22-09-2009, 11:34 PM
National Security Archive Update, September 22, 2009
JOE-1:U.S. Intelligence and the Detection of the First Soviet Nuclear Test, September 1949
For more information contact:
William Burr [National Security Archive] - 202/994-7000
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb286/
Washington D.C., September 22, 2009 – Sixty years ago tomorrow, on 23 September 1949, President Harry Truman made headlines when he announced that the Soviet Union had secretly tested a nuclear weapon several weeks earlier. Truman did not explain how the United States had detected the test, which had occurred on 29 August 1949 at Semipalatinsk, a site in northeastern Kazakhstan. Using declassified material, much of which has never been published, this briefing book documents how the U.S. Air Force, the Atomic Energy Commission, and U.S. scientific intelligence worked together to detect a nuclear test that intelligence analysts, still unaware of the extent to which the Soviets had penetrated the Manhattan Project, did not expect so soon.
JOE-1:U.S. Intelligence and the Detection of the First Soviet Nuclear Test, September 1949
For more information contact:
William Burr [National Security Archive] - 202/994-7000
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb286/
Washington D.C., September 22, 2009 – Sixty years ago tomorrow, on 23 September 1949, President Harry Truman made headlines when he announced that the Soviet Union had secretly tested a nuclear weapon several weeks earlier. Truman did not explain how the United States had detected the test, which had occurred on 29 August 1949 at Semipalatinsk, a site in northeastern Kazakhstan. Using declassified material, much of which has never been published, this briefing book documents how the U.S. Air Force, the Atomic Energy Commission, and U.S. scientific intelligence worked together to detect a nuclear test that intelligence analysts, still unaware of the extent to which the Soviets had penetrated the Manhattan Project, did not expect so soon.