The review is an expanded version of a report presented at a session of the Physical Sciences Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences dedicated to the 80th anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War and the 80th anniversary of the nuclear industry. The author hopes that the article will be useful to a wide range of readers, especially the younger generation, as it illustrates how, under the most difficult political and economic conditions of complete isolation from the outside world and without any assistance, our country, despite losing 27 million of its citizens in the Great Patriotic War and suffering enormous losses, managed to solve modernization problems and become a leader in global development in an astonishingly short time. In 1957, our country launched Sputnik, and, in 1961, Yury Gagarin flew into space. The achievements of our Atomic Project during those years are a clear example of the scientific and technological heights that can be reached in Russia when three key conditions are met: a vital super-task, the creative work of specialists from various fields united in a unique final product, and, finally, powerful government support. These were major advances in high technology — technologies based on completely new scientific knowledge. The country's leaders and the leaders of the Atomic Project managed to organize the work, creating multidisciplinary teams of specialists and closely linking scientific, engineering, design, experimental, and technological work into a unified system aimed at creating an atomic bomb in two to three years. The rapid implementation of fundamental scientific advances through the careful selection of priorities and the concentration of resources on them, the selection and training of talented personnel, and the utmost responsibility and enthusiasm of all nuclear weapons specialists have allowed, and continue to allow, despite our country's significantly smaller financial and economic resources compared to those of the USA, effectively maintaining strategic balance in the world and thereby ensuring peace for many decades.