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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.

How did the U.S. steal a sunken nuclear submarine? Right out from under the nose of the Soviet Union... Subscribe now: http://bit.ly/DarkDocs

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The Hughes Mining Barge, or HMB-1, is a submersible barge about 99 m (324 ft) long, 32 m (106 ft) wide, and more than 27 m (90 ft) tall. The HMB-1 was originally developed as part of Project Azorian (more widely, but erroneously, known as "Project Jennifer"), the top-secret effort mounted by the Central Intelligence Agency to salvage the remains of the Soviet submarine K-129 from the ocean floor.

The HMB-1 was designed to allow the device that would be used to grasp and lift the submarine to be constructed inside the barge and out of sight, and to be installed in the Glomar Explorer in secrecy. This was done by towing the HMB-1, with the capture device inside, to a location near Catalina Island (off the coast of California), and then submerging it onto stabilizing piers that had been installed on the seafloor. The Glomar Explorer was then maneuvered over the HMB-1, the retractable roof was opened, and the capture device lifted into the massive "moon pool" of the ship, all within clear sight of people on the beach

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DarkDocs is a new narrated documentary video from Dark5 taking an in-depth look at at some of the most mysterious stories on Earth. This week: Project Azorian, the Glomar Explorer, and the mysterious CIA to recover the lost Soviet submarine, K-129.

It’s March 1968. An unexplained event causes a Soviet Golf-II submarine known as the K-129 to sink to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean while enroute to its patrol station off the coast of Hawaii.

Publicly, no one in the world knew what happened, where the submarine was, or what secrets might be hidden on board. Behind the scenes, however, reporters caught wind of a classified US government operation to pry the wreckage from the floor with a giant claw and uncover whatever secret technology might be hidden within. The mission was codenamed Project Azorian, and it was launched from a covert ship named the Glomar Explorer.

Pressed for comment on the operation, a US government spokesman flatly replied, [quote] “We can neither confirm nor deny the existence of the information requested but, hypothetically, if such data were to exist, the subject matter would be classified, and could not be disclosed…"

Inside the Soviet submarine, the crew could feel the impact of explosions shaking the walls. They waited for hours, enduring the intense pressure of U.S. depth charges, desperate to receive some kind of signal or call to action. Meanwhile, the air conditioning had malfunctioned, and the men aboard were overheated, exhausted, fevered with worry and anticipation. They knew it was their responsibility was to fire their nuclear-tipped torpedo in the event of an attack on Russia, and in the intense chaos they debated how to act. Had the crisis between John F. Kennedy, the U.S. President, and Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Premier, finally boiled over? How close had the world come to witnessing the atomic apocalypse feared by so many over the course of the crisis?