Ball Lightning

“I should explain that in the Soviet scientific community in those days, mechanistic determinism held sway over all other approaches. Researchers believed that the natural world was governed by the iron law of cause and effect. This mentality was a product of the political environment. Renegades like Gamow{George Gamow (1904–1968), theoretical physicist and cosmologist. He defected in 1933 and ended up in the United States.} were still rare. This was the case even in basic science and pure theory. For ball lightning, which was classified as an applied project at the time, people’s minds were even more constrained by traditional linear thinking. They were unable to accept the outcome of the tests, believing that if they successfully produced ball lightning once, they should be able to produce it in subsequent tests using the same parameters. And so Niernov arrived at the obvious conclusion about the fifty thousand tests: the data for the ball lightning test had been recorded incorrectly.

“It wasn’t a big deal at first. Entirely solvable within the normal scope of work, and the most anyone would be penalized for would be for dereliction of duty. But Niernov made it political. His dictatorial style had made him lots of enemies, and now he was presented with an opportunity to get rid of dissent. In an alarmist report he submitted to the supreme leadership, he said that Project 3141 had been sabotaged by imperialist spies. And since Project 3141 was a key national weapons research program, his report received swift attention, and a large-scale investigation was launched.

“The investigation team was made up largely of GRU {“Main Intelligence Directorate,” the foreign military intelligence agency under the General Staff of the Soviet Army.} personnel, with Niernov a key member. To explain the ensuing experimental failures, he came up with a theory inspired by Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The protagonist of that book prepared a drug that could split a person’s personality, but when he made a second batch, the drug was ineffective. He assumed that the new ingredients he had bought were impure, but later he found out that the ingredients in his successful batch had been impure, and it was those impurities that made it a success. Niernov believed that in every test, the saboteur had caused the system to deviate from the preset parameters, but as luck would have it, one of the deviations ended up producing ball lightning. Of course, there was no record of what the deviation was, since only the preset parameters were recorded.

“The explanation may have been a little unusual, but it was the only one the investigation team was able to accept at the time. The next issue was which parameter experienced a deviation. Tests had been performed using four systems: the lightning simulator, the external magnetic field, the microwave emitter, and aerodynamics, each of which was formed of mostly independent personnel. This made it unlikely that a saboteur would have been able to penetrate several at once, so at first, deviation in only one system was considered. The mostly unanimous thinking at the time was that the key parameter was the discharge value in the lightning simulation system. The person in charge of the design and operation of this system was none other than me.

“This wasn’t the prewar Great Purge era, when unsupported speculation could convict a man. However, right at that time, when attending an academic conference in East Germany, my father defected to the West. He was a biologist, and a staunch geneticist, but genetics still rated as treachery in the USSR. At the time, Lysenko’s shadow still loomed large over the academic world, and even though it might not be as dangerous as before if you diverged from the mainstream, it at least meant the termination of your own academic career. My father’s viewpoint was suppressed and his spirit was mired in a deep depression. I imagine that was the main factor in his defection. For me, the consequences of his action were disastrous. The investigation focused itself on my person. They soon discovered that during an academic visit to Western Europe, I had had an affair with a British woman. Some of the members of my team, out of self-preservation and at Niernov’s behest, directed all manner of false accusations at me. Ultimately, I was convicted of espionage and received a twenty-year sentence.