ABSTRACT
In the first months of 1942, the possibility of an atomic bomb was becoming a more serious issue for the Soviet leadership, as a result of recent information obtained about British, American, and German work on the bomb. Ilya G. Starinov brought a notebook that had been captured from a German officer, a notebook that contained a list of materials needed for a bomb. The secret police under Beria's direction, like much else in Stalin's Soviet Union, had a paramount role in the bomb program. The full measure of the impact finally began to manifest itself to Stalin in August 1945 when the United States (US) dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. Soviet progress on the hydrogen bomb closely parallels developments in the US; indeed, Soviet efforts may have been misdirected by espionage reports of US designs that ultimately proved unsuccessful.
