Family background and early life Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov was born in Moscow on 21 May 1921, to a Russian family. His father, Dmitri Ivanovich Sakharov, was a physics professor at the
Second Moscow State University and an amateur pianist. His grandfather, Ivan, was a lawyer in the former
Russian Empire who had displayed respect for social awareness and humanitarian principles (including advocating the abolition of
capital punishment). Sakharov's mother, Yekaterina Alekseevna Sofiano, was a daughter of Aleksey Semenovich Sofiano, a general in the
Tsarist Russian Army with
Greek heritage. Sakharov's parents and paternal grandmother, Maria Petrovna, largely shaped his personality; his mother and grandmother were members of the
Russian Orthodox Church, although his father was a non-believer. When Andrei was about thirteen, he realized that he did not believe in God. However, despite being an
atheist, he did believe in a "guiding principle" that transcends physical laws. After schooling, Sakharov studied physics at the
Moscow State University in 1938 and, following evacuation in 1941 from fighting on the
Eastern Front with
Germany, he graduated in
Ashgabat in the
Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic. In 1942 he moved to
Ulyanovsk, working in the Voldarsky munitions plant. Whilst there, he invented a successful process to test for flaws in armour piercing shells.. In 1943, he married Klavdia Alekseyevna Vikhireva, with whom he raised two daughters and a son. They were married until Klavdia's death in 1969. In 1945, he joined the Theoretical Department of
Physical Institute of the
Russian Academy of Sciences under
Igor Tamm in Moscow. In 1947, Sakharov successfully defended his thesis for the
Doctor of Sciences (lit.
Doktor Nauk), which covered the topic of
nuclear transmutation.
Soviet program of nuclear weapons After World War II, he researched
cosmic rays. In mid-1948 he participated in the
Soviet atomic bomb project under
Igor Kurchatov and
Igor Tamm. Sakharov's study group at FIAN in 1948 came up with a second concept in August–September 1948. Adding a shell of natural, unenriched uranium around the deuterium would increase the deuterium concentration at the uranium-deuterium boundary and the overall yield of the device, because the natural uranium would capture neutrons and itself fission as part of the thermonuclear reaction. This idea of a layered fission-fusion-fission bomb led Sakharov to call it the
sloika, or layered cake. Sakharov's idea was first tested as
RDS-37 in 1955. A larger variation of the same design which Sakharov worked on was the 50 Mt
Tsar Bomba of October 1961, which was the most powerful nuclear device ever detonated. Sakharov saw "striking parallels" between his fate and those of
J. Robert Oppenheimer and
Edward Teller in the US. 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 the
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:
Support for peaceful use of nuclear technology In 1950 he proposed an idea for a controlled
nuclear fusion reactor, the
tokamak, based on
Oleg Lavrentiev's idea. Sakharov, in association with 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.
Magneto-implosive generators In 1951 he invented and tested the first
explosively pumped flux compression generators, compressing magnetic fields by
explosives. He called these devices MK (for
MagnetoKumulative) generators. The radial MK-1 produced a pulsed magnetic field of 25
megagauss (2500
teslas). The resulting helical MK-2 generated 1000 million amperes in 1953. Sakharov then tested a MK-driven "plasma cannon" where a small aluminum ring was vaporized by huge
eddy currents into a stable, self-confined
toroidal plasmoid and was accelerated to 100 km/s. Sakharov later suggested replacing the copper
coil in MK generators with a large
superconductor solenoid to magnetically compress and focus
underground nuclear explosions into a
shaped charge effect. He theorized this could focus 1023
protons per second on a 1 mm2 surface.
Particle physics and cosmology After 1965 Sakharov returned to
fundamental science and began working on
particle physics and
physical cosmology. He tried to explain the
baryon asymmetry of the universe; in that regard, he was the first to give a theoretical motivation for
proton decay. Proton decay was suggested by
Wigner in 1949 and 1952. Proton decay experiments had been performed since 1954 already. Sakharov was the first to consider
CPT-symmetric events occurring
before the
Big Bang:We can visualize that neutral spinless maximons (or photons) are produced at
t t = 0 when the density is infinite, and decay with an excess of quarks when
t > 0, realizing total CPT symmetry of the universe. All the phenomena at t 0. His legacy in this domain are the famous
conditions named after him: In those models, after a certain number of cycles the curvature naturally becomes infinite even if it had not started this way: Sakharov considered three starting points, a flat universe with a slightly negative cosmological constant, a universe with a positive curvature and a zero cosmological constant, and a universe with a negative curvature and a slightly negative cosmological constant. Those last two models feature what Sakharov calls a reversal of the time arrow, which can be summarized as follows: He considers times t > 0 after the initial Big Bang singularity at t = 0 (which he calls "Friedman singularity" and denotes Φ) as well as times t 0 as well as when time decreases for t 0 under CPT symmetry but also the case when it is not so: the universe has a non-zero CPT charge at t = 0 in this case. Sakharov considers a variant of this model where the reversal of the time arrow occurs at a point of maximum entropy instead of happening at the singularity. In those models there is no dynamic interaction between the universe at t 0. In his first model the two universes did not interact, except via local matter accumulation whose density and pressure become high enough to connect the two sheets through a bridge without spacetime between them, but with a continuity of geodesics beyond the Schwarzschild radius with no singularity, allowing an exchange of matter between the two conjugated sheets, based on an idea after
Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov. Novikov called such singularities a
collapse and an
anticollapse, which are an alternative to the couple
black hole and
white hole in the
wormhole model. Sakharov also proposed the idea of
induced gravity as an alternative theory of
quantum gravity.
Turn to activism Since 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. Sakharov was also involved in an event with political consequences in 1964, when the
Soviet Academy of Sciences nominated for full membership
Nikolai Nuzhdin, a follower of
Trofim Lysenko (initiator of the Stalin-supported anti-genetics campaign
Lysenkoism). Contrary to normal practice, Sakharov, a member of the academy, publicly spoke out against full membership for Nuzhdin and held him responsible for "the defamation, firing, arrest, even death, of many genuine scientists." In the end, Nuzhdin was not elected, but the episode prompted Nikita Khrushchev to order the
KGB to gather
compromising material on Sakharov. Since 1967, after the
Six-Day War and the beginning of the
Arab–Israeli conflict, he actively supported
Israel, as he reported more than once in the press, and also maintained friendly relations with
refuseniks who later made
aliyah. In May 1968, Sakharov completed an essay, "Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom". He described the anti-ballistic missile defense as a major threat of world nuclear war. After the essay was circulated in
samizdat and then published outside the Soviet Union, Sakharov was banned from conducting any military-related research and returned to FIAN to study fundamental theoretical physics. For 12 years, until his exile to Gorky (
Nizhny Novgorod) in January 1980, Sakharov assumed the role of a widely recognized and open dissident in Moscow. He stood vigil outside closed courtrooms, wrote appeals on behalf of more than 200 individual prisoners, and continued to write essays about the need for democratization. By 1973, Sakharov was meeting regularly with Western correspondents and holding press conferences in his apartment. -->In 1972, Sakharov became the target of sustained pressure from his fellow scientists in the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Soviet press. The writer
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn came to his defence. In 1973 and 1974, the Soviet media campaign continued, targeting both Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn for their pro-Western, anti-socialist positions. 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.": On the day the prize was awarded, Sakharov was in
Vilnius, where the human rights activist
Sergei Kovalev was being tried. In his Nobel lecture, "Peace, Progress, Human Rights", Sakharov called for an end to the arms race, greater respect for the environment, international cooperation, and universal respect for human rights. He included a list of
prisoners of conscience and
political prisoners in the Soviet Union and stated that he shared the prize with them. Between 1980 and 1986, Sakharov was kept under Soviet police surveillance. In his memoirs, he mentioned 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. 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, 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. In August, the Politburo discussed what to do about Sakharov. He remained in the hospital until October 1985, when his wife was allowed to travel to the United States. She had heart surgery in the United States and returned to Gorky in June 1986. In December 1985, the
European Parliament established the
Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, to be given annually for outstanding contributions to human rights. On 19 December 1986,
Mikhail Gorbachev, who had initiated the policies of
perestroika and
glasnost, called Sakharov to tell him that he and his wife could return to Moscow.
Political leader Ronald Reagan in 1988 In 1988, Sakharov was given the International Humanist Award by the
International Humanist and Ethical Union. 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. In November the head of the KGB reported to Gorbachev on Sakharov's encouragement and support for the coal miners' strike in Vorkuta. In December 1988, Sakharov visited Armenia and Azerbaijan on a fact-finding mission. He concluded, "For Azerbaijan the issue of
Karabakh is a matter of ambition, for the Armenians of Karabakh, it is a matter of life and death".
Death Soon after 9 p.m. on 14 December 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 11 p.m. as he had requested but she found Sakharov dead on the floor. According to the notes of Yakov Rapoport, a senior pathologist present at the autopsy, it is most likely that Andrei Sakharov, the renowned Soviet physicist, died of an
arrhythmia consequent to
dilated cardiomyopathy at the age of 68. He is interred in the Vostryakovskoye Cemetery in Moscow. == Influence ==