ABSTRACT
Shortly after Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Soviet intelligence sources unveiled that Britain and the United States were launching massive efforts aimed at developing a new weapon based on fission energy. Earlier it had been assumed that such a weapon could not be developed within the foreseeable future, but the secret reports suggested otherwise. This led the Kremlin to take greater interest in the Soviet scientific expertise that had been built up during the preceding two decades. For the first time, nuclear science was framed as having a very explicit practical purpose: to build a Soviet atomic bomb. Igor Kurchatov, a 40-year-old Leningrad physicist, was tasked with leading this effort. 30
