"Between the years 1942 and 1954, the obtained thousands of pages of technical information about the Manhattan Project. Sergei Leskov reports that this information included: calculations for the construction of the charge; calculations for the of ; information on detonation devices; information on the gaseous diffusion factory that produced U-235; information about a plutonium production report; a report on the study of secondary s; a report on the metallurgy of and plutonium; and information on the kinetics of atomic reactions. Such information would have been unfathomably important to the development of a bomb. Thus, energy could be focused along the successful lines of the American project rather than approaching the situation blindly and attacking all possible avenues. Kurchatov admitted in a memo of March 4, 1943, that certain information "came as a surprise to our physicists and chemists," such as the centrifugal method of isotope separation. The Soviets also had reached an impasse on the "problem of nuclear explosion and combustion." Stolen documents revealed that this problem could be rectified by mixing and together—a method the Soviet scientists thought was impossible. Moreover, the Soviets were provided with information on the “physical process” of the inner workings of the uranium bomb, which Kurchatov said "revised views on many problems," and, most importantly, told the Russians that an atomic bomb was a realistic possibility."