Sakharov Dies: Soviet Dissident and Nuclear Architect
Andrei Sakharov died in December 1989 in Moscow, sixty-eight years old. Three years earlier he'd been released from seven years of internal exile in Gorky, where the KGB had followed him everywhere and his wife Yelena Bonner had been his sole connection to the outside world. He was the man who designed the Soviet hydrogen bomb — the most powerful nuclear weapon ever tested — and then spent the second half of his life trying to limit what weapons like it could do. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 while still in the Soviet Union. They didn't let him go to Stockholm to collect it.
December 14, 1989
37 years ago
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