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Journal of Cold War Studies 3.3 (2001) 110-112



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Book Review

Red Atom:
Russia's Nuclear Power Program from Stalin to Today


Paul R. Josephson, Red Atom: Russia's Nuclear Power Program from Stalin to Today. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1999. 352 pp. $26.95.

This is the first major English-language study to provide an in-depth, comprehensive analysis of the Russian nuclear industry. Paul Josephson, a fellow at the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard University, has drawn on Soviet and Russian archival materials, interviews, and personal travel to many of the sites to uncover a fascinat- ing, complex, and fundamentally flawed industry that dates back to the era of Josif Stalin.

Josephson begins his account with a discussion of the experimental reactor at Obninsk in the 1950s and ends it with Chernobyl, arguably the world's worst civilian industrial accident. In between he examines the various stages of the program from its inception during World War II to the development of breeder reactors (at the Shevchenko complex on the Caspian Sea) and the efforts to set up grandiose centers for reactor construction and design. The centers included the South Ural Construction Trust in the Chelyabinsk region, where the early workers were common prisoners and Germans captured during the war, and Volgodonsk and the ill-fated Atommash complex, the giant factory for nuclear-related machinery constructed too close to the shores of a lake. The overall picture is one of frantic construction, early optimism, and willful sacrifice of the health and livelihoods of the industry's workers as a result of deplorable living conditions and high accident rates.

At times the book is a little too technical. Josephson has a good understanding of the operation of nuclear reactors, and though his style is communicative--almost journalistic in tone--the average reader may find some passages hard to follow. In general, however, his enthusiasm for the subject is infectious.

The middle chapters of the book illustrate the profound Soviet faith in the atom inspired in part by a belief, dating back to Vladimir Lenin, in the virtues of technology. Soviet scientists developed nuclear engines, a food irradiation program, and fusion power facilities. Josephson notes that many officials regarded fusion power as an ideal solution to Soviet energy problems, especially through the tokamak reactors. The machinery and equipment for this program came from the Efremov Scientific Research Institute of Electrophysical Apparatus located near Leningrad, but there were also significant developments throughout the Soviet Union, particularly in Ukraine where an Institute of Nuclear Research was founded in Kyiv in 1970.

No Soviet community was immune from the spreading wave of nuclear power. Even the Chukhotsk peninsula on the remotest northeastern tip of the Soviet Union was provided with a small nuclear power station at Bilibino for heating. Some of Josephson's most detailed research concerns the pioneers of the industry, and he provides a biographical account of each major figure. Some names--Igor Kurchatov, Andrei Sakharov, and Evgenii Velikhov--are familiar in the West. Others are Soviet heroes whom many Western readers will discover for the first time, including Vladimir [End Page 110] Malykh, Anatolii Aleksandrov, Lev Artsimovich, Lev Landau, and Kirill Sinelnikov.

The nuclear power program was clearly an integral facet of the Cold War. Under Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union appeared momentarily to have the edge. Secret cities were built in the Urals, and workers in these cities were restricted in their travels and lived reclusive lives. Josephson also looks at the construction of the icebreaker Lenin in 1959, a moment of great national pride. It plowed through 47,000 kilometers of northern ice in its first three years of operation.

Every accomplishment, however, was accompanied by a plethora of accidents and disasters. Some were deliberate, such as the use of nuclear explosions to alter the landscape and facilitate mining extraction and oil and gas development. The ocean, especially in the arctic region, has been a dumping ground for Soviet radioactive waste. Various parts of Russia and other...

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