Igor Kurchatov

(1903-1960)

Russian nuclear physicist

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Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov (Russian: Игорь Васильевич Курчатов; 12 January 1903 – 7 February 1960), was a Soviet nuclear physicist who is widely known as the director of the Soviet atomic bomb project. Along with Georgy Flyorov and Andrei Sakharov, Kurchatov is known as the "father of the Soviet atomic bomb" and, later, "the father of the Soviet Nuclear Missile" for his directorial role in a clandestine Soviet nuclear program formed during World War II in the wake of the USSR's discovery of the Western Allied efforts to develop nuclear weapons. After nine years of covert development, as well as Soviet spies successfully infiltrating the Manhattan Project, the Soviet Union successfully tested its first nuclear weapon, codenamed First Lightning at the Semipalatinsk Test Range in 1949. In 1954 he was awarded the USSR State Prize in physics.