Andrei Sakharov

John Gehl sends this bio of the brilliant physicist Andrei Sakharov (1921-1989), who was the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, but later became an outspoken critic of the USSR's communist regime and a courageous defender of human rights and democratic freedom. Sakharov was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, the first Russian to be so honored. He spent the first twenty years of his professional life designing nuclear weapons, contributing thereby to the military might of the USSR. Gradually he turned against the regime's abuses of human freedom and dignity, becoming a symbol of the unrest that ultimately brought down the Soviet dictatorship.

Andrei Sakharov was born in Moscow to a family whose ancestry included military nobility and Orthodox priests. He studied physics at Moscow State University, graduating in 1942, and then took up routine laboratory work at a munitions factory, where he met and later married Klavdia Vikhireva. In 1945 he returned to Moscow to take up graduate studies in theoretical physics, earning his Ph.D. in 1947. He was invited to join the Soviet group of scientists working on atomic weaponry. In 1953 Sakharov's design for a thermonuclear device culminated in the successful test of the first Soviet H-bomb. He was inducted into the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and was awarded the first of his three Hero of Socialist Labor Medals, as well as the Stalin Prize and a dacha in a privileged Moscow suburb.

Simultaneously with his work on nuclear weapons, Sakharov worked on the peaceful use of nuclear power. He also began to wrestle with the problems of the controlled use of nuclear weaponry -- convinced as he was that the harmful effects of testing nuclear weapons was an indisputable scientific fact, with inescapable moral consequences. He pushed Soviet politicians to stop atmospheric nuclear tests and strongly endorsed the 1963 Test-Ban Treaty. In 1960s he abandoned weaponry work to concentrate on cosmological problems in theoretical physics and also began to use his political connections on behalf of victims of political persecution, making numerous declarations denouncing violations of human rights. He also spoke out for rapprochement of the socialist and capitalist systems in order to eliminate or contain the grave dangers threatening the human race -- thermonuclear extinction, ecological catastrophe, famine, an uncontrolled populationexplosion, and alienation.

Soviet authorities did not sit idly by while Sakharov gained prominence as a dissident. They waged campaigns in the press to discredit him as a traitor, stripped him of his honorary awards and expelled him from the Science Academy. He was not allowed to travel to Oslo to receive his Nobel Prize. Finally in 1980, he was exiled to closed city of Gorki. Sakharov's banishment only ended with Gorbachev's policy of Perestroika. Back in Moscow he resumed his public life, and was busy participating in the drafting of the new Russian constitution when he died from a sudden heart attack in 1989.

See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1584652071/newsscancom/ref=nosim for Richard Lourie's biography of Sakharov,

RH: All this suggests that the Soviet Union collapsed of its own weight.