26.12.2017, DPR.
Liberals believe that the Soviet Union collapsed because of its failure to compete economically with the West. They believe so to this day, despite the clear evidence that Russia and other states, which emerged on the debris of the USSR, to this day exist on the Soviet economic foundation.
Even Ukraine, sparing no effort to squander its inheritance received from the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, failed to finish this squandering in twenty-five years.
History of the Soviet Union is full of landmark economic projects, the implementation of which is unimaginable nowadays.
One of them was launching the first nuclear reactor in Europe. This event happened on December 25, 1946.
The Great Patriotic War ended just over a year before, killing almost thirty million people. Half of the country was lying in ruins.
The country had to restore its industry, build houses. And right in those difficult times, a very complex work was being done, the nuclear reactor was being put into service.
Back then, only one reactor existed in the world. It was built in the United States, in the country, which did not know the war in its territory and managed to reach very high economic results at the expense of the war, using massive Germany’s groundwork in the field of the nuclear power industry.
The nuclear reactor called the Chicago Pile was launched four years earlier, in 1942, in the United States under the stadium viewing stands of the University of Chicago.
The Soviet atomic project was launched the same year. Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria was leading the project.
The launch of the reactor required scientific research, reactor mathematical model development as well as almost impossible at that time production of the purest materials.
The country lacked the required amount of uranium, almost all the German uranium stocks were shipped to the US. That is why the greatest efforts were used to locate the deposits of this material. The uranium mines were built in Ukraine and in the countries of Central Asia.
The first nuclear reactor boosted the development of the Soviet nuclear energy project.
In quite a short period of time, the USSR developed its own atomic bomb, and then a hydrogen bomb, burying the hopes of the American hawks to put an end to Russia.
Today, it’s reliably known that they had such plans.
In 1948, the USSR developed a more advanced reactor and in 1954 the first nuclear power plant in the world was built in the city of Obninsk [a city in the Moscow region – translator’s note].
This very foundation of these striking achievements lets Russia stay one of the global leaders of nuclear energy utilizers. Russian specialists are highly demanded in construction of nuclear reactors around the world. Russia is the only country to have a powerful nuclear icebreaker fleet.
It was surely not the economic reasons that lead to the collapse of the Soviet project, the situation has much deeper roots.
Source: Essence of Time unit in Donbass
