Biography yuli khariton

Stalin did not destroy physics in the Soviet Union because physics was needed to enhance the power of the state. The academician Lev Landau, a Nobel prizewinner, remarked that the survival of Soviet physics was the first example of successful nuclear deterrents. This comment had a serious point. What the bomb saved was a small island of intellectual autonomy in a society where the state claimed control of all intellectual life.

The pioneering nuclear physicist Yuli Khariton was one of the few people in a position to ring up Lavrenti Beria (1899-1953), the chairman of the special committee on the atomic bomb and head of the secret police, and tell him that so and so was not to be exiled because he, Khariton, needed him. Indeed when the first Russian atomic bomb was tested on 29 August 1949, Beria embraced both Khariton and Igor Kurchatov and kissed them on the forehead. This did not prevent Khariton from recognising that Beria was both a superb organiser and a terrible, terrible man.

To be three times a Hero of Soviet Labour and a member of the congress party was quite an achievement for Yuli Khariton, who was born into the Jewish intellectual aristocracy of St Petersburg. His mother was an actress, and his father was a journalist who after the Revolution became Director of the House of Writers, an important centre of literary life. Alas his son's emerging eminence came too late to save him from perishing in one of Stalin's labour camps.

In 1921, when he was still a second year student at the Polytechnical Institute, Khariton was invited by Nicolai Nikolaevich Semenov (1896-1986) to work in the chemical physics department at the Physicot Technical Institute in Leningrad, whose director was Abram Fedorovich Ioffe.

In the relatively liberal period between the wars, Khariton was sent to Cambridge University in 1926 where he spent three years at the Cavendish Laboratory studying directly under Lord Rutherford and Sir James Chadwick. He was

One 19 December 1996, Yuli Khariton, one of the fathers of the Soviet nuclear arms program, died at age 92. Khariton was born Feb. 27, 1904 in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Khariton was one of the elite group of physicists who, with Igor Kurchatov initiated the Soviet atomic weapons program in the 1940s. He helped found the secret nuclear weapons complex at Sarov, renamed Arzamas-16 (and nicknamed "Los Arzamas"), in April 1946 and became its first Scientific Director, a position he held for 45 years. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the name Sarov was restored, and that is where Khariton died . For his work in developing the first Soviet atomic bomb, and then hydrogen weapons, he was named a three-time winner of the title of Hero of Socialist Labour, the Soviet Union's highest civilian award. His body will be flown from Sarov to Moscow to be buried at the capital's elite Novodevichye cemetery.

Khariton studied under the pioneering British physicist Ernest Rutherford from 1926 to 1928 at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory where the neutron was later discovered in 1932. Khariton was probably Rutherford's last living pupil.

Although some news reports have described Khariton as the "Soviet Oppenheimer" and the "Father of the Soviet Atomic Bomb", those sobriquets are probably best reserved for Igor Kurchatov. A possibly better analogy would be to describe him as the "Soviet Norris Bradbury" who headed Los Alamos after Oppenheimer's departure for 25 years, and shepherded the American hydrogen bomb to maturity.

Khariton grew to professional maturity under Stalin's regime, and this seems to have marked him for the rest of his life. In a retrospective interview published in the May 1993, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, Khariton acknowledged the fact that Arzamas-16 was built by Gulag slave laborers, but indicated that it did not trouble him. Virtually none of the prisoners who were drafted to work at the nuclear weapons complex lived to see the ou

Yuli Borisovich Khariton (1904-1996) was a leading scientist on the Soviet atomic bomb program. He is often called the “father of the Soviet atomic bomb.”

Early Years

Born into St. Petersburg’s Jewish intellectual aristocracy, Khariton graduated from the Leningrad Polytechnical Institute in 1925, where he worked under the guidance of Abram Ioffe, Director of the Institute’s Chemical Physics Department. He then attended the University of Cambridge, where he earned a Ph.D in physics in 1928 and studied under Ernest Rutherford, the “father of nuclear physics,” at the University’s Cavendish Laboratory.

Upon returning to the Soviet Union, Khariton focused his research on explosives. In 1931, he founded and directed the Institute of Chemical Physics’ Laboratory of Explosives. During this time, he worked towards another doctorate in physical and mathematical sciences, which he received in 1935.

During World War II, Khariton developed munitions for the Soviet Army and contributed to the USSR’s preliminary atomic research efforts.

Soviet Bomb Project

Following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Stalin accelerated the Soviet bomb project, calling for an all-out crash program in atomic research and development. In 1946 Khariton was appointed by Igor Kurchatov, director of the Soviet project, as the program’s lead scientist. He was tasked with directing atomic research, development, design, and weapons assembly.

Khariton helped select and establish the site of the secret Soviet nuclear weapons facility, known as Arzamas-16 and nicknamed “Los Arzamas.” Located 250 miles east of Moscow, Arzamas-16 was formerly a monastery. When Khariton and his team relocated to the site in 1946, many of the monastery’s churches and living quarters were still standing and initially served as the first atomic laboratories until prisoners from a nearby labor camp developed the site and built new research facilities and houses. There