Word: kurchatov
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Then Kapitsa expressed a desire to go abroad. I could tell he wanted the press to raise a lot of hoopla about his traveling to other countries. We deliberated the matter in the leadership. Even though we had let [Atomic Physicist Igor] Kurchatov go to England [in 1956], we decided to wait a while before sending Kapitsa abroad. We still hadn't accumulated enough atomic weapons. Therefore it was essential that we keep secret from our enemies any and all information which might tip them off about how little...
...atomic physics, for example, Moscow's competing Lebedev and Kurchatov Institutes may well be ahead of Western research centers in the race to control thermonuclear fusion, the same energy process that powers the sun. Under Nobel Laureate Nikolai Basov, Lebedev scientists are using high-energy laser beams in an effort to produce a plasma, or ionized gas, of sufficiently high temperature and density to sustain a fusion reaction. Kurchatov researchers are using powerful doughnut-shaped machines, acronymically named Tokamaks, to obtain the same results with intense magnetic fields. Academician Lev Artsimovich, head of the Kurchatov work, doubts that anyone...
Died. Igor V. Kurchatov, 57, Soviet physicist who began tentative nuclear studies in the 1930s, ended up directing the fierce-driving organization that produced the Soviet atomic bomb in 1949, the hydrogen bomb in 1953; of a heart attack; in Moscow. The first Soviet atomic explosion came as a shock to the West largely because it was ignorant of the years of preparation of Kurchatov and his colleagues. Kurchatov, in fact, boasted that Russia invented the first real hydrogen bomb, since the thermonuclear device exploded earlier by the U.S. was too large to serve as a weapon...
...Kurchatov's last paragraph must have tantalized his Harwell listeners: "On appraising the various approaches to the problem of obtaining intense thermonuclear reactions, we do not deem it possible to completely exclude further attempts to attain this goal by using pulsed discharges. However, other possibilities must also be carefully considered. Especially interesting are those in which the idea of stationary processes may be used...
...When Kurchatov finished, the Harwell researchers gave him an ovation. British newspapers proclaimed that the Russians are close to success in harnessing fusion power, and are far ahead of the U.S. and Britain. Kurchatov's speech did not justify any such conclusion. What it did prove is that Soviet scientists 1) have been doing ambitious and interesting work on controlled fusion, and 2) they are not compelled to keep all their results secret...