Word: nuclear
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Sakharov emerged from the most improbable of backgrounds as a human rights activist and peace advocate. In the 1940s and 1950s, he lived under security wraps as the Soviet Union's top nuclear scientist, cut off from all normal social contacts and followed at all times by a bodyguard. A theoretical physicist ranking with America's J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, he was the youngest person ever elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences. After he helped develop the Soviet Union's hydrogen bomb in the early 1950s, he became one of the country's most decorated...
...late 1950s, Sakharov grew deeply concerned about the dangers of atomic fallout. Several times he attempted to use his prestige to halt Soviet nuclear testing. Recalling Sakharov's personal appeals against the atmospheric explosions, Nikita Khrushchev described the nuclear physicist in his memoirs as a "crystal of morality." When his behind-the-scenes lobbying turned to open criticism of the regime, Sakharov was fired from the nuclear program. "The atomic issue was a natural path into political issues," he explained...
...genuine Soviet constitution. His increasingly open defiance of the government caused his three children by his first wife virtually to disown him. Nonetheless, Sakharov gave them his comfortable Moscow apartment and his dacha when he stripped himself of the luxuries he had acquired as a nuclear physicist. He donated his life savings of $153,000, an astronomical sum by Soviet standards, to cancer research and the Red Cross...
...call he made to the city of Gorky in 1986, informing Sakharov and his wife Elena Bonner that they could return to Moscow after seven years of political exile. Like the prophets of biblical times who appeared before kings at the most inconvenient times with uncomfortable truths, the distinguished nuclear physicist and Nobel Peace Prize winner was always insisting that Soviet citizens deserved better, much better, than what the Soviet system had to offer. But last week's brisk exchange was destined to be the final encounter between two men who have come to symbolize in different ways the mind...
...felt a growing compulsion to speak out. I was influenced by my life experience and a feeling of personal responsibility, reinforced by the part I'd played in the development of the hydrogen bomb, the special knowledge I'd gained about thermonuclear warfare, my bitter struggle to ban nuclear testing and my familiarity with the Soviet system. My reading and discussions with a fellow scientist had acquainted me with the notions of an open society, convergence and world government. I hoped that these notions might ease the tragic crisis of our age. In 1968 I took my decisive step...