By Stanislav PESTOV Living Entrapped
At the suburbs of Kharkov there is situated the flat of a famous and at the same time unknown to the wide public person — Oleg Alexandrovich LAVRENTYEV. He is well known at the West, he was well known at the former governing body of USSR — by marshal Beria, by the first "atomic" minister Machnev, by academicians Kurchatov, Sakharov, Artzimovich, Leontovich.
Several years before the American and, correspondingly, before the Soviet scientists, Oleg Lavrentyev suggested the idea and the construction of the hydrogen bomb. He provided the projects of many inventions each of which was to get its area of usage — they were a reactor based on the quick neutrons, projectiles operated by a radio beam, a plasma engine for space ships… Thanks to the ideas of Lavrentyev, the dream of managing the thermonuclear reactions got close to coming true. And the dream promised the mankind a revolution in the energetics. He did his main inventions in his youth, having received a seven-years education. All the rest of his life he was "pushing" them "through
In the year of the seventy-th anniversary of Stalin soldier Oleg Lavrentyev sent the generalissimo a letter from the far island of Sakhalin. There were no birthday wishes in that letter. There were only several phrases which stated that he, Lavrentyev, knows for sure how to make a hydrogen bomb. The idea came to his mind as early as in 1948, a year before the first Soviet atomic bomb was tested and three years before the final decision about the principle of the H-bomb was formed in the imagination of the "father" of the thermonuclear arms, Edward Teller. Even before that, in 1946, Lavrentyev had sent to the Academy of Sciences of USSR his scheme of creation a nuclear reactor based on the quick neutrons. In a reactor of the kind the accumulation of explosives for atomic bombs was going much more intensively. And the lack of such explosives was the most important obstacle for raising the arsenal of the atomic arms: in 1950 the Soviet Union possessed only 5 bombs. The Academy of Sciences did not give any answer to Lavrentyev’s suggestion of the reactor based on the quick neutrons. The message to Stalin must have also sunk into oblivion.
In 1949 USSR exploded its first atomic bomb. Worried by the prospect of losing the monopoly on nuclear arms, Truman started urging the workers to end their work over the hydrogen bomb whose power was to be much larger than the destructive energy of the atomic weapon. Doctor Teller set down to work over this monster at the moment when the atomic bomb had not yet been tested. A Soviet agent, Claus Fuchs, was accurately attending all the seminars of Teller. The reports of them were sent to the New-York Consulate of USSR which patronized the intelligence service of NKVD (Peoples Commissariat of Internal Affairs). However, according to one version, Fuchs was wasting his time and forces. In 1950, mathematician Ulam discovered a mistake in the calculations of Teller. Only in 1951, having corrected it, Teller could begin moving on with his work. In any case the efforts of Fuchs came handy. After his messages, in Moscow there was created a special group under the guidance of Zeldovich which started to work over the H-bomb calculations. Igor Tamm joined this work and then, in 1949, Andrey Sakharov did as well. It was he who later on developed the ideas of Tamm and became the constructor of the thermonuclear charge. …So, at the moment that Oleg Lavrentyev had the idea of principles of the hydrogen bomb and the basic principles of its construction, neither the Soviet nor the American constructors had any accessible conceptions of the new instrument of war.
"AFTER the public speech of Truman, — Lavrentyev recalls, — our papers called the hydrogen bomb bluff and nonsense, and the speech itself — an atomic blackmail". But as early as in 1943 Lavrentyev had read a brief paper notice of the fact that alongside with the process of DIVIDING THE HEAVY NUCLEUSES, which is used in the atomic bomb, there is possible the inverse process — BLENDING OF THE LIGHT NUCLEUSES. Thus, there is produced five times as much energy for the unit of mass, which would make Oleg Alexandrovich look for the chain of nuclear metamorphoses leading to the releasing of the colossal power. There was no answer to the letter to Stalin, so Lavrentyev wrote to the Central Committee of the Communist Party. They telephoned the military unit he was serving at and sent lieutenant-colonel of the engineer service Urganov there. He was interested: how the young soldier had managed to come to this and become a real inventor. This was explained by the fact that finishing the war as a secret service man-observer, Lavrentyev had trained for a new profession and become a radio-telegraphist and out of a soldier had turned into a sergeant. As a sergeant he had a right for money allowances, and he had ordered in Moscow all the scientific books he was interested in. "Not far from our military unit there was opened an evening school, — Lavrentyev tells, — The commands of the unit supported me in that, and over a year I finished three classes with excellent marks and got my school-leaving certificate". The 24-hours duty at the radio center waiting for a signal from the central radio station provided much time for speculation and reading. Once the commands asked the young sergeant to prepare a lecture on the atomic weapon. He was given several days for getting ready to the lecture and Lavrentyev spent them between textbooks, books and journals. Once again Oleg reorganized his ideas, thought over everything he had collected for the long years of studying the nuclear physics. The ideas which used to be not quite clear became brighter and the construction of the thermonuclear bomb seemed to be almost tangible. At the beginning of 1948 he already could formulate in detail the succession of the nuclear reactions which would lead to the thermonuclear explosion, as well as the method of preparing the detonation itself.
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