Summing up the century-old results of the appearance of the first projects for the creation of atomic weapons, historians often pay attention to the original literary concept of the "continuous atomic bomb." This construction, strange from a modern point of view, was described by H. G. Wells in the novel “The World Set Free”. Was this idea of creating a super-destructive A-bomb the very first nuclear engineering development in the world? Today there are many versions on this score, among which there are paradoxically ambiguous …
Some domestic researchers of archival materials, such as the remarkable historian of science Gennady Efimovich Gorelik (currently a researcher at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University), more than once drew attention to the “atomic creativity” of Academician V. I. Vernadsky. Vladimir Ivanovich brilliantly foresaw many aspects of the future of nuclear power, and his thoughts were completely shared by his friend and colleague at the Radium Institute, Vitaly Georgievich Khlopin. Both Vernadsky and Khlopin were well aware that the explosive power of the atom brings to mankind, and how they could try to delay its appearance on the arena of world history. Vernadsky tried to do this with his philosophy of the noosphere, and Khlopin - with all administrative methods possible at that time, in particular, giving sharply negative reviews on the world's first real schemes of nuclear weapons. This happened with the invention of Kharkov physicists.
In 1940, scientists from the Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology (KIPT, then UPTI) - the 37-year-old head of the high-voltage laboratory of the UPTI Friedrich Lange, 28-year-old researcher Vladimir Shpinel and 26-year-old engineer Viktor Maslov - officially submitted applications for the invention of atomic ammunition. However, their invention was so far ahead of its time that they could not obtain copyright certificates for a very long time. All this time, the patent description of the "Kharkov bomb" was hidden in special storage.
Back in the summer of 1940, engineer Maslov published a thematic review on the possibilities of using intranuclear energy in the departmental collection of works of the UFTI, in which he argued that "the creation of an atomic weapon is largely becoming a technical problem." At the same time, he singled out two main problems: the production of a sufficient amount of the isotope of uranium-235 for the manufacture of the core of an atomic bomb and the development of an engineering scheme for completing a critical mass at the time of detonation of ammunition. Around the same time, a former employee of the UFTI Austro-German physicist Friedrich (Fritz) Houtermans, deported to Germany, presented the A-bomb project to the German "Uranium Club". There are good reasons to believe that this project was somehow closely related to the design of the first samples of nuclear weapons by Kharkov physicists. By the way,the first in the world to talk about the creation of a hydrogen bomb in the late 40s of the last century, the sergeant of the Soviet Army Oleg Lavrentyev, who until his death in 2011 worked at the UPTI.
Oleg Feigin