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Sakharov

Andrei Sakharov
Andrei Sakharov is often called the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, but most people know him as one of the twentieth century's most ardent and unrelenting champions of human rights and freedoms. It was for his work as an outspoken dissident to the Soviet regime that the Nobel Committee awarded him the Peace Prize in 1975.
Sakharov was born in 1921 to a family of Moscow intelligentsia. His father was a teacher of physics and a popular writer of science books, as well as a humane and forthright man (Gorelik, 1999). After graduating high school, Andrei enrolled in Moscow University in 1938. When the war broke out wit Germany, his weak heart prevented him from being drafted. He graduated with honors in 1942 and didn't want to pursue further studies. Instead he wanted to help with the war effort. He worked as an engineer in a military ammunition plant where he met his wife Klavdia Vikhireva (Gorelik, 1999).
Physicist Sakharov
Sakharov twice declined invitations from senior officials to join the atomic weapons project because he was exhilarated with pure physics. It wasn't until 1948 when Igor Tamm, a leading theoretical physicist, announced that he and some selected associates, including Sakharov, had been assigned to investigate the possibilities of a hydrogen bomb that Sakharov agreed to work o the project. Sakharov was intrigued with the combination of theoretical physics and engineering required in making the hydrogen bomb (Gorelik, 1999). Despite his junior status, Sakharov proposed a radically different design, called the sloika or "layered roll." It was used in the first Soviet hydrogen bomb
that was tested in 1953. It yielded energy about twenty times that of the Hiroshima
bomb (Gorelik, 1999). A few months after the testing Sakharov was elected a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and at age 32 was the youngest physicist ever. He also received the Stalin Prize and was decorated with the title Hero of Socialist Labor (Gorelik,...