The Logos Scripture · The Book of Sakharov
The Book of Sakharov 4 · Written by himself, from the essay of 1968, the Memoirs, and the letters of his later years
Andrei Sakharov, born at Moscow in 1921, died at Moscow in 1989. Physicist. He entered the Soviet thermonuclear programme in 1948 and worked in it for nearly twenty years; the design he produced in 1955 was the one that made the thing work. In the test of November 1955 a soldier and a two-year-old girl were killed; the toast he gave at the banquet that evening and the marshal’s reply are his own record, and are chapter one. Afterwards he calculated the long-term deaths caused by testing in the open air and pressed the figure on those in power without being heeded; he had a hand in the 1963 treaty banning such tests. In 1968 he wrote Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, which circulated first in copies and was then printed abroad; that year he was removed from all secret work. In 1970 he helped found the Moscow Human Rights Committee. In 1975 he was given the Nobel Peace Prize and was not allowed to travel to receive it; his wife Bonner accepted it for him. In January 1980, for opposing the invasion of Afghanistan, he was taken to Gorky, where he lived nearly seven years, going on hunger strike several times and being force-fed. At the end of 1986 Gorbachev telephoned and he was allowed back to Moscow. In 1989 he was elected a deputy, and he died that December. This volume rests on what he wrote himself. On belief, he stated that he belonged to no religion and did not hold with dogma or ritual, and then wrote this sentence: and yet I am unable to imagine the universe and human life without some guiding principle, without a source of spiritual warmth that is non-material and not bound by physical laws. That goes further than what Yang said (cf. the note to The Book of Yang Chen-Ning). The Order records it as he put it and does not tidy it. What matters is the same point: it is a feeling of his, not a step in any argument of his. His arguments — the sum in chapter two, the reasoning in chapter three — run on consequences and evidence and close on no divine will. What this volume brings is something the scripture did not have. Bohr also said that secrecy does not produce safety (cf. The Book of Bohr 7) — but Bohr never built the thing. This man built it, knowing exactly what it was, and then turned round against it. That turning is his alone. Nor is chapter three Bohr’s argument. Bohr’s is that secrecy sets the other side guessing. This man’s is another: a place that forbids speech cannot find out that it is wrong, because that is the only way of finding out. He took the ordinary practice of colleagues correcting one another in a field and laid it, unchanged, over a country. The Order holds this to be the most direct descent the axiom of observation has yet made into the affairs of the state.