- 6/20/2025
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00:00In the summer of 1949, three trains left a secret Soviet city called Arzamas-16.
00:19One carried scientists, one carried soldiers, and one carried an atomic bomb.
00:30It hardly needs to be said that the whole operation took place in the greatest secrecy.
00:35Along the whole route, not a single signal was against the special trains.
00:44All the points were switched in their favour.
00:50They were on their way to Kazakhstan, where they would test the first red bomb.
01:00Everything was done according to a strict plan, in case anyone tried to ambush the train
01:05on its journey.
01:14At a Politburo meeting a few days before, someone had asked, what will we do if the bomb doesn't work?
01:20Stalin replied, we can shoot the scientists.
01:23At the end of the track, lay a moment of truth for the post-war world.
01:29At the end of the track, lay a moment of truth for the post-war world.
01:32On earth, try to anted by black短-racialaza andВОIC.
01:34Now I'm hermate to Camila.
01:38He was one who knew each other to find their own hand on官ee.
01:40Then we're rallied.
01:42Tokyo Universe
01:46The cheesy steps for Але
01:54These cars isn't part of turned by the pain of the superstars,
01:58In the middle of the democratic theatre,
02:00In September 1945, two men from the FBI
02:29followed a suspected Russian agent called Anatoly Yakovlev
02:32into a New York cinema.
02:40On the screen was Russian news footage
02:43of triumphant Soviet troops
02:45marching through Moscow to celebrate the end of the war.
02:49Yakovlev went in and sat down in a very good seat,
02:52about halfway down.
02:53The theatre was maybe 25%, 30% full.
02:59We settled in a few minutes later,
03:01four or five rows in back of Yakovlev.
03:05And both of us got very much interested
03:08in the film that was being shown.
03:15And the next thing I looked up, and Yakovlev was gone.
03:19And I thought, oh, God.
03:20We hurriedly looked around the theatre, and here he was,
03:30way down front, way off to one side, in a very poor seat.
03:34The senior of the two FBI men was Bob Lanphier.
03:38He continued to watch his suspect.
03:40Though he saw nothing specific,
03:41he left the cinema feeling he'd witnessed something important.
03:45that in all likelihood, we had seen the servicing of a dead drop.
03:49In other words, somebody had come in
03:52and put something under that seat.
03:53Yakovlev had spotted where they were.
03:56Number three, seat over, rove.
03:58Eight.
04:00And had gone down and reached under
04:03darkened theatre and retrieved the message.
04:06Soviet espionage in America was then in full swing.
04:12And Yakovlev was the man who that autumn engineered
04:15the greatest coup of the atomic spy war between East and West.
04:28Nearly 50 years on, KGB officers from those days
04:32still have reunions to celebrate the end of the war.
04:36But one of their top men, General Pavel Sudoplatov,
04:45remembers that time for a different reason.
04:48A few months before that incident in the cinema,
04:51he'd been given an important new job.
04:57I was instructed to set up a special department
05:01at the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs
05:04to develop the atomic project.
05:07That department was known as Department S.
05:19The Commissariat, or secret police, was housed in the Lubyanka,
05:23then the most feared building in Russia.
05:30Sudoplatov knew the corridors and staff of the Commissariat well.
05:35Trained as an assassin, he'd been in charge of guerrilla action during the war.
05:39But his new job was potentially even more lethal.
05:44Department S was to be the secret information center of the Soviet bomb building program.
05:49In the Lubyanka vaults were some 10,000 documents relating to the building of America's bomb,
05:57the product of years of wartime espionage under the direction of Lavrenti Beria.
06:04Beria was Stalin's right-hand man.
06:07By reputation, the most ruthless schemer in the Kremlin.
06:10By habit, someone obsessed with secrecy.
06:15When the documents first started coming in,
06:18he allowed only one scientist to know they even existed.
06:21Igor Korchatov, the brilliant physicist who ran the Soviet bomb program.
06:28Korchatov did his best to keep up with the flood of incoming information.
06:32But Beria's taste for secrecy gave him an impossible task.
06:39Just how impossible became painfully clear when the Americans dropped their bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
06:47When Stalin realized how far the Soviet Union had fallen behind, he was furious.
06:53He was convinced that Russia would soon come under attack from the United States.
06:57And it was made clear to Pavel Sudoplatov that he had to sort the problem out fast.
07:04Sudoplatov's first requirement was people who knew enough science to understand what was in the vaults,
07:09but had enough discretion not to tell anyone it was there.
07:13Since the job was to be located in the Lubyanka, the secret police did the recruiting.
07:18The first person to get a visit was Yakov Teletsky.
07:28I was suddenly summoned to the NKVD headquarters on Ljubljanka Street.
07:32A summons to the Ljubljanka was always regarded as something very unpleasant.
07:36Next to get a visit from Sudoplatov's recruiting team was Arkady Rilov.
07:50One of the older men said, you have to go to Lubyanka Street.
07:55That was too much for me. And I said, what have I done?
07:58They burst out laughing. I thought they were taking me to the Lubyanka for a different purpose.
08:04That was just a practical joke they pulled at me.
08:07They said, we are not sending you to jail. You are to be offered a job.
08:15I informed Beria of my choice. He asked me to check those two men out,
08:20to find if they drank, talked too much and so on.
08:24I told him I didn't know them that well as yet.
08:29Beria replied, this is what you should do.
08:32Organise a dinner party in your flat and invite Terletsky and Rilov.
08:37Make sure you have as many bottles of brandy, vodka and wine as possible on the table during dinner.
08:43And prepare several kinds of hors d'oeuvre.
08:45I asked him where I would find all that.
08:48He replied, don't worry about a thing. We'll deliver it all straight to your flat.
08:52It was a posh party, a staggering party for the time.
09:00There were wines and all kinds of appetizers.
09:12I noticed that Sudoplatov drank very little. He just sipped.
09:23I noticed the others were also drinking little, so I followed their example.
09:36Toasts were raised, Stalin's health was drunk, then Beria's and all kinds of toasts.
09:42And then we parted company.
09:50The two scientists had passed the test and joined Department S in the Lubyanka.
09:58They soon realised how far they had to go.
10:00It's quite clear that this very valuable, super valuable information was put on ice for four years.
10:12It's a fact.
10:13This is why Department S wasn't set up until after the two bombs exploded in Japan.
10:19Then everyone remembered, so to speak.
10:25Oi, didn't we get information about this as much as four years ago?
10:30Department S had inherited the wartime spoils of a Soviet spy ring codenamed Operation Enormous.
10:45Operation Enormous was based in New York.
10:48And it was now being run by the man the FBI had been watching in that cinema.
10:53Anatoly Yatskov, otherwise known as Yakovlev.
10:56The single most important focus of his work was America's bomb.
11:03The prototype, codenamed Trinity, had been built by some of the best scientific brains in the world,
11:08many of them emigres from Hitler's Germany.
11:11At least one of them was a spy working for Yakovlev, the German-born scientist Klaus Fuchs.
11:21Sometime in September 1945, Fuchs smuggled a package out for delivery via a courier
11:26to Yakovlev in New York and from there to Moscow.
11:34We have obtained the translation that Department S made from those documents as soon as they arrived in Moscow.
11:43Top secret to this day, only selected parts can safely be shown.
11:48Because what they give are the critical dimensions and details of materials required to build a plutonium atom bomb.
11:55From the core to the shell casing, every single component is laid bare.
12:01Particularly sensitive, even today, is the special device which sets off the chain reaction.
12:06On advice from senior nuclear scientists, we have removed parts of the diagram from the document in our possession.
12:15What we can show clearly is the word at the top of the page.
12:20Trinity. The Russians had stolen a blueprint of America's first bomb.
12:24It was a triumph for Department S and a triumph for the Soviet spy ring in America.
12:41But Moscow in those days was no place in which to celebrate.
12:48The Soviet Union was still suffering from the ravages and deprivations of war.
12:54But with coups like that behind it, Department S prospered.
13:03New recruits found themselves in a world of unknown luxury.
13:12Department S enjoyed a special status and the personnel had perks.
13:17We had food coupons and other coupons for consumer goods shops.
13:29Also, we had breakfast brought to us every day by the charlady, or whatever you'd call her.
13:35There was a room where they sliced good bread loaves, fillet of sturgeon, or sausages.
13:47In any case, that kind of food was very scarce at the time and unavailable to ordinary people.
13:53We didn't eat up the food right away. We would hoard it in our desks and try to take it home.
14:01Of course, there were lots of cockroaches and mice running about.
14:13We started work at 10 in the morning and worked until 5 o'clock in the afternoon.
14:18There was a break from 5 o'clock to 8 o'clock,
14:21and then we worked until midnight at the earliest, but sometimes until 2 in the morning.
14:35There were two large steel safes which contained the materials.
14:49There were around 10,000 various items.
14:53There were photocopies of documents, U.S. documents, super-secret U.S. documents.
14:59A stamp on each document said it was secret and its disclosure was punishable as espionage.
15:12When these files with translations were prepared, we were told,
15:17get this or that file ready for a session of the Scientific and Technical Council.
15:29And we consulted the procedures manual to keep to the rules for transferring classified materials.
15:37The scientists, Rylov and Terlecky, took them from us and went to a report at Kirov Street.
15:50Kirov Street was only 300 yards away from the Lubyanka.
15:54But Rylov and Terlecky would make the short trip by car under military guard.
16:04A lieutenant accompanied me.
16:10He kept a Walter handgun in his pocket.
16:15It was so secret.
16:16The car headed for number 20, where the so-called Scientific and Technical Council,
16:26brain center of the bomb project, met under the chairmanship of the armaments minister, Vanikov.
16:34We came and were invited into the reception room and were asked to make our reports.
16:39After Terlecky, or I, gave our report, Vanikov would say,
16:53comrades, those who need this information, raise your hands.
16:57They did.
17:02The scientists in Kirov Street were hungry for information.
17:06Meetings would go on night and day with few breaks.
17:10For example, three persons would want one work, or ten would want another,
17:15or as many as 15 would want a third one.
17:20No one talked about Department S.
17:23If the scientists asked, they were led to believe the papers came from a rival team.
17:27Vanikov said these were materials produced by Bureau No. 2.
17:35This raised suspicions. What was Bureau No. 2? No one knew what it was.
17:40But Vanikov tactfully parried all questions. He said,
17:44oh, Bureau No. 2. You'll know what it is in due course.
17:48No one could complain about the quantity of information.
17:54But NKVD boss Lavrentiy Beria knew only too well the dangers of deliberate disinformation.
18:00An important breakthrough came in the autumn of 1945.
18:05Beria came into Kurchatov's office with an astonishing piece of news.
18:10Niels Bohr, one of the guiding lights behind America's bomb,
18:14was willing to meet discreetly with Russian scientists to discuss the problems they were having building their own bomb.
18:21Niels Bohr was somebody who had done as much, probably more than anyone else,
18:27to create this international community of physicists who had a great belief in what this internationalism of science could do for the human race.
18:37He thought if people could realize the common danger that faced the human race,
18:42then people would be led to cooperate and to avoid an arms race.
18:50Bohr had agreed to this crucial meeting after an approach from the Danish communists.
18:57What we can reveal for the first time is how the Russians then turned the opportunity
19:02into a major operation for Sudoplatov's Department S.
19:09We needed a meeting with Bohr. I don't need to explain to you who Bohr is.
19:15You probably know he was a great man.
19:18At that point, we had come to a deadlock in the development of the atom bomb in certain aspects,
19:24and we didn't know what to do.
19:26And we didn't know what to do. It was decided to send Terlecky to Bohr.
19:31Sudoplatov summoned me and said, Beria wants to talk to you.
19:44We waited in the anteroom for some time and finally Beria received us.
19:48He made a very depressing impression on me. He was a man of medium height, so to speak,
19:56not even a suggestion of smile. A very forbidding face.
20:01A very forbidding look. No hint of goodwill.
20:16He said, hello, and then began asking questions.
20:20How are you going to travel there? What kind of questions will you ask?
20:24What about the language barrier?
20:30The truth was that scientifically, Terlecky was not the best qualified for the job.
20:35He was chosen simply because Beria didn't trust any of the leading physicists.
20:40So Kachatov and his colleagues hurriedly had to tutor him in the basics of nuclear science.
20:45I could understand the general principle, but how was the explosive prepared? And what exactly is
20:54plutonium? They'd begun to explain things to me. It was a veritable lecture.
21:02Kachatov was the chief lecturer. I could write, record everything,
21:08and he told me everything from the very beginning.
21:15Tolecky is set up by train, accompanied by a translator and one of Beria's security chiefs,
21:37called Colonel Vasilevskii.
21:48They crossed the border into Finland and then went by sea to Copenhagen, where Bohr lived.
21:59The meeting was so important to them. Everyone was living on their nerves.
22:03I sensed already that we were being watched en route. And Vasilevskii said,
22:11look, this man here is a US intelligence man. And that one, the Finnish intelligence agent,
22:18they were watching us all the time. Finally, we reached the embassy. At first,
22:23I wasn't even allowed to leave the embassy. I was under lock and key.
22:27After an agonizing wait of two weeks, they got the signal to make the 200-yard drive to the Niels Bohr
22:36Institute. They were told to leave their notebooks behind. We weren't allowed to carry any papers,
22:43because the idea was that by carrying a paper, we might leave behind a document. We had to memorize
22:49everything, both the questions and the answers, and keep everything in our heads.
22:57Niels Bohr gave us a fairly reserved welcome. When he shook hands with me, I noticed his hands were shaking.
23:09The meeting was only a partial success. Bohr was unhappy to find Tylecki had not come on his own,
23:15and he didn't come up with the practical detail the Russians wanted.
23:22Bohr's answers weren't enthusiastic, because many of the questions were such that there were things
23:28he didn't know. He asked about the design of the atomic bomb, or separation facilities, which Bohr didn't know.
23:37He was a theoretician.
23:51The scientists back in Moscow had given Tylecki one particular dilemma to resolve.
23:57Should they concentrate on building a uranium bomb, like the one dropped on Hiroshima,
24:03or a plutonium one, like Nagasaki?
24:08Tylecki knew he had not got enough to satisfy them on this point.
24:15But two days later, he had another meeting, and this one turned out to be more productive.
24:24At the second meeting, Bohr handed over a mimeographed copy of a book about the building of
24:29America's bombs, written by a consultant to the Manhattan Project called Henry Smythe.
24:35All the things done in the United States were outlined in that book by Smith.
24:43The extraordinary thing about the book is that it had been published against the advice of Robert Oppenheimer,
24:48the scientist who ran the project to build the bomb, but with an approving forward by General Leslie Groves,
24:55the man responsible for security at Los Alamos. Groves had badly miscalculated how far the Soviets had
25:01got and how useful it would be to them. Groves used to say it would take them 20 years, but almost
25:06everyone else said three to four years. I think there's another totally different lesson to be
25:12learned out of this, and that is there really are no secrets. That is, if one person can figure
25:18something out, then likely another person is going to be figuring it out at about the same time. It
25:22doesn't take much information to get them on the right track. There really are no secrets.
25:28Publication proved one of the major security blunders of the Cold War.
25:34Within days of the meeting, Department S would be hard at work on Smythe's book.
25:39A copy was brought over. It was translated, processed and edited very fast, and a small
25:49number of copies were printed. I even had a copy myself, but I lost it somewhere. At first,
25:57the book carried either the stamp, secret, or a copy number.
26:01So probably without realising it, Bohr had given Terlecki the crucial bit of information that he'd come
26:11for. Put alongside the top-secret diagram sent back by Fuchs, it gave the Soviet scientists the
26:17breakthrough they needed. Plutonium was the fastest route to take.
26:25Terlecki, being a theoretician, was able to talk to Bohr about possible solutions to our
26:31deadlock without disclosing our difficulties with the building of the atom bomb. But we got what we
26:39wanted. The point is, Bohr was very friendly towards the Soviet Union.
26:50Bohr's own explanation, according to Terlecki, was somewhat different.
26:55Every country should know about the design of the atomic bomb, and possess the atomic bomb itself.
27:11And of these other countries, the first to obtain the atomic bomb should be Russia.
27:16Niels Bohr was not a spy, but the meetings were useful to Kurchatov. In the Soviet archives,
27:27we found a cryptic memo Kurchatov wrote after debriefing Terlecki.
27:35Niels Bohr made an important remark concerning the efficient use of uranium in the atomic bomb.
27:40This remark should be subjected to theoretical analysis.
27:46More by luck than ingenuity, they had acquired the vital information
27:49their scientists needed to accelerate progress towards the first red bomb.
27:54A few months after the meeting with Niels Bohr, one of the top men in the Soviet Union's atomic team,
28:11was sent on a journey across the country.
28:15Yuli Hariton, now 90, was then an expert in explosives.
28:19In his youth, he'd studied at Cambridge, England, where a number of the scientists,
28:25who'd later been involved in building America's bomb, had also studied.
28:31What he was looking for now was somewhere remote, in which to build a Russian one.
28:39What was needed was an open space, with a populated area nearby,
28:44where work with explosions could be carried out.
28:50These days, he travels in some style, with his own personal housekeeper, Tlodaya Yegorovah.
28:57After 40 years, she's acquired the habit of secrecy about her boss's work.
29:02This is Yuli Vorishov's personal wagon.
29:07Of course, he gave him the benefits.
29:10What else?
29:17What was he doing?
29:18What was the benefit?
29:19That he was the main designer, who created this new bomb.
29:27Well, that he was the main designer, who created this new bomb.
29:31Back in 1946, Hariton visited a series of possible sites before settling on one just
29:45400 miles outside Moscow. And this is the place he chose. The town of Sarov, where a 19th
30:10century hermit called Saint Seraphim once preached, and where Zaz once came to pray.
30:20Over the next few years, Sarov sprouted a mighty suburb, cloaked in secrecy and devoted entirely
30:26to the production of an atomic weapon. It was called Arzamas 16. Thousands of prisoners
30:34from the gulag camps were herded together to carry out the construction work.
30:39I was struck by the fact that the construction work was being done by prisoners, who at the
30:46time all lived in secure zones. So morning and night columns of these prisoners went by under
30:53guard. No one was immune from Stalin's oppression. Hariton took a realistic view of his new workforce.
31:02It was very unpleasant, but what were we to do? I realized that we couldn't get by in any other way.
31:17There was nowhere else to get the number of people needed to push construction work here ahead,
31:27at the speed required.
31:28Then, as now, no one entered Arzamas 16 without permission.
31:43To this day, it is a closed city where everyone lives under guard. Part of an archipelago of secret
31:58communities in which for years everything was geared to the production of nuclear weapons.
32:04In those days, under Stalin and Beria, people lived in fear as well as in isolation.
32:19The scientists were under suspicion.
32:25Of course, I was kept under what is called observation. Of that there is absolutely no doubt.
32:35There was basically a duty officer from the security service constantly at my side at all times.
32:44What it amounted to was that they simply lived at our apartment. They were around the whole time.
32:58The secret police had informers everywhere. This was a security operation which meant business.
33:05To give you some idea of how harsh security was, I'll give you an instance.
33:15The head of the capital works department here at the installation was the first person to get himself an official business trip back to Moscow.
33:24He told a bunch of his relatives that soon we were going to screw the Americans and that he was getting through a budget of so many millions that we could expect our great project to be a success.
33:43That was enough for the KGB to press for him to receive an eight-year sentence in a high-security prison.
33:54In that climate of fear, others didn't even wait for official punishment.
33:58One of the workers at the first section transferred some documents from one folder to another, forgot about it and couldn't find them.
34:16And foreseeing all these problems, because there was no way he could prove that he hadn't sold it to someone, to some spy, he shot himself.
34:28The big problem facing the Soviets in those early days was the supply of uranium.
34:43The only place it was then mined was in the Fagana Valley in the Republic of Tajikistan.
34:49It was one of those mountainous regions with steep hills and no proper roads.
35:05The uranium ore, which they obtained there in the mountains, had to be carted down on mules.
35:11The terrain was so tough that even a horse couldn't manage it easily.
35:29But beggars couldn't choose, and any seam they discovered had to be worked whatever the difficulty.
35:34A critical breakthrough, which probably saved them a year's work, came from occupied East Germany.
35:45Troops taking charge of factories there heard rumours of large supplies of uranium somewhere near the American zone.
35:51They themselves didn't know exactly where it was.
36:04So we set off around the factory, and we went into separate workshops.
36:10And in one of them, we saw there was a large number of small tubs.
36:14On one of them, we saw a piece of cardboard lying, on which was written in capital letters, Uranium 308.
36:33This is the building where the first experimental reactor was built.
36:37In those days, it was an open field, and working conditions were appalling.
36:41But it was a vital step.
36:44Unless they could make a reactor work, they wouldn't have a bomb.
36:52The reactor is still there, two floors underground.
36:58It was an unwieldy structure, assembled out of graphite bricks,
37:03with slugs of the precious uranium slotted into them.
37:05Alexei Kondratyev was then a young lab assistant.
37:06He remembers the day it went into commission. Everyone was nervous.
37:08I rode down to the storeroom, and they dressed me up in smart clothes.
37:11I didn't have the slightest idea what it was all about.
37:13I arrived back, and I'd come without a tie.
37:15Pavel Vasilevich shouted at the driver,
37:17Where's his tie?
37:18We managed to pick up a tie at a military base somewhere.
37:21The reason for this nervousness was that Labrenti Beria was coming to witness the occasion.
37:27It was a crucial moment. If the reactor didn't work, they would probably lose their jobs.
37:31If not worse.
37:32I arrived, and he was standing wearing his traditional three-piece suit.
37:34He was a small, square-shouldered man, an impressive man, and Kurchatov introduced us.
37:36We began to go to the military base.
37:38He was a tie. We managed to pick up a tie at a military base somewhere.
37:41We managed to pick up a tie at a military base somewhere.
37:44The reason for this nervousness was that Labrenti Beria was coming to witness the occasion.
37:47It was a crucial moment. If the reactor didn't work, they would probably lose their jobs, if not worse.
37:52Beria arrived, and he was standing wearing his traditional three-piece suit.
37:56He was a small, square-shouldered man, an impressive man, and Kurchatov introduced us.
38:00We began the demonstration. Our equipment lights came on.
38:05The needles on the gauges flickered. Sound signals came on.
38:09Everything was in working order.
38:13The guards got scared when the neutron counter started up.
38:17Ta-ta-ta-ta-ra!
38:21As team leader, Igor Kurchatov was anxious to make Beria understand how well his men had done just to get this far.
38:27Kurchatov says, this is our chain reaction. He began showing Beria.
38:36And he says, what are you showing me, Igor, my lad? You explode a bomb for me, and then I'll give you a kiss and a hug.
38:42The F-1 had begun to work on Christmas Day, 1946, at a minute after six in the evening.
38:55The control room clock froze the moment in time for history. The next stage would be the bomb itself.
39:01Eight of Britain's newest transport planes, the big Hanley Page Hastings aircraft, have now joined in the RAF's Berlin airlift.
39:15Our pictures show them leaving Dishforth in Yorkshire on their flight to Germany.
39:20In the summer of 1948, the world came close to war over Berlin.
39:29All pretense of the old wartime partnership between the Soviet Union and the West had disappeared.
39:35An Iron Curtain, as Churchill put it, had descended across Europe.
39:38Millions of people live or die depending on our adaptability.
39:45The world's mightiest offensive force has been transformed into the world's mightiest guardian of peace.
39:55The West's decision to draw the line at Berlin was underpinned by the ultimate sanction.
40:03Only America had the atomic bomb.
40:07But the disturbing truth, it's now clear, is that the Soviet Union was much closer to potential nuclear retaliation than most people suspected.
40:21A few hundred feet below the surface at Prebram in Czechoslovakia was one reason why.
40:27Fresh supplies of uranium, captured from the Germans at the end of the war, are now being fed back to the Soviet Union.
40:35Exactly the opposite of what the Los Alamos military boss, General Groves, was telling his own government.
40:41It was the fact that Groves himself knew how difficult it was to get uranium out of a low-grade ore
40:47that led him to believe that it would take the Russians 20 years, because he thought they didn't have any good sources of uranium.
40:52And at one point he even told the Senate committee in 1946, Soviets have no uranium.
41:03Clearly not true. I mean, our own espionage with regard to what was going on in Russia was abysmal.
41:11I mean, terrible.
41:12It meant that by early 1947, the Russians had both the raw material and the technology to manufacture plutonium for their bomb.
41:22What they needed now was a full-size industrial reactor.
41:25A jubilant Igor Kurchatov summoned a young engineer called Vladimir Merkin to see him.
41:36You're going to build a reactor in the Urals. Pack up your things. You're leaving tomorrow.
41:43You're leaving tomorrow.
41:48Merkin's destination was the remote site where a powerful new plutonium reactor would be built.
41:56Suddenly everyone was in good spirits.
41:58When we arrived there, we saw that nothing had been built yet.
42:05There was nothing but a few barracks, ramshackled wooden buildings, mud and foundation stones lying all over the field.
42:15Under the Tsars, the site had once been a place for the rich to feast by the lake.
42:24The travel-weary scientists now improvised a picnic of their own.
42:30A table had been laid at the lakeside.
42:34And while we were there, some of the guys began to fish for tench.
42:38They were big tench. I remember that well.
42:43They set up several baking trays for fried potatoes.
42:47And we were hungry after all the travelling.
42:49We ate and drank with relish. I remember that to this day.
43:06Merkin's job was to build a giant reactor that would make the plutonium for the first red bomb.
43:11This is the complex he helped to create at high speed.
43:20Now it is just a shell and the reactor has been dismantled.
43:26But during its heyday it produced plutonium to build hundreds of nuclear weapons for the Soviet arsenal.
43:31Merkin remembers the mood at the time.
43:36People worked instinctively, not counting the hours they put in.
43:41And the knowledge that completing the job quickly was vital for our country and our nation.
43:47It took us just one year and eight months to build, from the very first day to the finish,
44:01when the reactor began working at its full design capacity.
44:04One year and eight months.
44:06Seven hundred miles away, behind the perimeter fence at Asma 16,
44:17Yuli Harriton started using the plutonium to complete his bomb.
44:24Inside the museum there, they still keep a replica of what he designed.
44:27Even to the lay eye, it is virtually identical to the model on show in the museum in New Mexico, Fat Man,
44:36the bomb they dropped on Nagasaki.
44:40Harriton today makes no bones about it.
44:48This bomb, or to be more accurate, the nuclear device inside this bomb,
44:54is basically a copy of the first nuclear device tested by the Americans in 1945.
45:09In those days, that was an admission for which he had been shot.
45:16By early summer 1949, Harriton and Kerchatov were ready.
45:24The bomb set out on its 2,000-mile journey to a test site in remote Kazakhstan.
45:37It was accompanied by soldiers, scientists and the top men in the Politburo.
45:44Everybody's fate, to some extent, was in the balance.
45:46This is where the bomb would be tested.
45:54No-one in the West knew what was happening.
45:57The test firing, codenamed First Lightning, was set for 6am.
46:04It was August 29th, 1949.
46:07Beria's last words to Kerchatov, just 10 minutes before the test, were not encouraging.
46:15Nothing will come of it, Igor, he said.
46:18But there was no going back.
46:22The original control panel is preserved in the Azamas Museum.
46:26Everything that day depended on the throwing of a single switch.
46:29Throwing this switch cuts in the battery, leading to the apparatus, which, after a short pause, should deliver the correct surge of current.
46:45That finally detonates the powerful implosion, which compresses the sphere of plutonium, lying at the center of the bomb.
47:15So Kerchatov leapt up and headed for the open door.
47:32At that point, the fireball was just forming and turning to a rising mushroom shape, illuminating the whole area with a brilliant light.
47:45And the cloud continued to rise.
47:55And at that point, Kerchatov, at full tilt, grabbed hold of Beria and hugged him.
48:02We did it! It worked!
48:04Now, Kerchatov wasn't a small man.
48:07And he crushed him so hard that Beria started screeching,
48:11Let me go! Let me go! You're throttling me!
48:13But Kerchatov still wouldn't let him go.
48:17Beria kept shouting until the full mushroom cloud started to rise.
48:21And we could already see the shock wave coming towards us.
48:38Kerchatov started to rush for the door without any thought.
48:43He simply lost his self-control.
48:45But Fleurov caught up with him, stopped him and brought him back into the dugout,
48:50so that when the shock wave hit and we heard the rumble of the explosion,
48:55we were all back inside and the door was closed.
48:57The dark lake marks the spot where that explosion went off.
49:15The dark lake marks the spot where that explosion went off.
49:20The news reached the West before it was even announced in the Soviet Union.
49:27People were shocked that the Soviet Union had produced a bomb so quickly,
49:33at least two years earlier than even the pessimists had forecast.
49:35The arms race was on, and what no one realized was that on the next leg,
49:42the Soviets were going to overtake the Americans.
49:44The Americanians.
49:45The Americanians
49:47The Americanians
49:49I'm sorry.
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