Speaking with employees of Rosatom in the atomic city of Sarov on Aug. 23, President Vladimir Putin put out a number of important messages. He referred to the two major projects during Soviet times, missiles and the atomic project. This year Russia celebrates the 80th anniversary of the creation of a Soviet atomic agency on August 20, 1945, a decision taken less than two weeks after the bombing of Hiroshima. Without those projects, Putin underlined, the Soviet Union would have been defenseless against the new weapon. The importance of maintaining “sovereignty” was absolutely essential for a country like Russia. He also noted that most of the European countries have basically lost their sovereignty.
Putin also laid flowers at the grave of Yuri Khariton, one of the key developers of the nuclear project together with Igor Kurchatov, who had single-handedly in 1956 declassified the Soviet work on fusion, realizing that the hydrogen bomb, having witnessed a test of the third variant, was a weapon that could never be used in a war. The Rosatom employees were very young, most of them under 30 years old. One young lady in uniform, who raised a question about the nuclear program, was second mate on a nuclear icebreaker, which surprised the President, who, seeing the uniform, thought she might be a student at one of the military institutes.
Many of the employees seemed to have come from families who already worked in the nuclear industry. One rather thin, middle-aged woman, said she had dreams as a child of becoming a ballerina, but her father worked in the nuclear field and her grandfather had helped deal with the Chernobyl accident, and she decided to work in the nuclear field, now designing nuclear reactors.
