corn snake hatchling

Pictured: A photo of First Lightning, the first ever Soviet atomic bomb test. The United States assigned it the code-name Joe-1, in reference to Joseph Stalin. It was detonated on 29 August 1949 at 7:00 a.m., at Semipalatinsk, Kazakh SSR, after top-secret research and development as part of the Soviet atomic bomb project.

It was in 1939 that Winston Churchill famously defined Russia as "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.” The Soviet Union’s atom bomb project could certainly be considered a riddle, a mystery, and an enigma, such was its secrecy at the time.

Russia had been conducting independent research into radioactive elements as early as 1910, long before it even became the Soviet Union or USSR. By the 1930s Russian scientists had made remarkable efforts towards the advancement of physics research, even with setbacks such as the 1917 October Revolution and civil war of 1922.

Scientists tend to be a sharing community. That’s why Russian physicist, Georgy Flyorov, became suspicious in 1942 that the Allied powers were secretly developing an atomic super-weapon when his literature search showed that no one in the West was writing on nuclear fission. And so he wrote an urgent letter to Joseph Stalin pleading with him to start a Soviet atomic program.

Notable too is a report dated February 28th, 1945, and written for Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin’s right-hand man and the head of the NKVD, the country’s dreaded secret police. The report was titled “Progress of the Atomic Bomb Abroad” and stated that it was expected the United States would produce an atom bomb by July of that year.

During the Cold War arms race, both the US and USSR were testing top-secret, cutting-edge technologies that seemed beyond belief to deliver nuclear warheads effectively to the other side. The goal was to strike as quickly, quietly, and as devastatingly as possible. To accomplish this, in 1964 the Soviets began developing an audacious plan that turned their focus to a most unlikely place. While US attention was trained upwards towards aerial superiority, the USSR would instead target the ground beneath their feet. Underground, in fact… with a brand-new experimental vehicle nicknamed the "Battle Mole."

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As Cold War tensions grew in the 1950s, the U.S. relied upon the U-2 high-altitude reconnaissance spy planes and reconnaissance balloons from its Genetrix Program. But these tools, unable to surveil some of the darkest and farthest reaches deep within the USSR, did not provide enough aerial coverage to accurately determine Soviet military operations, movements, and capabilities.

Instead, the US was forced to reach even higher with its reconnaissance missions using the “Keyhole” series of satellites. Unlike modern digital spy satellites, the KH-series relied on the use of physical film that had to be secretly jettisoned and returned to Earth. To keep the film out of enemy hands, each KH satellite utilized a simple but effective trick. When their missions were complete, the KH satellites dumped their top-secret film into a reentry capsule and dropped it back to Earth. If the fiery descent went to plan, the capsule would jettison its heat shield and a parachute would deploy. All that would be left was for an airplane to hook it in mid-air some 60,000 feet above the ground...

“A very troubling development.” Those are not the type of words one wants to hear in the battle between the United States and Russia for outer space. But those were the exact words of Yleem Poblete, the US Assistant Secretary for Arms Control, as stated in a speech she gave at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, Switzerland, on August 14th, 2018.
The reason for Poblete’s ominous statement was simple: a Russian satellite seemed to be orbiting in space with an unknown purpose and had been repeatedly observed acting strangely. It had been troubling U.S. defense officials since it had been brought to their attention earlier that summer: Poblete told the assembled conference that she believed the Russians had covertly launched the space object the previous October under the auspices of it being a “space apparatus inspector.“ Yet Poblete contended that the space object appeared to be something else entirely.” Potentially, the U.S. believed it to be something dangerous and unprecedented in the field. It was, in the ominous words of Poblete, “a very troubling development.” Fighting words indeed.
Poblete explained the American assertion regarding this Russian spacecraft thus: “Its behavior on orbit was inconsistent with anything seen before from on-orbit inspection or space situational awareness capabilities, including other Russian inspection satellite activities. To add to the mystery, Poblete also reported that Russia’s intentions concerning the satellite were “unclear.” She continued: “Our Russian colleagues will deny that its systems are meant to be hostile. “So, the question before this body is this: how do we verify what countries say their spacecraft are doing?”