Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov

Russian physicist

• Born: January 12, 1903
• Birthplace: Sim Mill, in the Ural Mountains, Russia
• Died: February 7, 1960
• Place of death: Moscow, Soviet Union (now in Russia)

Kurchatov was the founder of atomic power in the Soviet Union. He played a pivotal role in the introduction and advancement of nuclear energy as a peaceful source of power in that country and was a leader in the development of the Soviet Union’s atomic bomb in the late 1940’s.

Early Life

Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov (EE-gehr vehs-YEEL-yihv-yihch kuhr-CHAH-tehf) was born at the village of Sim Mill, in the Ural Mountains, in Russia. His father, Vasili Alekseevich, was, at different times in his career, a surveyor and a forester’s assistant. Igor’s mother, Mariya Vasilevna Ostyroumeya, was the daughter of the local parish priest in Sim Mill. Igor was the second of three children born to Vasili and Mariya; his sister, Antonina, was the eldest and his brother, Boris, the youngest.

In 1909, Igor’s formal education began when his family moved to the town of Simbirsk to allow him to attend the Simbirsk gymnasium, an acclaimed regional primary school. Three years later, he transferred to the Simferopol gymnasium (secondary school), after his family moved to the Crimean town for his sister’s health. Igor excelled in virtually every subject in his early education, but it was not until his teens, after reading a book on engineering and physics, that he chose physics as what would later be his life’s work. In 1920, after working days and going to school at night, Igor was graduated from Simferopol with a gold medal for scholastic achievement. He went on the same year to attend the Tavricheski University in Simferopol.

Kurchatov was one of the first class of seventy in the university’s physics and mathematics department. As a result of his academic achievements, Kurchatov and another student were placed in charge of the university’s physics laboratory and allowed free rein to conduct experiments to advance their studies. From these early experiments, Kurchatov was to gain an important understanding of the value of practical evidence to support a scientific precept that would benefit him in his later research. By 1923, Kurchatov was graduated from Tavricheski University with a degree in physics, completing the four-year course of study in three years.

Moving to the city of Petrograd shortly after graduation, he was enrolled in postgraduate work in nautical engineering at the polytechnic institute there. As in Simferopol, Kurchatov had to work to support himself. He became a supervisor at the electrical pavilion of the Magnetometeorological Observatory in Pavlovsk, a position that allowed him both to earn a living and to advance his professional interests. As his work at the observatory grew in importance, Kurchatov fell behind in his studies at the institute and was dropped from the nautical engineering program in his second semester. Thereafter, Kurchatov decided to focus his efforts on physics.

After working as a researcher at the Baku Polytechnical Institute in 1924-1925, Kurchatov was selected to work as a physicist at the Physico-Technical Institute in Leningrad, the central facility for studies into advanced engineering and physics in the Soviet Union at the time. During the same period, including the time of his marriage in 1927 to Marina Dmitrievna Sinelnikov, Kurchatov also worked as an instructor in the mechanical physics department of the Leningrad Polytechnical Institute and of the Teachers’ Institute in the same city. In these positions, Kurchatov would spend his most active years and make some of the most important discoveries of his career.

Life’s Work

During the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, Kurchatov was fascinated with the study of what was termed ferroelectricity, the study of the properties and characteristics of different materials as affected by the introduction of electrical currents. These studies led to the development of electron semiconductors and moved Kurchatov’s attention to nuclear physics in the early 1930’s. After conducting some initial experiments on beryllium radiation and corresponding and meeting with nuclear physics pioneer Frédéric Joliot in 1933, Kurchatov began his seminal studies into harnessing the power of the atom. Working with other researchers, including his brother Boris, Kurchatov made pivotal breakthroughs in the discovery and study of isometric nuclei, atomic nuclei in Kurchatov’s case radioactive bromine isotopes that have the same mass and composition but that possess different physical characteristics. This work led to significant advancements in the understanding of the structure of the atom within the Soviet scientific community.

During the same period, 1934-1935, Kurchatov worked with scientists at the Soviet Radium Institute (a facility for research and education patterned after similar institutes started by radiation pioneer Marie Curie in France and Poland) on the study of the neutron, a neutral subatomic particle about which very little was known at the time. Highly charged neutrons are used to bombard the nucleus of a radioactive atom such as uranium to split the nucleus and release high levels of energy in a nuclear reaction.

In the 1930’s, researchers such as Joliot, Enrico Fermi, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and others in the United States, Germany, and elsewhere began to realize that the nuclear reaction, if properly harnessed, could be used to create a bomb of unparalleled explosive power. Kurchatov, as one of the Soviet Union’s leading nuclear physicists, was considered one of the de facto leaders of research and experimentation in the field in his country. Because of a variety of factors, including a scarcity of resources and the politically repressive atmosphere of the Stalinist regime at the time, the Soviet Union lagged behind the rest of the world in the race to master atomic energy.

In the late 1930’s, Kurchatov and his team of researchers in Leningrad made advances in nuclear fission in radioactive isotopes of thorium and uranium. In 1940, two of Kurchatov’s physicists discovered an incident of spontaneous fission in a uranium isotope and, under Kurchatov’s direction, wrote a brief article about it to the American scientific publication Physical Review. Physical Review, at the time, was the world’s leading scientific journal, publishing articles about progress in nuclear research.

After several weeks of waiting for a reply from the journal, Kurchatov initiated a search of current scientific publications for news about nuclear fission experimentation. The study showed that, after the middle of 1940, all American scientific journals had stopped publishing news of nuclear fission. This observation of sudden, uncharacteristic silence on the part of the American scientific community led Kurchatov to report to the Soviet political leadership that the United States, in reaction to the increasing threat of global war with the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan, was probably increasing its effort to build an atomic bomb. That led to a corresponding increase in the research being conducted in the Soviet Union. Kurchatov’s Leningrad laboratories became a major focus of that effort.

The advance of German troops into Soviet territory in July of 1941 drained resources from all sectors of the Soviet Union, including the scientific community. Many of Kurchatov’s researchers and physicists were reassigned to assist the war effort, with Kurchatov himself being put to work in the shipyards of Sevastopol, training sailors to degauss ships. Degaussing is a process in which metallic coils are placed around a ship to demagnetize it as a defense against magnetic mines.

By 1942, Soviet espionage efforts in the United States had confirmed that the Manhattan Project was making significant advances in the development of an American atomic bomb. At the urging of other scientists and politicians, Kurchatov was recalled from Sevastopol and named chief designer of the facility that would be charged with developing a sustained, controlled nuclear reaction. This facility would later form the heart of the Soviet Atomic Energy Institute.

At the institute, Kurchatov’s team built a cyclotron and other equipment necessary to operate a nuclear pile, or nuclear reactor. After the United States successfully tested and used atomic bombs at the end of World War II, the Soviet Union increased its effort to counter what it perceived as an American nuclear threat. Kurchatov was a central figure in that controversy. On December 27, 1946, Kurchatov and his team created the first nuclear reactor in Europe. From the reactor, Kurchatov was able to develop the plutonium isotope necessary for the atomic bomb. On September 29, 1949, the Soviet Union officially joined the nuclear age with the successful test explosion of an atomic bomb. This feat was followed in November, 1952, by the test detonation of an American hydrogen bomb a weapon many times more powerful than an atomic bomb and, on August 12, 1953, by a similar Soviet achievement.

After the development of the atom and hydrogen bombs, Kurchatov was instrumental as a leader in the movement within the Soviet scientific community to use nuclear power for peaceful purposes. He helped design and construct the first nuclear power plants in his country. In 1951, he organized one of the first major conferences on nuclear power in the Soviet Union and, later, was part of the team that put into operation the first nuclear-powered electrical generating stations in the Soviet Union on June 27, 1954.

Kurchatov was a highly regarded figure within the power structure of the Soviet government. In addition to serving the presidium (ruling body) of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, he was three times named a Hero of Soviet Labor, was a deputy to the Supreme Soviet, and was a respected politician in addition to his reputation as an outstanding scientist. It is believed that his political acumen, almost as much as his scientific ability, enabled him to lead successfully the increasingly complex organizations that accomplished his appointed objectives.

Beyond his role in the internal development of nuclear physics in his own country, Kurchatov was viewed as a pioneer by his peers in the international community of scientists. Joliot of France, the husband of Irène Joliot-Curie and corecipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics for his seminal work in nuclear physics, shared a long correspondence with Kurchatov. In the late 1950’s, Kurchatov participated in international conferences on atomic energy and joined other scientists in calling for a worldwide ban on nuclear weapons. In the late 1950’s, he was a strong advocate for a ban on the atmospheric testing of atomic weapons, a concept on which the United States and the Soviet Union later agreed in the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963. Moving into semiretirement after two strokes in 1956 and 1957, Kurchatov continued to involve himself in the continuing developments in nuclear physics and in the design and construction of several nuclear power plants in the Soviet Union. On February 7, 1960, in Moscow, he died, presumably of heart failure.

Significance

Kurchatov’s achievements go beyond the projects to which he dedicated his life. His theoretical work, while of considerable importance, only paralleled and usually lagged behind that of other nuclear pioneers of the early twentieth century. It is, rather, in the application of the theories he helped discover that his work takes on immeasurable importance.

Kurchatov flourished under the oppressive and technologically stifling atmosphere of the regime of Joseph Stalin. Kurchatov was able to assemble teams of outstanding scientists under grueling and arduous conditions and, moreover, to motivate those scientists to build a working, productive community. He managed to stay in favor and out of prison during Stalin’s several purges of the nation’s scientific and political leadership and to advance his objectives at the same time. He was, by all accounts, a dedicated scientist who believed that the laboratory was the place to develop and test theories of physics. Because of this practical perspective, he encouraged a whole generation of Soviet physicists to put their principles and concepts to the test throughout the creative process. He served as a mentor to many of his country’s greatest scientific figures, including nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov.

Kurchatov also helped his country move into the technological age of the last half of the twentieth century by shaping a dual course of development for atomic energy in the Soviet Union. Had he focused entirely on the development of nuclear weapons, the peaceful applications of atomic energy electrical generating plants might not have had a powerful champion to guide them to reality as early as occurred.

Bibliography

Golovin, I. N. I. V. Kurchatov: A Socialist-Realist Biography of the Soviet Nuclear Scientist. Translated by William H. Dougherty. Bloomington, Ind.: Selbstverlag Press, 1968. This book is one of the only biographies produced in the Soviet Union on Kurchatov that has been translated into English. As with many Soviet works, there is a strong propagandist cast to the narrative, but the information is well organized. It is interesting reading, both as a means to learn about Kurchatov and as a view into the mind-set of the Soviet system of government.

Levering, Ralph B., et al., eds. Debating the Origins of the Cold War: American and Russian Perspectives. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002. This examination of the causes of the Cold War includes a memo from Kurchatov and L. P. Beria, a top Soviet official, to Joseph Stalin on the preliminary data obtained from an atomic bomb test.

Pollock, Ethan. Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pollock explores Joseph Stalin’s mandate-to-succeed for scientists in the Soviet Union, including those, like Kurchatov, working on nuclear power and the atomic bomb.

Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986. This expansive compendium of information about the West’s development of the atomic bomb includes brief listings of information about Kurchatov but explores in greater depth the time and sociopolitical atmosphere in which both the United States and the Soviet Union raced to develop humankind’s most destructive weapon.