This article is a historical article written by Professor Zhang Guangxiang, academic leader of the history discipline of the Northeast Asian Research Center, which studies and introduces the development policy of the nuclear industry in the Soviet Union, which can be said to be the first article in the domestic historical field to analyze the development policy of the Soviet nuclear industry based on the latest declassified original archival materials, which has important historical and academic value. Against the background of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War, the Soviet Union adopted a catch-up approach to nuclear industry development, concentrating the most promising domestic resources and talents in the field of nuclear industry development, successfully completing the development and mass production of nuclear and thermonuclear weapons in a short period of time, and rapidly achieving a breakthrough in the nuclear industry from scratch, from weak to strong, and from single to multiple, gradually achieving the political goal of strategic checks and balances in the process of playing games with the United States. At the same time, the article also makes an objective assessment of the gains and losses of the development of the Soviet nuclear industry, pointing out that although the Soviet Union paid the price of life and ecology in the process of the development of the nuclear industry, it was not the only country that did so at this cost, and even in the implementation of the Manhattan Plan, the military and political goals of the United States were higher than moral and ecological requirements.

    This article was published in Russian Studies in October 2018, which caused certain social repercussions, and was later reprinted in full by Xinhua Digest (Issue 4, 2019) and Chinese Social Sciences Digest (Issue 4, 2019).