Technology and Culture

Nuclear Russia is a brisk introduction to the history of the nuclear age in the USSR and post-Soviet Russia. It's a small book about a big topic. There's a lot to cover, including the development of a massive arsenal of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons, the testing of military devices in the atmosphere and underground, and the various strategies developed to govern their use in war. But that's not all. There are discussions of foreign relations, including the arms race with the United States, atomic diplomacy and brinkmanship, and Soviet (and then Russian) participation in various arms control treaties. Then there is the "peaceful use of the atom" for energy and industrial development—areas that the leaders of the Soviet Union and later the Russian Federation deemed to be critically important for economic might and symbolic of cultural superiority and advancement, despite the infamous Chernobyl disaster and countless other nuclear accidents that played out on Soviet and former-Soviet territory. The book spans 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the Russian Federation, which means it has within its purview the complex relationship of contemporary Russia with the Soviet legacy. The Soviet, socialist bomb and the Russian, nationalist bomb are intertwined, but in ways that can be hard to parse. The context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and the escalation of the war in 2022, the threat of the use of nuclear weapons that that war has highlighted, and the vulnerability of Ukrainian nuclear energy plants to the Russian occupiers only compound the complexity of the topic. A comprehensive history of "nuclear Russia" would require many volumes. How, then, to fit such a sprawling topic into the format of Bloomsbury's Russian Shorts series, which calls for "thought-provoking books in a slim format"?

Paul R. Josephson gamely takes on this seemingly impossible task and largely succeeds. His experience with the topic pays off. Among Josephson's many earlier books, one is on Soviet physics and politics in Leningrad in the early Soviet period, and another addresses the peaceful applications of [End Page 388] the atom in the USSR from the early 1950s to the early twenty-first century. For Nuclear Russia, Josephson builds on this earlier work. He has organized the book chronologically and thematically. He begins with the Soviet participation in nuclear physics in the 1920s and 1930s, progresses through the Soviet atomic bomb project, then turns to nuclear energy and dreams of applying nuclear power to solve countless economic problems. He follows the story through the Chernobyl disaster, the collapse of the USSR, and the reemergence of a "nuclear renaissance" under Vladimir Putin. Throughout, Josephson shows how Soviet leaders and scientists hubristically supported nuclear weapons and civilian applications in the name of power and progress, only to create conditions of greater instability and danger for citizens and the state alike.

To fit the format, Josephson had to make some hard decisions about what to include and emphasize. Admirably, Josephson turns to lesser-known stories when possible. He plays up the importance of research at the Ukrainian Physical-Technical Institute in the 1930s rather than repeating the more familiar story of the crucial work done at the time in Leningrad and Moscow. Likewise, the Manhattan Project and the use of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II (the primary focus of so much scholarship on the nuclear age) is parenthetical to his account. The transition from Soviet to Russian nuclear history in the 1990s is handled relatively quickly in order to emphasize the collapse of the USSR in the 1980s and the rise of Putin in the twenty-first century. This means that the reasons why Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan gave up the nuclear weapons they inherited from the Soviet Union and why Russia stepped into the Soviet Union's position in international treaties are not thoroughly explored. All of these hard decisions...