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<text> <title> (May 14, 1990) Sakharov Memoirs </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1990 May 14, 1990 Sakharov Memoirs </history> <link 04269> <link 02957> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> SPECIAL BOOK EXCERPT, Page 40 Sakharov Memoirs By Andrei Sakharov </hdr> <body> [From Memoirs. (c) 1990 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Translated by Richard Lourie] I grew up in an era marked by tragedy, cruelty and terror. Many elements interacted to produce an extraordinary atmosphere: the persisting revolutionary elan; hope for the future; fanaticism; all-pervasive propaganda; enormous social and psychological changes; a mass exodus of people from the countryside; and, of course, the hunger, malice, envy, fear, ignorance and demoralization brought about by the seemingly endless war, the brutality, murder and violence. I was born on May 21, 1921, near Moscow's Novodevichy Monastery, the elder of two boys. I inherited my appearance from Mother's side, particularly the Mongol cast of my eyes (Grandmother had an Oriental maiden name, Mukhanova), as well as a certain obstinacy and an awkwardness in dealing with people that has troubled me for much of my life. Mother, the daughter of a soldier, taught gymnastics for a few years in Moscow. Father, an excellent piano player and music composer, came from a long line of priests but taught physics most of his life and wrote popular scientific works and textbooks. Father would sometimes show me some of his experiments--dazzling "miracles," but miracles I could understand. By the early 1930s, I had gained some idea of current events from the conversations of grownups--stories of teenagers fleeing from famine-stricken areas in the Ukraine, the central "black earth" region and Belorussia. They would hide in the tool compartments under freight cars and often were dead when finally pulled out. Starving people succumbed in railroad stations, homeless children took shelter in asphalt tanks and foundation pits. My Aunt Tusya found one such teenager and adopted him. Yegor became a highly skilled electrician and has worked on the assembly of all the major accelerators in the U.S.S.R. Porridge and Powdered Eggs [Four months after the outbreak of war in June 1941, Moscow University students were evacuated to Ashkhabad in Turkmenistan. Graduating in "defense metallurgy" in 1942, Sakharov was eventually assigned to a cartridge factory in Ulyanovsk, on the River Volga.] On Sept. 2, my train arrived shortly after daybreak at Ulyanovsk Station. I was sent to fell trees in the countryside. It was a strenuous task, and by the end of the day we were so exhausted we could hardly stand. At our campfire, for the first time in my life, I heard Stalin--a Georgian, not a native Russian--criticized openly: "If he were a Russian, he'd feel more pity for the people." That from a worker who'd just learned that his son had been killed at the front. A couple of weeks after joining the timber crew, I injured my hand and returned to Ulyanovsk to a new assignment: junior engineer in the blanking shop. Our plant followed the uniform national schedule: two shifts of eleven hours each, seven days a week. Lunch was a few spoonfuls of millet porridge mixed with American powdered eggs. Single workers from outside Ulyanovsk were assigned to dormitories, sleeping six to twelve to a room in three-tiered plank bunks. The toilet was in the courtyard, about 75 ft. away. Since many people didn't feel like walking this distance at night, there were always frozen puddles of urine outside the door. Lice were common. One day in November, the head of the department told me to start processing a new batch of metal. It was rusty and unsuitable for shell casings, but no one wanted to accept responsibility for rejecting it. After the second stamping the metal looked like a sieve. Someone had to put a stop to this farce. I told the foreman not to process the caps any further and went home. A storm burst the next morning. A special meeting was convened, and the foreman said, "Comrade Stalin has issued an order: Not one step back! Soviet soldiers are fulfilling that order and fighting the enemy at the cost of their lives, but engineer Sakharov abandoned his battle station without having completed a vital task. At the front, deserters are shot on the spot. We cannot tolerate such behavior in our plant!" Everyone was silent, and I said nothing. I heard no more of the matter. For me, this incident was the last straw. I decided to look for a job where I could be more useful. Something New and Awesome [Transferred to the munition factory's central laboratory to develop armor-piercing shell cores, Sakharov met Klavdia Vikhereva (Klava); they married in 1943. At night Sakharov resumed his studies of theoretical physics, though he was reprimanded for reading science texts instead of works by Lenin or Stalin. In December 1944 he was sent to Moscow for graduate work at the Physics Institute of the Academy of Sciences (FIAN) under the celebrated scientist Igor Tamm, who was to win a Nobel Prize for Physics in 1958. In the late 1940s, Tamm introduced Sakharov to the work that led to his role in developing the Soviet hydrogen bomb.] I first heard of the splitting of uranium nuclei just before the war, from my father. A short while later, I read an article on nuclear fission in a journal. I did not fully grasp the importance of this discovery, though both my father and the article mentioned the theoretical possibility of a chain reaction (I don't recall any clear distinction being made between a controlled chain reaction as seen in a nuclear reactor and an explosive chain reaction of the sort that occurs when an atom bomb is detonated). In 1939-40, foreign journals stopped publishing papers on the subject. I simply forgot about it until February 1945, when I read about a heroic British-Norwegian commando raid on a cache of heavy water in Norway that the Germans had intended to use in an "atomic bomb"--an explosive device of fantastic power utilizing nuclear fission. I believe this was the first mention of an atom bomb in the press. I immediately recalled everything I'd ever heard about fission and chain reactions. During the next few months, I began to hear occasional references to a "Laboratory No. 2." Later I was to learn that it was a major scientific research institute headed by the physicist Igor Kurchatov--the establishment now known as the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy. May 1945 brought V-E day; in Europe, Fascism had been defeated. But in the Pacific the war was still going on. On my way to the bakery on Aug. 7, 1945, I stopped to glance at a newspaper and saw President Truman's announcement that on Aug. 6 an atom bomb of enormous destructive power [20 kilotons] had been dropped on Hiroshima. I was so stunned that my legs practically gave way. My fate and the fate of many others, perhaps of the entire world, had changed overnight. Something new and awesome had entered our lives. A magazine for Soviet citizens published by the British embassy began serialization of the Smyth Report on the development of the atom bomb. It contained information on isotope separation, nuclear reactors, plutonium and uranium 235, and a general description of the structure of the atom bomb. I would scrutinize each issue minutely with purely scientific interest; I was eager to put my talents as an inventor to the test. But everything I dreamed up was either old hat or impractical. An old school friend said, "Andrei proposes at least two new methods of isotope separation a week." Toward the end of June 1948, Tamm rather secretively asked me, along with another of his charges, Semyon Belenky, to remain behind after his Friday seminar. Tamm announced startling news: the Council of Ministers and the party Central Committee had decided to create a special research group at FIAN. Tamm had been appointed to lead the group, and Belenky and I were to be among its members. Our task: to investigate the possibility of building a hydrogen bomb and, specifically, to verify and refine the calculations produced by Yakov Zeldovich's group at the Institute of Chemical Physics. (I now believe that the design being developed by the Zeldovich group for a hydrogen bomb was directly inspired by information acquired through espionage. However, I have no proof of this.) During the war Belenky had been involved in research on supersonic flow and jet flight. That was probably why he had been included in our group--no one else at FIAN had experience in gas dynamics. As to why I had been selected, I was told that Sergei Vavilov, director of FIAN and president of the Academy of Sciences, had said, "Sakharov's got a housing problem; we'll be able to help him if he is included in the group." The fact that I was working on nuclear physics and plasma theory no doubt also played a role. All in all, I imagine the overriding reason for my inclusion in the group was Tamm's recommendation. But Vavilov was right about my housing problem. In 1947 we had rented a house in Moscow, rumored to belong to a KGB colonel. We were just settling in when a KGB man came to see Klava while I was away and proposed that she "cooperate" by reporting all my meetings to him. Klava refused. Two days later, we were kicked out of the house. Vavilov was true to his word. In May 1948 I was assigned two rooms in the heart of Moscow. At the last moment, a FIAN official appropriated one of the rooms for his mother. Our remaining room measured only 150 sq. ft., so we had no place for a dining table and ate off stools or the windowsill. A single small kitchen served ten families. The toilet off the staircase landing served two communal apartments. There was neither bath nor shower. But we had our own place--no more capricious landlords who could kick us out whenever they pleased! Balance of Terror In 1948 no one asked whether or not I wanted to take part in the sort of work I was now doing. I had no real choice, but the concentration, total absorption and energy that I brought to the task were my own. One reason (though not the main one) was the opportunity to do "superb physics" (Enrico Fermi's comment on the atom-bomb program). Many people thought his remark cynical, but I believe Fermi was quite sincere, although he may have been begging the real question. Fermi's complete sentence--"After all, it's superb physics"--implies the existence of another side to the matter. The physics of atomic and nuclear explosions is a genuine theoretician's paradise. The equation of the state of matter at moderate pressures and temperatures cannot be calculated without introducing simplifying assumptions into the theoretical equations (otherwise the computations exceed the capabilities of the most advanced computers). But one can use relatively straightforward calculations to describe what happens at temperatures of millions of degrees Celsius under conditions resembling those at the center of a star. Similarly, formulas to determine the thermonuclear reaction rate become straightforward. I began my work with the Tamm group by making such calculations and a few days later submitted my first secret report, S-1 (for Sakharov 1). A thermonuclear reaction--the mysterious source of the energy of sun and stars, the sustenance of life on earth but also the potential instrument of its destruction--was within my grasp. It was taking shape at my very desk. But infatuation with a spectacular new physics was not my primary motivation; I could have found another problem in theoretical physics to keep me amused. What was most important for me and, I believe, for Tamm and the other members of the group, was the conviction that our work was essential. I understood the terrifying, inhuman nature of the weapons we were building. But the recent war had also been an exercise in barbarity; although I hadn't fought in it, I regarded myself as a soldier in this new scientific war. Over time we devised or borrowed a number of principles, including strategic parity and nuclear deterrence, that even now seem to some extent to justify intellectually the creation of thermonuclear weapons and our role in the process. Our initial zeal, however, was inspired more by emotion than by intellect. The monstrous destructive force, the scale of our enterprise and the price paid for it by our poor, hungry, war-torn country, the casualties resulting from the neglect of safety standards and the use of forced labor in our mining and manufacturing activities: all these things inflamed our sense of drama and inspired us to make a maximum effort so that the sacrifices--which we accepted as inevitable--would not be in vain. We were obsessed by a true war psychology, which became still more overpowering after our transfer to the Installation, the secret city where atomic and thermonuclear weapons were developed. I have read that on Aug. 6, 1945, Robert Oppenheimer locked himself in his office while his younger colleagues ran around the Los Alamos laboratory shouting Indian war whoops and also that he wept at his meeting with President Truman. Oppenheimer's personal tragedy disturbs me deeply, all the more because I believe he was acting in good faith, for reasons of principle. Of course, the whole sad story of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that so affected his soul was even more troubling. Nuclear weapons have never again been employed in battle, and my fervent and paramount dream continues to be that they will be used only to deter war, never to wage one. Have Soviet and American atomic scientists helped to keep the peace? We have had no third world war, and the balance of nuclear-missile terror--the threat of MAD (mutual assured destruction)--may have helped prevent one. But I am not at all sure; in those long-gone years, the question didn't even arise. What troubles me most now is the instability of the balance, the extreme peril of the current situation, the appalling waste of the arms race. Thermonuclear weapons could end human civilization; they have become so frightening that the very thought of using them seems unreal. Their credibility as a deterrent has thus decreased, while their threat has increased enormously. I believe the time has come for nuclear deterrence to be replaced by parity in conventional weapons, which, in the ideal case, would in turn be succeeded by an equilibrium reached through statesmanship and compromise. But the transition from nuclear deterrence to parity in conventional weapons must be managed with care and executed in stages. The Secret City I was involved in top-secret work on thermonuclear weapons and related research for 20 years. I became a member of Tamm's special group at FIAN in June 1948. In March 1950 I was assigned to the Installation and was there until my clearance was revoked in July 1968. Because I consider myself bound by a lifelong commitment to safeguard state and military secrets, a commitment I undertook of my own free will in 1948, I shall remain silent about some aspects of my life and work in that period. Toward the end of June 1949, I was summoned to a meeting with Boris Vannikov, who headed what was in 1953 to become the Ministry of Medium Machine Building [the innocent-sounding agency responsible for building Soviet nuclear weapons]. Vannikov told me I was to leave "for Khariton's place right away." Yuli Khariton was scientific director of the Installation. Vannikov gave me an address in Moscow and said, "They'll explain everything there." At the designated address, I saw a sign reading VEGETABLE AND FRUIT WAREHOUSE. I descended a flight of stairs and walked past several people who looked like forwarding agents or expediters. Hearing that I was going to "Khariton's place" for the first time, a pale, nervous man at a desk in the next room handed me a pass and told me which train and precisely which railway car to take. For several years thereafter, I obtained my pass for each trip to the Installation by reporting to that unforgettable "warehouse." That evening I went to the railroad station, passed through a cordon of people and boarded what turned out to be Vannikov's personal car. In my stuffy compartment, I couldn't sleep. What kept me awake was a new and challenging idea, the possibility of a controlled thermonuclear reaction. But it would take me another year to find the key to a promising approach: magnetic confinement. Tamm backed this idea and played a role in its development. As soon as the train reached its destination, several of us piled into waiting automobiles and set off for the Installation at breakneck speed through villages just coming to life. The pale light of dawn illuminated tumbledown peasant huts, their roofs of old straw or half-rotted shingles, torn rags hanging on clothesline, and kolkhoz [collective farm] cattle--dirty and scrawny even in summer. Suddenly our driver slammed on the brakes: we had reached the "zone"--two rows of barbed wire strung on tall posts and separated by a strip of plowed land. In 1950 I moved full time to the Installation, where I lived for 18 years, sometimes with my family, sometimes alone. The town where we lived and worked was a curious artifact of our time. The peasants in the poverty-stricken villages nearby could see nothing but a barbed-wire fence enclosing a vast expanse. I was told that they were given a highly original explanation for what was going on: a "test model of communism" was under construction. The test model (the Installation) in fact embodied a curious symbiosis between an ultramodern scientific research institute and a large labor camp. When the place had been simply a camp, it had a mixed prisoner population, including long-term convicts--probably much like the "typical" camp described in Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. The workshops, the proving grounds, the roads, even the housing for the Installation's employees had been built by prisoners who were escorted to work by guard dogs. On my first visit to the Installation, I heard about a mutiny that had occurred a couple of years earlier. Some 50 zeks [prisoners] seized a truck and some weapons and burst through the camp gates, shooting several guards and disarming others. They probably hoped to hide in the forests and villages nearby, but three divisions of NKVD troops cordoned off a large area and began to tighten the ring. The fugitives' defensive position fell under mass artillery and mortar fire. I think the besiegers even used aircraft. Every last escapee was slaughtered. After the uprising, the convict population was radically altered. Those with long sentences and nothing to lose were replaced by short-term prisoners. There were no more mutinies. But the authorities faced another problem: when their terms were up, prisoners might reveal the location of the Installation. The authorities found a simple, ruthless and absolutely illegal solution: released prisoners were permanently exiled to remote places, where they couldn't tell any tales. We lived in close proximity to that camp from 1950 to 1953. Every morning long gray lines of men in quilted jackets, guard dogs at their heels, passed by our windows. After the 1953 amnesty that followed Stalin's death, they were replaced by army construction battalions (another form of conscript labor). Death of a Tyrant [In 1953 Stalin, gravely ill, hatched an assault against the Soviet Jewish community. At the same time, the Soviet Union was preparing to detonate its first hydrogen bomb.] The world remembers 1953 as the year of Stalin's death and the aftershocks that followed. For us at the Installation, it was also the year of our first thermonuclear test. Stalin's final months were ominous. In early 1953 the Soviet press began hammering away about the "Doctors' Plot": a group of physicians in the Kremlin Hospital, nearly all Jews, had supposedly committed several well-disguised medical murders of party and government officials and had begun plotting to assassinate Stalin. The investigation had ostensibly been triggered by a letter from a physician in the hospital (and no doubt a secret KGB collaborator). Everyone who had lived through the campaigns of the 1930s understood that the Doctors' Plot was a wide-ranging anti-Jewish provocation, an extension of the chauvinist "anticosmopolitan campaign" directed against Jews and foreigners, a continuation of anti-Semitic atrocities like the 1952 execution of several Yiddish-language writers. After Stalin's death, we heard that trains had been assembled in early March to transport Jews to Siberia and that propaganda justifying their deportation had been set in type, including a Pravda article titled THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE ARE RESCUING THE JEWISH PEOPLE. Meetings were held everywhere to denounce the medical murderers and their accomplices, and a number of Jewish physicians were fired. People began to fear that pogroms were in the offing. Yves Farge, a French author, politician and Stalin Prize winner, visited Moscow and worked to see the detained physicians. During his meeting with them he inquired how they were being treated. Very well, they answered, but one of them rolled back his sleeve and silently displayed the marks of torture. Shaken, Farge rushed off to Stalin, who may well have issued an order to prevent this overly curious man from leaving the U.S.S.R. A few weeks later, Yves Farge died in suspicious circumstances near Tbilisi in the Caucasus. Some people believe that the Doctors' Plot was intended as a prelude to a wide-ranging terror like that of 1937, and that Stalin's associates sensed the danger hanging over their heads. Such an assumption lends plausibility to the theory that top party officials had a hand in Stalin's death, although the tenor of Nikita Khrushchev's account suggests that he died of natural causes. The announcement of Stalin's death came as a complete shock. People feared the situation would deteriorate--but how could it get any worse? Some, including those who harbored no illusions about Stalin, worried about a general collapse, internecine strife, another wave of mass repressions, even civil war. Central Moscow was invaded by hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens who wanted to view Stalin's body laid out in the Hall of Columns. The authorities clearly hadn't expected this surge of people; in the absence of orders from above, they failed to take timely security measures, and hundreds of people, possibly thousands, were killed in the crush. A few days later, things got sorted out--if only briefly--and we learned that [Georgi] Malenkov was the new chairman of the Council of Ministers. (I recall Zeldovich remarking, "Decisions like that aren't made for one year; they're made for 30." Malenkov lasted two years.) People roamed the streets, distraught and confused. I too got carried away. In a letter to Klava, I wrote, "I am under the influence of a great man's death. I am thinking of his humanity." I can't vouch for that last word, but it was something of the sort. Very soon I would be blushing every time I recalled these sentiments. I can't fully explain it. After all, I knew enough about the horrible crimes that had been committed--the arrests of innocent people, the torture, the deliberate starvation and all the violence. But I hadn't put the whole picture together, and there was still a lot I didn't know. Somewhere at the back of my mind the idea existed, instilled by propaganda, that suffering is inevitable during great historic upheavals: "When you chop wood, the chips fly." I was also affected by the general mourning and by a sense of death's universal dominion. I was more impressionable than I care to recall. But above all, I felt committed to the goal that I assumed was Stalin's as well: after a devastating war, to make the country strong enough to ensure peace. I had the need to create an illusory world, probably like everybody else, to justify myself. I soon banished Stalin from that world (it seems likely that I admitted him to it only for a limited time and to a limited extent under the influence of those disjointed and emotion-packed days following his death). But the state, the nation and the ideals of communism remained intact for me. It was years before I fully understood the degree to which deceit, exploitation and outright fraud were involved in those notions. In the face of all I had seen, I still believed the Soviet state represented a prototype (though not as yet a fully realized one) for all other countries to imitate. That shows the hypnotic power of mass ideology. I later came to regard our country as one much like any other. Conventional wisdom holds that all nations have their faults: bureaucracy, social inequality, secret police; crime and the retaliatory cruelty of the judges, police and jailers; armies and military strategists, intelligence and counterintelligence; a drive to expand their spheres of influence on the pretext of national security; mistrust of the actions and intentions of other governments. This view of the world (probably the most widely held one) can be called the "theory of symmetry": all governments and regimes are (in the first approximation) bad; all nations are oppressed; all of us are threatened by common dangers. During my activist period, I came to wonder, How can one speak of symmetry between a normal cell and a cancerous one? With its messianic pretensions, its totalitarian suppression of dissent and its authoritarian power structure, our regime resembles a cancer cell. The public has no control whatsoever over vital political decisions. We have lived in a closed society in which the government conceals matters of substance from its own citizens. We have been closed off as well from the outside world. I finally rejected the theory of symmetry, but it does contain a large measure of truth. The truth is never simple. Tips from the Black Book By July 1953 we had completed our work on the device that was to be tested. At the test site in Kazakhstan, near Semipalatinsk, an unexpected complication arose. The device was to be detonated on a special tower built in the center of a field. No one had appreciated the fact that an explosion of the power we anticipated would spread radioactive fallout far beyond the test site and jeopardize thousands of innocent people. Victor Gavrilov, working for the ministry in Moscow, alerted us to the danger. The chiefs were alarmed. Minister of Medium Machine Building Vyacheslav Malyshev complained, "Everything was going beautifully, and then all of a sudden Gavrilov pops up like an evil genius, and now everything's a mess." Several teams assigned to the problem worked virtually around the clock. A couple of days later, making liberal use of the Black Book (an American manual on the effects of nuclear explosions), we had estimates for the dispersion of fallout under the conditions anticipated for our test: the power of the explosion, the weather, the soil and the height of the tower. The Black Book--we called it that only partly because of the color of its cover--served for a long time as a valuable reference work during our tests and in discussions of nuclear warfare and defense systems. A fallout pattern forms when a ground-level explosion sucks up dust from the earth. The surfaces of the dust particles melt and absorb radioactive material produced by the fission of uranium and plutonium nuclei. The atomic cloud blazes upward, mixing with the air and cooling as it is carried along by the stratospheric winds. The heavier dust particles fall to earth first, while the lighter particles are carried to a greater distance. Radioactive fallout could cause terrible damage in a large-scale thermonuclear war. The belligerents are likely to explode nuclear devices at or near ground level to destroy the enemy's underground missile silos and other hardened targets. The fallout pattern would then extend over a vast area and cause death, illness and genetic damage. Millions of people would die immediately from the direct effect of the blasts--shock waves and heat radiation--while the poisoning of the earth's atmosphere would cause time-delayed biological effects. We decided that it was absolutely necessary to evacuate everyone downwind from ground zero, where total radiation was likely to exceed 200 roentgens. Then existing estimates predicted that 100 roentgens would cause serious injury to some children and some people in weakened condition, while 600 roentgens would kill half the healthy adults exposed. We assumed, however, that no one in the danger zone would receive the full 200 roentgens, since people would not remain continuously in the open and could still be evacuated after the explosion if necessary. The test directors faced a choice: drop the device from a plane (that would have meant an impermissible delay of six months or longer) or evacuate tens of thousands of people from the danger zone we had mapped out. Malyshev began one discussion by reminding us that we would be subjecting tens of thousands of people--including the sick, the elderly and the young--to the difficulties and dangers of a hasty evacuation by truck in a region lacking decent roads. Casualties would be inevitable. Everyone still agreed that evacuation was necessary. First Deputy Defense Minister Marshal Alexander Vasilevsky, the military director of the tests, had already deployed 700 army trucks; the operation could begin at once. Later, Vasilevsky told a few of us: "There's no need to torture yourselves. Army maneuvers always result in casualties--20 or 30 deaths can be considered normal. And your tests are far more vital for the country and its defense." That was not a view we could accept. Of course, we worried about the success of the test, but for me, anxiety about potential casualties was paramount. I remember Zeldovich's words at the time: "Don't worry, everything will be fine. The Kazakh kids will survive. It will all turn out O.K." Subsequent events did confirm that evacuation had been necessary. Radioactive fallout contaminated the large settlement of Kara-aul, within the evacuation zone. The residents had been told that they could return in a month; in fact they were not able to go home until some eight months later. In March 1954 a Japanese fishing boat, the Fuku-maru, sailed into the fallout zone of an American nuclear test. The radio operator died as a result of his exposure, and the vessel's entire tuna catch turned out to be radioactive. The entire population of Kara-aul might well have suffered the same fate as the crew of the Fuku-maru. On Aug. 5, 1953--exactly one week before the test--Malenkov delivered a major report to the Supreme Soviet, announcing significant policy changes: workers on collective farms would receive larger allocations of land for their personal use and fair compensation for their labor instead of the inadequate payments that had led to the ruin of the countryside under Stalin; capital investment in the consumer-goods sector would be increased; detente would be pursued in international relations. Concluding his address, Malenkov said the U.S.S.R. had everything necessary for its defense, including the hydrogen bomb! This caused an international sensation. We listened to Malenkov's speech in the dim lobby of our small hotel. The device had not yet been installed on the tower; trucks were still carrying families and their belongings away from ground zero across the trackless Kazakhstan steppe. Malenkov's remarks would have raised the level of tension if we had not already been so keyed up. A Stupendous Cloud At last, our day arrived--Aug. 12, 1953. All of us in the hotel were awakened at 4 a.m. by the alarm bells. I could see the headlights of trucks sweeping across the horizon. At 6:30 I reached my station 20 miles from ground zero, where I was to observe the explosion in the company of young scientists from my group and Zeldovich's group. Following instructions, we all lay down on the ground, facing the tower. We listened to the countdown coming over the loudspeakers. With two minutes to go, we put on our dark goggles. Five seconds, four, three, two, one, zero. We saw a flash, and then a swiftly expanding white ball lit up the whole horizon. I tore off my goggles, and though I was partially blinded by the glare, I could see a stupendous cloud trailing streamers of purple dust. The cloud turned gray, quickly separated from the ground and swirled upward, shimmering with gleams of orange. The customary mushroom cloud gradually formed, but the stem connecting it to the ground was much thicker than those in fission explosions. More and more dust was sucked up at the base of the stem, spreading out swiftly. The shock wave blasted my ears and struck a sharp blow to my entire body; then there was a prolonged, ominous rumble that slowly died away after 30 seconds or so. Within minutes, the cloud, which now filled half the sky, turned a sinister blue-black color. The wind was pushing it in a southerly direction toward the mountains and the evacuated Kazakh settlements; half an hour later the cloud disappeared from sight, with radiation-detection planes following after it. Malyshev came out of the bunker and congratulated us. Then he declared, "The Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Georgi Malenkov, has just telephoned. He congratulates everyone who helped build the hydrogen bomb--the scientists, the engineers, the workmen--on their wonderful success. Georgi Maximilianovich [Malenkov] requested me to congratulate and embrace Sakharov in particular for his exceptional contribution to the cause of peace." Malyshev embraced and kissed me and invited me to tour the site. At a checkpoint, we were issued dustproof jump suits and dosimeters. We drove past buildings destroyed by the blast, braking to a stop beside an eagle whose wings had been badly singed. It was trying to fly but couldn't get off the ground. One of the officers killed the eagle with a well-aimed kick, putting it out of its misery. Thousands of birds are destroyed during every test; they take wing at the flash, but then fall to earth, burned and blinded. Our convoy stopped within 200 ft. of ground zero. Only Malyshev and I got out. We walked over a fused black crust that crunched underfoot like glass toward some concrete supports with a broken steel girder protruding from one of them--all that was left of the tower. After staring at the debris for a few moments, we drove back. That evening we met to hear a preliminary report prepared by the test-range staff. Kurchatov opened the meeting by saying, "I want to congratulate everyone here. I want to congratulate Sakharov personally and thank him on behalf of the leadership for his patriotic work." In the U.S. they named the Aug. 12 test Joe-4--"Joe" for Stalin, "4" because it was the fourth Soviet test. [The three earlier tests had been of fission devices.] Something Indecent [Two years later, after yet another test, Sakharov learned to his pain how ill suited his humanitarian ideas were to the Soviet nuclear program.] The Presidium scheduled a test for the fall of 1955 that would tell us whether my Third Idea [a theory Sakharov does not spell out, honoring his pledge to keep state secrets] had any validity. A classical device would be detonated only if the first one failed. We tested the device based on the Third Idea on Nov. 22, 1955. Meteorologists and explosion analysts gave the go-ahead despite a temperature inversion (air temperature rose with increasing altitude rather than falling, as it normally does). Had we been more experienced, the inversion would have caused us to delay the test, since we now know that the velocity of a shock wave increases as the temperature does. The majority of the observers were stationed at a point midway between ground zero and the small town where we were working and living. Zeldovich and I, and a few others needed for consultation, were placed on a low platform built near the headquarters for the test, a laboratory building on the outskirts of the town. The steppe began immediately beyond the laboratory fence; it was covered by a thin coating of snow, through which scattered plumes of feather grass protruded. An hour before the drop, I spotted our dazzling white craft banking to gain altitude after takeoff: with its swept-back wings and slender fuselage extending far forward, it looked like a sinister predator poised to strike. I recalled reading in a splendid book on folklore by Vladimir Propp that for many peoples the color white symbolizes death. After an hour, the controller announced over the loudspeaker, "Attention! The plane is over the target." Five minutes later: "The bomb has dropped! The parachute has opened! One minute!" Having studied the Americans' Black Book, I did not put on dark goggles: if you remove them after the explosion, your eyes take time to adjust to the glare; and if you keep them on, you can't see much through the dark lenses. Instead, I stood with my back to ground zero and turned quickly when the building and horizon were illuminated by the flash. I saw a blinding, yellow-white sphere swiftly expand, turn orange in a fraction of a second, then turn bright red and touch the horizon, flattening out at its base. Soon everything was obscured by rising dust that formed an enormous, swirling, gray-blue cloud, its surface streaked with fiery crimson flashes. A mushroom stem, even thicker than the one that had formed during the first thermonuclear test, grew between the cloud and the swirling dust. Shock waves crisscrossed the sky, emitting sporadic milky-white cones. I felt heat like that from an open furnace on my face--and this was in freezing weather, tens of miles from ground zero. The whole magical spectacle unfolded in complete silence. Several minutes passed, and then all of a sudden the shock wave was coming at us, approaching swiftly, flattening the feather grass. "Jump!" I shouted, as I leaped from the platform. Everyone followed except my bodyguard. The shock wave blasted our ears and battered our bodies, but all of us remained on our feet except for the bodyguard on the platform, who fell and suffered minor bruises. The wave continued on its way, and we heard the crash of glass. Zeldovich raced over to me, shouting "It worked! It worked!" After a few minutes, the chiefs emerged from headquarters. Avraami Zavenyagin, who had recently replaced Malyshev at the head of the Ministry, was rubbing a prominent bump on his bald head--the shock wave had cracked the ceiling and knocked loose the plaster--and he looked excited and happy, as did everyone. A few hours after the test, we learned that the shock wave had caused far more than a bumped head. It had collapsed a nearby trench sheltering a platoon of soldiers; one had been killed. In a settlement that should have been well outside the danger zone, the inhabitants had been ordered into a primitive bomb shelter. After they saw the flash, they emerged, leaving behind a two-year-old girl who was playing with blocks. The shock wave demolished the shelter, and the girl was killed. The test crowned years of effort. It had essentially solved the problem of creating high-performance thermonuclear weapons and opened the way for a whole range of devices with remarkable capabilities, although we still sometimes encountered unexpected difficulties producing them. After the test, on the evening of Nov. 22, Marshal Mitrofan Nedelin, military director of the test, gave a banquet in his cottage. When the brandy was poured, Nedelin, a thickset man who spoke softly but with a confidence that brooked no objection, invited me to propose the first toast. I rose and said something like, "May all our devices explode as successfully as today's but always over test sites and never over cities." The table fell silent, as if I had said something indecent. Nedelin grinned a bit crookedly. Then he rose, glass in hand, and said, "Let me tell a parable. An old man wearing only a shirt was praying before an icon. `Guide me, harden me. Guide me, harden me.' His wife said, `Just pray to be hard, old man; I can guide it in myself.'" The marshal added, "Let's drink to getting hard." My whole body tensed. For a few seconds no one spoke, and then everyone began talking loudly. I drank my brandy in silence and didn't open my mouth again for the rest of the evening. Many years have passed, but I still feel as if I had been lashed by a whip. I am not easily offended, especially by a joke. But Nedelin's parable was not a joke. He wanted to squelch my pacifist sentiment and to put me and anyone who might share my ideas in our place. The point of his story (half lewd, half blasphemous, which added to its unpleasant effect) was clear enough. We, the inventors, scientists, engineers and craftsmen, had created a terrible weapon, the most terrible in human history; but its use would lie entirely outside our control. The people at the top of the party and military hierarchy would make the decisions. Of course, I knew this already--I wasn't that naive. But understanding something in an abstract way is different from feeling it with your whole being. The ideas and emotions kindled at that moment have not diminished to this day, and they completely altered my thinking. Fourteen months later, I ran into Nedelin at the New Year's Eve reception at the Kremlin. He didn't reply to my greeting. I don't think it was an intentional slight, but it's at least possible he was snubbing me because he no longer considered me one of "theirs." Nedelin was killed in 1960 during preparations for an intercontinental-ballistic-missile test. When the control panel signaled a possible malfunction, the technicians in charge recommended that work be halted, but Nedelin, then commander of the Soviet strategic forces, ordered that it go ahead. He stationed himself on the launch pad directly under the exhaust tubes, when, suddenly, the main engines began firing. Jets of red-hot gas shot out of the exhaust tubes, struck the launch pad and rebounded upward, engulfing the scaffolding and the workers on it. Nedelin was probably killed in the first seconds. Some 190 people died that day. A Run-In with Khrushchev [Sakharov's growing concern about the perils of biological damage from continued nuclear testing eventually brought him into direct conflict with Nikita Khrushchev, who by early 1958 had outdistanced all his rivals and established his supremacy in the leadership of the Soviet Union.] The first time I saw Nikita Khrushchev in action as head of government was in 1959. I was one of those invited to represent the Installation at a conference on military technology. Khrushchev delivered the opening address in the Kremlin's Oval Hall. He appeared anxious to limit military expenditures and concentrate on the most effective programs. In this, as in other initiatives, he seemed to meet with sullen resistance (if not outright sabotage) from certain circles in the bureaucracy. The situation was complicated by Khrushchev's tendency to pursue sound ideas and unsound ones (of which he had more than enough) with equal drive and tenacity. He began by introducing sorely needed reforms, delivering his epoch-making speech against Stalinism at the 20th Party Congress in 1956 and releasing political prisoners from the bowels of the Gulag. But he lacked the consistency and insight needed to mobilize countrywide support and was unable to free his thinking completely from dogmas he had espoused as one of Stalin's favorites and as an executor of Stalin's criminal will. Nonetheless, Khrushchev did renounce many of his preconceptions. I believe that this, combined with his innate intelligence and an ambition to be worthy of his post, ensured that his accomplishments would outweigh his mistakes (and even his crimes). Khrushchev's later years in office were marred by blunders and reckless adventures, caused by a lack of wise and well-intentioned advisers and a loss of touch with reality, exacerbated by a delusory belief in his own limitless power. We were yet to witness a tightening of the screws in the labor camps, disastrous agricultural and foreign ventures, the Berlin Wall, the assault on the party bureaucracy's monopoly of power (a test of strength that backfired), military cutbacks and attempts to demilitarize the economy (which provoked resistance in the armed forces), clashes with the cultural intelligentsia, and the Cuban missile crisis and the 1963 food shortages. This kaleidoscopic succession of incongruous events led to Khrushchev's ouster in October 1964, the triumph of the conservative party bureaucracy personified by Leonid Brezhnev, and the augmented roles for the military-industrial complex and the KGB. In 1961 I again entered the Oval Hall, this time for "A Meeting of Party and Government Leaders with the Atomic Scientists." Khrushchev had convened this conference to announce that nuclear tests would resume in the fall. We lagged behind the U.S. in tests, so we would have to show the "imperialists" what we could do. It was clear that the decision was politically motivated. After Khrushchev's speech, the key people talked briefly about their work. I spoke about our weapons research, then volunteered the opinion that we had little to gain from resuming tests. Back at my seat, I scribbled a note to Khrushchev and passed it down the aisle. It read in part: "A resumption of testing at this time would only favor the U.S.A., which could make use of the tests to improve their devices. Don't you think that new tests will seriously jeopardize the test-ban negotiations, the cause of disarmament and world peace?" Khrushchev read the note, glanced in my direction and shoved it into his jacket pocket after folding it into quarters. But at dinner in the banquet hall that night, where a festive table had been set for 60, Khrushchev began to speak about my note--calmly at first, then with growing agitation, turning red in the face and raising his voice: "Academician Sakharov writes that we don't need tests. Can Sakharov really prove that with fewer tests we've gained more valuable information than the Americans? Are they dumber than we are? The number of tests, that's what matters most. How can you develop new technology without testing? "Sakharov has moved beyond science into politics, poking his nose where it doesn't belong. You can be a good scientist without understanding a thing about politics. Politics is like the old joke about the two Jews on a train. One asks the other, `So, where are you going?' `I'm going to Zhitomir.' `What a sly fox,' thinks the first Jew. `I know he's really going to Zhitomir, but he told me Zhitomir so I'll think he's going to Zhmerinka.' "Leave politics to us--we're the specialists. You make your bombs and test them, and we won't interfere with you; we'll help you. But remember, we have to conduct our policies from a position of strength. We don't advertise it, but that's how it is! Our opponents don't understand any other language. Look, we helped elect Kennedy last year. Then we met with him in Vienna, a meeting that could have been a turning point. But what does he say? `Don't ask for too much. Don't put me in a bind. If I make too many concessions, I'll be turned out of office.' Quite a guy! He comes to a meeting but can't perform. What the hell do we need a guy like that for? Why waste time talking to him? Sakharov, don't try to tell us politicians what to do or how to behave. I'd be a jellyfish if I listened to people like Sakharov!" Khrushchev broke off on this harsh note: "Perhaps that's enough for today. Let's drink to our future successes." While Khrushchev was speaking, everyone sat frozen, some averting their gazes, others maintaining set expressions. After Khrushchev cooled down, he added, "I can see Sakharov's got illusions. The next time I go for talks with the capitalists, I'll take him with me. Let him see them and the world, and then maybe he'll understand." That was a promise Khrushchev did not keep. I saw Khrushchev again in mid-August 1961, just after the Berlin Wall had been built. We were briefing him on preparations to explode a device of record-breaking power, the "Big Bomb," several thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. I had decided to test a "clean" version, which would reduce its force but would minimize casualties from fallout. But radioactive carbon would still cause an enormous number of victims over the centuries. At one point, Khrushchev asked, "Does Sakharov realize that he was wrong?" I answered, "My opinion hasn't changed, but I do my work and carry out orders." Khrushchev muttered something I couldn't make out, then emphasized the heightened importance of our work in light of the tense world situation. He mentioned that he had told a visiting American--possibly a Senator, possibly John McCloy, a prominent political adviser--about the scheduled tests and the 100-megaton bomb. According to Khrushchev, this information caused the American's grown daughter to burst into tears. "Israel" and "Egypt" [As testing of the multimegaton monsters continued, Sakharov became increasingly alarmed about the impact of all nuclear testing on the earth's atmosphere.] During the 1950s, I had come to regard testing in the atmosphere as a crime against humanity, no different from secretly pouring disease-producing microbes into a city's water supply. I had calculated that because of global radiation the number of human victims of a one-megaton detonation would be 10,000. By 1957 the total power of the nuclear bombs tested totaled nearly 50 megatons or 500,000 casualties. And the figures were increasing swiftly. But my views were not shared by my associates, and even well-disposed individuals would argue that if I was right, diagnostic X-ray examinations should be banned first. "After all, the patient receives a larger dose of radiation than he does from your tests." Whenever I tried to explain that the issue is the total, cumulative dose for the whole of mankind--since this factor determines the overall number of victims of non-threshold biological effects--people either failed to understand or scolded me for being too "abstract." (As for diagnostic X rays, we should probably make more use of scanning devices that entail much lower doses of radiation.) In 1962 these abstract arguments suddenly assumed a very concrete form. My hopes that it might be possible to halt testing with the 1961 "demonstration" series turned out to be naive: further tests were already in the works. The U.S. and Britain resumed testing in 1962, and we spared no effort trying to find out what they were up to. At one meeting I attended on that subject, we were shown photographs of some documents, but most were askew, as if the photographer had been rushed. Mixed in with the photocopies was a single, terribly crumpled original. I innocently asked why and was told that it had been concealed in the photographer's undershorts. I was especially disturbed because the most powerful and potentially most lethal device was to be tested in two variants in our fall 1962 series. One had been proposed by our Installation; the other, differing only slightly in power, weight and cost, by the second Installation, which had been created in the hope that competition would spur new ideas. The ministry overtly favored the second Installation. One reason may have been the large contingent of Jews among the first Installation's top scientists, including Khariton, Zeldovich and others. In private, ministry officials nicknamed the second Installation "Egypt" (implying that ours was "Israel") and referred to our dining room as "the synagogue." Each explosion could cause cumulative long-term casualties running into six figures. I did not question the need for one test: the device, developed for a promising new carrier, would become a key element in our strategic armory once it was proved. But there was no justification at all for a second test. For several months, I struggled to avert this duplication. But I found myself encroaching on powerful bureaucratic interests and quickly realized that they held all the cards. Tantamount to Murder I began by seeking support from Khariton, who had backed me in resisting the big tests in 1961 (albeit indecisively). "I can't interfere," Khariton decided. "You know how difficult relations with the other Installation have been. My intervention would give people the wrong idea. Their design differs from ours, and from their point of view and the ministry's, that justifies testing both devices." Since Khariton was unwilling to take any initiative, I spoke with Yefim Slavsky, now head of the ministry. He agreed that there was no need for two tests and that the second could be canceled if the first was successful, but he wanted both devices made ready and asked me which should be tested first. I said this wasn't a major issue. I flew out to the second Installation, hoping that its director, Yevgeni Zababakhin, would accept my proposal. Aware of the purpose of my mission, he convened five or six people, his brain trust. Though tired from my journey, I think I was persuasive and logical. To clinch my case, I hung colored drawings over the blackboard: the two devices looked like twins, one normal and robust, the other delicate and somewhat blemished. After an awkward silence, Zababakhin spoke without looking me in the eye. "You can do whatever you want so long as our device is tested first. But if yours is first, we'll insist that our device be tested too. Its design may make it significantly more powerful." "How great a difference could there be? Ten percent?" "I can't say right now." "Zhenya, what are you doing?" I demanded, beginning to shout. "This is tantamount to murder!" Zababakhin remained silent. Back in Moscow, I told Slavsky that the other Installation's device should be tested first since they insisted on it, and the principle of no duplication should be respected. "I've already agreed to that," Slavsky confirmed. A few weeks before the test, the second Installation sought to make its rather puny and somewhat peculiar device more reliable by increasing its weight approximately 10%. But the device proved no more powerful than ours, so the increase in weight turned out to have been unjustified. The heavier device should have been held in reserve as a backup. As a professional engineer, Slavsky must have preferred our device from the beginning, but he didn't want to sour his relations with Egypt, the second Installation, and he kept hoping that it might produce a "miracle." No miracle occurred. It was in these circumstances that Slavsky broke our agreement and tested the first Installation's device seven days after its rival. His principal argument was that the lesser weight of our device increased its utility as a warhead for the designated missile. But the differences between the two devices were in fact minor and scarcely critical. On Sept. 25, I discovered that our device was to be tested the next day. Khariton refused to intervene, despite his annoyance over the second Installation's having tampered with the weight of its device. I called Slavsky and told him he had broken our agreement. "If you don't call off the test," I said, "a lot of people [I specified a six-figure number] are going to die for no reason." "The decision is final," he said. "If you won't call it off, I can't work with you anymore. You've double-crossed me." In a rage, Slavsky shouted, "You can go wherever you want. I don't have you on a leash!" And he hung up. I decided to call Khrushchev, but he had gone to Ashkhabad to present an Order of Lenin to Turkmenistan. I called a number there, and on my second try, Khrushchev came to the phone. "I'm listening, Comrade Sakharov." I had rehearsed what I was going to say, but it sounded unconvincing and muddled. And the connection was poor. "I don't quite understand," Khrushchev complained. "What do you want from me?" "I believe the test is pointless, and it will kill people for no reason. Slavsky and I disagree. I'm asking you to postpone tomorrow's test and appoint a commission to look into our dispute." "I don't feel well today," Khrushchev said. "I'll call Comrade Kozlov right away and ask him to look into it." (Frol Kozlov was then one of Khrushchev's most reliable allies on the Presidium.) When I spoke to Kozlov the next day, I said the test had to be postponed. Kozlov argued that the more often we conducted powerful tests, the sooner the imperialists would agree to a ban and the fewer overall casualties there would be. The conversation was pointless. He simply didn't want to get into an argument with Slavsky. My last hope was General Nikolai Pavlov, a KGB watchdog at the Ministry. When I called, he told me that the aircraft would soon be over the test range. Evidently, Slavsky had feared that I might find some way to delay the test and had taken no chances. It was the ultimate defeat for me. A terrible crime was about to be committed, and I could do nothing to prevent it. I was overcome by my impotence, unbearable bitterness, shame and humiliation. I put my face down on my desk and wept. [NEXT WEEK: In Part II of TIME's excerpt, Sakharov's Memoirs focuses on his heroic activism, his bleak years of exile--and his final vindication.] </body> </article> </text>