Word: physicist
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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...
...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 and soul...
...dictated by his keen conscience and profound humanistic convictions." Whatever bitterness Sakharov's friends may have felt about the way he was treated in the past, the authorities, at least, tried to make amends. An official obituary published on Saturday in the party daily, Pravda, condemned the noted physicist's banishment to Gorky as a "grave injustice...
Preoccupied though he was with the Soviet Union's political upheaval, Andrei Sakharov found time in his last months to polish his autobiography. The following fragments from Sakharov's Memoirs, to be published in 1990 by Alfred A. Knopf, tell of his evolution from an honored physicist into a man reviled, hounded and condemned to exile as the U.S.S.R.'s foremost human rights activist...