Coming up on the 72 year anniversary of the execution of the Rosenbergs on June 19th.
Factoids about the Russian nuke.
First Soviet explosion Aug 1949. They had a development program starting early 40s and it had to flee the German invasion in 1941 and that slowed them down substantially. Their first graphite based facility achieved chain reaction Dec 1946. There is no scarcity of Uranium in Russia or Kazakhstan so that was never an issue.
They used that facility to be plutonium-creating.
Presto, bomb fuel.
They were on track to do their explosion in the 1948 time frame, but the commissars told them no. They had some espionage data just obtained from the US, and the Politburo insisted that the design follow that of the US, rather than homegrown, for the first explosion.
So they had to stop their construction and change over to what they felt was the less efficient and meaningful American design. By Aug 1949 they were ready and exploded a nuke — probably about a year later than it needed to be.
The Soviets then worked at fast pace. Their first H bomb exploded just 8ish months after the first US H bomb.
Key point: There is no great secret of nuclear weapons. The process has been known by physicists globally since the 1930s. The Soviets might have beaten the US to it had Germany not invaded and forced the labs to tear down, relocate and reassemble.