I realized that we couldn't
get by in any other way.
There was nowhere else
to get the number of people needed
to push construction work here
ahead at the speed required.
Then, as now,
no one entered Arzamas 16
without permission.
To this day, it is a closed city
where everyone lives under guard.
Part of an archipelago
of secret communities
in which for years
everything was geared to the
production of nuclear weapons.
In those days,
under Stalin and Beria,
people lived in fear
as well as in isolation.
Even the scientists
were under suspicion.
Of course,
I was kept under
what is called observation.
Of that, there is
absolutely no doubt.
There was basically a duty officer
from the security service
constantly at my side
at all times.
What it amounted to was that
they simply lived at our apartment.
They were around the whole time.
The secret police had
informers everywhere.
This was a security operation
which meant business.
To give you some idea of
how harsh security was,
I'll give you an instance.
The head of the capital works
department here at the installation
was the first person to get himself an
official business trip back to Moscow.
He told a bunch of his relatives that
soon we were going to
screw the Americans
and that he was getting through
a budget of so many millions
that we could expect our
great project to be a success.
{an8}That was enough for the KGB
to press for him
{an8}to receive an eight-year
sentence in a high security prison.
In that climate of fear,
others didn't even
wait for official punishment.
One of the workers
at the first section
transferred some documents
from one folder to another,
forgot about it
and couldn't find them.
And foreseeing all these problems
because there was no way
he could prove that
he hadn't sold it to someone,
to some spy.
He shot himself.
The big problem facing the Soviets
in those early days
was the supply of uranium.
The only place it was then mined
was in the Fergana Valley
in the Republic of Tajikistan.
It was one of those
mountainous regions,
with steep hills
and no proper roads.
The uranium ore, which they
obtained there in the mountains,
had to be carted down on mules.
The terrain so tough
that even a horse
couldn't manage it easily.
But beggars couldn't choose,
and any seam they discovered
had to be worked,
whatever the difficulty.
A critical breakthrough,
which probably saved them
a year's work,
came from occupied East Germany.
Troops taking charge of factories there
heard rumors of large
supplies of uranium
somewhere near the American zone.
They themselves didn't know
exactly where it was.
So we set off around the factory,
and we went into separate workshops,
and in one of them
we saw there was a large
number of small tubs.
On one of them we saw
a piece of cardboard lying,
on which was written
in capital letters,
uranium 308.
This is the building where the first
experimental reactor was built.
In those days it was an open field,
and working conditions
were appalling.
But it was a vital step,
unless they could make a reactor work,
they wouldn't have a b*mb.
The reactor is still there,
two floors underground.
It was an unwieldy structure,
assembled out of graphite bricks
with slugs of the precious uranium
slotted into them.
Alexei Kondratyev was
then a young lab assistant.
He remembers the day
it went into commission.
Everyone was nervous.
{an8}I rode down to the storeroom,
{an8}and they dressed me
up in smart clothes.
{an8}I didn't have the slightest idea
what it was all about.
{an8}I arrived back,
and I'd come without a tie.
Pavel Vasilyevich
shouted at the driver,
where's his tie?
We managed to pick up a tie
at a military base somewhere.
The reason for this nervousness
was that Lavrentiy Beria was
coming to witness the occasion.
It was a crucial moment.
If the reactor didn't work,
they would probably
lose their jobs,
if not worse.
Beria arrived,
and he was standing wearing
his traditional three-piece suit.
He was a small,
square-shouldered man,
an impressive man, and
Kurchatov introduced us.
We began the demonstration.
Our equipment lights came on.
The needles on the gauges flickered.
Sound signals came on.
Everything was in working order.
The guards got scared when
the neutron counter started up.
As team leader, Igor Kurchatov
was anxious to make Beria
understand how well his men
had done, just to get this far.
Kurchatov says,
this is our chain reaction.
He began showing Beria.
And he says, what are you
showing me, Igor, my lad?
You explode a b*mb for me,
and then I'll give you
a kiss and a hug.
The F-1 had begun to
work on Christmas Day,
at a minute after six
in the evening.
The control room clock froze
the moment in time for history.
The next stage
would be the b*mb itself.
Eight of Britain's
newest transport planes,
the big Hanley-Page
Hastings aircraft,
have now joined
in the RAF's Berlin airlift.
Our pictures show them leaving Dischwalt
in Yorkshire on their flight to Germany.
In the summer of 1948,
the world came close
to w*r over Berlin.
All pretense of the
old wartime partnership
between the Soviet Union
and the West had disappeared.
An iron curtain,
as Churchill put it,
had descended across Europe.
Millions of people live or die
depending on our adaptability.
The world's mightiest offensive force
has been transformed into the
world's mightiest guardian of peace.
The West's decision
to draw the line at Berlin
was underpinned by
the ultimate sanction.
Only America had the atomic b*mb.
But the disturbing truth,
it's now clear,
is that the Soviet Union was much
closer to potential nuclear retaliation
than most people suspected.
A few hundred feet below the surface
at Prebram in Czechoslovakia
was one reason why.
Fresh supplies of uranium,
captured from the Germans
at the end of the w*r,
are now being fed
back to the Soviet Union.
Exactly the opposite of what
the Los Alamos military boss,
General Groves, was
telling his own government.
It was the fact that Groves himself
knew how difficult it was
to get uranium out of a log radar
that led him to believe that
it would take the Russians 20 years
because he thought
they didn't have any
good sources of uranium.
And at one point he even
told the Senate committee
in 1946,
Soviets have no uranium.
Clearly not true.
I mean, our own espionage
with regard to what was going on
in Russia was abysmal.
I mean, terrible.
It meant that by early 1947
the Russians had both the raw
material and the technology
to manufacture
plutonium for their b*mb.
What they needed now was
a full-size industrial reactor.
A jubilant Igor Kochartov
summoned a young engineer
called Vladimir Merkin to see him.
{an8}You're going to build
a reactor in Europe.
{an8}Pack up your things.
{an8}You're leaving tomorrow.
Merkin's destination
was the remote site
where a powerful new
plutonium reactor would be built.
Suddenly everyone
was in good spirits.
When we arrived there, we saw that
nothing had been built yet.
There was nothing
but a few barracks,
ramshackled wooden buildings,
mud and foundation stones
lying all over the field.
Under the tsars,
the site had once been a place
for the rich to feast by the lake.
The travel-weary scientists now
improvised a picnic of their own
A table had been laid
at the lakeside
and while we were there, some
of the guards began to fish for tins.
They were big tins,
I remember that well.
They set up several baking
crates for fried potatoes
and we were hungry
after all the traveling.
We ate and drank with relish.
I remember that to this day.
Merkin's job was
to build a giant reactor
that would make the plutonium
for the first red b*mb.
This is the complex he helped
to create at high speed.
Now it is just a shell
and the reactor has
been dismantled.
But during its heyday
it produced plutonium
to build hundreds of nuclear
weapons for the Soviet arsenal.
Merkin remembers
the mood at the time.
People worked unscentingly,
not counting the hours they put in,
in the knowledge that
completing the job quickly
was vital for our
country and our nation.
It took us just one year
and eight months to build,
from the very first day
to the finish,
when the reactor began working
at its full design capacity.
One year and eight months.
behind the perimeter fence
at ASMA-16,
Yuli Hariton started
using the plutonium
to complete his b*mb.
Inside the museum there,
they still keep a replica
of what he designed.
Even to the lay eye,
it is virtually identical
to the model on show
in the museum in New Mexico,
Fat Man,
the b*mb they dropped
on Nagasaki.
Hariton today makes
no bones about it.
This b*mb, or
to be more accurate,
the nuclear device inside this b*mb
is basically a copy of
the first nuclear device
tested by the Americans in 1945.
In those days,
that was an admission
for which he'd been shot.
By early summer 1949,
Hariton and Kurchatov were ready.
The b*mb set out
on its 2,000-mile journey
to a test site
in remote Kazakhstan.
It was accompanied by
soldiers, scientists
and the top men in the Politburo.
Everybody's fate, to some extent,
was in the balance.
This is where the b*mb
would be tested.
No one in the West
knew what was happening.
The test firing,
code-named First Lightning,
was set for 6 a.m.
It was August the 29th, 1949.
Beria's last words to Kurchatov,
just 10 minutes before the test,
were not encouraging.
Nothing will come of it, Igor,
he said.
But there was no going back.
The original control panel
is preserved in the Yasemas Museum.
Everything that day depended
on the throwing of a single switch.
Throwing this switch
cuts in the battery,
leading to the apparatus,
which, after a short pause,
should deliver the
correct surge of current.
That finally detonates
the powerful implosion,
which compresses
the sphere of plutonium
lying at the center of the b*mb.
So Kurchatov leapt up
and headed for the open door.
At that point,
the fireball was just forming
and turning to a rising
mushroom shape,
illuminating the whole area
with a brilliant light.
And the cloud continued to rise.
And at that point,
Kurchatov, at full tilt,
grabbed hold of Beria
and hugged him.
{an8}We did it.
{an8}It worked.
Now, Kurchatov wasn't a small man,
and he crushed him so hard
that Beria started screeching,
let me go, let me go,
you're throttling me.
But Kurchatov still
wouldn't let him go.
Beria kept shouting
until the full mushroom
cloud started to rise.
And we could already see
the shockwave coming towards us.
Kurchatov started to rush
for the door without any thought.
He simply lost his self-control.
But Florov caught up with him,
stopped him and brought him
back into the dugout
so that when the shockwave hit
and we heard the
rumble of the expl*si*n,
we were all back inside
and the doors closed.
The dark lake marks the spot
where that expl*si*n went off.
The news reached the West
before it was even announced
in the Soviet Union.
People were shocked that
the Soviet Union had
produced a b*mb so quickly,
at least two years earlier than
even the pessimists had forecast.
The arms race was on,
and what no-one realised
was that on the next leg,
the Soviets were going to
overtake the Americans.
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