KURCHATOV, IGOR VASILYEVICH

born Jan. 12, 1903, Sim, Russia died Feb. 7, 1960, Moscow Soviet nuclear physicist who guided the development of his country's first atomic bomb, the world's first practical thermonuclear bomb, and the first atomic electric-power station in the Soviet Union. After graduation (1923) from the Crimean University in Simferopol, Kurchatov joined (1927) the staff of the Physico-Technical Institute of the Academy of Sciences in Leningrad. His initial studies concerned ferroelectricity, but by 1933 he was concentrating on nuclear physics. As director of the nuclear physics laboratory at the Physico-Technical Institute, he supervised the construction of the first Soviet cyclotrons. In 1939 he and his associates published studies of nuclear chain reactions, and in 1940 he reported the spontaneous fission of uranium, previously reported only a year earlier by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in Germany. During World War II, Kurchatov's nuclear research was suspended in favour of defense research concerning methods of protecting ships from magnetic mines. Kurchatov directed the construction of the first Soviet cyclotron (1944) and, after the war, the first atomic reactor in Europe (1946). His team produced the first Soviet atomic bomb in 1949, four years after the United States. In 1953 the team detonated a thermonuclear (hydrogen) bomb, six months before the first U.S. thermonuclear bomb. The nonmilitary applications of atomic power explored and developed under Kurchatov's leadership included, besides electric-power stations (the first of which began operation in 1954), the nuclear-powered icebreaker Lenin. Kurchatov also directed research on the ultimate power source, fusion energy, centring on a means of containment of the extremely high temperatures that are needed to initiate the fusion process. In 1956 Kurchatov was publicly identified as director of the Institute of Atomic Energy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences (from 1960 called the I.V. Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy). The Kurchatov Medal was established by the Academy of Sciences for outstanding work in nuclear physics. Scientists in the Soviet Union proposed that the radioactive element with the atomic number 104 (which American scientists have called rutherfordium) be named kurchatovium, but neither group has been able to verify the results of the other, and both the name and priority of the discovery are still controversial.