Sakharov, Andrei Dmitrievich (1921–1989) | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

Andrei Sakharov was a Soviet physicist who became, in the words of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, "a spokesman for the conscience of mankind." He made many important contributions to our understanding of plasma physics, particle physics, and cosmology. He also designed nuclear weapons for two decades, becoming "the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb" in the 1950s. After recognizing the dangers of nuclear weapons tests, he championed the 1963 U.S.-Soviet test ban treaty and other antinuclear initiatives.

From the 1960s onward, at great personal risk, Sakharov severely criticized the Soviet regime and ardently defended human rights against it. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975.

Andrei Sakharov was born in Moscow, Russia, to a family of the intelligentsia on May 21, 1921. His father, Dmitri, taught college physics and wrote textbooks and popular science books. Sakharov studied at home until the seventh grade. Dmitri, a man of warmth and culture, was his first physics teacher.

In 1938 Sakharov entered the Physics Department of Moscow State University. When World War II began, his academic prowess exempted him from military service. He and the remaining students and teachers were evacuated to Ashkhabad in Soviet Central Asia. Sakharov graduated with honors in 1942, with the war at its height, but joined a factory rather than continue school. While doing routine laboratory work at a munitions factory in Ulyanovsk on the Volga River, his engineering talent showed through a number of inventions. He also met Klavdia Vikhireva, a laboratory technician. They married in 1943.

Sakharov returned to Moscow in early 1945, as a graduate student at FIAN, the Physical Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Igor Tamm, head of FIAN's Theoretical Physics Department, influenced him greatly. In 1947, Sakharov received his Ph.D. for work on particle physics.

In June 1948 Tamm was commissioned to help Yakov Zeldovich and his research team, which for two years had studied the feasibility of a thermonuclear, or hydrogen, bomb. Tamm and several of his students, including Sakharov, formed a special auxiliary group at FIAN to work on an H-bomb proposal. Sakharov suggested a radically new scheme for the bomb, and Vitaly Ginzburg added a key idea concerning thermonuclear explosive material. The U.S.-Soviet arms race took off. In the spring of 1950, Tamm and Sakharov moved to the Installation, a secret city in the central Volga region of the USSR. They worked on Sakharov's scheme and successfully tested the first prototype Soviet H-bomb on August 12, 1953.

Also in 1950 Sakharov and Tamm proposed an idea for a controlled thermonuclear fusion reactor, the TOKAMAK (acronym for the Russian phrase for "toroidal chamber with magnetic coil"), which achieved the highest ratio of output power to input power of any fusion device of the twentieth century. This reactor grew out of interest in a controlled nuclear fusion reaction, since 1950. Sakharov first considered electrostatic confinement, but soon came to the idea of magnetic confinement. Tamm joined the effort with his work on particle motion in a magnetic field, including cyclotron motion, drifts, and magnetic surfaces. Sakharov and Tamm realized that destructive drifts could be avoided either with current-carrying rings in the plasma or with an induction current directly in the plasma. The latter is essentially the TOKAMAK concept.

At the Installation, Sakharov worked with many colleagues, in particular Yakov Zeldovich and David Frank-Kamenetskii. Sakharov made key contributions to the Soviets' first full-fledged H-bomb, tested in 1955. He also made many contributions to basic physics, perhaps the most important being his thesis that the universe is composed of matter (rather than all matter having been annihilated against antimatter) is likely to be related to charge-parity (CP) noninvariance.

Sakharov received many honors. He was elected as a full member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1953 (at only age thirty-two); he was awarded three Hero of Socialist Labor Medals; he received a Stalin Prize; and he was given a country cottage. Sakharov's anti-Soviet activism cost him these rewards.

In May 1968 he completed the essay "Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom." It proposed Soviet cooperation with the West, which the Soviets flatly rejected. The manuscript circulated in several typewritten copies known as samizdat("self-print" in Russian) and was widely read outside the USSR. Sakharov was summarily banned from military-related research.

Also in May 1968, Sakharov accepted an offer to return to FIAN to work on academic topics. He combined work on fundamental theoretical physics with increased political activism, developing contacts to the emerging human rights movement. His wife, Klavdia, died of cancer in March 1969. In 1970 Sakharov and Soviet dissidents Valery Chalidze and Andrei Tverdokhlebov founded the Moscow Human Rights Committee. In the movement he met Elena Bonner, who became his companion-in-arms. They married in 1972.

Although Sakharov won the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize, and was the only Soviet ever to win it, he was barred from leaving Russia to receive it. The Nobel Committee's official citation praised Sakharov for his "fearless personal commitment in upholding the fundamental principles for peace.... Uncompromisingly and with unflagging strength Sakharov has fought against the abuse of power and all forms of violation of human dignity, and he has fought no less courageously for the idea of government based on the rule of law."

The Soviet regime persecuted Sakharov for his activism on behalf of dissidents and those seeking to emigrate. After he spoke out against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, he was picked up by the KGB and exiled to Gorky, under house arrest. There was no trial. In 1986 he was released by Premier Mikhail Gorbachev and returned to Moscow.

Sakharov made his first trip outside the Soviet Union in late 1988. In 1989 he was elected to the Congress of People's Deputies, the supreme legislative body of the Soviet Union. He died on December 14, 1989.

Ethical and Moral Aspects of Energy Use; Military Energy Use, Historical Aspects Of; Nuclear Energy, Historical Evolution of the Use Of; Nuclear Fusion.

Anderson, R. H. (1989). "Andrei D. Sakharov, 68, Nobel Laureate and Wellspring of the Soviet Conscience." New York Times, December 16.

Andrei Sakharov: Soviet Physics, Nuclear Weapons, and Human Rights. American Institute of Physics. Niels Bohr Library. August 1, 2000 <http://www.aip.org/history/sakharov />.

Kapitza, S. P., and Drell, S., eds. (1991). Sakharov Remembered, New York: American Institute of Physics. Sakharov, A. (1990). Memoirs. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

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