Soviet nuclear weapons

In the early parts of World War II, the Soviet Union conducted effective espionage, and, by late 1945, Joseph Stalin had ordered Operation Bododino, a committed attempt to build Soviet nuclear weapons. Minister of State Security Lavreni Beria, an effective manager if a brutal secret policeman, became the Party head of the program. The earlist study program had begun in 1939, under Igor Kurchatov. Kurchatov had become aware American and German physicists were disappearing from sight.

The United States intelligence community estimated 1950 as the first plausible bomb test date, the uncooperative Soviets prepared for the first static test at Semipalitinsk in late August 1949, with a 20 KT yield from an implosion fission device, RDS-1.

They exploded RDS-2, also known in the U.S. as Joe-2, a device with a yield of 38 KT, in September 1951. RDS-3, a 42 KT airdrop, succeeded in October, and the Avangard Electromechanical Plant, opened in 1951 at the secret city of Arzamas-16, went into production in 1951, with a quota of 24 airdroppable variants of the RDS-1.