Word: sakharovs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Norgay, conquerors of Mount Everest --Helen Keller, champion of the disabled --The Kennedys, dynasty --Bruce Lee, actor and martial-arts star --Charles Lindbergh, transatlantic aviator --Harvey Milk, gay-rights leader --Marilyn Monroe, actress --Emmeline Pankhurst, suffragist --Rosa Parks, civil rights torchbearer --Pele, soccer star --Jackie Robinson, baseball player --Andrei Sakharov, Soviet dissident --Mother Teresa, missionary nun --Bill Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous
...fall of 1962, when his life took its fateful turn, Andrei Sakharov was not yet known to the world. He was 41 years old, a decorated Soviet physicist developing atomic weapons of terrifying power deep in the heart of the Soviet Union. The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were locked in a frenzied contest for nuclear superiority. That September the Kremlin was to conduct two massive atmospheric tests of bombs that Sakharov had helped design. Sakharov feared the radioactive fallout from the second test would kill hundreds of thousands of civilians. He had also come to believe that another nuclear demonstration...
...Sakharov wept. "After that," he said, "I felt myself another man. I broke with my surroundings. I understood there was no point arguing." Sakharov would no longer be an academician concerned mainly with the theory of thermonuclear reactions; instead he began a journey that would make him the world's most famous political dissident and ultimately the inspiration for the democratic movement that doomed the Soviet empire. Sakharov realized that the ideals he had pursued as a scientist--compassion, freedom, truth--could not coexist with the specter of the arms race or thrive under the authoritarian grip of state communism...
...Sakharov abandoned his cocooned life as his country's leading physicist to risk everything in battle against the two great threats to civilization in the second half of this century: nuclear war and communist dictatorship. In the dark, bitter depths of the cold war, Sakharov's voice rang out. "A miracle occurred," Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, "when Andrei Sakharov emerged in the Soviet state, among the swarms of corrupt, venal, unprincipled intelligentsia." By the time of his death in 1989, this humble physicist had influenced the spread of democratic ideals throughout the communist world. His moral challenge to tyranny, his faith...
...constant technological change, Sakharov reminded the world that science is inseparable from conscience. Sakharov believed that science was a force for rationality and, from there, democracy: that in politics as in science, objective truths can be arrived at only through a testing of hypotheses, a democratic consensus "based on a profound study of facts, theories and views, presupposing unprejudiced and open discussion." As a physicist, he believed that physical laws are immutable, applying to all things in nature. As a result, he regarded certain human values--such as liberty and the respect for individual dignity--as inviolable and universal...