The World of Andrei Sakharov A Russian Physicist's Path to Freedom

by Gorelik, Gennady; Bouis, Antonina W.

• ISBN13: 9780195156201
• ISBN10: 019515620X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-04-14
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

How did Andrei Sakharov, a theoretical physicist and the acknowledged father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, become a human rights activist and the first Russian to win the Nobel Peace Prize? In his later years, Sakharov noted in his diary that he was "simply a man with an unusual fate." To understand this deceptively straightforward statement by an extraordinary man, The World of Andrei Sakharov , the first authoritative study of Andrei Sakharov as a scientist as well as a public figure, relies on previously inaccessible documents, recently declassified archives, and personal accounts by Sakharov's friends and colleagues to examine the real context of Sakharov's life. In the course of doing so, Gennady Gorelik answers a fascinating question, whether the Soviet hydrogen bomb was really fathered by Sakharov, or whether it was based on stolen American secrets. Gorelik concludes that while espionage did initiate the Soviet effort, the Russian hydrogen bomb was invented independently. Gorelik also elucidates the reasons that brought about the seemingly sudden transformation of the top-secret physicist into a public figure in 1968, when Sakharov's famous essay "Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom" was distributed in samizdat in the USSR and smuggled out to the West. Recently declassified documents show that Sakharov's metamorphosis was caused by professional concerns, particularly regarding the development of an anti-ballistic missile defense. An insider's view of how the upper echelons of the Soviet regime functioned had led Sakharov to the conclusion that the goals of peace, progress, and human rights were inextricably linked. His free thinking and free feeling were manifested in his hope that scientific thought and religious perception would find a profound synthesis in the future.

Table of Contents

Introduction: How I Came to Write This Book	xiii
Prologue: Pyotr Lebedev: The Pressure of Light and the Pressure of Circumstances	3	(16)
PART I: From Tsarist Russia to the Tsardom of Soviet Physics
The Emergence of Soviet Physics and the Birth of Fian	19	(18)
Leonid Mandelshtam: The Teacher and His School	37	(17)
The Year 1937	54	(19)
PART II: Intra-atomic, Nuclear, and Thermonuclear
The Moral Underpinnings of the Soviet Atomic Project	73	(12)
Andrei Sakharov, Tamm's Graduate Student	85	(11)
Sergei Vavilov: The President of the Academy of Sciences	96	(8)
Nuclear Physics under Beria's Command	104	(9)
Russian Physics at the Height of Cosmopolitanism	113	(14)
The Hydrogen Bomb at Fian	127	(22)
PART III: In the Nuclear Archipelago
The Installation	149	(16)
The ``Heroic'' Work at the Installation	165	(24)
Theoretical Physicists in Soviet Practice	189	(19)
The Physics of Social Responsibility	208	(25)
From Military Physics to Peaceful Cosmology	233	(27)
World Peace and World Science	260	(15)
Reflections on Intellectual Freedom in 1968	275	(18)
PART IV: A Humanitarian Physicist
Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn: The Physics and Geometry of Russian History	293	(19)
On the Other Side	312	(12)
Andrei and Lusya	324	(10)
Freedom and Responsibility	334	(27)
Chronology	361	(8)
Notes	369	(28)
Suggestions for Further Reading	397	(2)
Index	399