Meeting the Demands of Reason

Meeting the Demands of Reason

Review by Martin A. Miller

Jay Bergman’s new book is a lucid history of the career of the physicist known best as the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, but it is much more than that. He approaches Sakharov from the perspective of his thinking, which permits the reader to be taken on a fascinating journey from Sakharov’s family upbringing through his institutional education, to his preeminent role in the Soviet scientific community under Stalin, and finally his last years as the iconic and inspiring leader of the humane civil rights movement in the USSR. It is a tome of Tolstoyan proportions, meaning that it is both huge and also a very engaging read from the first page.

American readers over a certain age will recall Sakharov’s bold defense of the principles of democratic socialism in defiance of his country’s one-party dictatorship and the regime’s silencing of his work by placing him under house arrest in the sealed-off town of Gorky. It was a punishing confinement as he was cut off from all contact with the outside world. Younger readers may not be familiar at all with this astonishingly bold and creative individual.

Bergman has performed an important service for his readers by managing to explain some of the complexities of Sakharov’s scientific ideas in a readable manner. He also brings to light the extraordinary trajectory of Sakharov’s career, especially the conditions of heightened anxiety in the Soviet Union during the war years and the ensuing Cold War era.

It is interesting to compare the huge shift he underwent with his counterparts in the American physics community. Just as Sakharov moved from his role as one of the leading nuclear scientists in the USSR to a principled moral opposition to his government’s arsenal of the very weapons he helped design, Leo Szilard and others in this country campaigned against their earlier contributions to the World War II Manhattan Project. None, however, faced the political authoritarianism in their anti-nuclear campaigns that Sakharov had to confront in Moscow.

There will inevitably be disagreements among specialists about some of Bergman’s interpretations, but this should lead to a fuller and more open discussion of Sakharov’s huge impact on the world. Were he here today, he would surely be campaigning for nuclear disarmament before the United Nations and any parliament on the planet willing to listen to the wise and rational foundation of his conceptual universe.

Hardcover: 440 pages

Publisher: Cornell University Press ( August 20, 2009 )

Item #: 24-0383

ISBN: 9780801447310

Product Dimensions: 6.125 x 9.25 x 0.0 inches

Product Weight: 22.0 ounces