Yeltsin Orders Publication of Atomic Bomb Papers

President Boris N. Yeltsin on Saturday ordered the publication of top-secret archive documents that will shed light on the controversial history of the former Soviet Union’s early nuclear program.

Yeltsin signed a decree ordering the preparation and publication of an official collection of archive papers dating up to 1954, said a statement issued by the presidential press office.

The statement did not say when the publication would appear. Nor did it make clear whether all or only some of the documents will be disclosed.

“The decree . . . aims at reconstructing an objective picture of the emergence of the national nuclear industry and the history of the creation of nuclear weapons in the Soviet Union,” the statement said.

The Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in 1949, four years after the United States. It was the first to test a hydrogen bomb in 1953.

It is widely believed in the West that the Soviet Union, keen to get a nuclear bomb as a counterbalance to the U.S. arsenal, stole the technology.

A couple from the United States, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, were convicted in 1951 of plotting to give the Soviets secret information about the U.S. atomic bomb. They were sent to the electric chair in 1953.

Over decades, Kremlin authorities denied allegations about the foreign origin of their atomic and hydrogen bombs.

But the dispute over the issue re-emerged after a series of revelations by a former Soviet official.

Pavel Sudoplatov, a top officer in the Soviet KGB secret police, published a book in the United States last year alleging that four famous Western scientists had knowingly leaked nuclear secrets to Moscow.

Sudoplatov, who claims to have been in charge of spying on the U.S. atomic bomb project in the mid-1940s, said J. Robert Oppenheimer, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard leaked the information through moles planted in the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb.

His claims were roundly dismissed by Western experts.

Even Russia’s spy chiefs, breaking with longstanding practice, issued a denial that the scientists handed over nuclear weapons data.

But later, Russian national archive director Sergei Mironenko told the Moscow News weekly newspaper that secret Stalin-era archives supported Sudoplatov’s allegations.

Mironenko said in a newspaper interview published last June that the information was contained in recently opened archives of all secret police reports to dictator Josef Stalin from 1944 to 1953.