PAVEL V. OLEYNIKOV German Scientists in the Soviet Atomic Project PAVEL V. OLEYNIKOV1 Pavel Oleynikov has been a group leader at the Institute of Technical Physics of the Russian Federal Nuclear Center in Snezhinsk (Chelyabinsk-70), Russia. He can be reached by e-mail at <
[email protected]>. he fact that after World War II the Soviet Union This article first addresses what the Soviets knew at took German scientists to work on new defense the end of World War II about the German bomb pro- Tprojects in that country has been fairly well docu- gram and then discusses their efforts to collect German mented.2 However, the role of German scientists in the technology, scientists, and raw materials, particularly advancement of the Soviet atomic weapons program is uranium, after the war. Next, it reviews the Soviets’ use controversial. In the United States in the 1950s, Russians of German uranium and scientists in particular labora- were portrayed as “retarded folk who depended mainly tories working on different aspects of atomic weapons on a few captured German scientists for their achieve- development. It discusses the contributions and careers ments, if any.”3 Russians, for their part, vehemently deny of several German scientists and their possible motiva- all claims of the German origins of the Soviet bomb and tions for participating in the Soviet bomb program. The wield in their defense the statement of Max Steenbeck importance of the Germans’ contributions was reflected (a German theorist who pioneered supercritical centri- in the awards and other acknowledgments they fuges for uranium enrichment in the USSR) 4 that “all received from the Soviet government, including numer- talk that Germans have designed the bomb for the Sovi- ous Stalin Prizes in the late 1940s and early 1950s.