It was shorter than the infantry rifles it would displace, but longer than the submachine guns that had been in service for 30 years. It seemed a puzzling embodiment of a firearm compromise, a blend of design choices no existing Western army was willing yet to make. The number was shorthand for 1947, the year a technical bureau in Kovrov, a city east of Moscow, had finished the prototypes.
The acronym abbreviated two Russian words, Avtomat Kalashnikova, the automatic by Kalashnikov, a nod to Senior Sergeant Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov, a 29-year-old former tank commander to whom the army and the Communist Party formally attributed the weapon's design. Teams of engineers, armourers, and factory supervisors were fine-tuning its design. Within the dark brick walls of a set of immense factories, a product was being prepared for mass production. It was 1949, and the Soviet Union was moments from entering the atomic age – ending the American monopoly in atomic arms, securing the Kremlin's status atop a global superpower, and giving the Cold War its sense of doomsday menace.Īs diplomatic cables about the atomic explosion moved from embassies in Moscow to Western capitals, about 1,100 miles to the west of the test site, in a Russian industrial city in the Ural range, another of Stalin's secret military projects was gaining momentum. Inside its shell was a uranium and plutonium charge equal to about 20 kilotons of TNT, making it a rough equivalent to the weapon the United States had used to destroy Nagasaki four years before.
Known as RDS-1, it was shaped like a huge metal teardrop with rivets and bolts along its sides. The atomic bomb rested on a tower 100 feet above the ground.
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