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photo of Soviet nuclear bomb

Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, January 24, 2011 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Peter Volkovitsky

"The History of the Soviet Nuclear Weapons Project"

ABSTRACT -- The Soviet nuclear weapons project was one of the most dramatic pages in Soviet history. Coming right after World War II (and, by some estimates, costing the Soviets as much as the war did), the project was directed by Lavrenty Beria, right-hand man of Soviet dictator Stalin (and probably the most effective manager in the history of the USSR.) The Soviet fission bomb was created by a group of talented Soviet scientists, aided by a group of Germans, using information from Soviet agents in the US, Great Britain, and Canada. The Russians tested their fission bomb in 1949, only three years after the project was given the green light.

The second part of the project, the fusion bomb, was realized practically without intelligence information. The first Soviet semi-fusion bomb, designed by Sakharov, was tested in 1953, before the USA tested the full-scale fusion bomb. The full-scale fusion bomb was tested in the USSR only a few months after tests in the US.

I knew some of the key figures of the Soviet nuclear project, and I worked for 25 years in one of laboratories which participated in the project. The motivations of scientists, who made an evil weapon for evil dictator, were always objects of my interest.

In this talk I present the key people of the Project, including German scientists and Soviet spies abroad, and tell about their contributions to the Project, and in some cases about their motivations.

The picture above shows Yuly Khariton, a former Ernest Rutherford student, the head of the weapons part of the Project, sitting near the model of the first Soviet fission bomb. The photo was taken 40 years after the first Soviet nuclear bomb was tested. At that time, Yuly Khariton was still project head.

SPEAKER -- Dr. Peter Volkovitsky graduated from Moscow State University in 1969 with an MS degree on Physics. He received a PhD in theoretical physics and a Doctor of Sciences degree from the Moscow Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP), where he was a staff member, leading researcher, and member of the Institute Scientific Council.

Dr. Volkovitsky has been a visiting professor in several countries, including Italy, Germany, and Japan. He has been a committee member and invited speaker at many international conferences. His publications include one book on high energy physics and over 60 journal publications.

Dr. Volkovitsky has lived in the US since 1995 . He was an adjunct professor of Physics at George Mason University and Vice-President of BioTraces, Inc., a small hi-tech company. Since 2003 Dr. Volkovitsky has been a physicist at the NIST Physics Laboratory. His main fields of interest are nuclear physics, detection of ionizing radiation, and application of radioisotopes in industry and medicine.




Engineering Colloquium home page: https://ecolloq.gsfc.nasa.gov