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Rockets and People
ership of the country. In 1950, he was executed for the fabricated “Leningrad
Affair.” 11 This was a heavy blow for our economy.
the story of the famed r-7 missile, which was the basis for the Soyuz-U
launch vehicle known to everyone in the world, serves as one example of the rapid
solution of the most difficult scientific-technical problems using progressive
“mobilization economics.”
In 1954, under the directorship of S. P. Korolev, who already had experience
producing intermediate-range missiles, the development of the first intercontinental
missile was begun. Tests were prepared for the R-5M missile, which would
carry a nuclear warhead with four to five times the yield of the one dropped on
Hiroshima by the Americans. It was natural that such a nuclear device, which had
already been perfected, be the proposed “payload” for the warhead of the first-ever
intercontinental missile. By design, a missile with such a warhead had a launch mass
of 170 metric tons and a range of 8,000 kilometers. The range was specified by
governmental decree as early as 1953.
At that time it was believed that such a nuclear charge was completely sufficient
to have a sobering effect on the American “hawks.” But on 12 August 1953, near
Semipalatinsk, tests on a thermonuclear (hydrogen) bomb were successfully
conducted. One of the directors of these tests was Vyacheslav Aleksandrovich
Malyshev, a member of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist
Party (of Bolsheviks) [VKP(b)]. 12 At that time he was Minister of Medium
Machine-Building and subsequently deputy chairman of the Council of Ministers.
When it became clear that, in principle, the problem of the hydrogen bomb was
solved, Malyshev confronted its creators with the task of reducing its mass and
dimensions so that it would be acceptable for the missile that Korolev was designing.The
effectiveness of the hydrogen bomb was ten times greater than the atom
bomb. But no matter how hard they tried at the famed Arzamas-16, the mass and
dimensions still greatly exceeded those of the atom bomb. 13 The charge for the
atomic warhead had a mass of 1 metric ton, while the hydrogen warhead was
around 3.5 metric tons. Nevertheless, on his own initiative (and who was there to
ask, as Stalin and Beriya were already gone, and Khrushchev and other members
of the Politburo did not know about this business) Malyshev took this data, went
directly to Korolev in May 1954, and proposed changing the design of the intercontinental
missile so that the atomic warhead was replaced with a thermonuclear
warhead—with the compulsory stipulation that the flight range of 8,000 kilome-
11. The “Leningrad Affair” involved a massive purge of powerful Party and government officials in
Leningrad in the late 1940s that was orchestrated by Stalin in order to weaken Leningrad as a power base.
12. VKP(b)—Vsesoyuznaya Kommunisticheskaya partiya (bolshevikov) [All-Union Communist Party (of Bolsheviks)]—was
the full designation of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during the Lenin and Stalin eras.
13. Arzamas-16 was the closed city where one of the Soviet Union’s two major nuclear weapons laboratories
was founded.
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