Igor Kurchatov

Igor Vasilyevich Kurchatov (; 12 January 1903 – 7 February 1960), was a Soviet nuclear physicist who is widely known as the director of the Soviet atomic bomb project. Along with Georgy Flyorov and Andrei Sakharov, Kurchatov is widely remembered and dubbed as the "father of the Soviet atomic bomb" for his directorial role in the development of the Soviet nuclear program, in a clandestine program during World War II formed in the wake of the USSR's discovery of the Western Allied efforts to develop nuclear weapons. After nine years of covert development, the Soviet Union successfully tested its first nuclear weapon, codenamed First Lightning at the Semipalatinsk Test Range in 1949. In 1954 he was awarded the USSR State Prize in physics.