In the post-war period, the former allies moved from the policy of cooperation to confrontation between the two world social systems. On March 5, 1946, the former British Prime Minister W. Churchill, in the presence of American President G. Truman, delivered a speech in Fulton city (USA), which marked the beginning of the Cold War.

The formation of bipolar world began after the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) by the United States of America and 11 Western European states on April 4, 1949. According to the document, each of the parties undertook to provide immediate military assistance in the event of an attack on any country included in the bloc.

Under these conditions, the USSR was forced not only to complete the restoration of the national economy, but also to strengthen the country’s defense capability. Since the solution of these problems is impossible without the development of national science, the Institute of Precision Mechanics and Computer Technology, the Institute of Radio-Engineering and Electronics, the Institute of Applied Geophysics, the Institute of Physical Chemistry, the Institute of Nuclear Problems, the Institute of Atomic Energy and others were opened in the country in the second half of the 1940s.

Scientific achievements formed the basis of the unprecedented Soviet atomic project. The American atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945 laid the beginning of the decisive stage in its implementation. After that, the USSR accelerated the work on the creation of the atomic bomb and the atomic energy use. By January 1949, the entire complex of engineering issues on the first Soviet atomic bomb RDS-1 was worked out. On August 29 of this year, the first trial of the Soviet atomic weapons took place at Semipalatinsk test site under the leadership of Igor Kurchatov.