Hiroshima and Soviet Bomb Development

ヒロシマ。ベリヤの核開発

On 6 August 1945, America dropped its bomb on Hiroshima. Stalin did not wish to miss out on the spoils, sending his armies against Japan, but the destruction of Hiroshima made a far greater impact than Truman’s warning… ‘War is barbaric,’ reflected Stalin, ‘but using the A-bomb is a super-barbarity. And there was no need to use it. Japan was already doomed!’ He had no doubt that Hiroshima was aimed at himself: ‘A-bomb blackmail is American policy.’
Next day, Stalin held a series of meetings at Kuntsevo with Beria and the scientists:
‘Hiroshima has shaken the whole world. The balance has been destroyed,’ he told them. ‘That cannot be.’ Now Stalin understood that the project was the most important in his world; codenamed ‘Task Number One’, it was to be run ‘on a Russian-scale’ by Beria’s ‘Special Committee’ that functioned like an ‘Atomic Politburo’… Stalin was ‘bored’ by the science but treated Kurchatov kindly: ‘… Ask for whatever you like. You won’t be refused.’
Beria threw himself into Task Number One as if his life depended on it – which it did. The project was on a truly Soviet scale, with Beria managing between 330,000 and 460,000 people and 10,000 technicians. Beria was the pre-eminent Terror entrepreneur, telling one of his managers, ‘You’re a good worker but if you’d served six years in the camps, you’d work even better.’ He controlled his scientists in the sharashki, special prisons for technical experts, described by Solzhenitsyn in The First Circle….
Yet he could also be ‘ingratiating’, asking the physicist Andrei Sakharov charmingly, ‘Is there anything you want to ask me?’ His handshake, ‘plump, moist and deathly cold,’ reminded Sakharov of death itself… His name was enough to terrify most people….
… he also won the scientists’ loyalty by protecting tem, appealing to Stalin who agreed:
‘Leave them in peace. We can always shoot them later.’… (pp. 445-446)