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Andrei Sakharov

Andrei Sakharov

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For the historian, see Andrey Nikolayevich Sakharov.
  • Andrei Sakharov
  • Андрей Сахаров
RIAN archive 25981 Academician Sakharov.jpg
Andrei Sakharov
BornMay 21, 1921
Moscow, Russian SFSR
DiedDecember 14, 1989 (aged 68)
Moscow, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
ResidenceMoscow, Soviet Union
CitizenshipSoviet Union
FieldsNuclear physics
Alma mater
Known for
Notable awards
Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov (Russian: Андре́й Дми́триевич Са́харов; May 21, 1921 – December 14, 1989) was a Soviet nuclearphysicist, dissident, and human rights activist.
He became renowned as the designer of the Soviet Union's Third Idea, a codename for Soviet development of thermonuclear weapons. Sakharov was an advocate of civil liberties and civil reforms in the Soviet Union. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. TheSakharov Prize, which is awarded annually by the European Parliament for people and organizations dedicated to human rights and freedoms, is named in his honor.[1]

Biography[edit]

Sakharov was born in Moscow on May 21, 1921. His father was Dmitri Ivanovich Sakharov, a private school physics teacher and an amateur pianist.[2] His father later taught at the Second Moscow State University.[3] Dmitri's grandfather Ivan had been a prominent lawyer in Russia who had displayed respect for social awareness and humanitarian principles (including advocating the abolition ofcapital punishment) that would later influence his grandson. Sakharov's mother was Yekaterina Alekseyevna Sakharova, a great-granddaughter of the prominent military commander Alexey Semenovich Sofiano (who was of Greek ancestry).[4][5] His parents and his paternal grandmother, Maria Petrovna, largely shaped Sakharov's personality. Although his paternal great-grandfather had been a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church, and his pious mother did have him baptised, he was an atheist in later life.[6][7][8] However, he did believe that a non-scientific "guiding principle" governed the universe and human life.[9]

Education and career[edit]

Sakharov entered Moscow State University in 1938. Following evacuation in 1941 during the Great Patriotic War (World War II), he graduated in Aşgabat, in today's Turkmenistan. He was then assigned laboratory work in Ulyanovsk. During this period, in 1943, he married Klavdia Alekseyevna Vikhireva, with whom he raised two daughters and a son before she died in 1969.[9] He returned to Moscow in 1945 to study at the Theoretical Department of FIAN (the Physical Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences). He received hisPh.D. in 1947.

Development of thermonuclear devices[edit]

After the end of World War II, Sakharov researched cosmic rays. In mid-1948 he participated in the Soviet atomic bomb project under Igor Kurchatov and Igor Tamm. The first Soviet atomic device was tested on August 29, 1949. After moving to Sarov in 1950, Sakharov played a key role in the development of the first megaton-range Soviet hydrogen bomb using a design known as Sakharov's Third Idea in Russia and the Teller-Ulam design in the United States. Before his Third Idea, Sakharov considered imploding a sphere of deuterium using shaped (chemical) charges, much like a fission bomb. The results were disappointing, yielding no more than a typical fission bomb. However the design was worth pursuing because deuterium is abundant and uranium is scarce, and he had no idea how powerful the US design was. One of the Bikini atomic experiments changed that, because the magnitude of the explosion became public knowledge, because of the dispute between Japan and the US over the contamination of a large area of ocean. Sakharov was surprised by the size of the explosion and immediately realized that the chemical force of shaped charges could not have compressed the ball of deuterium enough for such a result, and that somehow the Americans had harnessed the power of a fission explosion to compress the deuterium. But how? How could an explosion to one side of a ball of deuterium cause a symmetric compression, and indeed, a compression within 5% of spherical symmetry? Then it hit him. Focus the light emitted with mirrors! The details had not been officially declassified in Russia when Sakharov was writing about this, but we know that in the US bomb soft X-rays emitted by the fission reaction were focused onto a cylinder of a deuterium-tritium mixture to compress it symmetrically. The Teller-Ulam design also had a secondary fission device inside the fusion cylinder to assist with the compression of the fusion fuel.[10][11] The idea was first tested as RDS-37 in 1955. A larger variation of the same design which Sakharov worked on was the 50MT Tsar Bomba of October 1961, which was the most powerful nuclear device ever exploded.
Sakharov saw "striking parallels" between his fate and those of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller in the USA. Sakharov believed that in this "tragic confrontation of two outstanding people," both deserved respect, because "each of them was certain he had right on his side and was morally obligated to go to the end in the name of truth." While Sakharov strongly disagreed with Teller over nuclear testing in the atmosphere and Strategic Defense Initiative, he believed that American academics had been unfair to Teller’s resolve to get the H-bomb for the United States since "all steps by the Americans of a temporary or permanent rejection of developing thermonuclear weapons would have been seen either as a clever feint, or as the manifestation of stupidity. In both cases, the reaction would have been the same – avoid the trap and immediately take advantage of the enemy’s stupidity."
Sakharov never felt that by creating nuclear weapons he had "known sin," in Oppenheimer’s expression. He later wrote: "After more than forty years, we have had no third world war, and the balance of nuclear terror ... may have helped to prevent one. But I am not at all sure of this; back then, in those long-gone years, the question didn’t even arise. What most troubles me now is the instability of the balance, the extreme peril of the current situation, the appalling waste of the arms race ... Each of us has a responsibility to think about this in global terms, with tolerance, trust, and candor, free from ideological dogmatism, parochial interests, or national egotism."[12]

Support for peaceful use of nuclear technology[edit]

In 1950 he also proposed an idea for a controlled nuclear fusion reactor, the tokamak, which is still the basis for the majority of work in the area. Sakharov, in association with Igor Tamm, proposed confining extremely hot ionized plasma by torus shaped magnetic fields for controlling thermonuclear fusion that led to the development of the tokamak device.[13]

Efforts to improve nuclear reactor technology[edit]

In 1951 he invented and tested the first explosively pumped flux compression generators,[14] compressing magnetic fields by explosives. He called these devices MC or MK (formagnetocumulative) generators. The radial MK-1 produced a pulsed magnetic field of 25 megagauss (2500 teslas). The following helical MK-2 generated 100 million amperes in 1953.
Sakharov then tested a MK-driven "plasma cannon" where a small aluminium ring was vaporized by huge eddy currents into a stable, self-confined toroidal plasmoid and was accelerated to 100 km/s.[citation needed] Sakharov later suggested to replace the copper coil in MK generators by a big superconductor solenoid to magnetically compress and focusunderground nuclear explosions into a shaped charge effect. He theorized this could focus 1023 protons per second on a 1 mm2 surface, then envisaged making two such beams collide. But it is not known if any experiment based on this idea has been ever achieved.

Research and physics[edit]

After 1965 Sakharov returned to fundamental science and began working on particle physics and cosmology.[15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]
He especially tried to explain the baryon asymmetry of the universe, being the first scientist to introduce two universes called "sheets", linked by the Big Bang. Sakharov achieved there a complete CPT symmetry since the second sheet is enantiomorph (P-symmetry), has an opposite arrow of time (T-symmetry) and is mainly populated by antimatter (C-symmetry) because of an opposite CP-violation. In this model the two universes do not interact, except via local matter accumulation whose density and pressure would become high enough to connect the two sheets through a bridge without spacetime between them, but with geodesics continuity beyond the radius limit allowing an exchange of matter. Sakharov called such singularities a collapse and an anticollapse, which are an alternative to the couple black hole and white hole in the wormhole theory. Sakharov also proposed the idea of induced gravity as an alternative theory of quantum gravity.

Turn to activism[edit]

From the late 1950s Sakharov had become concerned about the moral and political implications of his work. Politically active during the 1960s, Sakharov was against nuclear proliferation. Pushing for the end of atmospheric tests, he played a role in the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, signed in Moscow.
The major turn in Sakharov’s political evolution came in 1967, when anti-ballistic missile defense became a key issue in US–Soviet relations. In a secret detailed letter to the Soviet leadership of July 21, 1967, Sakharov explains the need to "take the Americans at their word" and accept their proposal "for a bilateral rejection by the USA and the Soviet Union of the development of antiballistic missile defense", because otherwise an arms race in this new technology would increase the likelihood of nuclear war. He also asked permission to publish his manuscript (which accompanied the letter) in a newspaper to explain the dangers posed by this kind of defense. The government ignored his letter and refused to let him initiate a public discussion of ABMs in the Soviet press.[23][24]
In May 1968 he completed an essay, "Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom", where the anti-ballistic missile defense is described as a major threat of world nuclear war. After this essay was circulated in samizdat and then published outside the Soviet Union (initially on July 6, 1968, in the Dutch newspaper Het Paroolthrough intermediary of the Dutch academic and writer Karel van het Reve, followed by The New York Times[25]), Sakharov was banned from all military-related research and returned to FIAN to study fundamental theoretical physics. In 1970 he, along with Valery Chalidze and Andrei Tverdokhlebov, was one of the founders of the Committee on Human Rights in the USSR and came under increasing pressure from the government.[13] He married a fellow human rights activist, Yelena Bonner, in 1972.
In 1973 and 1974, the Soviet media campaign targeted both Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. While Sakharov disagreed with Solzhenitsyn’s Slavophile vision of Russian revival, he deeply respected him for his courage. Only a few individuals in the Soviet Union dared to defend 'traitors' like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, and those who had dared were inevitably punished.[12]
Sakharov later described that "it took years" for him "to understand how much substitution, deceit, and lack of correspondence with reality there was" in the Soviet ideals. "At first I thought, despite everything that I saw with my own eyes, that the Soviet state was a breakthrough into the future, a kind of prototype for all countries". Then he came, in his words, to "the theory of symmetry: all governments and regimes to a first approximation are bad, all peoples are oppressed, and all are threatened by common dangers." After that he realized that there is not much "symmetry between a cancer cell and a normal one. Yet our state is similar to a cancer cell – with its messianism and expansionism, its totalitarian suppression of dissent, the authoritarian structure of power, with a total absence of public control in the most important decisions in domestic and foreign policy, a closed society that does not inform its citizens of anything substantial, closed to the outside world, without freedom of travel or the exchange of information."[12] Sakharov's ideas on social development led him to put forward the principle of human rights as a new basis of all politics. In his works he declared that "the principle 'what is not prohibited is allowed' should be understood literally", defying the unwritten ideological rules imposed by the Communist ruling elite on the society in spite of the seemingly democratic USSR Constitution.
In 1973, Andrei Sakharov was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and in 1974 was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, although he was not allowed to leave the Soviet Union to collect it. His wife read his speech at the ceremony in Oslo, Norway.[26][27] The Norwegian Nobel Committee called him "a spokesman for the conscience of mankind".[1] In the words of the Nobel Committee’s citation: "In a convincing manner Sakharov has emphasised that Man's inviolable rights provide the only safe foundation for genuine and enduring international cooperation."[12]
In no way did Sakharov consider himself a prophet or the like: "I am no volunteer priest of the idea, but simply a man with an unusual fate. I am against all kinds of self-immolation (for myself and for others, including the people closest to me)." In a letter written from his exile, he cheered up a fellow physicist and human rights activist with the words: "Fortunately, the future is unpredictable and also – because of quantum effects – uncertain." For Sakharov the indeterminacy of the future supported his belief that he could, and should, take personal responsibility for it.[12]

Internal exile[edit]

The apartment building in the Scherbinki district of Nizhny Novgorod where A.D. Sakharov lived in exile from 1980 to 1986. His apartment is now a museum.
Sakharov was arrested on January 22, 1980, following his public protests against the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1979, and was sent to internal exile in the city of Gorky, now Nizhny Novgorod, a city that was off-limits to foreigners.
Between 1980 and 1986, Sakharov was kept under tight Soviet police surveillance. In his memoirs he mentions that their apartment in Gorky was repeatedly subjected to searches and heists. Sakharov was named the 1980 Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association.[28]
In May 1984, Sakharov's wife, Yelena Bonner, was detained and Sakharov began a hunger strike, demanding permission for his wife to travel to the United States for heart surgery. He was forcibly hospitalized and force-fed. He was held in isolation for four months. In August 1984 Yelena Bonner was sentenced by a court to five years of exile in Gorky.
In April 1985, Sakharov started a new hunger strike for his wife to travel abroad for medical treatment. He again was taken to a hospital and force-fed. He remained in the hospital until October 1985 when his wife finally was allowed to travel to the United States. She had heart surgery in the United States and returned to Gorky in June 1986.
Most of Sakharov's friends in the human rights movement failed to appreciate the motivation for his hunger strikes and blamed Bonner for his sufferings. Sakharov, meanwhile, claimed his human right to make decisions that he felt to be morally necessary for him personally.[12]
In December 1985, the European Parliament established the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, to be given annually for outstanding contributions to human rights.[29]
On December 19, 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev, who had initiated the policies of perestroika and glasnost, called Sakharov to tell him that he and his wife may return to Moscow.[30]
Left to right: Yelena Bonner, Sakharov and Sofiya Kalistratova, 1986.

Political leader[edit]

In 1988, Sakharov was given the International Humanist Award by the International Humanist and Ethical Union.[citation needed] He helped to initiate the first independent legal political organizations and became prominent in the Soviet Union's growing political opposition. In March 1989, Sakharov was elected to the new parliament, the All-Union Congress of People's Deputies and co-led the democratic opposition, the Inter-Regional Deputies Group.

Death[edit]

Sakharov's grave, 1990.
Photo by George Garrigues
Soon after 21:00 on December 14, 1989, Sakharov went to his study to take a nap before preparing an important speech he was to deliver the next day in the Congress. His wife went to wake him at 23:00 as he had requested but she found Sakharov dead on the floor. He died of a heart attack at the age of 68.[31] He was interred in the Vostryakovskoye Cemetery in Moscow.

Influence[edit]

The Sakharov Prize, established in 1988 and awarded annually by the European Parliament for people and organizations dedicated to human rights and freedoms, was named in his honor.
An Andrei Sakharov prize is also to be awarded by the American Physical Society every second year from 2006, "to recognize outstanding leadership and/or achievements of scientists in upholding human rights".
The Andrei Sakharov Prize For Writer's Civic Courage was established in October 1990.[32]

Andrei Sakharov Archives and Human Rights Center[edit]

The Andrei Sakharov Archives and Human Rights Center, established at Brandeis University in 1993, are now housed at Harvard University.[33] The documents from that archive were published by the Yale University Press in 2005.[34] These documents are available online.[35] Most of documents of the archive are letters from the head of the KGB to theCentral Committee about activities of Soviet dissidents and recommendations about the interpretation in newspapers. The letters cover the period from 1968 to 1991 (Brezhnev stagnation). The documents characterize not only the Sakharov's activity, but that of other dissidents, as well as that of highest-position apparatchiks, and the KGB. No Russian equivalent of the KGB archive is available.

Legacy and remembrance[edit]

Places
Media
Andrei Sakharov with a group of Soviet dissidents, Sakharov is the first from right, the first from the left is Naum Meiman fromMoscow Helsinki Group
  • The fictitious interplanetary spacecraft Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov from the novel 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke is powered by a fictitious Sakharov drive. The novel was published in 1982, when A.D. Sakharov was in exile in Nizhny Novgorod.
  • Italian painter Vinzela has dedicated his artwork "Saharov" to the great personality of human right activist.
  • Russian singer Alexander Gradsky wrote and performed the song "Памяти А. Д. Сахарова" ("In memory of Andrei Sakharov"), which features on his Live In "Russia" 2 (Живем в "России" 2) CD.[39]
  • in the TV series Seinfeld, a Russian cable TV installer who had been imprisoned in the Gulag is described as "the Sakharov of cable guys".

Quotations[edit]

  • "In this pamphlet, advanced for discussion by its readers, the author has set himself the goal to present, with the greatest conviction and frankness, two theses that are supported by many people in the world. These are:
    1. The division of mankind threatens it with destruction... Only universal cooperation under conditions of intellectual freedom and the lofty moral ideals of socialism and labor, accompanied by the elimination of dogmatism and pressure of the concealed interests of ruling classes, will preserve civilization...
    2. The second basic thesis is that intellectual freedom is essential to human society – freedom to obtain and distribute information, freedom for open-minded and unfearing debate and freedom from pressure by officialdom and prejudices. Such a trinity of freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorship. Freedom of thought is the only guarantee of the feasibility of a scientific democratic approach to politics, economics and culture." (Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom, in The New York Times, July 22, 1968)[40]
  • "I foresee a universal information system (UIS), which will give everyone access at any given moment to the contents of any book that has ever been published or any magazine or any fact. The UIS will have individual miniature-computer terminals, central control points for the flood of information, and communication channels incorporating thousands of artificial communications from satellites, cables, and laser lines. Even the partial realization of the UIS will profoundly affect every person, his leisure activities, and his intellectual and artistic development. ...But the true historic role of the UIS will be to break down the barriers to the exchange of information among countries and people." (Saturday Review/World, August 24, 1974)[41]
  • "Thousands of years ago, tribes of human beings suffered great privations in the struggle to survive. In this struggle it was important not only to be able to handle a club, but also to possess the ability to think reasonably, to take care of the knowledge and experience garnered by the tribe, and to develop the links that would provide cooperation with other tribes. Today the entire human race is faced with a similar test. In infinite space many civilizations are bound to exist, among them civilizations that are also wiser and more "successful" than ours. I support the cosmological hypothesis which states that the development of the universe is repeated in its basic features an infinite number of times. In accordance with this, other civilizations, including more "successful" ones, should exist an infinite number of times on the "preceding" and the "following" pages of the Book of the Universe. Yet this should not minimize our sacred endeavors in this world of ours, where, like faint glimmers of light in the dark, we have emerged for a moment from the nothingness of dark unconsciousness of material existence. We must make good the demands of reason and create a life worthy of ourselves and of the goals we only dimly perceive." (Last paragraph of Sakharov's Nobel Lecture, December 11, 1975)[27]

Honours and awards[edit]

This article incorporates information from the equivalent article on the Russian Wikipedia.
In 1980, Sakharov was stripped of all Soviet awards for "anti-Soviet activities". Later, during glasnost, he declined the return of his awards and, consequently, Mikhail Gorbachev did not sign the necessary decree.[citation needed]

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