The Gun

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Outside an Institute Known by a Codeword, Nadezhda, on the Steppe in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic

The atomic bomb rested on a tower one hundred feet above the ground. Known as RDS-1, it was shaped like a huge metal teardrop with rivets and bolts along its sides. Everything had been prepared. Inside its shell was a uranium and plutonium charge equal to about twenty kilotons of TNT, making it a rough equivalent to the weapon the United States had used to destroy Nagasaki four years before. In the hours after midnight the scientists had departed, and now, shortly before dawn on August 29, 1949, they gathered at their instruments in a control bunker more than six miles away, where they were watched by Lavrenty Beria, chief of Stalin’s secret police. Detonation was set for 6:00 A.M. The Soviet Union was moments from entering the atomic age—ending the American monopoly in atomic arms, securing the Kremlin’s status atop a global superpower, and giving the Cold War its sense of doomsday menace. This was a decade after the purges, two decades after the brutalities of collectivization, and in a postwar period in which German prisoners of war were used as forced labor and captured Soviet soldiers returned from German camps had been interrogated, incarcerated, and, sometimes, put to death. Beria’s methods of pursuing Stalin’s will were well-known. The lead physicist, Igor V. Kurchatov, and his team were anxious. If the bomb did not work, some of these scientists expected to be shot.

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