- 6 hours ago
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:07These pictures were shot by the East German secret police.
00:15They show a spy called Alexander Feiklisov
00:19visiting the grave of a person he regards
00:22as one of the Soviet Union's greatest heroes.
00:27He was a real hero, you know, because he risked his life
00:32in order lives of tens of thousands of people,
00:38Americans, Soviet, British, and others were saved.
00:43Colonel Feiklisov was one of the most important agents
00:47in the KGB's history,
00:48at one time in charge of the North American spy network.
00:53His hero is Klaus Fuchs, the German scientist
00:57who passed the secrets of America's atom bomb to Moscow.
01:12The End
01:13Oh, my God.
01:55The first Soviet bomb had gone down well in the Kremlin.
01:59The top men, Stalin and Beria, were reportedly ecstatic.
02:06The scientists who built it certainly were.
02:18Yuli Hariton, a key man in the team which built the bomb, became part of the privileged minority.
02:24Limousines, parties and all the perks the bureaucracy could provide.
02:29He and his boss, Igor Kurchatov, had delivered at least a year ahead of schedule, and their political paymasters were
02:38duly grateful.
02:40But the leadership knew the biggest debt they owed was to their spies.
02:47While the Americans spent the equivalent of some 20 to 30 billion rubles to develop the bomb,
02:55we spent far less.
02:56And that was certainly thanks to the Soviet intelligence services.
03:04One of the many spies to whom they owed such thanks was Alexander Feklysov.
03:13After a gap of over 40 years, he agreed to retrace his steps to the centre of one of his
03:19most important assignments.
03:23His destination was London, just as it had been in 1947, when a message had reached the KGB that Klaus
03:30Fuchs wanted to reopen contact.
03:34Feklysov had been sent off with a special briefing from the KGB's chief of intelligence.
03:39Chief of the intelligence, he instructed me, he said, first of all, you should remember that Klaus Fuchs, he is
03:49one of the best of our agents.
03:52And he showed that he can observe secrecy very well.
04:03The man the KGB admired so much was now working at Harwell, Britain's new top-secret nuclear research centre.
04:12All day long, lorries come and go. They're stopped at the gates too. Surely they don't think there's a spy
04:18in there?
04:19He was once again at the cutting edge of the nuclear industry, theoretically for peaceful purposes,
04:23but really, as he later told East German intelligence, still working on the bomb.
04:30Harwell itself was concerned mainly with developing nuclear reactors.
04:39Naturally, most of the staff emphasised the future peaceful applications.
04:50But the senior staff knew that the first reactor to be developed would be used to produce plutonium for military
04:58purposes.
05:11Veklisov's job was to make contact in London and pick up a package of information which Fuchs thought would be
05:16useful to the Soviet Union.
05:19Their first rendezvous was arranged outside a pub in North London called the Nag's Head.
05:24When you have a meeting with an important person,
05:30a person which will pass you materials of the utmost secrecy,
05:38you certainly could be
05:41holded up, could be arrested,
05:44could be beaten up.
05:45But certainly it was very
05:48tense moment.
05:54Veklisov didn't have to wait long.
05:56Once he and Fuchs had identified each other,
05:58they slipped out into the street.
06:00He told me that he brought with him very important information about
06:06reactors and chemical plants to produce plutonium.
06:11And I told him that at the end of the meeting, while we will turn around the corner,
06:18he will quickly pass it to me and then we will depart.
06:24Veklisov got to know the pubs and parks of London well, as a succession of meetings followed.
06:29But both men were nervous.
06:31They knew that British and American counter-espionage was stepping up the pressure.
06:36In April 1949, Fuchs failed to turn up for his meeting.
06:40The FBI had picked up his trail and tipped off British security.
06:49Concrete suspicions had been directed at me.
06:52From the questions that were asked, I had to assume that the material I had passed on from New York,
06:58that some kind of information about it had reached the American authorities.
07:10And then came the day when the deputy director, Dr. Skinner,
07:16a very close personal friend, he said to me,
07:23Klaus, accusations have been made against you.
07:28If you can assure us there's nothing in them, we'll stand by you to a man and fight it through
07:33with you to the end.
07:38I simply wasn't equal to that.
07:41As someone involved with intelligence, I should have been delighted.
07:45But as a human being, I was suddenly struck by the human relations aspect.
07:49The fact that one can feel such a close bond with one's friends,
07:53that they can place such trust in one.
07:56And that was the moment I betrayed myself.
08:01Fuchs was arrested.
08:03His old friend and mentor, Rudolf Piles, like Fuchs, a refugee from Nazi Germany,
08:09went to visit him in jail.
08:14When I said that I found it hard to believe that he accepted all the orthodoxy of Marxism and so
08:22on,
08:22and of the Soviet regime, he said, well, you must remember what I went through as a young man in
08:30Germany.
08:31But also, it was always my intention.
08:33When I had helped the Russians to take over everything, then I would get up and tell them what was
08:38wrong with their system.
08:41It seems to me a fantastic arrogance and naivety.
08:50He was prepared to meet death.
08:56And when he was later arrested, he expected that he would be executed.
09:06But Fuchs was sentenced to just 14 years.
09:09Technically, the Soviet Union had not been an enemy for much of the time he was spying.
09:15When the fuss died down, Alexander Fiklisov slipped back to Moscow, dismayed at the loss of a top spy.
09:24In a series of dawn raids, FBI agents swooped down on communists,
09:28indicted on charges of advocating the violent overthrow of the government.
09:32But in America, the arrest fuelled anti-communist feeling.
09:36There is no doubt as to where a real communist loyalty rests.
09:41Their allegiance is to Russia, not the United States.
09:44FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover asked for funds to hire 300 more special agents.
09:50But already, the Soviets were getting far less dependent on their spies.
09:56In October 1951, Oleg Kiryushkin was given special instructions.
10:04Now a be-meddled veteran, he was then a navigator on a Tupola IV that had been detailed to test
10:10drop an atom bomb.
10:14It was October the 19th, 1951.
10:17The test centre chief called us together and said,
10:20Comrades, today you are making an important test flight.
10:23Fine.
10:24We lined up to get the final briefing from the Deputy Minister of the Interior.
10:42He warned us that if we told anybody, it would be the death of us.
10:46It was the death of us because we were pioneers.
10:49We and our families would all die.
10:52But as he tried to intimidate us, we smiled, but our hearts sank.
10:56Who knew how it would go?
10:58It was the first airdrop.
11:05In the atmosphere of those days, the Soviet Union was working flat out
11:09to build an atomic arsenal that could threaten credible retaliation.
11:15They knew that the US had targeted all their major cities.
11:23The plane headed out towards the same test site in Kazakhstan,
11:26where the first Soviet bomb had been tested.
11:31How would the plane behave after the explosion?
11:34What would we feel like ourselves?
11:45We dropped the bomb.
11:47You can picture it.
11:48The plane lost six tons and bucked upwards,
11:53climbing because it had lost that weight.
11:59Then for 56 seconds, we waited for the flash to come.
12:17It was worse when the shock wave hit.
12:20The plane began to creak and grow.
12:22Just imagine.
12:23It's a heavy plane.
12:25There were three almighty shocks, very powerful shocks.
12:28We've got an instrument called a variometer
12:31that shows the rate of climb and descent.
12:34Now, that variometer needle went round the clock three times.
12:38It didn't register just 10 or 15 metres.
12:41It went round three times.
12:43The shock was so violent.
12:45The plane was just hurled upwards.
12:54The plane could have broken up or caught fire from the flash.
12:58We were relieved and happy to make it safely back to base.
13:08Before we took off to make the bombing run,
13:10we were shown what we would be bombing.
13:16A factory had been built there,
13:18and a railway station, an airport.
13:20There were tanks on the ground,
13:22artillery pieces, residential housing blocks,
13:25and all the structures were real, solid.
13:33And after we dropped the bomb,
13:36we were shown what we had done.
13:38Everything was destroyed, smashed, demolished.
13:42So they were right to claim that the bomb
13:44is the most horrible weapon.
13:49We were all against it, and we wanted it banned.
13:52And after April.
13:57But there was no chance of that.
14:01The production of a nuclear arsenal to match the Americans
14:04was now involving more and more of the Soviet Union's scarce resources.
14:16At various places in the vast expanse of the country,
14:20special troops were patrolling a network of secret nuclear work centres.
14:26To this day, they remain forbidding places to any visitor.
14:32Ours was the first Western team they'd ever allowed through these gates,
14:36and that took months of delicate negotiation.
14:42By 1950, these work centres were rapidly expanding into cities,
14:47as thousands of people were drafted in to work on nuclear weapons.
14:59Gone were the days when atomic scientists worked in freezing tents
15:02with minimal help from above.
15:04Now they were top of the pile,
15:06all the resources of the state at their command.
15:12Inside these atomic cities,
15:14life was portrayed by the internal propaganda
15:16as an idealised collective.
15:19Work together, live together, stay together,
15:21and enjoy the rewards.
15:33But it was a privilege in a world of mirrors.
15:36These cities had no postal address,
15:38no place on a map,
15:39no contact with the outside world.
15:46Then they gave us free airline passes.
15:50We called them magic carpets,
15:52allowing free and unlimited travel
15:54on all forms of transport,
15:56planes, boats, and trains.
15:58But of course, since we weren't allowed out of the city,
16:01there wasn't much we could do with them.
16:03We could do with them.
16:07Altshula knew that beyond the barbed wire and the guards,
16:10there was another side to this story.
16:12He'd only been saved from the gulag
16:14because his boss told Beria he was too good a scientist to lose.
16:21But other victims of the programme were now legion.
16:31Some of them lived by the Irtish River in Kazakhstan.
16:39The ferry there is meant to run every second day.
16:43But the local population is dwindling now,
16:46and more often than not the service is cancelled.
16:54The people round here are among the many Soviet citizens
16:58who suffered because their government wanted nuclear parity
17:01at virtually any price.
17:04The villagers of Darlon live within the fallout zone
17:08of the Soviet Union's main test site.
17:10Their first brush with radiation had come back in 1949
17:14when the first red bomb was tested.
17:16The authorities today admit that not enough precautions
17:20were taken to protect them.
17:30Naturally, when it exploded,
17:32it sucked up a large quantity of dust from the ground.
17:39And all this dust was dispersed by the wind,
17:42and it settled on the area roundabout,
17:45causing radioactive contamination.
17:52We ought to have evacuated people from the populated areas downwind.
17:57But that just didn't happen.
18:04Over the next few years, they would see many such explosions,
18:07many such dust clouds.
18:09The local doctor tracked the consequences.
18:16We have a very high rate of infant mortality here.
18:19Apparently, this is linked to genes which were damaged during these radiation tests.
18:23And this infant mortality is specifically connected with the effects of radiation on the genes.
18:28We also get children born with birth defects, a great many.
18:32But in my opinion, it is reflected not in the first generation,
18:35which suffered the radiation, nor to such an extent in the second generation,
18:39but in the third and fourth.
18:44Others suffered more directly from Stalin and Beria's ruthlessness.
18:59In 1993, there was an unusual reunion in the Czech mining town of Yakimov.
19:14Aleluja! Aleluja! Aleluja!
19:25Back in 1950, these men were political prisoners of the new Communist regime in Prague.
19:36They became unwilling components of the Soviet bomb.
19:44Beneath the surface of the bleak countryside, the rock carried seams of uranium.
19:59When the Russians wanted supplies stepped up, political prisoners were drafted in to do the work.
20:06The conditions in the mines are very difficult because there is cold, there is water, there is danger of falling
20:19down of boulders, of fragments of the rock.
20:24And then also, especially in the uranium mines, there was radioactivity because it was the radiation either from the ore
20:37veins, from the uranium ores, or also, and it was far more dangerous, the breathing of radon, the gas radon.
20:54This is mill number one, the tower of the death.
20:59The material was milled down and brought through the elevator to the top of the tower.
21:09This very strong radioactive material was very dangerous for the health of the people who have been working here.
21:21This tower of the death was full of dust and radioactive danger.
21:32The most dangerous place in all this plant.
21:38When the snow melted, the survivors reassembled.
21:41One of them told us how disobedience was punished.
21:46Yes.
21:47There was one priest, the parson.
21:50He was put into what they call correction.
21:56And they force fed him, using a hose and a funnel.
22:02The hose was put down his throat and they poured food into the funnel.
22:10That was how they fed people who went on hunger strike and who didn't want to work here.
22:16Afterwards, they were driven away and they disappeared.
22:25Some of the men then decided to show us the way they'd had to march three miles to work each
22:30day.
22:30The difference, fifty years ago, was that they were badly fed, badly clothed,
22:36and tightly bound together by sharp wire which cut into their flesh.
22:46It's the official statistic from the Ministry of Interior.
22:50They have been together, 300 died.
22:55The reason illness, 84.
23:01Suicide, 26.
23:04Mortal injury, 134.
23:09Shutdown when attempting to escape, 24.
23:14One murder, and the unknown reason, 31.
23:27They were the victims of the ever colder war.
23:40I am holding in my hand a microfilm of very highly confidential secret State Department documents.
23:47These documents were fed out of the State Department over ten years ago by communists who were employees of that
23:56department,
23:57and who were interested in seeing that these documents were sent to the Soviet Union.
24:01The war of propaganda between East and West was now reaching a crescendo.
24:06I was determined, as far as it was humanly possible, to see that no disloyal person should be employed by
24:13our government.
24:15President Truman's post-war philosophy had taken root.
24:18Communism should be resisted wherever it showed its face.
24:21Are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?
24:24It is perfectly clear to me, gentlemen, that if you continue in this particular fashion,
24:28you have only one body here.
24:32In Moscow, the propaganda machine was pushing the same message.
24:50One crucial difference, of course, the aggressor was America, the intended victim, the Soviet Union.
24:56Mr Guiaoold?
24:57Mr Guiao Zeig.
25:01Mr Guiaoold, Mr Guiao Justincus.
25:03This was the military Chief of Reginald Post.
25:04Mr Guiao cher IG.
25:10Mr Guiao Hon refuse.
25:12Mr Guiao.
25:13Mr Guiao.
25:15Mr Guiao้ belong Mum.
25:17Mr Guiaoót.
25:17Mr Guiao How long has you and if you have heard the ê´‘ Navajo Magic.
25:19Mr Guiao Allahu language and hear the工作 warnings Storage.
25:20Mr Guiao, take the gestion plane of the prepared продукty.
25:23Mr Guiao lowersshop into the Esperỗ 뿌� and the practical fednas.
25:30This film shows how the authorities were preparing the population for nuclear attack from America.
25:37Just as Londoners had sheltered from German bombing in the city's underground system,
25:42so Muscovites were now taught how to survive bombardment in their own underground shelters.
25:54Let's go to the regime of germatization. Close the doors of the protective equipment.
25:59Close the doors of the protective equipment.
26:02Close the doors of the protective equipment.
26:14The country had lost over 20 million people during the war against Hitler.
26:22With the new war now raging in Korea, it was not hard to convince them that the threat from America
26:28was serious.
26:50The Pacific is the chosen proving ground for the United States H-bomb experiment,
26:54here amid vast ocean spaces far from human habitation.
26:59Both sides were fast approaching the moment when they could threaten each other with a weapon 20 times more powerful
27:04than any they'd tested so far.
27:07In November 1952, the Americans prepared to explode a massive device on an atoll in the Pacific.
27:12In less than a minute, you will see the most powerful explosion ever witnessed by human eyes.
27:20The blast will come out of the horizon just about there.
27:24And this is the significance of the moment.
27:27This is the first full-scale test of a hydrogen device.
27:31If the reaction goes, we're in the thermonuclear era.
27:36Eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.
27:48The explosion showed the terrifying power of thermonuclear fusion.
27:54The shock waves of the world's first H-bomb rushed towards the onlookers,
27:58and spellbound, they watched something never seen before.
28:03But the device was so cumbersome that it could never have been dropped from a plane,
28:07or in that sense regarded as a usable weapon.
28:11So the race was on to turn that technology into a bomb,
28:15and two new figures were dominating the picture.
28:21In Los Alamos, Edward Teller was leading the American research team.
28:25Like so many other nuclear scientists, a refugee from the Nazis,
28:28but untroubled by doubts that communism now needed to be fought at every turn.
28:36In the secret city of Arzamas-16, Andrey Sakharov,
28:40later to be the great dissident against communism,
28:43but now the wonder boy of Soviet science.
28:46A close colleague of his at that time was Yuri Trutnev,
28:50now scientific director at Arzamas,
28:52then one of the team working on the hydrogen bomb.
28:59The atmosphere was very creative,
29:03fresh ideas were valued,
29:05and somehow the way it went was that the young specialists who had arrived here
29:10worked with enthusiasm,
29:12and the fresh ideas came tumbling out.
29:18We actually had this concept of a fresh idea.
29:23A few months later, the Soviets were back at the Kazakhstan test site,
29:28preparing to explode Sakharov's latest fresh idea,
29:31a bomb using a layer of a light hydrogen isotope called lithium.
29:36They felt certain this was an advantage over the Americans,
29:39because they'd seen early American plans, courtesy of Beria's spies.
29:49Zildović was the one who examined the materials, which, it subsequently turned out, were tellers' work.
30:01But after analysis by Zildović and his colleagues, they turned out to be flawed.
30:08Then, not for the first time in this saga, the unexpected intervened.
30:15Stalin died.
30:20In the power struggle which followed, his apparent successor and head of the atomic program,
30:25Lavarenti Beria, lost out.
30:29Nikita Khrushchev emerged as the new leader, and Beria was executed.
30:37Many of his associates in the Lubyanka lost their jobs or were dispatched to prison,
30:42including some in the spy network which had accumulated the secrets of America's bomb.
30:49Only the importance of the nuclear program stopped his protégés at Arzamas going the same way.
31:03It was September before preparations resumed in Kazakhstan.
31:09The American test the previous year had demonstrated the awesome potential of such a device,
31:14but theirs was more of an exploding laboratory than a weapon.
31:22Although Sakharov's would be exploded from a tower, it was small enough to be dropped from a plane.
31:27So if it worked, Sakharov and the Russians could claim that they had overtaken the Americans in the race to
31:33build a usable hydrogen bomb.
31:57It was a very small business.
31:57It was a very small business.
32:00It was a very small business.
32:11Forty years ago, Ilja Radugin was a young lieutenant in the Red Army.
32:17His task had been to build this house, specially to test the destructive power of the explosion.
32:23He was watching from only a few miles away when the bomb went off and the house disintegrated.
32:32It's difficult to put it into words.
32:34You have to see it, this crackling sound.
32:37You get the impression that the material explodes in one or two seconds.
32:44It's a drawn-out period.
32:45The crackling goes on for several tens of seconds.
32:48And that has a powerful effect on the nerves, the ears, on everything.
32:53And then afterwards comes the shockwave, and then the secondary shockwave.
32:58It's all very unpleasant, very unpleasant at a short distance.
33:06And this was a bomb which had not relied on American secrets.
33:10The Russians' effort had paid off.
33:12They had overtaken the Americans.
33:16All the evidence there is shows that this was an independent Soviet design.
33:21It was not a copy of anything that had been received from the United States.
33:26And in fact, all the early intelligence, or all the intelligence we know about on the hydrogen bomb from the
33:32United States,
33:33would have been quite misleading, because it was all leading down to dead ends
33:38in thinking about how you would design such a weapon.
33:53You can judge the power of the explosion, at least from the wrecked basement where we are standing.
33:58This was supposed to be a bomb shelter with a reinforced concrete capping.
34:03There are some steel rods sticking out.
34:05It's as if they've been cut off with a knife.
34:07There's concrete under our feet.
34:09And that's not to mention the fact that there were three brick stories above.
34:13They were swept away.
34:14They've gone.
34:18The shockwave of the explosion on those remote planes was also felt in Washington.
34:27The U.S. really had underestimated Soviet progress.
34:32The bomb was tested three years before the CIA estimated was the earliest it could be tested.
34:38So there was a very unstable and dangerous situation in which you had some people arguing for a preventive war
34:47against the Soviet Union
34:48before the Soviet Union really developed the capacity to strike with nuclear weapons at the United States.
34:57Both sides knew that the cost of fighting a war with such weapons would be fearsomely high.
35:01But it wasn't beyond imagining, and it was for that both sides now planned.
35:18The bridge over the river Yurul, near the town of Orenburg in central Russia,
35:23is technically the dividing line between Europe and Asia.
35:26In September 1954, Vasily Kowalov and Ivan Skvortsov were privates in a unit of the Red Army stationed nearby.
35:46They were told to report for special manoeuvres near the town of Totsk, some 50 miles away.
36:01As a young communist leader, I was given the job of organising preparations.
36:06I had to see to it that squad personnel kept strict discipline, and to check their morale,
36:12because we had to carry out a very important government mission.
36:22The area had been chosen because it had some similarities with the Fulda Gap in West Germany,
36:27where Soviet forces planned to drive through NATO lines in the event of war.
36:33Everything that happened was kept secret for years.
36:36Records of who took part were suppressed,
36:38and this film was locked in the military archive until the Soviet Union collapsed.
36:44But we have found witnesses to what was an extraordinary rehearsal for nuclear war.
36:51Some of the preparations were unsurprising.
36:56Trenches had been dug across the plain, as though for an infantry battle.
37:01Tanks were left camouflaged, and aircraft positioned for take-off.
37:08Less expected were the livestock tethered round the battlefield in the autumn sun.
37:15And this was the reason.
37:18An atomic bomb was going to be exploded over the site as part of the exercise.
37:23And the Soviet leaders wanted to find out how close a living creature could go and still survive.
37:32Military chiefs from the communist countries turned up to watch what happened from the bunker.
37:38The code word to start the exercise was MOLNIA, or lightning.
37:52MOLNIA!
38:01MOLNIA!
38:05MOLNIA!
38:10The command came at 9 o'clock in the morning, September 14th.
38:15Enemy air attack, and then...
38:18ATOM.
38:19Atomic alert.
38:20That is, an atomic attack.
38:22We took to the trenches, and we took cover.
38:25And for some 25 to 30 minutes, we remained in the trenches,
38:30waiting for the next signal.
38:32We have a combat.
38:37We have the case.
38:43We have the case.
38:45We have the flames.
38:47We have the fire.
38:47We have the fire.
38:48We have the fire.
39:07At that point, there was a flash that blinded the men in the trench.
39:21Then the explosion took place. It was unusual.
39:27Now I'd fought in the war, and I'd seen explosions of conventional ammunition during the Second World War.
39:35But that explosion was very sharp, very abrupt.
39:41And when the explosion went off, there was a blinding lightning, so to speak, a powerful beam, a very powerful
39:49beam.
39:51We had black pieces of glass installed in our gas masks.
39:56You could hardly even see the sun through those glasses.
40:00But that light was stronger than an electric arc welder.
40:06It was a few seconds before the blast hit them.
40:10Of course, we covered our eyes with our hands, as we had been told to do.
40:16We crouched in the bottom of the trench.
40:18And this was followed by a sensation like an earthquake.
40:22It was as if we were on board a large seagoing ship with a ground rocket.
40:53Some animals died instantly.
41:00Others survived the attack, and in that bleak sense, the experiment yielded useful data.
41:12The cloud was still rising when 40,000 troops were ordered to start their mock battle under its deadly shadow.
41:37We received the order to break cover, board the trucks, and move forward to the firing position, the site of
41:47stage two of the exercise.
41:50Followed up by an attack on the enemy defensive positions.
41:56The moment we got out of the trenches, we saw a gigantic mushroom cloud rising in the distance.
42:15Then, as now, people lived and farmed in the countryside around where the exercise was held.
42:22A few days before, they'd been evacuated from their land.
42:28But they were allowed back almost before the dust had settled.
42:38When we returned, the village was still burning.
42:41There was military equipment ablaze.
42:44The fire engines were putting the fires out.
42:48Bulldozers were working away.
42:50But they actually allowed us to eat everything right away.
42:54We'd got cucumbers, tomatoes, melons in our vegetable gardens.
42:59And when we got back, all this vegetable crop was ripened.
43:04The tomatoes and such, they were all red.
43:10And they said, go ahead, you can eat everything.
43:12It's not dangerous.
43:14Of course, we and the children began eating.
43:20Forty years later, in the long grass nearby, a moth emerged from its chrysalis into the summer sun.
43:26But it will never fly.
43:28Its right wing has inherited a genetic fault from the poisoned earth around Totsk.
43:36On the surface, most of the scars have healed.
43:42Kovalev and Skvortsov have never been back to the epicentre before.
43:49There is no official record to prove that they, or any of the other 40,000 soldiers, actually took part
43:56in the exercise.
44:04But at the local hospital in Totsk, the truth has been harder to obliterate.
44:09Despite opposition from his superiors, Dr. Nikolai Sidorov kept a record of how the local population fared.
44:24In the 1960s, there was a definite explosion of tumorous illnesses in both the region and in the whole province.
44:32I should mention here that at the end of 1991, we had 28,000 people suffering from tumorous illnesses in
44:40the province.
44:41And this trend is growing stronger every year.
44:46If we compare the statistics relating to 1950 with those for the current years,
44:51we will see that the number of cases has gone up 500%,
44:55and the mortality rate has gone up accordingly as a consequence.
45:08Despite the damage to humans and to the environment, the testing went on.
45:16And Sakharov, in those days, was a loyal servant of the Soviet arms race.
45:29After his explosion of August 12th, Sakharov racked his brains to see if it was feasible to make a bomb
45:37that was more powerful and more efficient.
45:47Towards the end of 1954, there was an idea for a new type of hydrogen bomb, on a far more
45:55economic and efficient principle.
46:00The device carried in this plane in 1955 was, to that date, the most powerful bomb ever tested in the
46:07atmosphere.
46:12It was called Sakharov's third idea.
46:33It should have been a moment of triumph for Soviet science.
46:37But it wasn't entirely, at least not for the very scientists who had created it.
46:53Just as their counterparts in Los Alamos had been shocked when the first atom bomb was actually tested,
46:58so too were the Soviet scientists when they saw what they had done.
47:06Igor Kurchatov, the man who led the Soviet team from the start, returned to Moscow two days after the explosion.
47:13Friend said he was appalled by the implications of the test.
47:20Kurchatov was terribly depressed by everything that had occurred.
47:24I asked him, how did it all go?
47:27Was it difficult?
47:28Very difficult, he replied.
47:30And from that point on, he devoted himself completely to peaceful applications.
47:37By the time of his public funeral in 1960, the military men had taken complete control of the project.
47:44They and their counterparts in the West had devised a policy for peace, of a sort.
47:49It was called MAD, mutually assured destruction.
47:53A far cry from the vision Kurchatov had inherited from pioneers of physics like Rutherford, Bohr and Einstein.
48:00Kurchatov had died in the arms of his old friend and colleague, Yuli Hariton.
48:09Hariton was the man who had actually built the first red bomb.
48:12He's 90 now.
48:15More out of habit than need, he still lives in isolation and secrecy.
48:22Only his closest friends know the toll it has taken on his personality and life.
48:28When he was young, he liked to dance, to sing, to go to theatre, to have many friends.
48:39He was interested in beautiful women.
48:43But his science was too serious, and the science made him also so serious.
48:51Because it was a secret, secret, secret.
48:58Andrei Sakharov, the genius who built the hydrogen bomb, turned against the system which required it to survive.
49:09He became communism's most famous dissident, believing that building bombs to protect a nation was pointless unless the nation first
49:17protected human rights.
49:19It was a fight he continued until his dying day.
49:25Klaus Fuchs was released from prison after serving just eight years for what he'd done.
49:30He returned to his communist homeland, East Germany, where he remained till he died.
49:37To the end, he believed he'd acted in the interests of peace on Earth.
49:42The known system was abandoned by a place.
49:44Gambino to run this.,'
49:45and we want to see that died. No?
49:45Ha-ha
50:03-ha. We want to
50:04have... Defetrical gasp
50:04Mes practice. Makes himè,
50:12Let's find out of
Comments