Description
Book SynopsisHow 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
Trade ReviewWith its wider perspectives on the institutions and realities of Sakharov's age, this book should take a rightful place...among front displays of books about science, public policy and society...Through the example of the Soviet Union and its dissident hero Andrei Sakharov, Gorelik and Bouis have made an invaluable contribution to the universal conversation about morality and science. * The Moscow Times *
Table of ContentsPart I: From Tsarist Russia to the Tsardom of Soviet Physics 1: The Emergence of Soviet Physics and the Birth of FIAN 2: Leonid Mandelshtam: The Teacher and His School 3: The Year 1937 Part II: Intra-Atomic, Nuclear, and Thermonuclear 4: The Moral Underpinnings of the Soviet Atomic Project 5: Andrei Sakharov, Tamm's Graduate Student 6: Sergei Vavilov: The President of the Academy of Science 7: Nuclear Physics under Beria's Command 8: Russian Physics at the height of Cosmopolitanism 9: The Hydrogen Bomb at FIAN Part III: In The Nuclear Archipelago 10: The Installation 11: The "Heroic" Work at the Installation 12: Theoretical Physicists in Soviet Practice 13: The Physics of Social Responsibility 14: From Military Physics to Peaceful Cosmology 15: World Peace and World Science 16: Reflections on Intellectual Freedom in 1968 Part IV: A humanitarian Physicist 17: Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn: The Physics and Geometry of Russian History 18: On the Other Side 19: Andrei and Lusya 20: Freedom and responsibility
