Saturday, March 15, 2008

Big Bombs, Big Bomb Makers, and the Sounds of Dissidence

Krystina at "For the Record" makes a good post here about the biggest bomb ever detonated by the Soviets or anyone, the so-called Tsar Bomba, which yielded 50 Mt and was tested in the Nova Zemblya (Russian for "New Land") archipelago on October 30th 1961, the same day as it happens that Stalin's body was removed from its privileged place inside Lenin's tomb to a lesser place outside, near a Kremlin wall. The Soviets claimed at the time to possess an even bigger bomb that would have yielded 100 Mt that they were holding in reserve and whose existence coupled with the testing of Tsar Bomba they were hoping would act as the mother of all deterrents.

This idea of building the biggest bomb possible as a means of ending the nuclear race, as preposterous as it seems, is something we saw in the youthful idealism (if we can call it that) of Ted Taylor as well, as McPhee describes it in The Curve of Binding Energy.

And it seems that the Russians had their own Taylor just as they had their bomb; for one of the scientists who worked on Tsar Bomba was Andrei Sakharov, who would go on to become one of the leading Soviet dissidents and opponent of proliferation.

Sakharov was also a critic of anti-ballistic missile defense seeing it as fueling the arms race and perpetuating the cold war. Not to mention that he saw it as a policy that would inexorably lead to nuclear confrontation. ABM defense was to Sakharov what safeguards were to Taylor.

Sakharov's words and activities led to his arrest and internal exile in 1980, from which he was not to be released until December of 1986 by Mikhail Gorbachev, during the early years of perestroika and glasnost.

And for those of us who wonder and worry (as does the Amazon reviewer) about the potential dangers of breached nuclear secrets documented in McPhee's 1974 book for all to see and the danger such openness generally poses to an open and democratic society, we might consider these words from Sakharov:

The second basic thesis is that intellectual freedom is essential to human society — freedom to obtain and distribute information, freedom for open-minded and unfearing debate and freedom from pressure by officialdom and prejudices. Such a trinity of freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorship. Freedom of thought is the only guarantee of the feasibility of a scientific democratic approach to politics, economics and culture.

Sakharov died on December 14th 1989, 164 years to the day after the Decembrist uprising shook the Russian monarchy in Moscow.

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