After the American atomic bomb was revealed, Soviet scientist Yuli Khariton moved quickly to achieve deterrence parity for the Soviet Union. How did he become the classified face of the Soviet nuclear program, and what was the personal cost? Another installment in the series Jewish Scientists in the 20th Century
Possession of nuclear weapons makes a country a superpower. After the end of World War II, the powerful country – the Soviet Union – which dominated Eastern Europe, sought to acquire nuclear weapons to close the gap between itself and the United States. The Cold War heated up.
In December 1943, on the recommendation of Jewish physicists Rudolf Peierls and Robert Oppenheimer, leading nuclear physicists of the Manhattan Project to create nuclear weapons, a British citizen of German origin, Dr. Klaus Fuchs, a former member of the German Communist Party, was added to the project. Fuchs was transferred to the Los Alamos laboratory under extremely strict security measures. There, he worked in the group of Hans Bett, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, a Jew on his mother's side, and achieved extraordinary scientific results. In January 1945, Fuchs held three meetings with Soviet intelligence officers, during which he conveyed to them extremely important information about the progress of work on the American nuclear project and the first atomic bomb test, in which he personally participated. On March 1, 1950, Fuchs was sentenced to 14 years in prison for spying for the Soviet Union. After Fuchs's exposure, Fuchs said: "I know that Fuchs "He acted on his convictions. He did it not for money or under duress. He simply thought that the Communists should have all the information." Another leading member of the Manhattan Project, the Jew Victor Weiskopf, commented: "He was an ardent Communist. He believed that the atomic bomb should not belong only to the Western world."
Piersall and Weiskopf did not condemn their colleague for damaging the project and transferring deadly weapons to a country that did not strive for peace. Due to their leftist views and their proximity to socialism, Piersall and Weiskopf saw Fox's actions as a courageous and moral approach, devoid of greed. They did not see him as a traitor who violated his obligation to keep his work on the nuclear project secret. They did not see his actions as treason, but rather as an ideologically motivated action by a principled man loyal to his ideals. They were not shocked by the handing over of this important secret to a totalitarian state with an imperialist character.
On July 24, 1945, in Potsdam, U.S. President Truman announced to Stalin that the United States “now possesses a weapon of extraordinary destructive power.” According to Churchill’s memoirs, Stalin smiled. He smiled because Soviet scientists, who had long been working on the creation of the nuclear bomb, had the data obtained from Fox.
On April 1, 1946, the village of Serov in the Russian periphery was chosen as the site for the first Soviet nuclear center, called Arzamas-16. This site was to be the site for the production of a Soviet nuclear bomb. The project's chief director and chief scientist was physicist Yuli Khariton.
Yuli Khariton, Doctor of Physics, member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and the Russian Academy of Sciences, three-time Hero of Socialist Labor, winner of the Lenin Prize and three Stalin Prizes, was born on February 27, 1904, in St. Petersburg, to a family of assimilated Jews.
His father, Boris Khariton, was a journalist and the editor-in-chief of the newspaper of the Constitutional Democrats party. SpeechHe was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1922 by order of Lenin along with two hundred Russian intellectuals who opposed the Soviet regime. He arrived in Berlin, where he edited the magazine ניצוצות and published in newspapers wheel וDaysIn 1923, he moved to the Latvian capital, Riga. There he was the editor of the weekly newspaper People's Thought, published by the Jewish Democratic People's Party. From 1925 to 1940, he was the permanent editor of the largest Russian newspaper in the Baltic States, Today, and of his evening edition, The nightIn his journalistic activities, he took an anti-Soviet stance. After Latvia was occupied by the Soviet Union in 1940, Boris Khariton was sentenced to 7 years in a labor camp and died in the Gulag on August 30, 1941.
Yuli's mother, Mira Borovskaya, was an actress in several theaters in St. Petersburg, at the Moscow Small Academic Theater, and finally at the Moscow Art Theater (1908–1910). She divorced her husband in 1907, and in 1910 moved to Germany, where she married the psychoanalyst and Zionist, Freud's student, Dr. Max Eitingon. In 1933 she moved to Israel with her second husband. Yuli, aged six, lost his mother. He was raised by his father until his father's deportation from the Soviet Union. After the establishment of Soviet rule, Yuli was forbidden any contact with his parents, who were alien to socialism.
From 1926 to 1928, on the recommendation of the "father" of Soviet physics, Avraham Ioffe, and with the participation of future Nobel laureates, physicist Peter Kapitsa and chemist Nikolai Semyonov, Yuli interned at the Cavendish Laboratory (Cambridge, England) under the supervision of Nobel laureates in physics Ernest Rutherford and James Chadwick. There, Yuli received a Doctor of Science (D.Sc.) degree with a dissertation on the topic: On counting flashes produced by alpha particles. During his internship, he managed to meet his mother in Germany and understood the extent of the danger she was in there as a Jew. His arrival in Berlin was a scientific mission from England. He asked his German colleagues what they thought of the Nazis. They simply laughed: "Those children from the operetta" are not dangerous, they should not be taken seriously.
In an atmosphere of complete secrecy, work was carried out in Sorov, which resulted in the successful testing of the first Soviet nuclear bomb (August 29, 1949) and the hydrogen bomb (August 12, 1953). The name and surname of the main creator and scientific leader of the nuclear project, Yuli Khariton, were classified.
On the day of the first successful test of the Soviet nuclear bomb, Khariton was in his underground bunker when the political leader of the project, People's Commissar of Internal Affairs, Levon Beria, arrived. When the explosion occurred, Beria grabbed Khariton, lifted him up, hugged him tightly, and kissed him. Beria realized that thanks to this man, he had become the central figure in Stalin's eyes in the nuclear project—he had fulfilled the task of the leader and "prepared" the nuclear bomb. Thus, the Soviet Union became a nuclear power.
Khariton described his approach to the great task he completed as follows: "We had a supreme task: to create an extremely powerful weapon in the shortest possible time that could protect our homeland. When we managed to solve this problem, we felt relief, even happiness, because by mastering the new weapon, we prevented other countries from using it against the Soviet Union with impunity, and thus, it [nuclear weapons] would serve peace and security."
Khariton, like Klaus Fuchs, acted on an ideological basis: in his work he wanted to promote “peace and security.” But he did the opposite – increased the quantity and improved the quality of the destructive weapons that the totalitarian and fanatical regime aspired to possess. After the creation of the nuclear and hydrogen bombs, the Soviet Union began to threaten the peace and security of the world and conducted its imperialist policy thanks to the huge arsenal of nuclear weapons. The imperialist policy of the Soviet Union was inherited by Russia.
Yuli Khariton himself was under threat of liquidation. During his work on the nuclear project, the main moves of Soviet state anti-Semitism took place: the "Cosmopolitan Affair," the "Jewish Action Committee Against Fascism Affair," and the "Doctors' Plot." He was the optimal candidate for liquidation because he was Jewish, his parents were immigrants, that is, "foreigners" and "enemies" from the point of view of the Soviet regime, his father was a licensed "criminal," and he himself lived in England for two years and traveled in Germany, that is, he was in contact with the enemies of the communists (with the "foreign agents"!). But Khariton achieved enormous success and extraordinarily strengthened the Soviet regime, which oppressed his people, isolated him from his parents, and made great efforts to forcefully import the "socialist revolution" to large areas of the globe.
Yuli Khariton died on December 18, 1996, in Sorov, where his nuclear activities took place. In the last years of his life, Khariton became blind, but even when he could see, he wore the glasses of a Soviet patriot whose ideology could not contain the aggressive nature of his country.
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One response
Another great article. Thank you.
I personally don't understand why people like him continued to be communists despite everything.