Arzamas-16 was the Soviet Union’s hidden, ultra top secret nuclear weapons laboratory, modelled on America’s Los Alamos. Nuclear physicist Veniamin Tsukerman worked there for nearly half a century, and he and his wife wrote a memoir in 1984 that was translated and published in the West in 1999.
Igor Kurchatov, the father of the Soviet bomb and its peacetime reactors, was extraordinary and looked extraordinary with his long spade-like beard. He initiated Arzamas-16 and toward the end of 1957, just two years before his death at age 57, he made a final visit to Arzamas-16. This is the Soviet Union, right? Terror is the way, right? What we don’t expect is this memory from Tsukerman:
That same evening Khariton invited Kurchatov and a number of leading scientists to his home. On a large table-tennis table supper for twenty people was organized. The atmosphere was cheerful and relaxed. There was dancing. For the most part people amused themselves with water-pistols, which someone had brought back from Lebanon, and with a little portable movie camera. We managed to get some brief footage of Kurchatov getting the hang of shooting with a water-pistol. The best pictures were of Kurchatov, Zel’dovich and Zababakhin enthusiastically squirting water over one another.
Tsukerman, Veniamin, & Zinaida Azarkh. 1999. Arzamas 16: Soviet Scientists in the Nuclear Age. Bramcote Press, Nottingham, p. 116.
The detail that springs out from the page is that their water pistols were Lebanese!
