Word: kapitsa
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...eminent Soviet expert on Asia, and China in particular, was Mikhail Kapitsa. Erudite and capable, gregarious and jovial, Kapitsa would undoubtedly have moved faster if he had not received a black mark in his dossier and a deep scar on his head when, as Ambassador to Pakistan in 1961, he took up with his driver's wife. The chauffeur discovered the liaison. Rushing into the Ambassador's office, where Kapitsa was using his couch as a bed, the infuriated husband clouted the diplomat on the head with a crowbar. He might have killed Kapitsa if aides had not come...
...later asked Kapitsa how it could have happened that more than 30 of our frontier guards had been killed on Damansky Island and why they had been so obviously unprepared to respond effectively. "The Chinese completely surprised us," he answered. "The Politburo, despite all the tensions in our relations with Peking, had no idea they would do anything like that." According to Kapitsa, the events on Damansky had had the effect of an electric shock on Moscow. The Politburo was terrified that the Chinese might make a large-scale intrusion into Soviet territory that China claimed. A nightmare vision...
...Kapitsa also said the Soviet leadership had come close to using nuclear arms on China. He had been at the Politburo discussion. He said that Marshal Andrei Grechko, the Defense Minister, actively advocated a plan "once and for all to get rid of the Chinese threat." Grechko, a dim-witted martinet replaced by Dimitri Ustinov in 1976, called for unrestricted use of the multimegaton bomb known in the West as the "blockbuster." The bomb would release enormous amounts of radioactive fallout, not only killing millions of Chinese but threatening Soviet citizens in the Far East and people in other countries...
DIED. Pyotr Kapitsa, 89, Nobel-prizewinning Soviet physicist who made major discoveries in magnetism and low-temperature and plasma physics but who was placed under house arrest in the last years of the Stalin era for refusing to conduct nuclear weapons research; in Moscow. He spent much of his early career at England's Cambridge University, until Stalin in 1934 pressured him into staying home by creating Moscow's Institute of Physical Problems, which Kapitsa headed until 1946 and then from his post-Stalin rehabilitation in 1955 until his death...
...inaugural issue, the result of five years of discussions between the magazine's publisher, Gerard Piel, and Moscow officials, makes plain that editors in the U.S.S.R. will translate all articles and occasionally will include entirely new pieces by Soviet authors. More pointedly, notes Chief Editor Sergei Kapitsa, "we have the right, in consultation with the American editors, to remove any article of a given issue." Among taboo subjects: social and economic sciences and defense matters. The Soviet issue also excludes consumer advertising. The translation does, however, retain the original's colorful charts and photographs, thereby making...