Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov was a Soviet Russian nuclear physicist. He was the leader of the Soviet atomic bomb project. He was one of the main central figures in the Soviet nuclear program. He is best known for his role as a director of nascent Soviet nuclear programme. He led a team of soviet scientists in developing and building a nuclear weapon program. Under his direction Soviet Union successfully tested its first plutonium-based nuclear device, First Lightning in 1949. For this reason he is remembered as "The Father of the Soviet Atomic Bomb".
In 1932, he received funding for his own nuclear science research team, which built the Soviet Union's first cyclotron in 1939.
When World War II broke out between Germany and the USSR in 1941, Kurchatov was appointed director of the nascent Soviet nuclear programme. Under the escalating pressures of the war, including the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Kurchatov's team successfully detonated First Lightning (a plutonium implosion bomb) at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in 1949.
Kurchatov subsequently worked on the Soviet hydrogen bomb program (1953), but later worked for the peaceful use of nuclear technology, and advocated against nuclear bomb tests. Among the projects completed under Kurchatov's leadership was the first cyclotron in Moscow (1949), the first Atomic Reactor in Europe (1946), the first Nuclear power plant in the world (1954), the first Nuclear reactor for Submarine.
Kurchatov and his apprentice Georgy Flyorov discovered the basic ideas of the uranium chain reaction and the nuclear reactor concept in the 1930s. In 1942 Kurchatov declared: "At breaking up of kernels in a kilogram of uranium, the energy released must be equal to the explosion of 20,000 tons of trotyl." This announcement was practically verified during the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
Stalin ordered Kurchatov to produce a bomb by 1948, and put the ruthless Lavrenty Beria in direct command of the project. The project took over the town of Sarov in the Gorki Oblast (now Nizhny Novgorod Oblast) on the Volga, and renamed it Arzamas-16. The team included other prominent Soviet nuclear scientists such as Julii Borisovich Khariton and Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich.
On 29 August 1949 the team detonated First Lightning, its initial test device (a plutonium implosion bomb) at the Semipalatinsk Test Site. Kurchatov later remarked that his main feeling at the time was one of relief, as he was confident that had the weapon failed, Stalin would have had him shot.
Kurchatov subsequently worked on the Soviet hydrogen bomb program (1953), but later worked for the peaceful use of nuclear technology, and advocated against nuclear bomb tests.
During the A-bomb programme, Kurchatov swore he would not cut his beard until the program succeeded, and he continued to wear a large beard (often cut into eccentric styles) for the remainder of his life, earning him the nickname "The Beard". Kurchatov died in Moscow in 1960 of a blood clot in his brain, and his ashes were buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis on Red Square.
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