TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/051490/0514996.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 62.9 KB | 1,261 lines

                ¡ì                                                            SPECIAL BOOK EXCERPT, Page 40

Sakharov Memoirs 

By ANDREI SAKHAROV


[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.

   Chronicle of Tragedies

    I began to hear the words "arrest" and "search" more and
more often. Hardly a single family remained untouched, and ours
was no exception.

    My Uncle Ivan, whose two sons literally starved to death in
1920, during the civil war, had a tragic fate. Father often
said that Ivan, his older brother, was a born engineer. He
mastered any work he picked up and had more breadth and dash
than any of the other four brothers. Persuaded by high school
classmates like Nikolai Bukharin (later a prominent Bolshevik)
that he ought to "serve the people," he abandoned engineering
for law school. He rose quickly to the top of the legal
profession.

    There were a great many things he didn't like about the
system. Years later I was told that he had drawn a caricature
of Stalin with fanglike teeth and a sinister grin behind the
mustache. But it wasn't this that caused his arrest. He tried
to help a friend leave the country by lending him his passport
and was imprisoned for about two years.

    Released in the early 1930s, Uncle Ivan became a draftsman,
and a very good one. In 1935 he was arrested again. Sent into
internal exile, he worked as a buoy keeper on the Volga and as
manager (and sole employee) of a hydrological station in the
same area. During the war, arrested a third time, he died from
malnutrition in Krasnoyarsk prison hospital. A letter his wife
had mailed to him was returned inscribed: "Addressee relocated
to the cemetery."

    This wasn't the only misfortune to befall our family in the
1930s. The second husband of Father's sister-in-law Valya had
been an officer in the Czar's forces and then with the
anti-Bolshevik forces. In the mid-1930s, like most former White
Guard officers, he was arrested and shot. Mother's half-brother
Vladimir died in a camp. My cousin Yevgeni was sent to a labor
camp, where he drowned while rafting timber down a river.
Another of Mother's half-brothers, Konstantin, was arrested and
died during the investigation; he may have been killed while
under interrogation, but we preferred not to think of that
possibility.

    Every family I know suffered casualties, and many lost more
members than ours did. Millions perished from a whole range of
cataclysms: the deportation of kulaks [well-to-do peasants] to
special settlements; the famine following collectivization;
witch hunts for "saboteurs" and "enemies of the people" (often
the more enterprising members of society); spy mania; religious
persecution; ill-treatment of returning prisoners of war;
campaigns against "cosmopolitans," "gleaners" (it was a crime
to gather grain left in the fields after the harvest) and
violators of work discipline; and other causes. Millions more
died in the war, and the magnitude of the losses must be
charged to the regime and the disorganization it produced.

    I hardly ever heard Father condemn the regime outright. But
once in 1950 he vehemently denounced Stalin. It may be that
Father had refrained from expressing his feelings for my sake;
he may have worried that understanding too much too soon might
make it difficult for me to survive. This reluctance to reveal
one's thoughts even to one's own son may be the most haunting
sign of those times.

    Uncle Ivan, on the other hand, would speak with far less
restraint. He regarded the socialist system as an efficient
instrument for consolidating power but one poorly geared to the
satisfaction of human needs. Under capitalism, he would say,
the seller chases after the buyer, and that makes both of them
work better; under socialism, the buyer chases the seller, and
neither has time to work. The aphorism reflects a measure of
truth.

    No less important are other features of the system: the
denial of civil liberties and of the rights of the individual,
intolerance of other ideologies, a dangerous pretension to
absolute truth. But I did not become conscious of these until
much later. I was content to absorb communist ideology without
questioning it.

    I remember Grandmother using the word "peacetime" for the
era prior to 1914; there was a widespread yearning for
stability. In our day too there is nostalgia for stability and
order; ironically, it looks back to the Stalin era described
so aptly by Anna Akhmatova in her poem "Requiem" as "a time
when only the dead could smile, delivered from their wars."

    In the 1920s and 1930s the terms Russia and Russian had an
almost indecent ring to them, suggesting the bitter nostalgia
of people "who once had been something." But in the mid-1930s,
official propaganda found a use for the idea of national pride.
This idea has since been increasingly exploited, not just for
defense purposes, but to bolster the fading slogan of "world
communism," to justify the country's isolation, the campaign
against "cosmopolitanism" and so on. It no longer seems
impossible that the state might openly endorse an ideology of
Russian nationalism. And, at the same time, Russian nationalism
is becoming more intolerant, in dissident circles as well.

    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.]