Joe 1

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Joe One, the first Soviet atomic test.

The first Soviet bomb, "RDS-1" was an implosion-type bomb which closely resembled the U.S. "Fat Man" bomb even in its external appearance. The large "eyes" on the front are radar fuses.

Joe-1 (or Joe One; USSR version РДС-1, RDS-1) was the American codename for the first Soviet nuclear weapon test, in reference to Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leader. The bomb was tested on August 29, 1949 at Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan.

The yield was 22 kilotons of TNT, similar to the United States' "Gadget" and "Fat Man" bombs. At Lavrenty Beria's insistence, it was similar to the design of the American "Fat Man", which had been dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. It was called First Lightning (Первая молния, Pervaya molniya) by the Soviets. Its development was years ahead of American military-intelligence projections and came as quite a shock to the West.

Various explanations have been given for the USSR code-name of RDS-1. It is usually explained as an arbitrary designation which was backronymed as "Stalin's Rocket Engine" (Реактивный двигатель Сталина, Reaktivnyi Dvigatel Stalina) or "Russia does it herself" (Россия делает сама, Rossiya Delayet Sama). Later weapons continued the RDS designations with different model numbers following.

[edit] See also

Soviet atomic bomb project
Joe 4
Image:Chagan nuclear test.jpg – image that has wrongly been described as showing the First Lightning test in several publications.