My personal recollections of Andrei Dmitreycvich Sakharov
and the issues and precepts he poses
Talk at acceptance of APS Sakharov Prize February 28th 2012
I am deeply honored whenever my name is linked with that of Andrei Sakharov I would like to thank the selection committee of the APS for selecting me for the 2012 prize, and also the five people who nominated me for it. It brings up many memories of Andrei Dmitreyvich and the inspiration he gave me. Although in my human rights activities I have had some harrowing moments, and been concerned that I have overstepped the bounds of what the authorities would tolerate, I have never faced prison. It therefore gives added meaning to share the prize this year with Dr Bekele from Addid Ababa who was jailed for 7 years by a military government after the overthrow of the Emperor Haile Selassie.
I am not sure when I first heard of Andrei. Probably on a mountain in Switzerland in 1958 when Igor Tamm (later Nobel Laureate) urged a small party of Panofsky, Hofstadter, Peter Hillman and myself, to look out for his younger associate, Andrei Sakharov. Igor claimed that Andrei was brighter than he himself was..
I next became aware of Andrei in 1968 when the New York Times published his article “Reflections on Peace progress and Intellectual Freedom”. That came out when I had just arrived in Aspen with my family for the first Fermilab summer study. It was a bad time of year to take notice of the document and even worse when Russian tanks entered Prague in mid-August - not to rejoicing as in 1944 but in conquest. It was easy for us to ignore Andrei especially since many of us had already talked with Yuri Orlov and Pietr Kapitza. Indeed there was almost no mention of Sakharov at the international High Energy Physics Conference in Vienna a few weeks later.
I realized that Andrei was different when, at the start of a genetics meeting in Moscow in 1991 when he wrote on the blackboard: :
“I am collecting signatures on behalf of Zhorez Medvedev who is an involuntary patient in a mental hospital. Please meet me at the coffee break or telephone this number”.
This stayed on the board for ½ hour. That night Pietr Kapitza asked to see Sakharov, and while agreeing whole heartedly with Andrei on what he had written tried to persuade Andrei to “work within the system”. But Andrei was part a different generation.. He was willing to challenge the system directly. Indeed 15 years later, in 1987. Pietr’s widow, Anna Kapitza told me that Andrei was very important. He had told scientists that there is a time to just stand up and say “NO!”
But until 1979 did I meet Andrei when my wife Andree and I visited Russia. I had three basic questions. What did he think of ABM systems, did he still believe what he had written ib the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article “Nuclear Power and the Freedom of the West” and how could one help Yuri Orlov who was then in prison camp in Permsk. I had been a signer of “Scientists and Engineers for Orlov and Sharansky” and took the promises very seriously. I did not visit the USSR since 1969, and refused to invite Russian Scientists to Harvard -explaining in many cases exactly why not.. We broke this promise in 1979 on our two week visit but salved our consciences by visits to refuseniks, particularly in Leningrad, bringing them journals which they were forbidden to access... We had only the telephone number of Andrei Sakharov, and that was connected to a machine which switched off when English was spoken. But we found out that even such sophisticated machines had to have a cup of tea or coffee sometime, so we persisted and finally got through at 11.30 pm and found the address: 49B Tsaikolova Street.
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We got to his apartment - actually the apartment of Elena Bonner’s mother just before midnight. As we entered Andrei said “ I assume that all the words spoken in this apartment are recorded.” . The stark simplicity of this statement took us by surprise. My response was also direct: “That makes life simple. You do not have to worry whether someone is listening or not!”. Indeed I had become concerned that my telephone might occasionally have been tapped. Candidates might be the KGB, the CIA, MI5, or Mossad. More recently one might add a much more efficient group headed by Rupert Murdoch. Indeed I now assume that my phone is bugged. My e mail is examined. If someone tells me it is not, I am disappointed. It means that I am unimportant. Younger people put all their personal information on FAcebook without worrying.
Other Russians, and other scientists have been concerned about the evils of the Stalinist system. I think in particular of Pietr Kapitza, and Yuri Orlov. But Andrei “pulled out all the stops”. He had the authority of a scientist who had been given the highest honors his country could give him - and he threw them away. The KGB were scared of him - and that gave him power which he used. Our discussion in the first meeting was wide ranging, but I quote from memory. Alas if it was recorded the recording is not in the archives.
I was very struck by his comment: “There must be a 100 people who have tried to do what I am doing (about human rights) of whom we shall never hear”. I assumed then, and assume now that he thought they were liquidated. Another Russian had already confided tom Andree and myself earlier that day. “One per cent of our friends just disappear.” We must not forget the bravery of Sakharov but even more we must honor the bravery of tho 100 of whom we will never hear which exceeds it. It was and is very clear that Andrei and his wife Elena Bonner worked very closely together. In our presence Elena was constantly goading Andrei into action. “You must not let them let away with it.” Her bravery exceeded that of Andrei: She did not have his prestige and power. But she continued fighting for another 20 years after his death till she herself died in June 2011.
We had our disagreements. It is well known that Andrei Sakharov believed than nuclear power rectors should be underground - as are the production reactors at Krasnoyarsk. In that he agreed with Edward Teller. But I explained that would not help in the type of extreme accident that we were now considering in the USA - including TMI which had just occurred. Indeed one of the problems at Fukushima in 2011 was that the reactor is too far below ground! I asked whether he had changed his opinion of nuclear power after the Accident at Three Mile Island (TMI) 5 weeks before. His views expressed in the Bulletin had not changed. He was definitely pro nuclear. “One must not turn one’s back on progress” was his explanation. He repeated this in a public meeting in Moscow, a conference on a Nuclear Free World, just after Chernobyl, in February 1987suggesting that a German anti nuclear activist spend his energies trying to make nuclear power safer..
During the cold war we in the USA and its orbit, felt that the Peace, Progress and Intellectual Freedom applied overwhelmingly to the USSR But I claim that the article applies to the USA of today almost as much as to the USSR of 40 years ago. It is always instructive to see how ones criticism of an adversary applies to oneself when the phrases are appropriately inverted. We have not yet got around to discussing what intellectual freedom is all about. Repression is not merely directly by a government. It includes denial of access to the media, refusal to permit publication in crucial journals and lack of access to funding. One obvious example is the politicization of the whole issue of anthropogenic global warming since about 1991. Scientists who felt that drastic steps were unnecessary could not get funding and often were not published. Unfortunately I feel that the APS committees and council were not blameless in this regard, and several fine scientists have resigned from the APS in protest. This has swung back in the last 2 years and now the skeptics have too much influence.
All societies, including our own, agree on limits to intellectual freedom. An extreme example illustrates this. It is illegal in most countries to deny the Jewish holocaust and in some countries illegal to deny the Armenia genocide. These are by most definitions violations of intellectual freedom and such limitations need frank discussion in themselves. Likewise some artists have been stopped from displaying pictures demeaning a religion. In a museum in Brooklyn. In the Sakharov museum in Moscow. Ridiculing Mahomed in Copenhagen or Amsterdam. I have a feeling that the artists were probably self-serving. They want the notoriety and are not interested in intellectual freedom. I wonder what Andrei would have thought.
We had our disagreements. It is well known that Andrei Sakharov believed than nuclear power reactors should be underground - as are the production reactors at Krasnoyarsk. In that he agreed with Edward Teller. But I explained that would not help in the type of extreme accident that we were now considering in the USA - including TMI which had just occurred. I asked his opinion of TMI. He was definitely pro nuclear. “One must not turn one’s back on progress” was his explanation. He repeated this in a the conference on a “nuclear free world” in Moscow just after Chernobyl, suggesting that a German anti nuclear activist who was present spend his energies trying to make nuclear power safer..
Andrei asked me what I knew about the human rights in the Sudan and the international food assistance being given . I was in a position to tell him a sad answer. A few weeks before my friend Abdlatif Al-Hamad, the Director General of the Arab Fund (an organization modeled after the world bank to transfer money and other assistance from rich Arab countries) told me that in his belief every penny of a $30 million grant to the Sudan had gone into the pockets of army officers. That reminded him of the Ukraine in 1927. I had heard about the tragedy there as a boy. We called it “the liquidation of the kulaks”. Food was taken from the people and when the starving people tried to emigrate they were stopped. In the west we thought of this as one of the many evils of the Stalinist regime in the USSR and that diverted our attention from the evils of the other grim regime in Europe of Adolf Hitler.
I had forgotten this. But Andrei never seemed to forget such injustices and do what he could to correct them. The record also shows that various people in the USSR, publicly disagreed with Andrei during the 1970s period. The reasons were and are unclear. In the west we tended to assume that they disassociated themselves from Andrei to gain favor inside the system. In 1979 he was a little upset particularly by his close friend Zeldovich.. But he never spoke out publicly against Zeldovich or the other scientists. Indeed I am reliably told that he gave the most eloquent and emotional speech about his friend at Zeldovich’s funeral. From this and his other reported actions throughout the years I learned a very simple rule, but one extremely hard to follow.
ALWAYS forgive. But NEVER forget..
I asked how we could help Yuri Orlov then in prison camp. Andrei’s idea was brilliant in its simplicity. Get a big bureaucratic organization the USA, the US Post Office fighting the big bureaucratic organization in the USSR, the KGB. Andrei knew the International Postal Regulations. Send Yuri Orlov a registered letter to his prison camp and if it was not acknowledged with Orlov;’s signature, demand one’s money back and the Soviet post office should pay a refund. I did as he suggested and the signature of course was not Orlov. I tried to get the US Post office to do their job and get my money back. My representative in the US Congress backed away from the task. So I was out a few dollars. For me the saddest feature was that I could not get any other scientists to write their own letters.
Andrei was a human rights worker because he was a scientist. Not the other way around. He never wanted to be called a “dissident”. In addition to designing and testing the biggest bomb ever exploded (1 billion times as powerful as the first bomb whose effect I saw which dropped in August 1940 close to our house in England and killed a man). In addition to his bomb work he was involved with basic theoretical work when he was at the “installation”. He recognized at once the importance of the cosmic microwave background experiments and made predictions for what happened just before the Universe became transparent. His ideas, developed with his friend Zeldovich, was that there would be oscillations across the universe. Alas, the verification os these predictions has come only in the 20 years since his death. When he wrote these papers which were published in the USSR journals and immediately translated into English in SOVIET PHYSICS, published by the American Physical Society. It was note worthy that they never came from an address. We all knew what that meant. He was at a secret “installation”.
By the time of our 1979 visit, I had visited arab countries and found friends therein and begun to understand them. Andrei had not. It was clear to me that during the cold war the USSR deliberately fostered and exploited arab-Israeli disagreements. Iraq had supported the Baghdad pact to form a bulwark against what they called the “new colonialism” of the USSR. The fostered President Abdel Nasser in Egypt and his Syrian friends and encouraged the 1958 revolution in Iraq. They then invited Palestinians to Moscow as students and encouraged them. Andrei had been harassed by Palestinian students, no doubt under KGB orders, visiting his apartment and tended to couple that with the harassment of Russian Jews. I disagreed with this particular view.
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But I noticed that in his letter for the US press which he dictated in Russian to Elena (and his stepdaughter Tanya Yankelevich translated for me a week later) he joined Pentecostalists and Jews in the same sentence. I do not think this was an accident. He wanted to be sure that his appeal was an appeal about ALL victims of conscience.
Andrei also acted on a belief that a family was important. He went on hunger strike in Gorky to persuade the authorities to allow Lizabeta Semenov to join his step son Alexei. Many scientists were surprised that he had stepped away from the general aims that he supported for a more personal one. But mostly they realized that family values are important. This hunger strike awoke the consciences of s of people of the world and forced recognition by the authorities.
He was very interested in the health of his wife, Elena Bonner and constantly tried to persuade her to give up cigarette smoking. He failed, and went on smoking till her death in 1981. In the 1960s he had written a paper about the number of cancers caused by the explosion of the last nuclear test 30 Megatons TNT in Nuova Zembla that he had worked on. He compared that to the risks of cigarette smoking. If I remember aright he thought that an exposure to 1 Rem for a year was equivalent to smoking 300 cigarettes. I last saw Andrei on his visit to USA and Boston in 1989. He came to our house for afternoon tea in a relaxed mood. Indeed his efforts were paying off in the USSR. He reminded me of his calculation and asked me my expert opinion. I believe that he underestimated the risks of radiation by a factor of three or so and I gave the figure of 800 cigarettes. Some other scientists use even a larger number.
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Andrei as a Russian naturally talked and acted about human rights abuses in Russia and the former USSR. But he phrased his thoughts in a way applicable to us all. It behooves us to consider how they apply. If there are 100 people in the USSR who were liquidated for opposing the system, how many more are there throughout the world? Should we not think of them and give them all the honor and support to these men and women that we give to Andrei?
In awarding the prize jointly with Dr Bekele the APS is of course doing this. But I would like to bring to your attention one other example of my personal acquaintance But bear in mind that there are many others who I do not know. It is well known that Saddam Hussein was an admirer of Stalin and his repressive methods for keeping power. For a number of reasons I have been aware of this for many years and have tried a little to help Iraqis. In particular I refer to Dr Hussain Shahristani. Shahristani got an MA in nuclear chemistry from ImperialCollege in London and then a PhD and became a Professor in Toronto. In 1979 he was persuaded to accept a position building up his field in Baghdad using the new French built research reactor soon to come on line. He was, and is, a devout Shiite and was promptly jailed for his beliefs and tortured. In 1981, when his friend Jafar Dhia Jafaar was persuaded to build an atomic bomb his jailers promised freedom if he would work on the bomb with his friend. He declined saying that it was his duty as a human being not to do so. He stayed in solitary confinement, including a period in Abu Graib, for 12 years till the US bombed his jail in 1991. I understand that he was the only person in solitary to survive this long. Maybe that was because Amnesty International was constantly asking about him. Indeed when in 1982 I asked to see him on behalf of Amnesty, the request was turned down “at the highest level.” I leave to your imagination what the highest level was.