How 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 also elucidates the reasons that brought about the seemingly sudden transformation of the top-secret physicist into a public figure in 1968, when Sakharov's famous essay "Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom" was distributed in samizdat in the USSR and smuggled out to the West. Recently declassified documents show that Sakharov's metamorphosis was caused by professional concerns, particularly regarding the development of an anti-ballistic missile defense. An insider's view of how the upper echelons of the Soviet regime functioned had led Sakharov to the conclusion that the goals of peace, progress, and human rights were inextricably linked. His free thinking and free feeling were manifested in his hope that scientific thought and religious perception would find a profound synthesis in the future.
(source: Nielsen Book Data) 9780195156201 20160528

• Temples of the future: Cyclotron republic
• Practical philosopher's stone
• Useful adviser
• Adventurous time
• Inside the wire: Enormoz
• Question of divided loyalties
• Break, blow, burn
• Stone's throw from despair
• Scientists in gray flannel suits: World in which war will not occur
• Character, association, and loyalty
• Rather puzzled horror
• Desperate urgency here
• Sorcerer's apprentice: Nuclear plenty
• Bad business now threatening
• Descent into the maelstrom
• Not much more than a kangaroo court
• All the evil of the times: Good deed a man has done before
• Like going to a new country
• Cross of atoms.

Brotherhood of the Bomb is the fascinating story of the men who founded the nuclear age, fully told for the first time. The story of the twentieth century is largely the story of the power of science and technology. Within that story is the incredible tale of the human conflict between Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller -- the scientists most responsible for the advent of weapons of mass destruction. How did science -- and its practitioners -- enlisted in the service of the state during the Second World War, become a slave to its patron during the Cold War? The story of these three men, builders of the bombs, is fundamentally about loyalty -- to country, to science, and to each other -- and about the wrenching choices that had to be made when these allegiances came into conflict. - www.brotherhoodofthebomb.com.
In this vital slice of American history, told authoritatively--and grippingly--for the first time, Herken relates the tangled lives and localities of the men who founded the nuclear age: Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller.

In a brilliantly researched work, the author of The Man Who Kept the Secrets tells how the interplay between science and espionage, military motivation and moral reaction, and paranoia and cool logic conspired to keep the Nazis--with all their technological strength and war-making passion--from developing an atom bomb.
(source: Nielsen Book Data) 9780394514116 20160527

• v.
• 6. January 1, 1985-December 31, 1985.