Alexey Isaev. The Economics of War. Short on uranium? I'll send some your way under Lend-Lease.
An article from the Telegram channel “Alexey Isaev. ‘Iron Wind’.”
It is generally known that work on the atomic project in the USSR began as early as the Great Patriotic War. On November 27, 1942, the State Committee for Defense (GKO) ordered the People’s Commissariat for Non-Ferrous Metals (Narkomtsvetmet) to organize the extraction of 4 metric tons of uranium ore per year by May 1, 1943. Frankly speaking, that’s not much. At that time, the USSR was aware of uranium deposits in Central Asia (which were mined on an industrial scale in the postwar period right up until the 1990s, when Uzbekistan shot itself in the foot by abandoning mining).
Pre-war estimates were 10 metric tons per year, which was nowhere near enough for Kurchatov to meet the 1949 deadline. Another GKO decree, issued in August 1943, set an even higher target—100 metric tons of uranium in 1944.
During the war, however, work on uranium was proceeding rather slowly. Kurchatov, however, needed uranium for his experiments right away. Where could he get it?
Before the nuclear age, uranium was, generally speaking, also used in industry; there was something called “uranium glass.”
So they decided… to ask the Americans for uranium. This might seem like a tall tale, but the story is fully corroborated by American data.
According to reports from February 1943
“The Russians stated that they needed uranium salts for ‘military and medical purposes,’ as well as metallic uranium itself to harden the steel used in gun barrels.”
The paradox of this story lay in two things. No one asked Leslie Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project, because his project was classified. Another official, however, believed that refusing to supply uranium would be interpreted in the USSR as a positive answer to the question of whether the U.S. was working on a nuclear bomb. It would be better to play the fool and hand over the small quantities that were requested. As part of a general shipment of various chemicals.
As a result, the USSR, as was later calculated, received
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- metallic uranium — 2.2 pounds;
- uranium nitrate—500 pounds;
- uranium oxide—220 pounds;
- uranium oxide (U3O8)—500 pounds.
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Of course, the significance of these shipments shouldn’t be overestimated, but the story turned out to be quite remarkable.
APPENDIX. Uranium Under the Lend-Lease Program
Source: https://t.me/iron_wind/1726
