[3] As many of his contemporaries in Russia, Kurchatov, initially educated as a naval architect, was an autodidact in nuclear physics and was brought by Soviet establishment to accelerate the feasibility of the "super bomb".

[8] After his older sister, Antonina, passed away in Crimea, Igor grew up with his younger brother, Boris, where they both attended the Simferopol gymnasium №1, and was a Mandolin player at his school's orchestra.

: 449 [11] There, he presented his experiments in electrical conduction, which impressed Dr. Abram Ioffe who was there as a guest, and invited him to Physico-Technical Institute in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

[15][16] During this time, Kurchatov considered studying physics abroad at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the United States but the plan fell apart due to political reasons.

[17][18][19] The job with Soviet Navy solved Kurchatov's objection on spontaneous fission when he wrote in 1944: "Uranium must be separated into two parts at the moment of detonation.

[24]: 30 [25]: 34 [26] The Soviet establishment did not start the program until 1943 despite receiving intelligence from Russian spies in the United States and a warning from Georgii Flerov.

: 34 [26] Kurchatov, as many others, was working towards building ammunition for the Red Army's campaign against the German forces at the Eastern Front of World War II.

2 in Moscow by bringing Abram Alikhanov (who worked on heavy water production) from Armenia and Lev Artsimovich who was instrumental in electromagnetic isotope separation.

: 53–54 [27] Facing a tighter deadline from Stalin, Kurchatov relied upon foreign data by choosing the Gaseous diffusion method to produce the fissile material, a move that irked Pyotr Kapitsa who raised objections against this but was dismissed.

2 which sustained the nuclear chain reaction in late 1946.: 23 [28] Together with Alikhanov and Flerov, Kurchatov authored a paper on the production of plutonium in a uranium graphite reactor.

: 55 [27] In 1946, the Soviet program was aggressively pursued under Lavrentiy Beria, who (like Kapitsa) had a conflict with Kurchatov over his reliance on design data provided by Klaus Fuchs, a German physicist in the American Manhattan Project, to meet Stalin's deadline.

The Russian spies in the United States greatly aided in providing the key data on American nuclear devices, which allowed Kurchatov to avoid time-consuming and expensive trial and error problems.

: 11–14 [34] In an effort to save the uranium load and reduce losses in the production of plutonium, Kurchatov, without proper safety gear, was the first to step into the central hall of the damaged reactor full of radioactive gases.

For his part in establishing the Soviet nuclear program, in accordance with state decree 627-258, Kurchatov was awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labor, the Stalin Prize First Class, the sum of 500,000 rubles (besides the earlier results of (50%) premium in the amount of 500,000 rubles) and a ZIS-110 car, a private house and cottage furnished by the state, a doubling of his salary and "the right (for life for him and his wife) to free travel by rail, water and air transport in the USSR".