Word: physicists
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...quality of Rhodes' narrative history resides not only in the grandeur of its structure but in its details: Hungarian-born Physicist Leo Szilard stepping off a London curb in 1933 and being struck by the shattering inspiration of sustained chain reaction; Cambridge's Ernest Rutherford angling for the secrets of the universe with string and red sealing wax; Pierre Curie's hands, swollen by prolonged exposure to radium; the flat feet that kept Albert Einstein out of the army; Nobel Prizewinner Enrico Fermi arriving for an appointment at the U.S. Navy Department and overhearing the desk officer tell his admiral...
...took to type this out, mankind had its first radioactive mushroom cloud, and nothing would ever be the same. Project Director Oppenheimer realized this immediately, and his reach into Hindu scripture has become famous: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Even before the test blast, Danish Physicist Niels Bohr foresaw a fundamental change in the relationships among nation-states. Both Hitler and Churchill, on the other hand, failed to grasp the political consequences of the new energy. "After all," said the Prime Minister, "this new bomb is just going to be bigger than our present bombs...
Working with Yankelevich, Talbott and Aikman edited the speeches into a single letter from the physicist. Aikman, who was Eastern Europe bureau chief from 1977 to 1978, wrote an introduction to the text, focusing on its views of the arms race and on Gorbachev's push for reforms. "The struggle in the Soviet Union between the momentum for change and the inertia of privilege," says Aikman, "is one of the great political and intellectual dramas...
Diplomats in Moscow last week were suggesting that Gorbachev's proposal should be called the Sakharov Plan because it contained ideas the dissident physicist put forth in a speech in mid-February (see following story). But arms-control hands with longer memories recognize the initiative by another name: the zero option. In 1981 the Reagan Administration presented just such a proposal for the elimination of all medium-range missiles from Europe. The move was an attempt to soothe peace activists nervous about the pending deployment of Pershing IIs and cruise missiles, which were intended to match the Soviet...
...February, barely two months after Soviet authorities unexpectedly released him from internal exile, Andrei Sakharov created a worldwide sensation by turning up at an international forum in Moscow. Sakharov, 65, a nuclear physicist often described as the "father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb" and a courageous defender of human rights in his homeland, spent nearly seven years under virtual house arrest with his wife Elena Bonner in the closed city of Gorky. During the February forum, Sakharov delivered three speeches eloquently expressing his concerns about human rights, U.S.-Soviet relations and the nuclear arms race. He made a slightly edited...