Location: Moscow, Kharkov, USSR
On 2 March 1946, the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR adopted top secret decree No. 493-202ss according to which it was decided to organise laboratory No. 1 of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
Laboratory No. 1 became a full-fledged institute created on the basis of KIPT - the Ukrainian (later Kharkov) Institute of Physics and Technology to implement the USSR’s atomic project. KIPT Director Kirill Sinelnikov was appointed director of the laboratory.
The Ukrainian Institute of Physics and Technology in Kharkov proposed an atomic bomb project long before the war. Scientists from Great Britain, Germany, and Austria worked at the Institute. Many foreign physicists, including Niels Bohr, John Cockcroft, and Paul Dirac visited it.
During the "purge" in 1937-38, many talented staff members were arrested and killed. Alexander Weisberg, a refugee from Nazi Germany, was handed over to the Gestapo as an “undesirable foreigner” (he miraculously managed to survive in a concentration camp). Lev Landau, who worked at the institute, was saved only because of academician Pyotr Kapitsa’s intercession.
But even after that, the institute remained a powerful scientific centre. In 1940, staff members Fritz Lange, Vladimir Spinel, and Viktor Maslov submitted a package of patent applications related to the development of “atomic-molecular ammunition”:
“On the use of uranium as an explosive and poisonous substance”, “Method for preparation of uranium mixture enriched with uranium with a mass number 235. Multidimensional centrifuge”, and “Thermal circulation centrifuge”.
KIPT’s accelerators were actively used within the framework of the nuclear project, Igor Kurchatov worked on it. It was in Kharkov that Kurchatov proposed an interesting decoding of the abbreviation of the name of the first Soviet atomic bomb RDS-1. (“Jet Engine S”): “Russians Do It Themselves”.
Source:
The Soviet atomic bomb project. Documents and materials. Volume II, Book 2
