by Joseph Mcquade

Created on: August 25, 2009   Last Updated: August 27, 2009

Kazakhstan is located in central Asia. It's surrounded by Russia to the north and northwest, China to the east and Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan to the south. The Caspian sea creates the southwestern border. Kazakhstan's climate varies between 40 degrees below zero in winter to over 100 degrees in the summer. Kazakhstan is the world's ninth largest country.

The Semipalatinsk district is located in the remote northeastern steppes of Kazakhstan. The district encompasses approximately 6950 square miles. The Kazakh steppe has a breadth of 1367 miles and stretches from the Caspian depression to an area north by northeast of our discussed site. The Kazakh steppes are desert, semi-desert and grasslands which resemble the Canadian prarie in climate. Semipalatinsk was chosen in 1947 by Lavrenti Beria, head of the Soviet atomic bomb program, to be the location for the Soviet Union's nuclear testing center. Semipalatinsk's low population, remote location and access to the world's third largest deposit of uranium made it the logical site on which to build the Polygon, the USSR's principal nuclear testing facility.

A former head of the Georgian secret police, the OGPU, and an astute political ally of Stalin, Beria was groomed by Stalin to be his trusted lieutenant. Stalin used Beria to supervise his most important projects. Beria was known as someone who would get things done, at any cost. He was the NKVD's (the Communist Secret Police) top deputy during the "Great Purge" which took place from 1936-1938. Under Beria, the NKVD killed and imprisoned millions of Russians. In 1938 Stalin made Beria the new head of the NKVD, where he would carry out a purge of that organization, too.

During the 1930's, a gifted young physicist named Igor Kurtchatov and his team developed and built a proton accelerator and a cyclotron, they also conducted research delving into neutron-proton interactions and artificial radioactivity. Kurchatov had published papers on these topics and his papers had been widely read in the scientific community. Kurchatov had been accepted and lauded by the nuclear physics community at a young age. Igor Kurchatov had been chosen to lead the atomic project as it's scientific director. Kurchatov had roughly 100 scientists, researchers and engineers working on the Soviet atomic project in 1944 at a top secret research facility in Moscow.

On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. America had the bomb and would use it.

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