This year is not only the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, but also the anniversary of the creation of the Soviet nuclear agency, today Rosatom. From the beginning, under the direction of Russian physicist Igor Kurchatov, the agency worked to utilize atomic power not only for the bomb, but also for producing electricity. The world’s first nuclear power plant putting electricity online was built in 1954 under Kurchatov’s directions in the city of Obninsk.
Igor Kurchatov had been appointed the scientific director of the Soviet nuclear program in 1943. He was instrumental in the development of the atomic bomb and then headed up the work on the hydrogen bomb. After seeing one of the tests of the hydrogen bomb in 1950, he came back to his colleagues, shaken, saying, “We can never use this bomb in a war.” At the end of December 1950, he told his colleagues, “Let’s begin next year not with weapons, but with a magnetic thermonuclear reactor: Let’s begin with that.”
In celebrating the Rosatom anniversary, various nuclear scientists told reporters what they would show Igor Kurchatov if he visited them now in 2025. Rosatom also issued key quotes from Kurchatov’s 1956 speech at the famous 20th Party Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, at which Khrushchev gave his well-known de-Stalinization speech. Kurchatov’s speech was published the next day in Pravda.
It was a decisive shift, as Kurchatov called for cooperation on developing thermonuclear energy with other countries, including specifically with the United States. Kurchatov said: “We, Soviet scientists, would like to work together with scientists from all countries of the world, including scientists from America, whose scientific and technical achievements we highly appreciate, to solve this most important scientific problem for mankind. For this to be possible, the only thing necessary is that the U.S. government accept the Soviet Union’s proposal to ban the use of atomic and hydrogen weapons, for which our party is tirelessly fighting.” Kurchatov’s speech in London that year revealed to the world the Soviet work on a new thermonuclear device called the “tokamak.” This unilateral revelation of “state secrets” led to the general declassification of the work on fusion in all nations.
Here are some other quotes from that London speech of Kurchatov’s, published today by Rosatom:
