Russia’s First Atomic Bomb: The Greatest Secret Ever Lost

Subscribe to Dark Docs: 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 a