Young Yulii B. Khariton.
Source: Courtesy of Alexey Semenov, Moscow.
Russian stamp honoring Yulii Khariton’s centennial in 2004.
Yulii B. Khariton (1904–1996) was for forty-six years in charge of the principal Soviet nuclear weapons laboratory, Arzamas-16. He was part the Soviet J. Robert Oppenheimer, the initial director of Los Alamos, and part Edward Teller, the life-long leader of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the United States. Khariton had a middle-class Jewish background with family connections abroad that made his position a miracle under Soviet circumstances.
He started his scientific career under Nikolai Semenov and early on made an experimental discovery that eventually led to the concept of branched chain reactions. He spent two years at the Cavendish Laboratory, where he earned his PhD degree. Following the discovery of nuclear fission, he became a leading member of the Soviet nuclear physics community. He was much decorated for the achievements of Arzamas-16, but stayed in the shadow of classified activities for much of his life.
Yulii Borisovich Khariton was born on February 27, 1904, in St. Petersburg and died on December 19, 1996, in Arzamas-16.* He is buried in the Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow. He came from a middle-class Jewish family; his father was a journalist, and his mother an actress. This did not recommend him to the rulers of the dictatorship of the proletariat. A closer look at Khariton’s family background reveals yet more serious problems from this point of view. In the autobiographies submitted to the authorities at different times, Khariton painstakingly detailed the fates of his parents, avoiding even the hint that he was hiding anything.1
His mother, Mirra Yakovlevna Burovskaya, had an unusual career for a provincial Jewish woman; she became a well-known actress in the famous Moscow Artistic Theater. She left Russia in 1910 to be treated for an illness at a European resort and never returned to Russia. She met a medical doctor by the name of Max Eitingon, a well-known Berlin psychiatrist and follower of Sigmund Freud. She divorced Khariton’s father and married Dr. Eitingon. When the Nazis came to power in Germany, the couple moved to Palestine and lived there to the end of their lives. She is buried in Jerusalem.
His father, Boris Osipovich Khariton, was more than a journalist; he was also an editor and publisher. He had a law degree from Kiev University from a time when it was rare that Jews would be admitted to law school. After the 1917 revolution he was the director of the House of Writers in St. Petersburg. He had clashes with the authorities. Following the departure of his wife, he hired a young woman from the Baltics to care for Yulii, whom she taught to speak perfect German. Boris Khariton was a well-known member of intellectual circles in Petrograd (which was the new name of St. Petersburg for a few years after the start of World War I). His activities were judged to be so alien to Soviet ideology and the Soviet state that in 1922, at the age of forty-six, he was exiled from the country together with a group of journalists and professors. When, in 1940, the Soviet Union annexed the Baltic States, Boris Khariton was arrested, tried, and sentenced to seven years in labor camp. The sixty-four year old Boris Khariton was sent to the Gulag, and died either on his way to or in one of the camps.
When Khariton reached school age, he started learning at home. He began attending school when he was eleven years old. He went to a trade school, which he completed at the age of fifteen. He could not go to college at once because of the prescribed minimum age of sixteen years. He started working in a workshop, where he learned how to operate various machines that proved useful in his future career.
At the age of sixteen, he became a student at the electrical-mechanical faculty of the Petrograd Institute of Technology. Abram Ioffe was the physics professor. Khariton found physics to be his most stimulating subject. Under Ioffe’s influence, he moved to the physical-mechanical faculty. Aleksandr Friedman, another of Khariton’s professors, published papers about the structure of the universe and corresponded with Einstein. Khariton was especially fascinated by another Ioffe disciple, Nikolai Semenov, whose work used the techniques of physics in chemistry; Semenov called his field of research “chemical physics” rather than “physical chemistry.” The two are hard to distinguish; the new label stressed that it was basically physics, but the adjective “chemical” pointed to the objects of its inquiry.
Semenov recognized Khariton’s talent early and let him develop his research with great independence. This trust soon paid off with the discovery of the branched chemical chain reactions, which had started with Khariton and Zinaida Valta’s experiments. They wanted to investigate the oxidation of phosphorus vapors. The light-emitting ability of phosphorus—called “phosphorus luminescence”—was well known. It was also known that white phosphorus would glow at room temperature in air, but not in pure oxygen unless the oxygen pressure was below a certain value. This was a puzzle. Khariton and Valta decided to vary the experimental conditions for the oxidation of phosphorus, starting with applying very low oxygen pressures in the experiments. Khariton designed a glass apparatus; he asked the glass blowers to prepare the more difficult parts, but fused the different parts of the apparatus with his own hands.
In this experiment, a glass container with a piece of white phosphorus was pumped to sufficiently low pressure. Oxygen gas from another container was let into the principal container through a narrow capillary while the pressure was monitored by a sensitive pressure gauge. On the way from the principal container to the pressure gauge, there was a cold trap to collect the phosphorus vapors and prevent them from contaminating the pressure gauge. As the oxygen pressure increased, at one point light appeared. The light remained on while the oxygen supply stayed open, but subsided as soon as it was closed. There was thus a lowest pressure below which the reaction would not go. Later, Khariton and Valta found a higher pressure limit above which the reaction would not go either. Khariton and Semenov found the observations puzzling but did not have the impression that they would lead to a great discovery. Khariton and Valta reported their experimental observations both in Russian and in German.2
Sketch of the glass apparatus used by Yulii B. Khariton and Zinaida F. Valta for the investigation of the oxidation of phosphorus.
In the temperature/pressure relationship, the shaded area shows the experimental conditions at which the luminescence of phosphorus happened. For example, at a given temperature, T1, there is a lower pressure, P1, at which luminescence occurs, and with increasing pressure it stops at the higher pressure, P2.
Valta graduated from Leningrad State University (Leningrad was the new name for Saint Petersburg under the Soviets) and in 1925 she became a coworker of the Institute of Physical Technology. She worked with Khariton as a postgraduate student. In 1927, she discontinued her graduate studies and moved to the State Geophysical Observatory in Leningrad, where she worked in atmospheric physics. She stayed there to the end of her life (the time of her death is unknown).
Khariton stopped working on the project because he was preparing for a foreign trip. He was to be a doctoral student at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, one of the most famous centers of physics research, under the directorship of Ernest Rutherford. Semenov’s close friend, Petr Kapitza, had been Rutherford’s esteemed associate since 1921 (see chapter 4). When in 1926 Kapitza returned to the Soviet Union for his first visit since leaving, Semenov introduced Khariton to Kapitza as a bright rising star of Soviet science. He asked Kapitza to help the young man to receive a fellowship at the Cavendish.
Khariton prepared for his studies in Cambridge with considerable anxiety, but he would prove equal to the challenge. He traveled to England by train in 1926, and on his way, he visited his mother in Berlin for a few days. He stopped again in Berlin in 1928, on his way back from England to Leningrad. On this second stopover, he was especially appalled by the Nazi propaganda in the media, which he found frightening already at this early stage. He returned to the Soviet Union with the impression that real danger was brewing in Germany.
In Cambridge, Kapitza helped Khariton get established and join Trinity College. Semenov did not let Khariton disappear from his radar during his stay there. He wanted to build connections with the chemists of Cambridge and Oxford using his protégé’s stay in England as a bridge. Khariton worked primarily with James Chadwick investigating the sensitivity of the eye with respect to weak light impulses and alpha-radiation. In 1928 he earned his PhD degree from Cambridge University.
Khariton enjoyed the excellent facilities of the Cavendish Laboratory, including its splendid library. At the beginning of his stay, he noticed an intriguing paper in the German physics journal, the Zeitshrift für Physik, where he and Valta had published their report. The article was written by a German authority of chemical kinetics, Max Bodenstein, who declared Khariton and Valta’s observations impossible and ascribed them to some unknown errors in their experiment. Khariton’s initial fears soon subsided because he knew that they had performed their experiments with utmost care and that their observations were reproducible. He wrote a letter to Semenov, who took up the challenge. Semenov’s painstaking studies led to the discovery of the branched chemical reactions (see chapter 8).
Branched chain reactions in time proved to be a widespread concept that would be used for the interpretation of many other chemical reactions, such as polymerization, cracking hydrocarbons, and combustion. Soon enough, there was yet another branched chain reaction discovered that had even higher significance—pertaining to the fate of humankind—the nuclear chain reactions, which are also branched chain reactions. Khariton recognized early the connection between branched chemical chain reactions and nuclear chain reactions. He became involved with the latter in 1939, right after the discovery of nuclear fission.
Upon Khariton’s return to Leningrad from England, he continued working under Semenov. Khariton focused his attention on explosions and explosive materials and was building a research unit for these studies. In 1932, a whole series of discoveries happened in physics; among them, the discovery of the neutron (by Khariton’s Cavendish mentor, James Chadwick) and the discovery of heavy water. Also, nuclear reactions were produced by means of artificially accelerated particles.
Although the Soviet scientists were not among the initiators of the new nuclear physics, they followed it closely. In December 1932, a group of nuclear physics was created in the Institute of Physical Technology, which soon expanded into a division. Igor Kurchatov, also one of Abram Ioffe’s disciples, was in charge of it. Elsewhere in the Soviet Union, notably in Kharkov, in the Ukrainian Institute of Physical Technology, there was increased interest in nuclear physics. In the 1930s, nuclear physics did not yet hold the special position it would in the postwar period, when it would be exempted from the targets of Stalin’s ideological crusades against the sciences.
In the Soviet Union, the first nationwide conference on nuclear physics was organized in September 1933 in Leningrad. At that time interactions with foreign scientists were still possible in the Soviet Union. The meeting included stellar foreign scientists, such as Victor Weisskopf, Paul Dirac, Frederic Joliot-Curie, and others. Note that in the United States, it would take a few more years for two immigrant physicists, George Gamow and Edward Teller, in Washington, DC, to organize similar meetings.
In 1933, a British friend of the Soviet Union, the engineer George Eltenton, arrived in Leningrad and was employed by Semenov’s Institute of Chemical Physics, which had been established recently. Khariton’s wife, Maria, worked for Eltenton as a laboratory assistant. Eltenton learned Russian fast and stayed at the institute until 1937, when his friends and acquaintances started disappearing and he returned to England. He continued working in his profession, but his friendly feelings toward the Soviet Union persisted. He surfaced in connection with the Manhattan Project as the one who tried to get Robert Oppenheimer to cooperate with the Soviet Union by supplying them with information about the American nuclear project. Khariton wrote in 1978–1979 that he had read recently in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists about Eltenton’s attempts.3 The story must have been interesting for Khariton since he was at the receiving end of the intelligence about the American nuclear project at the time of the development of the first Soviet atomic bombs.
Khariton collected a superb group of researchers in Semenov’s institute for the study of explosives; the most brilliant among them was the prodigy Yakov Zeldovich (see chapter 2). When in 1939 they learned about the discovery of nuclear fission, Khariton and Zeldovich immediately jumped into this area of research. They produced three important papers, of which two were published, one in 1940 and the other in 1941, in the Russian journal Uspekhi Fizicheskikh Nauk (Advances in Physics). World War II had already started, but initially the Soviet Union’s involvement was limited. By the time the third paper should have appeared, Germany had attacked the Soviet Union, and for a couple of years nuclear research was put on hold. Only in 1983 would the third Zeldovich-Khariton paper be published (they always listed themselves in this order, in accordance with the Cyrillic alphabet). They investigated the fission of uranium nuclei; established the regularities in the process; pointed out the necessity for isotope enrichment, that is, to increase the relative abundance of the light, fissionable isotope of uranium; discussed the possibility of the production of slow neutrons by means of heavy water; and estimated critical mass.
In nuclear physics, Khariton and Zeldovich could only pick up in fundamental research what was left for them by the true pioneers. The similar roles of Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller come to mind. Where Khariton and Zeldovich—like Oppenheimer and Teller on the American side—could be at the top was in building weapons. Here, priority for individuals did not matter because the work would be classified. Even if Khariton and Zeldovich were second to the Americans, the value of their efforts would be equivalent to that of the Americans, provided that they acted quickly. Soviet nuclear research resumed during the war, and the man in charge of it, Igor Kurchatov, invited Khariton and Zeldovich to join. Intelligence reports about the Manhattan Project were a decisive factor in Stalin’s decision to go in this direction and to proceed rapidly. This was a very different situation for Khariton and Zeldovich from the one before the war, when they had labored on the nuclear chain reactions only in their free time.
Khariton gave a talk at one of Kapitza’s seminars on March 8, 1944, in the Institute of Physical Problems in front of an audience consisting of outstanding physicists. He spoke about some of the peculiarities of explosions. Khariton reported that, according to his experiments, if the time of flight of the pieces scattering from the detonating charge was shorter than the time needed for the completion of the chemical reaction, the explosion would die. Kapitza asked him why he was talking about this. Khariton explained: Imagine war preparations in the Lilliputian country. If they wanted to use grenades of Lilliputian size filled with trinitrotoluene, grenades larger than ten millimeters in diameter would not explode. If, instead, they used a more efficient explosive, for which a diameter less than one millimeter would suffice, the grenades would work beautifully. Eventually, the specialists would start calling these conditions of explosive geometry “the Khariton criteria.”4
Khariton and Kapitza had become good friends during their interactions in Cambridge. This friendship was different from the one between Kapitza and Semenov that had formed in their early youth. In the Kapitza-Semenov interactions two very different personalities bonded. Khariton was more like Kapitza, delicate, although he eventually was placed in charge of many thousands people at the “Soviet Los Alamos,” Arzamas-16. According to observers, both Kapitza and Khariton had to mask their sensitivity because they lived and operated in a world that demanded harshness, especially from people who were in charge of projects.5
In April 1945, as the Soviet war machine was taking over the eastern part of Germany, a group of Soviet physicists was dispatched there to find out about the German atomic bomb project. The group included such renowned physicists as Khariton, I. K. Kikoin, L. A. Artsimovich, and others. They held the temporary rank of colonels of the Interior Ministry and were under General A. P. Zavenyagin of the Interior Ministry (Narodnii Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del [NKVD]). The mission was smaller than but similar to the American “Alsos.”6 It could promise only limited success, especially in locating famous German scientists, because most of them had moved to areas that were to be occupied by Western Allies. They preferred to be captured by Americans and the British rather than the Soviets.
Yulii Khariton, Ludmilla Semenova (Nikolai Semenov’s daughter), Evgenii Lifshits, and Lev Landau.
Source: Courtesy of Alexey Semenov, Moscow.
Yulii Khariton and Igor Kurchatov.
Source: Courtesy of Alexey Semenov, Moscow.
Khariton was not only a superb scientist; he spoke fluent German as well. He and his colleagues flew to Berlin and found that the German atomic bomb project had not progressed very far. Kikoin and Khariton decided to pursue another goal, to find possible reserves of uranium that the Germans might have accumulated for their project. At that time the Soviet Union did not have reserves of uranium. Kikoin and Khariton interviewed German physicists and discovered a building in Berlin, not far from Hitler’s headquarters, where all the records were kept about the reserves of various materials. Getting hold of these reserves was a race between the Americans and the Soviets. The Soviets did not win, but they still collected about one hundred tons of uranium ore in the form of U3O8, which made it possible to begin plutonium production in a Soviet reactor one year earlier than it would have been otherwise.7 This was a major boost to the Soviet project. Another one was the German scientific personnel taken back to the Soviet Union.
The first, and for a long time the only, nuclear weapons installation in the Soviet Union was developed in the Gorky Region—known before and again today as the Nizhnii Novgorod Region—near the Sarov Monastery. It was eventually called Arzamas-16 (today, the whole development that used to be Arzamas-16, is called Sarov). There is a town by the name of Arzamas, from which Arzamas-16 was situated at about a forty-five-mile distance. From the start, Khariton was in charge of the installation although he never had the title of director. His first title was chief constructor; later he gave this position to someone else and became the scientific leader. This was the position he found most fitting. Khariton had been so impressed by his experience at the Cavendish Laboratory that he tried to follow its working style at Arzamas-16. Of course, he never succeeded; the Soviet environment was so different from the British conditions, but it is telling that he tried.
The nuclear project did not only bring successes, but the manner in which the scientists referred to the outcome of tests showed that they related their work to their devotion to the Soviet Fatherland. If there were six successful tests and five did not work, they would say, Soviet Union, 6–Harry Truman, 5. Defeat was reported as, for example, Harry Truman, 2–Soviet Union, 1. The first Soviet atomic bomb explosion on August 29, 1949, broke the American monopoly on nuclear weapons. Subsequently, about a thousand people involved with the project were recognized with various awards and medals. The top were Kurchatov (who worked in Moscow) and Khariton. During the last months of the preparation for the test, a slogan spread: “Let’s ‘overkhariton’ Oppenheimer.”8
Initially, Khariton was appointed to his Arzamas-16 position, at Kurchatov’s recommendation, by Lavrentii Beria, the Soviet leader charged with supervising the nuclear weapons program. Khariton knew that his family background carried a lot of uncertainty for his standing. On the other hand, Beria may have thought that Khariton’s roots and family history would make him even better suited for the position. One cannot help recalling the suggestion in connection with the Manhattan Project that General Groves might have thought it easier to keep Robert Oppenheimer under control because Oppenheimer’s leftist past made him more vulnerable before the security services.
The first Soviet atomic bombs were a copy of the American atomic bombs. The information came from very efficient intelligence in which one of the key persons was the refugee communist German physicist Klaus Fuchs. He immigrated to England from Germany, and then moved to the Manhattan Project as member of the British team. The design of the first Soviet bomb may have been the result of intelligence, but its production was stilla tremendous achievement. The Soviet Union was in ruins as a consequence of a devastating war when it embarked on this most ambitious project. Even if their atomic bomb was a copy, it required the highest level of technological production. The work began in 1943, when the war was still being waged on the territory of the Soviet Union. And there were other problems for the Soviet project, including self-inflicted ones. Stalin’s anti-Semitism started in the postwar period and was coupled with ongoing anti-science measures that devastated cybernetics and biology, damaged chemistry, and nearly destroyed physics. The latter was saved at the last minute when Beria, and through him Stalin, understood that without modern physics and the physicists, there would be no Soviet atomic bomb.
At one point, the anti-Semitic campaign reached even the classified laboratory of the atomic bomb construction. Leading scientists, such as Veniamin Tsukerman, David Frank-Kamenetsky, and Lev Altshuler were accused of producing scientific results contradicting Marxist philosophy. Among their “crimes” was also that they held and disseminated views about music and biology that were in disagreement with the party line. Today such stories sound hilarious, but at that time they could have repercussions, such as slave labor and exile for many years. At one point, Khariton had to call Altshuler suggesting to him that he not to come to work for a while.9 In the meantime, Khariton called the defending angel of the atomic project, Beria, who then took the necessary measures to ensure that Altshuler and the others would be left alone. Khariton greatly contributed to the normal atmosphere at Arzamas-16, and anti-Semitism would not become an important force there. Of course, being Jewish himself, Khariton would have found it difficult to do this alone, but other leading scientists, non-Jewish, took also a strong stand against any kind of discrimination and persecution. The most famous among them, Igor Tamm and Andrei Sakharov, were known to consider being free of anti-Semitism as a litmus test measuring a person’s decency (see chapters 1 and 3).
Khariton’s involvement was ubiquitous in Arzamas-16, including the research projects of scientists that fell outside the development of nuclear weaponry. But he never let his name appear as coauthor on publications by his colleagues. His attention to the minutest details in every facet of the work in developing and producing nuclear bombs was legendary. His approach might be called meticulous, exacting, captious, and scrupulous, but there was also a special expression coined to characterize it using his initials, Yu. and B.—“yubism.” A conspicuous example how important minute details might be was the tragedy of the US. space shuttle Challenger in 1986. Richard Feynman was a member of the president’s commission that investigated the disaster. He demonstrated in a dramatic presentation for a huge TV audience that a simple and inexpensive O-ring, used for insulation, was sensitive to temperature changes. The O-ring could fulfill its function due to its flexibility, but at cold temperatures it became rigid and thus could not perform its function of insulation. It was a minute detail; a typical example that closer attention to minute details should have uncovered a potential source for disaster.10
Khariton did not leave anything to blind trust; neither did he like generalities in discussions. He preferred facts and insisted on receiving them from those who gathered and produced them. His heads of divisions and subdivisions had to get used to his approach; the official service channel meant nothing to him, and he approached directly the engineers or others, even if they were of the lowest rank, to get the necessary factual information. He involved so many people at lower ranks that it would have been difficult for the people in charge to enact repercussions against their subordinates whom Khariton invited to participate in the discussions.
Except for the first periods of his career, Khariton was a scientific director rather than a researcher. He did not create new science, but encouraged others to do so and ensured the necessary conditions for their work. He often determined the tasks and problems to solve, but he seldom contributed to their solution. Of course, his relentless questioning, prodding, and constructive criticism of the scientists and engineers was part of the creative process.
Khariton was a most kind and considerate person whom friends and family could have found difficult to associate with the most rigorous and demanding leader of the secret nuclear installment. But the sensitive and considerate Khariton could become tough and ruthless once he was in the environment of Arzamas-16, where he could not have done his job without such qualities. He took pride in seeing his subordinates working day and night, literally. In this, he differed considerably from his Cavendish role model, Ernest Rutherford, who attributed great value to stopping actual work and renewing one’s intellectual capabilities. Khariton would call his colleagues any time he wanted to discuss anything or had a question for them. He invited them to his office or to his home even on holidays. He may have been polite and apologetic, but nobody would have ever declined such an invitation.
However, having been a scientist, Khariton also knew that it was impossible to work without errors. If everything succeeds every time, it might be a sign of not taking any risks in innovations. Thus, demanding absolutely flawless performance of one’s associates could backfire, prompting them always to take the safest route. He avoided being such a leader, and his was not a unique approach. For example, the first tests conducted by the second American weapons laboratory in Livermore, California, were unsuccessful. Ernest Lawrence had the magnanimity to see in these failures something positive. He told his associates that always succeeding in everything might speak to a lack of innovation and healthy risk taking.
Under the Soviet circumstances, however, Khariton’s approach was not only reasonable, but, it was also daring, and showed that Khariton must have wielded considerable authority.
The defense projects were under tremendous pressure created not only by the enormity of the task but by outside interference. Orders came from above, and the scientists often did not have the freedom to determine the pace of their own activities. In the words of Zeldovich, “Sometimes the decision about next day’s work had to be made overnight. They could follow only one single version that had to be realistic, simple, hopeful, and the most economical. Making mistakes was not permitted.”11 While Khariton tolerated mistakes, he expected and even demanded that his associates be well prepared for their tasks. One of his principles was that one has to know ten times more about a given problem than the minimum amount necessary to solve it. He was also willing to invest his time and efforts to enable him to follow his own maxim.
Khariton usually went around Arzamas-16 with a bodyguard, not that there was need for one, but bodyguards were assigned to him. On his travels, he was accompanied by two bodyguards. His office was on the second floor in the theoretical divisions building. When entering his locked office, he would personally examine the security stamping of the door prior to removing it. Outside Khariton’s office was a reception room in which one of his bodyguards fulfilled the role of secretary when Khariton was in his office. The office was huge and long, with a large desk at one end and a small table in front of it with comfortable leather armchairs on both sides. In the middle of the office was a long table with many tall chairs around it. When one entered, a small, thin man stood up at the far end of the office and then came out up from behind his desk to greet the visitor with an outstretched hand. Some of his visitors noticed the conspicuously large slide rule on his desk always ready to be used.
There was a safe in Khariton’s office. When it had to be moved, he let his “secretaries” handle its contents, except for a locked internal compartment. From the memoirs of one of his secretaries we know that the safe contained gold watches, uranium half-spheres, and many documents. Among them was a copy of the famous letter, from 1973, signed by forty academicians, including Khariton, condemning Andrei Sakharov’s social activities. In 1996, the 92-year old Khariton, shortly before his death, finally let an assistant open the inside compartment of his safe and pulled out a crumpled, thin envelope from it. There were a few dollar bills in the envelope.12
The bodyguards were KGB officers. In contrast with some of his colleagues, Khariton did not mind having bodyguards around and found them useful. They helped the Kharitons with various household chores, made his travel arrangements, got the medicines for Khariton and his family, even if they were difficult to find, and so on. They were always with him during his travels. The arrangement of assigning bodyguards to top scientists of classified projects lasted until the fall of 1965 when the Soviet government ended such services.
For his safety, Khariton was not allowed to fly in the early period of the nuclear weapons project. Instead, he traveled by rail, and he had a comfortable, personalized carriage that was set up as a fully equipped office so he could work while riding the train. Between the town Arzamas and Moscow, in either direction, his train always departed in the evening to arrive in the morning, so he could use his time most efficiently. Often, a number of his associates traveled with him. An attendant was assigned to the carriage who prepared meals from the food Khariton and his associates brought with them. There was a forty-five-mile car ride to the Arzamas railway station from the institute or his home, which took an hour and a half. Usually two cars were dispatched for his trips in case one broke down. The train ride between Arzamas and Moscow was far from optimal. The rest of the train (apart from Khariton’s personal carriage) was in neglected condition and the town of Arzamas could do nothing to change the situation. When the town leaders turned to Khariton for help, his intervention resulted in an improved service.
Khariton was a seasoned, even shrewd bureaucrat. One of his principles was to avoid at all costs getting rejection from the superiors above Arzamas-16—the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, which was in fact the ministry of nuclear matters. He never turned to the ministry with requests that had not been most carefully prepared. He thought that it would take only one rejection to open the way to further rejections, and he did not find that acceptable. His situation was delicate because if the ministry rejected a request, he was still in a position to turn directly to the supreme leadership of the country. He knew, however, that such a step would alienate the ministry, which already viewed him with suspicion because of his very special position, and he could not be turning to the leaders of the country with every one of the needs of Arzamas-16. On the other hand, years of experience taught the ministry to take Khariton seriously. Once he requested something they knew they had better pay full attention to what he wanted.
It was during the most successful period of Arzamas-16 that Khariton decided to join the Communist Party. It happened shortly following the 20th Congress of the Party in February 1956, when Nikita Khrushchev unmasked many of Stalin’s crimes in a secret speech. This may have prompted Khariton to become a party member. His involvement in “political” activities was not limited to party membership. For decades, he was “elected” to be member of the Supreme Soviet—the Soviet parliament. It was always to represent a certain district, and Khariton took the interests of his constituency seriously. He did not seem to spare time or effort going after their various problems, and in this, his “secretaries” helped him a great deal. He seemed to have an affinity for this public service. It augmented his classified world, which was interrupted only by annual vacationing with friends and family.
When Khariton took his vacations, he knew that sometimes—probably out of ignorance—somebody would inquire about his work. Khariton would tell the would-be intruder into his other life that he never discussed work while on vacation. He took secrecy very seriously, and the whole regime in which he operated was based on secrecy. There is an amusing human story in this connection. The drivers of automobiles carrying the leading scientists involved in the classified nuclear weapons program were not only forbidden to discuss anything they had overheard of their passengers’ conversations; they were even forbidden to repeat the individual words they may have overheard. It was noticed that after a while the drivers stopped swearing and using “four-letter” words.13
The first Soviet nuclear device was tested successfully on August 29, 1949, near Semipalatinsk, in Eastern Kazakhstan. It was a copy of the American plutonium bomb, and it meant a great victory for Khariton and Arzamas-16. It was also a great victory for the Soviet Union because it broke the American monopoly of nuclear weaponry, and Stalin now possessed what he badly wanted. Accordingly, the Soviet State expressed its gratitude to those who helped create this bomb. Large amounts of money were given out as bonus, but money did not mean much in Soviet society as there was not much to buy. So the top participants, including Khariton, in addition to the title of “Hero of Socialist Labor,” received an automobile and a weekend house (dacha). Their children were entitled to receive education in any institution of higher education in the country. The awardees, their wives, and children received the right to free, unlimited travel within the country, by trains, ship, and airplanes for as long as they lived (this privilege was later withdrawn by Khrushchev). Numerous other participants in the project received progressively lesser benefits. According to some sources—whether it is true or not, we don’t know—the order of awardees was determined by a simple scheme devised by Beria. Those who would have been shot had the test failed, became Heroes of Socialist Labor; those who would have been sentenced to the longest prison terms received the Order of Lenin, and so on.
The Soviet officialdom for decades denied that intelligence played any role in creating the first Soviet atomic bomb. After the political changes, however, Khariton admitted that its success was the result of espionage. It seemed that the Russians were now assuring the world that they were not holding back anything about the atomic bomb. Perhaps this was to make their story about the Soviet hydrogen bomb more credible—they have always maintained that it was created exclusively by Soviet efforts.
The first Soviet hydrogen bomb test of August 12, 1953, utilized lithium(6) deuteride as solid fuel for the thermonuclear reaction. Its power was 0.4 megaton TNT-equivalent, and it was not a bona fide hydrogen bomb; rather, it was a boosted atomic bomb containing a thermonuclear reaction component. The application of lithium(6) deuteride was the so-called second idea. The layered arrangement of thermonuclear fuel and uranium was the sloika, or so-called first idea. By this time the Americans had already introduced the Teller-Ulam approach: radiation implosion. It was utilized in the “Mike” test on November 1, 1952, the test of a thermonuclear device, huge and heavy, which produced a 10.4 megaton TNT-equivalent explosion.
Radiation implosion would eventually become the so-called third idea in the Soviet program. There were further labels of the various solutions in the Arzamas-16 project. Thus, the utilization of the layered arrangement of fuel was also called “sakharization” a derivative of Sakharov’s name (sakhar means sugar), referring as if to the caramelization of the fusion fuel. There was yet another test using the sloika arrangement, on November 6, 1955. Very soon after this test, came the test on November 22, 1955, in which the compression of the thermonuclear fuel was achieved using the third idea, that is, by radiation implosion. The numbering of the ideas rather than revealing what they really were was a way of describing them from the time when all this was still classified information.
The desire to prove that the Soviets were on a par with the Americans—and at times might have even performed better or earlier—seems to have been present from the beginning to the end in Khariton’s activities. A. K. Chernyshev was twenty-three years old, a fresh physicist graduate, when he joined Khariton in 1969; he stayed with him for twenty years. He noted that in the 1980s they were still looking to American projects for guidance. They worked hard to emulate the American approach in Project Plowshare, which was about peaceful applications of atomic and thermonuclear explosions, and did not prove a success in the United States. When there were discussions of various issues in this connection, and the participants had run out of arguments, Khariton would ask, “How about the Americans? Do they have it? What can we know about this?”14 Chernyshev thinks that even the great successes of the Sputnik and Gagarin’s first manned flight did not suffice to create true Russian self-confidence.
In 1983, on the occasion of his recognition by the Soviet Academy of Sciences with its highest distinction, the Lomonosov Gold Medal, Khariton gave a prescient address. He talked about the future of energy consumption by humankind. He mentioned the sharp increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and about global warming. He also warned about acid rain and about radioactive contamination. His conclusion was that there was a real danger of ecological catastrophe, and that the solution was safe atomic energy. Furthermore, he called for continued efforts for developing controlled thermonuclear synthesis. In conclusion, he brought up a third example of branched chain reactions, that of the exploding growth of the Earth’s population. This showed his interest in the most diverse problems of society, about which, during much of his life, he could not voice his opinion because he was living in the shadow of his classified activities.
In his old age, Khariton gradually lost his vision and the ability to write. His grandson, Alexey Semenov, helped him with his correspondence. Khariton’s last printed contributions were prepared with the help of his associates, especially V. N. Mokhov. Mokhov was compiling a volume of reviews of the scientific contributions of Arzamas-16 and thought it would be nice if Khariton would introduce it. Khariton dictated his thoughts but could only make changes when the text was read to him; so the work progressed slowly. It was not a long piece, but it took about one week of hard work to produce. Obviously, Khariton’s meticulous attention to detail, to every word and phrase persisted. The product was titled “Appeal to the Readers.”15
In it, Khariton stated that he did not regret having worked on nuclear weapons, in part because it was interesting physics (as if echoing, for example, what Enrico Fermi had expressed). It was also a decisive contribution to maintaining peace because they made the world more stable. He warned that even without further development of nuclear weapons, the existing arsenal required maintenance and the involvement of highly qualified personnel. It was difficult to create such a collective, but it could be destroyed easily. It was important to stop testing in order to terminate the arms race. The associates of Arzamas-16 had started studying the related questions long before they became popular. At the same time, it is necessary to ensure the safety and security of existing nuclear weapons. Neglecting these questions would be hazardous. As long as nuclear weapons exist anywhere in the world, they must be serviced by highly qualified scientists and engineers. Keeping the necessary collective together would be impossible without cultivating research projects in fundamental science. Even during the most intensive period of weapons development, the associates of Arzamas-16 conducted fundamental research, thereby turning their knowledge and experience to peaceful use. They can be proud of what they achieved in advancing fundamental science, in addition to the means of defense they created.
The last test explosion of the Soviet Union was conducted on October 24, 1990. In his late eighties when asked whether or not he thought about stepping down from his position, Khariton insisted that his involvement was needed to maintain the position of the Arzamas-16 institute. Nuclear weaponry was no longer considered as important as before, and the institute was making efforts to extend its activities to maintain its integrity. Khariton deeply worried about the future of Arzamas-16. In a speech in 1993 about the fundamental research at Arzamas-16, he mentioned that twenty-five thousand people worked at the institute and a whole town had grown up around it. He called for new challenges and new tasks under the changing conditions.
There have been attempts to draw parallels between Khariton and Oppenheimer and between Khariton and Teller. The Oppenheimer parallel is especially attractive, even starting with their first names Yulii (Khariton) and Julius (Robert Oppenheimer, though Oppenheimer did not use Julius), their same year of birth (1904), and other similarities.
However, Oppenheimer was the director of Los Alamos only for a short period. Regarding the length of their service as leaders of weapons laboratories, Teller is closer to Khariton. An important difference in the comparison with either American is that Khariton did not conduct any activities outside his immediate realm (his activities as a member of the Supreme Soviet do not count for anything substantial).
The very quiet Khariton, though, joined a few protests over the years. In 1952, he was in the group of physicists who turned to Beria protesting the attacks against the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. In 1955, Khariton joined his colleagues by signing a letter to Khrushchev protesting the antiscience activities of Trofim Lysenko. In 1966, Khariton was in a small group of scientists (the others were N. N. Semenov and A. P. Aleksandrov) who asked Leonid Brezhnev to prevent attempts to exonerate Stalin. Alas, there was then the letter in 1973 condemning Andrei Sakharov, which Khariton signed and then regretted to the end of his life. It may be argued that the signers of the former three letters were not threatened by repercussions, whereas Khariton must have been afraid that the refusal to sign the letter against Sakharov might have made the authorities remove him from his position at Arzamas-16.
Considering Khariton’s roots and family background, it was an ironic quirk that he occupied the position he did and occupied it for such a long time. A person with his background was most unlikely to have such a position in the Soviet Union. People in much lesser positions could not keep their jobs, sometimes not even their lives, under Stalin. It is then a sad irony that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Khariton’s roots seem to have hindered him from receiving the honors others who had been in similar positions had already been given. In Russia, there are many institutes that carry the names of their founders, such as the Ioffe Institute, Semenov Institute, Kapitza Institute, Kurchatov Institute, Zababakhin Institute (Zababakhin was Khariton’s pupil), and so on, but Arzamas-16 has not been yet named after anybody, and there is no Khariton Institute. Khariton has been accused of causing harm to the Sarov Monastery. The accusation may be linked to the reluctance to name Arzamas-16 after him. This reasoning seems doubtful, however, when it is suggested that had he converted to Christianity, the naming would have had no opposition. Thus, it is not Khariton’s deeds; rather, anti-Semitism has been the cause of unwillingness to name an institute after him.
In 1977, Khariton’s wife died; he never married again. He was then already seventy-three years old; he could have returned to Moscow and lived there, enjoying his extended family. He could have found interesting occupations, could have even received a prestigious assignment. However, he opted to stay at Arzamas-16 and continue as its supreme leader. He was helped by subordinates and family members who came and stayed with him for extended periods. Yet he must have felt lonely. His wife died in Arzamas, but due to her husband’s position was buried in Moscow at the Novodevichy Cemetery, with the expectation that one day Khariton would join her in the Novodevichy grave.
Alexey Semenov, a professor of chemical biology at Moscow State University is the grandson of two of the most famous Soviet scientists: Tatyana Khariton, the Kharitons’ only child, was his mother and the Semenovs’ son, Yurii Semenov was his father. Both his parents are buried in the Khariton grave at the Novodevichy. That also became the burial place of Semenov’s second wife, the mother of the Semenovs’ children, Alexey’s paternal grandmother.
Yulii Khariton, widowed, in Arzamas in front of the house where the Kharitons’ apartment was.
Source: Courtesy of Alexey Semenov, Moscow.
Khariton loved to travel and during his busy doctoral studies at the Cavendish he found time to travel to southern France. Then for six long decades it did not even occur to him to visit any place in the world outside the Soviet Union; there was, though, an exception in the early 1960s when he traveled to Prague on business. By the time the borders opened for him, he was close to ninety years old. In 1991, for the first time since 1928, he embarked on a trip to the West. He had a severe case of glaucoma, and on his trip to the United States he was accompanied by his grandson and by his doctor. His right eye had been operated on by Soviet doctors—unsuccessfully. The American doctors did not recommend surgery for his left eye. Khariton became completely blind by 1994, when he was ninety years old.
In 1993, Khariton and one of his associates, Yurii Smirnov, published an article in the American Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists about the Soviet nuclear program.16 In it there is this passage: “Of course there was little joy in watching the columns of prisoners who built the installations initially. But all that receded into the background, and people had little regard for the difficulties of everyday life—they were trying to achieve success in the best and quickest way.”17,** This passage provides food for a lot of thought. There was nothing more about this in the long article, and one wonders whether or not Khariton might have had more emotions about those prisoners who built the installations than the passage revealed. Had his father not been killed in 1941, he might have been among those prisoners, and we do not even know whether or not Khariton knew that his father had perished. In the passage quoted above there is “the end justifies the means” approach. For fairness, however, I must add that according to Khariton’s grandson, this joint paper was written when Khariton could no longer see, and this incriminating passage may have slipped in without his knowing about it. When Alexey questioned him about it, Khariton wanted it removed, but it was too late, the paper had already been printed.18
The passage quoted earlier was not the only one that a reader of that article might find stunning. It states summarily that “today, many people realize that it was Soviet physicists who first developed thermonuclear weapons.”19 This sentence introduces the section entitled “The First Hydrogen Bomb.” The section describes a version of the history of the development of the hydrogen bomb in which emphasis is given to Soviet preeminence. When scientists claim authorship of the hydrogen bomb and give the impression of exaggerating their roles at the expense of others, John von Neumann’s words come to mind: “Some people confess guilt to claim credit for the sin.”20 Khariton and Smirnov recognize that the first Soviet atomic bomb was a faithful copy of the American plutonium bomb (dropped over Nagasaki). In contrast, they go out of their way to ascertain that intelligence played no role or that its role was negligible in developing the Soviet hydrogen bomb. Our purpose here is not to analyze the history of nuclear weapons, but the title of Khariton and Smirnov’s article “The Khariton Version” is an inevitable reminder of another “version.” Werner Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker concocted a “version” of history about the failed German attempts to build an atomic bomb. It will be difficult to offset decades of secret operations and deception, and understandable suspicion and doubt linger about statements from Russian sources about espionage and priorities.
Edward Teller had great respect for Khariton, and proposed him for the prestigious American distinction, the Fermi Award. This award was originally established by the US Atomic Energy Commission as its highest recognition for achievements in nuclear science and technology. The Fermi Award is presented to its recipient by the president of the United States. In 1954, Enrico Fermi was its first recipient, followed by John von Neumann (1956), Ernest Lawrence (1957), Eugene Wigner (1958), Glenn Seaborg (1959), Hans Bethe (1961), Edward Teller (1962), and Robert Oppenheimer (1963), to mention just the first few awardees. Although it is an American distinction, there have been a few international recipients in its history. For example, in 1966, Otto Hahn, Lise Meitner, and Fritz Strassmann, the discoverers of nuclear fission, received it.
The Khariton grave at the Novodevichy Cemetery.
Buried here are Yulii Borisovich Khariton; Yurii N. Semenov, Khariton’s son-in-law; Natalia N. Semenova, Yurii’s mother (Nikolai Semenov’s second wife); Maria Nikolaevna Khariton, Khariton’s wife; and Tatyana Yulevna Khariton, Khariton’s daughter.
Source: Photograph by and courtesy of the author.
Teller wrote a long letter of nomination dated January 17, 1995, in which he carefully enumerated Khariton’s merits.21 It was a rather bizarre proposition. In my Teller biography I wrote: “Had the cold war and its arms race been a sporting event, this [the Fermi Award to Khariton] might have been an expression of fair sportsmanship, but the cold war could have hardly been considered just another sporting event.”22 Teller’s proposal was declined, and it was never repeated because Khariton died in 1996, and the Fermi Award cannot be given posthumously. A few years later, Teller stated something about Khariton—he meant it as praise, but for most other people it would have read as condemnation; either way, it lacked foundation. He wrote in a letter of February 9, 1999, to Siegfried S. Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory: “As I hear the story of Russian workers on nuclear weapons, I notice a remarkable difference between us and them. In our case, there was strong controversy whether or not to proceed on nuclear weapons. In the Soviet case, there was no controversy and this may have been in part due to reasonable administrative work done by people like Khariton (emphasis added).”23 Khariton was indeed part of the regime, but the “administrative work” that was meant to avoid any “controversy” was not done by Khariton but by Stalin, Beria, and their men.
One wonders how much and how often Khariton had to bow to expediency as he did in 1973 when he signed the letter condemning Sakharov. He had an introvert personality; for all his exceptional decorations, he seems to have been in his own private internal exile within the Soviet system. He must have had tremendous nostalgia for the brief period of his time in Cambridge. In March 1964, there was a Labor Party science delegation in Moscow, and the Soviet Academy of Sciences held a reception for the delegation. One of the British delegates, Tam Dalyell, described a strange encounter there: “As we dispersed, an ascetic, gaunt, dapper man of some 60 years with piercing yet kindly eyes, who had not opened his mouth, sidled up to me and said very quietly: ‘I see you were a student at King’s College, Cambridge—how is Edward Shire?’ E. S. Shire was the physics tutor at King’s and a distinguished member of the Cavendish. I told my questioner about Shire and felt that he had a genuine affection for his friends in Cambridge from 40 years ago. But he avoided my best efforts to find out who he was.”24 Eventually, Dalyell learned that he had met Yulii Khariton, a conspicuously rare event for a Westerner.
Khariton’s privileges, including his private railway carriage, resemble a golden cage; he could not have felt himself truly free, ever. It is also telling that in the innermost compartment of his safe he of all people, for decades, kept a few dollar bills—for what purpose? In 1990, Khariton, who was always careful with his words, greeted the first American visitors at Arzamas-16 by saying, “I was waiting for this day for forty years …”25 For forty years Khariton lived under a variety of tension; the burden of his roots, the enormity of responsibility of his position, and the possibility of confrontation utilizing the weapons he built. Forty years is a long time to wait, and waiting so that he could finally share this feeling of relief with someone, might have been almost unbearable.
