Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov

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Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov

Q: What was the Cold War?

The Cold War was an ongoing political rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies that developed after World War II . This hostility between the two superpowers was first given its name by George Orwell in an article published in 1945. Orwell understood it as a nuclear stalemate between “super-states”: each possessed weapons of mass destruction and was capable of annihilating the other. The Cold War began after the surrender of Nazi Germany in 1945, when the uneasy alliance between the United States and Great Britain on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other started to fall apart. The Soviet Union began to establish left-wing governments in the countries of eastern Europe, determined to safeguard against a possible renewed threat from Germany. The Americans and the British worried that Soviet domination in eastern Europe might be permanent. The Cold War was solidified by 1947–48, when U.S. aid had brought certain Western countries under American influence and the Soviets had established openly communist regimes. Nevertheless, there was very little use of weapons on battlefields during the Cold War. It was waged mainly on political, economic, and propaganda fronts and lasted until 1991.

Q: How did the Cold War end?

The Cold War came to a close gradually. The unity in the communist bloc was unraveling throughout the 1960s and ’70s as a split occurred between China and the Soviet Union . Meanwhile, Japan and certain Western countries were becoming more economically independent. Increasingly complex international relationships developed as a result, and smaller countries became more resistant to superpower cajoling. The Cold War truly began to break down during the administration of Mikhail Gorbachev , who changed the more totalitarian aspects of the Soviet government and tried to democratize its political system. Communist regimes began to collapse in eastern Europe, and democratic governments rose in East Germany , Poland , Hungary , and Czechoslovakia , followed by the reunification of West and East Germany under NATO auspices. Gorbachev’s reforms meanwhile weakened his own communist party and allowed power to shift to the constituent governments of the Soviet bloc. The Soviet Union collapsed in late 1991, giving rise to 15 newly independent nations, including a Russia with an anticommunist leader.

Q: Why was the Cuban missile crisis such an important event in the Cold War?

In the late 1950s, both the United States and the Soviet Union were developing intercontinental ballistic missiles . In 1962 the Soviet Union began to secretly install missiles in Cuba to launch attacks on U.S. cities. The confrontation that followed, known as the Cuban missile crisis , brought the two superpowers to the brink of war before an agreement was reached to withdraw the missiles. The conflict showed that both superpowers were wary of using their nuclear weapons against each other for fear of mutual atomic annihilation. The signing of the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty followed in 1963, which banned aboveground nuclear weapons testing. Still, after the crisis, the Soviets were determined not to be humiliated by their military inferiority again, and they began a buildup of conventional and strategic forces that the United States was forced to match for the next 25 years.

Soviet physicist

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Born:: January 12, 1903, Sim, Russia

Died:: February 7, 1960, Moscow (aged 57)

Subjects Of Study:: nuclear energy; nuclear fission; nuclear fusion; energy conversion

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Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov (born January 12, 1903, Sim, Russia—died February 7, 1960, Moscow) was a Soviet nuclear physicist who guided the development of his country’s first atomic bomb, first practical thermonuclear bomb, and first nuclear reactor.

Kurchatov’s father was a surveyor and his mother a teacher. In 1912 the family moved to Simferopol in Crimea. In 1920 Kurchatov entered Simferopol State University, from which he graduated three years later with a degree in physics. In 1925 he was invited to join A.F. Ioffe’s Physico-Technical Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). Kurchatov’s initial studies concerned what is now called ferroelectricity. In 1933 he shifted his research interests to the maturing field of nuclear physics, familiarizing himself with the literature and conducting experiments. With his colleagues, he published papers on radioactivity and supervised the construction of the first Soviet cyclotrons.

News of the discovery of fission by the German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in 1938 spread quickly throughout the international physics community. In the Soviet Union, the news was cause for excitement and concern about possible applications. Kurchatov and his colleagues tackled the resulting new research problems, conducting experiments and publishing articles on spontaneous fission, uranium-235, chain reactions, and critical mass. Inspired by these results, Kurchatov and his colleagues submitted a plan in August 1940 to the Presidium of the Soviet Academy of Sciences recommending further work on the uranium problem. The academy responded with a plan of its own as awareness grew of the military significance of the atom. With the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, research on nuclear fission ground to a halt, and the scientists were pressed into other tasks. Kurchatov worked on degaussing techniques to protect ships from magnetic mines and later took over the armour laboratory at the P.N. Lebedev Physics Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. By early 1943, intelligence reports about the British and American atomic energy project, and fear of a German atomic bomb, had helped spur a renewed Soviet research effort. In April 1943 Kurchatov was made scientific director of Laboratory No. 2 (LIPAN). After the bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin ordered a crash program, and Kurchatov’s responsibilities grew enormously as he implemented a program comparable to the Manhattan Project in the United States.

Michael Faraday (L) English physicist and chemist (electromagnetism) and John Frederic Daniell (R) British chemist and meteorologist who invented the Daniell cell.

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Kurchatov directed the construction of the first nuclear reactor in Europe (1946) and oversaw development of the first Soviet atomic bomb, which was tested on August 29, 1949, four years after the United States conducted its first test. Kurchatov also oversaw the thermonuclear bomb effort, with key tests in August 1953 and a more modern design in November 1955.

The nonmilitary applications of atomic power explored and developed under Kurchatov’s leadership included, besides electric-power stations (the first of which began operation in 1954), the nuclear-powered icebreaker Lenin. Kurchatov also directed research on the “ultimate power source,” nuclear fusion, centring on a means of containment of the extremely high temperatures that are needed to initiate and sustain the fusion process in a fusion reactor.

Kurchatov was elected to the Academy of Sciences in 1943, and he was awarded the Hero of Socialist Labour in 1949, 1951, and 1954. A further honour was his burial in the Kremlin Wall in Moscow and the renaming of his institute to the I.V. Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy in 1960 (redesignated the Russian Research Centre Kurchatov Institute in 1991). Also, the Kurchatov Medal was established by the Academy of Sciences and awarded for outstanding work in nuclear physics.

Thomas B. Cochran Robert S. Norris

Cold War

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Date:: 1947 - 1991

Participants:: North Atlantic Treaty Organization; Soviet Union; United States; Warsaw Treaty Organization

Context:: international relations

Major Events:: Bay of Pigs invasion; Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty; Strategic Arms Limitation Talks; Berlin crisis of 1961; collapse of the Soviet Union

Key People:: Dean Acheson; John Foster Dulles; John F. Kennedy; Kim Philby; Ronald Reagan

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Cold War, the open yet restricted rivalry that developed after World War II between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies. The Cold War was waged on political, economic, and propaganda fronts and had only limited recourse to weapons. The term was first used by the English writer George Orwell in an article published in 1945 to refer to what he predicted would be a nuclear stalemate between “two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds.” It was first used in the United States by the American financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch in a speech at the State House in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1947.

A brief treatment of the Cold War follows. For full treatment, see international relations.

Origins of the Cold War

Following the surrender of Nazi Germany in May 1945 near the close of World War II, the uneasy wartime alliance between the United States and Great Britain on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other began to unravel. By 1948 the Soviets had installed left-wing governments in the countries of eastern Europe that had been liberated by the Red Army. The Americans and the British feared the permanent Soviet domination of eastern Europe and the threat of Soviet-influenced communist parties coming to power in the democracies of western Europe. The Soviets, on the other hand, were determined to maintain control of eastern Europe in order to safeguard against any possible renewed threat from Germany, and they were intent on spreading communism worldwide, largely for ideological reasons. The Cold War had solidified by 1947–48, when U.S. aid provided under the Marshall Plan to western Europe had brought those countries under American influence and the Soviets had installed openly communist regimes in eastern Europe.

The struggle between superpowers

The Cold War reached its peak in 1948–53. In this period the Soviets unsuccessfully blockaded the Western-held sectors of West Berlin (1948–49); the United States and its European allies formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a unified military command to resist the Soviet presence in Europe (1949); the Soviets exploded their first atomic warhead (1949), thus ending the American monopoly on the atomic bomb; the Chinese communists came to power in mainland China (1949); and the Soviet-supported communist government of North Korea invaded U.S.-supported South Korea in 1950, setting off an indecisive Korean War that lasted until 1953.

From 1953 to 1957 Cold War tensions relaxed somewhat, largely owing to the death of the longtime Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in 1953; nevertheless, the standoff remained. A unified military organization among the Soviet-bloc countries, the Warsaw Pact, was formed in 1955; and West Germany was admitted into NATO that same year. Another intense stage of the Cold War was in 1958–62. The United States and the Soviet Union began developing intercontinental ballistic missiles, and in 1962 the Soviets began secretly installing missiles in Cuba that could be used to launch nuclear attacks on U.S. cities. This sparked the Cuban missile crisis (1962), a confrontation that brought the two superpowers to the brink of war before an agreement was reached to withdraw the missiles.

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The Cuban missile crisis showed that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union were ready to use nuclear weapons for fear of the other’s retaliation (and thus of mutual atomic annihilation). The two superpowers soon signed the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty of 1963, which banned aboveground nuclear weapons testing. But the crisis also hardened the Soviets’ determination never again to be humiliated by their military inferiority, and they began a buildup of both conventional and strategic forces that the United States was forced to match for the next 25 years.

Throughout the Cold War the United States and the Soviet Union avoided direct military confrontation in Europe and engaged in actual combat operations only to keep allies from defecting to the other side or to overthrow them after they had done so. Thus, the Soviet Union sent troops to preserve communist rule in East Germany (1953), Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), and Afghanistan (1979). For its part, the United States helped overthrow a left-wing government in Guatemala (1954), supported an unsuccessful invasion of Cuba (1961), invaded the Dominican Republic (1965) and Grenada (1983), and undertook a long (1954–75) and unsuccessful effort to prevent communist North Vietnam from bringing South Vietnam under its rule (see Vietnam War).