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The academician helped the USSR in a nuclear race, and then openly opposed repression and military threat.
Andrei Sakharov for his life managed to get three stars of Hero of Social Work, the Nobel Peace Prize and seven years of exile in Gorky. All three awards were given to the same country. One person proposed the design of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, nuclear torpedoes against the American coast and the idea of international nuclear weapons control. The biography of the academician is read as four different lectures, and each will be true.
Sakharov was born on May 21, 1921 in Moscow in the family of a physics teacher. As a child, he collected radios. In the war he worked as an engineer at a cartridge factory in Ulyanovsk and came up with ways to automatically check armor-piercing bullets on the quality of steel. In 1948, a young physicist with a defended candidate was in the group of Igor Tamm in FIAN. The Soviet leadership at this moment caught up with the Americans in the thermonuclear race, the backlog was measured for years.
In August 1953, a “layer” of Sakharov exploded at the Semipalatinsk test site. The device RDS-6s gave 400 kilotons, more than twenty times larger than the chiroshim bomb. Physics was 32 years old. For the work, the academician received the first star of the Hero Soztrud, the dacha near Moscow, the personal driver and the actual status of the scientific superstar of the USSR. Colleagues on the object recalled that Sakharov could walk around the office for hours for hours, and then for half an hour to write three sheets into a cage by a decision.
The ideas of the academician regularly went beyond human beings. In the early 1960s, Sakharov proposed to equip a large torpedo of the T-15 thermonuclear warhead to 100 megatons and attack the enemy’s coast with artificial radioactive tsunamis. Rear Admiral Peter Fomin listened to the calculations and said that Soviet sailors are accustomed to fighting with an armed enemy, and not drowning cities with housewives. The idea was put under the cloth. Sixty years later, she returned under the name “Poseidon”, and Sakharov warned in the memoirs in direct text about such a development of her thoughts.
On October 30, 1961, a Tsar bomb with a capacity of 58 megatons exploded over the New Earth. The most powerful explosion in the history of mankind, designed, by the way, with the participation of Sakharov himself. The academician considered data on radioactive sediments, modeled excess mortality and rested on simple arithmetic: every megaton explosion in the atmosphere gives the planet tens of thousands of future deaths from cancer. Sakharov began to write to the Kremlin. Khrushchev at one of the meetings directly told physicists not to get into politics and deal with their numbers.
In June 1968, Sakharov completed his essays on progress, peaceful coexistence and intellectual freedom. The text went to samizdat, then to Holland, then all over the world. By the end of the year, the Western cumulative circulation, according to various estimates, exceeded 18 million copies - more than the USSR had any living Soviet author. The academician was quietly suspended from secret works. The salary fell five times, the guards disappeared, the phone of the special communication was turned off in one day.
Sakharov switched to human rights with the same systemicity as previously considered nuclear sections. The academician defended General Grigorenko, Crimean Tatars, Baptists, refuseniks and Seventh-day Adventists. In 1973, TASS published a collective letter from forty academics against Sakharov. The signatures were put by Nobel laureates Alexandrov and Semenov. The old colleague of the hydrogen project Yakov Zeldovich refused to sign and then apologized for several years at meetings. In 1975, the Nobel Committee in Oslo awarded Sakharov Peace Prize. In Norway, the academician was not released, the medal was received instead by Elena Bonner.
On January 22, 1980, Sakharov was detained on Chkalov Street and sent to Gorky without trial. The reason was an interview with Western journalists condemning the entry of Soviet troops into Afghanistan. On Gagarin Avenue, the academician was placed under the round-the-clock supervision of the KGB. A policeman was on duty at the door. There was no fixed telephone. The mail was opened, the manuscripts were withdrawn, Bonner was searched at every exit to Moscow. For seven years of exile, Sakharov spent four hunger strikes with a total of more than a hundred days - one for the sake of permission of the daughter-in-law Lisa Alekseeva to fly to her husband in the United States. The visa was eventually given. The manuscripts of the academician were stolen from the apartment regularly: one volume of memories disappeared four times and each time recovered from memory.
On December 15, 1986, a telephone was suddenly put in a Gorky apartment. The next day, Mikhail Gorbachev called and invited him to return to “patristic work.” Sakharov asked about political prisoners in response. At the First Congress of People's Deputies in May 1989, the academician from the rostrum demanded the abolition of the sixth article of the Constitution on the leading role of the CPSU. The hall whistled, the presidium turned off the microphone, according to Soviet TV, this was shown for the first time. On December 14 of the same year, Sakharov died of a heart attack at home, having worked the previous day on the draft of a new Constitution.
The main paradox of the academician is not that one man invented the weapon of the end of the world and then fought against him. The paradox is that the system that awarded Sakharov to three Hero stars for a bomb, after a quarter of a century, put the same Sakharov under the supervision of the word. Sakharov survived this system by exactly two years. The main weapon of the physicist was not hydrogen, but his signature under the first letter against Afghanistan. The charge still works.
Andrei Sakharov for his life managed to get three stars of Hero of Social Work, the Nobel Peace Prize and seven years of exile in Gorky. All three awards were given to the same country. One person proposed the design of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, nuclear torpedoes against the American coast and the idea of international nuclear weapons control. The biography of the academician is read as four different lectures, and each will be true.
Sakharov was born on May 21, 1921 in Moscow in the family of a physics teacher. As a child, he collected radios. In the war he worked as an engineer at a cartridge factory in Ulyanovsk and came up with ways to automatically check armor-piercing bullets on the quality of steel. In 1948, a young physicist with a defended candidate was in the group of Igor Tamm in FIAN. The Soviet leadership at this moment caught up with the Americans in the thermonuclear race, the backlog was measured for years.
In August 1953, a “layer” of Sakharov exploded at the Semipalatinsk test site. The device RDS-6s gave 400 kilotons, more than twenty times larger than the chiroshim bomb. Physics was 32 years old. For the work, the academician received the first star of the Hero Soztrud, the dacha near Moscow, the personal driver and the actual status of the scientific superstar of the USSR. Colleagues on the object recalled that Sakharov could walk around the office for hours for hours, and then for half an hour to write three sheets into a cage by a decision.
The ideas of the academician regularly went beyond human beings. In the early 1960s, Sakharov proposed to equip a large torpedo of the T-15 thermonuclear warhead to 100 megatons and attack the enemy’s coast with artificial radioactive tsunamis. Rear Admiral Peter Fomin listened to the calculations and said that Soviet sailors are accustomed to fighting with an armed enemy, and not drowning cities with housewives. The idea was put under the cloth. Sixty years later, she returned under the name “Poseidon”, and Sakharov warned in the memoirs in direct text about such a development of her thoughts.
On October 30, 1961, a Tsar bomb with a capacity of 58 megatons exploded over the New Earth. The most powerful explosion in the history of mankind, designed, by the way, with the participation of Sakharov himself. The academician considered data on radioactive sediments, modeled excess mortality and rested on simple arithmetic: every megaton explosion in the atmosphere gives the planet tens of thousands of future deaths from cancer. Sakharov began to write to the Kremlin. Khrushchev at one of the meetings directly told physicists not to get into politics and deal with their numbers.
In June 1968, Sakharov completed his essays on progress, peaceful coexistence and intellectual freedom. The text went to samizdat, then to Holland, then all over the world. By the end of the year, the Western cumulative circulation, according to various estimates, exceeded 18 million copies - more than the USSR had any living Soviet author. The academician was quietly suspended from secret works. The salary fell five times, the guards disappeared, the phone of the special communication was turned off in one day.
Sakharov switched to human rights with the same systemicity as previously considered nuclear sections. The academician defended General Grigorenko, Crimean Tatars, Baptists, refuseniks and Seventh-day Adventists. In 1973, TASS published a collective letter from forty academics against Sakharov. The signatures were put by Nobel laureates Alexandrov and Semenov. The old colleague of the hydrogen project Yakov Zeldovich refused to sign and then apologized for several years at meetings. In 1975, the Nobel Committee in Oslo awarded Sakharov Peace Prize. In Norway, the academician was not released, the medal was received instead by Elena Bonner.
On January 22, 1980, Sakharov was detained on Chkalov Street and sent to Gorky without trial. The reason was an interview with Western journalists condemning the entry of Soviet troops into Afghanistan. On Gagarin Avenue, the academician was placed under the round-the-clock supervision of the KGB. A policeman was on duty at the door. There was no fixed telephone. The mail was opened, the manuscripts were withdrawn, Bonner was searched at every exit to Moscow. For seven years of exile, Sakharov spent four hunger strikes with a total of more than a hundred days - one for the sake of permission of the daughter-in-law Lisa Alekseeva to fly to her husband in the United States. The visa was eventually given. The manuscripts of the academician were stolen from the apartment regularly: one volume of memories disappeared four times and each time recovered from memory.
On December 15, 1986, a telephone was suddenly put in a Gorky apartment. The next day, Mikhail Gorbachev called and invited him to return to “patristic work.” Sakharov asked about political prisoners in response. At the First Congress of People's Deputies in May 1989, the academician from the rostrum demanded the abolition of the sixth article of the Constitution on the leading role of the CPSU. The hall whistled, the presidium turned off the microphone, according to Soviet TV, this was shown for the first time. On December 14 of the same year, Sakharov died of a heart attack at home, having worked the previous day on the draft of a new Constitution.
The main paradox of the academician is not that one man invented the weapon of the end of the world and then fought against him. The paradox is that the system that awarded Sakharov to three Hero stars for a bomb, after a quarter of a century, put the same Sakharov under the supervision of the word. Sakharov survived this system by exactly two years. The main weapon of the physicist was not hydrogen, but his signature under the first letter against Afghanistan. The charge still works.
