Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov (; May 21, 1921 – December 14, 1989 ) was a Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident and human rights activist.

Sakharov was an advocate of civil liberties and civil reforms in the Soviet Union.

Sakharov was born in Moscow on May 21, 1921.

His father was Dmitri Ivanovich Sakharov, a private school physics teacher and an amateur pianist.

A larger variation of the same design which Sakharov worked on was the 50MT Tsar Bomba of October 1961, which was the most powerful nuclear device ever exploded.

While in the view of most American academics the two were as diametrically opposed as good and evil, Sakharov believed that in this " tragic confrontation of two outstanding people ," both deserved respect, because " each of them was certain he had right on his side and was morally obligated to go to the end in the name of truth.

Sakharov then tested a MK-driven " plasma cannon " where a small aluminium ring was vaporized by huge eddy currents into a stable, self-confined toroidal plasmoid and was accelerated to 100 km / s.

Politically active during the 1960s, Sakharov was against nuclear proliferation.

After this essay was circulated in samizdat and then published outside the Soviet Union ( initially on July 6, 1968, in the Dutch newspaper Het Parool through intermediary of the Dutch academic and writer Karel van het Reve, followed by The New York Times ), Sakharov was banned from all military-related research and returned to FIAN to study fundamental theoretical physics.

Sakharov later described that " it took years " for him " to understand how much substitution, deceit, and lack of correspondence with reality there was " in the Soviet ideals.

In 1973 Andrei Sakharov was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and in 1974 was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca.

Between 1980 to 1986, Sakharov was kept under tight Soviet police surveillance.

Sakharov was named the 1980 Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association.

In May 1984 Sakharov's wife, Yelena Bonner, was detained and Sakharov began a hunger strike, demanding permission for his wife to travel to the United States for heart surgery.

In 1988, Sakharov was given the International Humanist Award by the International Humanist and Ethical Union.

In March 1989, Sakharov was elected to the new parliament, the All-Union Congress of People's Deputies and co-led the democratic opposition, the Inter-Regional Deputies Group.

Soon after 21: 00 on December 14, 1989, Sakharov went to his study to take a nap before preparing an important speech he was to deliver the next day in the Congress.

* January 22 – Andrei Sakharov, Soviet scientist and human rights activist, is arrested in Moscow.

After 1965 Sakharov returned to fundamental science and began working on particle physics and cosmology.

His wife went to wake him at 23: 00 as he had requested but she found Sakharov dead on the floor.

* In Nizhny Novgorod, there is a Sakharov Museum in the apartment on the first floor of the 12-storeyed house where the Sakharov family lived for seven years.

* David Holloway on: Andrei Sakharov.

The concept of the explosively pumped flux compression generator for generating a non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse was conceived as early as 1951 by Andrei Sakharov in the Soviet Union, but nations have usually kept their most recent work on non-nuclear EMP highly classified until the technology was old enough for similar ideas to be conceived by physicists in other nations.

In 1951, together with Andrei Sakharov, Tamm proposed a tokamak system of the realization of CTF on the basis of toroidal magnetic thermonuclear reactor and soon after the first such devices were built by the INF, resulting the T-3 Soviet magnetic confinement device from 1968, when the plasma parameters unique for that time were obtained, of showing the temperatures in their machine to be over an order of magnitude higher than what was expected by the rest of the community.

* In November 1970, the Committee on Human Rights in the USSR was founded by Andrei Sakharov and other Soviet dissidents to publicize Soviet violations of human rights.

* 1968-Results from the tokamak, a T-3 Soviet magnetic confinement device, which Igor Tamm and Andrei Sakharov had been working on, shows the temperatures in their machine to be over an order of magnitude higher than what was expected by the rest of the fusion community.

According to Jay Nordlinger, on a visit with American dignitaries, Soviet human rights activist Andrei Sakharov said, " Kirkpatski, Kirkpatski, which of you is Kirkpatski?

* More on Sakharov ( and some photographs of Sarov ), from the Center for History of Physics

Andrei Sakharov, the veteran dissident, claimed in a 1980 letter to Brezhnev that the increasing expenditure on the armed forces was stalling economic growth.

The Sakharov Prize is usually awarded annually on or around 10 December, the day on which the United Nations General Assembly ratified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, also celebrated as Human Rights Day.

Prior to that, in 1981, Bonner and Sakharov went on a dangerous but ultimately successful hunger strike to get Soviet officials to allow their daughter-in-law, Yelizaveta Konstantinovna (" Lisa ") Alexeyeva, an exit visa to join her husband, Bonner's son Alexei Semyonov, in the United States.

Following Sakharov's death on 14 December 1989, she established the Andrei Sakharov Foundation, and the Sakharov Archives in Moscow.

With Turkey applying to become a member of the European Union, the EU repeatedly called for her release on human rights grounds, making its position clear by awarding Zana with the Sakharov Prize in 1995.

In December 1988 she accompanied Academician Andrei Sakharov on a fateful trip to Armenia, Azerbaijan and the Karabakh region in an attempt at mediation and reconciliation.

When in January 1980 Sakharov was exiled to Gorky, a city closed to foreigners, the harassed and publicly denounced Bonner became his lifeline, traveling between Gorky and Moscow to bring out his writings.

The apartment building in the Scherbinki district of Nizhny Novgorod where A. D. Sakharov lived in exile from 1980 to 1986.

* During the 1980s, the block of 16th Street NW between L and M streets, in front of the Soviet embassy, in Washington, D. C. was renamed " Andrei Sakharov Place " as a form of protest against his 1980 arrest and detention.

In 1980, Sakharov was stripped of all Soviet awards for " anti-Soviet activities ".

In February 1980, she, John Hersey, and Norman Mailer wrote to Soviet authorities to protest retribution against Kopelev for his defense of Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov.

Parallel to this historical and legal narrative, Solzhenitsyn follows the typical course of a zek ( a slang term for inmate, derived from the widely used abbreviation " z / k " for " zakliuchennyi "( prisoner )) through the Gulag, starting with arrest, show trial and initial internment ; transport to the " archipelago "; treatment of prisoners and general living conditions ; slave labor gangs and the technical prison camp system ( where Andrei Sakharov and his team of prisoner-scientists developed the Soviet Union's first hydrogen bomb ); camp rebellions and strikes ( see Kengir uprising ); the practice of internal exile following completion of the original prison sentence ; and ultimate ( but not guaranteed ) release of the prisoner.

* A public square in Vilnius in front of the Press House is named after Sakharov.

On December 17, 1989 a public meeting organized in Kyiv by Rukh is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Andrei Sakharov, human rights campaigner and Nobel Peace Prize laureate ; 30, 000 attend.