On 5 November 1944, the head of the Soviet NKVD Foreign Intelligence Directorate, Pavel Mikhaylovich Fitin, disseminated a Top Secret report on global advances in the field of nuclear weapon developments. The list of addressees for the report is not included in the material, but given the level of detail and the highly sensitive nature of the information, it could only have been meant for the upper echelons of Soviet leadership.
Fitin oversaw efforts to keep track of no-longer-fledgling efforts by the US, England, Canada, France, and Germany to fully develop nuclear fission technology to the point of being able to produce nuclear bombs. It was a very thinly-veiled secret in the early days of the Great Patriotic War that the Soviets were seriously lagging behind the other countries in this field; Stalin directed his foreign intelligence services to carry out an aggressive program to do the seemingly impossible:
- identify the countries performing the practical work to create nuclear weapons,
- inform leadership of the contents of their efforts, and
- using Soviet intelligence agent capabilities, obtain the necessary scientific and engineering information that would make it easier for the USSR to create similar weapons.
The program described above would become known semi-formally as “Enormoz” which, as the savvy reader will recognize, is taken from the English word “enormous.” The program was clearly one of Beria’s and Stalin’s highest priorities.
Fitin’s most prolific sources were working in England, but the more important feet-on-the-ground operations were taking place in the United States. By late 1944, Fitin notes that the US was on the cusp of having its own experimental nuclear bomb.
The report he submits contains information on the efforts of the US, England, and Canada (the Big Three in terms of developments), as well as France and Germany. By 1944, more eyes and ears were being turned toward US efforts, and the evidence is obvious in this report.
The following translation is the third in a short series of declassified Russian-language documents reporting on the race to be the first country to possess a nuclear bomb.
Translating History 