One letter that woke Stalin, one element that bears his name
During the RDS-1 project in 1949, Flyorov personally conducted the plutonium critical-mass experiment by hand. When colleagues warned of radiation exposure, he insisted: 'If I'm to trust the data, I need to see it with my own eyes.'
Soviet nuclear physicist. In 1940 he co-discovered spontaneous fission of uranium with Konstantin Petrzhak, and in 1942, writing from the front as a lieutenant, he alerted Stalin to the conspicuous silence of Western nuclear science: a letter that helped launch the Soviet atomic bomb project. He personally conducted the critical-mass experiment for the RDS-1 plutonium bomb. In 1957 he founded the Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions (FLNR) in Dubna, where his team synthesized elements 102 through 106. Element 114, flerovium, is named in his honor.
Career Timeline
- 1938–1941Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute (LFTI), Kurchatov's laboratory
- 1940Co-discovered spontaneous fission of uranium with Konstantin Petrzhak
- 1942Wrote Stalin from the front, warning of Western nuclear silence and urging resumption of atomic research
- 1943–1954Soviet atomic bomb project; personally conducted RDS-1 plutonium critical-mass experiment
- 1957–1990Founder and scientific director, Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions (FLNR), JINR Dubna; led synthesis of elements 102–106
- 1968Elected full member (academician) of the USSR Academy of Sciences
Related historical events
The 1942 Letter from the Front
In the autumn of 1941, Flyorov volunteered for the Leningrad People's Militia. Because he was a physicist, he was quickly sent to the Air Force technical school in Yoshkar-Ola to train in aircraft equipment maintenance, and by early 1942 he was serving with the 90th Independent Reconnaissance Aviation Squadron on the Southwestern Front. Stationed near Voronezh, he spent his free time in the university library, which had not been evacuated, searching through foreign physics journals. He was looking for any Western response to the discovery he and Konstantin Petrzhak had made in 1940: spontaneous fission of uranium.
He found nothing. Not a single paper on nuclear fission appeared in the journals. Fermi, Szilard, Joliot-Curie: all silent. Flyorov understood immediately: the West had classified all nuclear physics research, which could mean only one thing: they were seriously building an atomic bomb.
In December 1941, he gave a seminar in Kazan to the evacuated scientists of the Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute, urging them to resume uranium research. He was dismissed. So in April 1942, Flyorov wrote directly to Joseph Stalin. He warned that if the West developed a bomb first, "the results will be so huge that there will be no time to decide who was guilty of the fact that we abandoned this work here in the Union." Historians debate whether the letter ever reached Stalin's desk, but Flyorov's warning coincided with intelligence reports, and in September 1942 the State Defense Committee established Laboratory No. 2, the future Kurchatov Institute, officially restarting the Soviet atomic bomb project. Flyorov was demobilized in August 1942 and joined Igor Kurchatov's team.