Andrei Sakharov

• 1. Introduction

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  Andrei Sakharov was the man who built the Soviet Union's most devastating weapon and then spent the rest of his life trying to limit the damage it could do. Born in Moscow on the 21st of May 1921, he grew up in a household shaped by science and principle. His father taught physics at the Second Moscow State University and played piano in his spare time. His grandfather had argued for abolishing the death penalty in the old Russian Empire. By the time Andrei was a teenager, he had quietly decided he did not believe in God. He did, however, believe in something he called a "guiding principle" that transcends the physical world. That tension, between the material and the moral, would define his entire life.

  What happens when the person most responsible for a nation's deadliest weapon turns around and demands that the nation account for what it is doing to its own people? And what does a state do when the scientist it depended on for its survival becomes its loudest critic? Those are the questions at the heart of this story.

• 2. Building the Bomb

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  In mid-1948, Sakharov joined the Soviet atomic bomb project under Igor Kurchatov and Igor Tamm, working at the Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences. His study group arrived at a striking idea in August-September of that year: wrapping a shell of natural, unenriched uranium around deuterium would increase the yield of a thermonuclear device by letting the uranium capture neutrons and fission as part of the reaction. Sakharov called this layered arrangement the sloika, which means layered cake.

  The first Soviet atomic device was tested on the 29th of August 1949. Sakharov then moved to Sarov in 1950 and worked on what became known in Russia as Sakharov's Third Idea. In the United States the same design principle was called the Teller-Ulam design. The core insight was that soft X-rays from a fission bomb, focused onto a cylinder of lithium deuteride, could compress the fusion fuel symmetrically through a process called radiation implosion. The layer-cake design had yielded disappointing results, producing no more energy than a typical fission bomb. The Third Idea changed that entirely.

  Sakharov's idea was first tested as RDS-37 in 1955. The largest variation of the design was the Tsar Bomba of October 1961, a 50-megaton device that remains the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated. Sakharov later reflected that after more than forty years without a third world war, nuclear deterrence may have helped prevent one. But he was not sure of it, and what troubled him most was not the past but the future: the instability of the balance, the extreme peril of the situation, and the waste of the arms race.

• 3. Fusion, Plasma, and Magnets

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  Nuclear weapons were not the only place Sakharov's ideas left a mark. In 1950 he proposed a design for a controlled nuclear fusion reactor built around a torus-shaped magnetic field. Working with Igor Tamm, he described a way to confine extremely hot ionized plasma using those fields. That proposal became the tokamak, a device that still underpins most serious fusion energy research today.

  In 1951 he invented and tested the first explosively pumped flux compression generators, which he named MK generators, short for MagnetoKumulative. The radial MK-1 produced a pulsed magnetic field of 25 megagauss, equivalent to 2500 teslas. The helical MK-2 generated 1000 million amperes in 1953. Sakharov then tested a plasma cannon driven by these generators, in which a small aluminum ring was vaporized by eddy currents into a stable toroidal plasmoid and accelerated to 100 kilometers per second. He later proposed replacing the copper coil with a large superconductor solenoid to focus underground nuclear explosions into a shaped charge, theorizing this could concentrate 10 to the 23rd power protons per second onto a surface of just one square millimeter.

• 4. Cosmology at the Edge

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  After 1965, Sakharov returned to fundamental science and began working on particle physics and physical cosmology. He was the first to offer a theoretical motivation for proton decay, building on a suggestion Eugene Wigner had made in 1949 and 1952. Experiments testing for proton decay had been running since 1954.

  Sakharov was also the first to consider CPT-symmetric events occurring before the Big Bang. He imagined neutral spinless particles produced from contracting matter before the singularity, passing through one another at the moment of infinite density, and then decaying with an excess of quarks afterward, realizing total CPT symmetry across time. The conditions he identified for matter to dominate over antimatter in the universe carry his name to this day: baryon number violation, C-symmetry and CP-symmetry violation, and interactions out of thermal equilibrium.

  He was drawn as well to the question of why the universe has such small curvature. This led him to cyclic models, in which the universe oscillates between expansion and contraction. He examined three starting configurations and considered a "reversal of the time arrow," in which entropy increases as time moves forward after the Big Bang and also as time moves backward before it. In some of his models the two sheets of the universe could exchange matter through a bridge based on an idea developed by Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov, who called such structures a collapse and an anticollapse.

• 5. Conscience Against the State

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  Since the late 1950s Sakharov had grown uneasy about the moral implications of his work, and by the 1960s that unease had become outright opposition. He pushed for an end to atmospheric nuclear tests and is credited with playing a role in the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, signed in Moscow.

  In 1964 he publicly opposed the election of Nikolai Nuzhdin, a follower of Trofim Lysenko, to the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Lysenko had led the Stalin-supported campaign against genetics. Sakharov stood up in the academy and held Nuzhdin personally responsible for "the defamation, firing, arrest, even death, of many genuine scientists." Nuzhdin was not elected, but Nikita Khrushchev responded by ordering the KGB to gather compromising material on Sakharov.

  In a secret letter to the Soviet leadership on the 21st of July 1967, Sakharov warned that an arms race in anti-ballistic missile technology would increase the likelihood of nuclear war and argued that the Soviet Union should accept the American proposal for a mutual ban on such systems. The government ignored the letter. In May 1968, he completed an essay titled "Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom," which circulated in samizdat before being published abroad. The result was his removal from all military research. He returned to FIAN and to fundamental physics.

  For twelve years, until his exile in January 1980, Sakharov worked openly as a dissident in Moscow. He stood outside closed courtrooms, wrote appeals for more than 200 individual prisoners, and co-founded the Committee on Human Rights in the USSR in 1970 alongside Valery Chalidze and Andrei Tverdokhlebov. He appealed to the United States Congress to approve the 1974 Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which linked trade access to Soviet willingness to allow emigration of Soviet Jews. He also married fellow human rights activist Yelena Bonner in 1972.

• 6. Nobel and Exile

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  The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded Sakharov the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, calling him "a spokesman for the conscience of mankind." The citation read: "In a convincing manner Sakharov has emphasised that Man's inviolable rights provide the only safe foundation for genuine and enduring international cooperation." The Soviet authorities refused to let him travel to Oslo to receive it. Yelena Bonner read his speech at the ceremony in his place.

  On the day the prize was awarded, Sakharov was in Vilnius, attending the trial of human rights activist Sergei Kovalev. His Nobel lecture, titled "Peace, Progress, Human Rights," called for an end to the arms race, respect for the environment, and universal human rights. He included a list of political prisoners in the Soviet Union and stated that he shared the prize with them. By 1976, KGB chairman Yuri Andropov was prepared to call Sakharov "Domestic Enemy Number One" before a group of KGB officers.

  Following his public protests against the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, Sakharov was arrested on the 22nd of January 1980 and sent to Gorky, now called Nizhny Novgorod, a city closed to foreigners. His apartment there was repeatedly searched. In May 1984, Yelena Bonner was detained. Sakharov went on hunger strike demanding she be allowed to travel to the United States for heart surgery. He was hospitalized, force-fed, and kept in isolation for four months. In August 1984, Bonner was sentenced to five years of internal exile in Gorky. Sakharov began another hunger strike in April 1985. She was eventually allowed to travel abroad, had heart surgery in the United States, and returned to Gorky in June 1986.

  On the 19th of December 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev called Sakharov personally to say he and Bonner could return to Moscow.

• 7. Final Years and Death

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  Once back in Moscow, Sakharov moved quickly into the new political landscape that Gorbachev's reforms were creating. In 1988 he received the International Humanist Award from the International Humanist and Ethical Union. He helped form the first independent legal political organizations in the Soviet Union and in March 1989 was elected to the All-Union Congress of People's Deputies. He co-led the democratic opposition group known as the Inter-Regional Deputies Group.

  In December 1988 he visited Armenia and Azerbaijan to investigate the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh. He concluded that for Azerbaijan the issue was a matter of ambition, while for the Armenians of Karabakh it was a matter of life and death.

  Soon after 9 p.m. on the 14th of December 1989, Sakharov went to his study to rest before working on a speech he planned to deliver the following day in the Congress. When his wife went to wake him at 11 p.m., she found him dead on the floor. A senior pathologist, Yakov Rapoport, concluded that he most likely died of an arrhythmia arising from dilated cardiomyopathy. He was 68. Sakharov is buried at the Vostryakovskoye Cemetery in Moscow. The speech he never gave was for a session of the very parliament he had helped bring into being.

• 8. A Name on Prizes and Streets

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  The Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought was established by the European Parliament in December 1985, while Sakharov was still in exile in Gorky. It is awarded annually to people and organizations dedicated to human rights and is described as the highest tribute to human rights work offered by the European Union. Among its past recipients is journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

  The American Physical Society has awarded its own Andrei Sakharov Prize every second year since 2006, recognizing scientists who have shown leadership in upholding human rights. The Andrei Sakharov Archives and Human Rights Center, established at Brandeis University in 1993, later moved to Harvard University. The documents from that archive, which include KGB letters to the Central Committee covering the period from 1968 to 1991, were published by Yale University Press in 2005.

  Sakharov's name appears on squares and streets across Europe, the Middle East, and North America: in Jerusalem, Yerevan, Vilnius, Saint Petersburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Nuremberg, Washington D.C., and New York City, where the corner of Third Avenue and 67th Street in Manhattan carries the name Sakharov-Bonner Corner, just down the block from what was once the Soviet Mission to the United Nations. Arthur C. Clarke dedicated his 1982 novel 2010: Odyssey Two to Sakharov, who was in exile in Nizhny Novgorod at the time, and powered its fictional spacecraft with a "Sakharov drive."