A measured account of the development of the Soviet bomb program by
Holloway (Political Science/Stanford, The Soviet Union and the Arms
Race, 1983) that contrives to be both technically comprehensive and
gripping. Using interviews with some of the main protagonists, such
as Kapitsa and Sakharov (though before they were able to talk
fully), and access to those archives that have become available in
Russia, Holloway clarifies a number of issues. He confirms that the
Soviets were heavily dependent on espionage to provide both a sense
of the seriousness with which the British (and later the Americans)
were pursuing nuclear weapons, and guidelines to their methods.
Still, the success of the Soviet Union in constructing such a
weapon, in almost the same amount of time as the US, was a
"remarkable feat," given the devastation of the Soviet economy
after the war. The Communist command-administrative system,
Holloway notes, "showed itself able to mobilize resources on a
massive scale, and to channel them into a top priority project." It
was, however, at immense cost both in terms of the hundreds of
thousands of prisoners toiling in the uranium mines and elsewhere,
the appalling health and safety record, and the damage to the
environment. The building of the hydrogen bomb, by contrast, was
largely and no less remarkably an indigenous Soviet achievement.
Little credit seems due to Stalin, who was responsible for shooting
many of the top physicists during the purges and who understood the
significance of nuclear weapons only after the explosion at
Alamogordo. Nor does Holloway think much of Stalin's postwar
policies, which succeeded in unifying the West and causing it to
rearm, though he concludes that Stalin's refusal to be browbeaten
made the US more cautious about asserting its nuclear monopoly.
What could have been a dry technical and analytical study is
enlivened by the immensity of the issues at stake and the
extraordinary characters populating the story. (Kirkus Reviews)
For forty years the Soviet-American nuclear arms race dominated
world politics, yet the Soviet nuclear establishment was shrouded
in secrecy. Now that the Cold War is over and the Soviet Union has
collapsed, it is possible to answer questions that have intrigued
policymakers and the public for years. How did the Soviet Union
build its atomic and hydrogen bombs? What role did espionage play?
How did the American atomic monopoly affect Stalin's foreign
policy? What was the relationship between Soviet nuclear scientists
and the country's political leaders? This spellbinding book answers
these questions by tracing the history of Soviet nuclear policy
from developments in physics in the 1920s to the testing of the
hydrogen bomb and the emergence of nuclear deterrence in the
mid-1950s. In engrossing detail, David Holloway tells how Stalin
launched a crash atomic program only after the Americans bombed
Hiroshima and showed that the bomb could be built; how the
information handed over to the Soviets by Klaus Fuchs helped in the
creation of their first bomb; how the scientific intelligentsia,
which included such men as Andrei Sakharov, interacted with the
police apparatus headed by the suspicious and menacing Lavrentii
Beria; what steps Stalin took to counter U.S. atomic diplomacy; how
the nuclear project saved Soviet physics and enabled it to survive
as an island of intellectual autonomy in a totalitarian society;
and what happened when, after Stalin's death, Soviet scientists
argued that a nuclear war might extinguish all life on earth. This
magisterial history throws light on Soviet policy at the height of
the Cold War, illuminates a central but hitherto secret element of
the Stalinist system, and puts into perspective the tragic legacy
of this program today-environmental damage, a vast network of
institutes and factories, and a huge stockpile of unwanted weapons.
General
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