Mutiny: The True Events That Inspired The Hunt for Red October

By the late forties Sakharov was working with Igor Kurchatov on the design of the Soviet Union’s first atomic bomb, made possible in part because of the KGB’s spying on the Manhattan Project in the United States. By 1950 the young scientist and hero of the people had moved to the development of the hydrogen bomb, which was successfully tested in 1953—several months before he had even earned his doctorate, which was given to him at the same time he was awarded the first of his three Hero of Socialist Labor medals.

Two years later he developed the first hydrogen bomb in the megaton range using his own design, which in 1961 led to the test of a fifty-megaton hydrogen bomb—the largest man-made explosion ever.

About that same time he developed an old Russian idea for what’s called the tokamak, which is a way to control plasma in a nuclear fusion reactor, still in use around the world today.

He was elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences, came up with the idea of induced gravity as an alternative to quantum mechanical gravity, and was awarded another Hero of Socialist Labor medal.

All this by the time he was forty years old.

But then Russia’s most famous and brilliant scientist came up against the KGB, and it was no contest.

Around the late fifties, Sakharov began to worry about the moral implications of his work on nuclear weapons designs. After all, he reasoned, big hydrogen bombs were only useful for one thing—destroying major cities such as New York or Washington, Moscow or Leningrad, in one blow. There were no peaceful uses for the hellish devices.

By the early sixties he came out publicly against nuclear proliferation, by 1963 he had become a major player in the Partial Test Ban Treaty signed in Moscow, and by 1965 he pulled completely out of nuclear weapons research and turned his energies to the study of cosmology—how the universe came into being and how it worked.

None of this endeared him to the leaders in the Kremlin. Even as he was being awarded his third Hero of Socialist Labor medal, talks at the highest levels centered on the question of what to do with Sakharov.

Two things happened then to seal his fate. The first came in 1967 when the idea of an antiballistic missile defense system started to become a big issue in Soviet-U.S. relations. In a secret letter to the Kremlin in July, he wrote that the Americans had to be taken at their word that they would never launch a pre-emptive nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, so a fabulously expensive, nation-bankrupting antiballistic missile defense was not necessary.

Otherwise, he argued, an arms race for this new technology would almost certainly increase the possibility of all-out nuclear war.

He asked for permission to publish his views in newspapers, but of course the Kremlin refused. In fact, they ignored him. But the decorated hero of the nation was not about to give up, and neither was the KGB.

In May he wrote an essay, Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom, in which he argued that an antiballistic missile defense system would pose a major threat to increase the chances of nuclear war. It was first circulated in the Soviet Union as a samizdat publication, which amounted to mimeographed copies passed hand to hand in the underground. Even worse than that, however, a copy reached the outside world and was published for everyone to read.

The KGB had enough, and it struck back, immediately canceling his security clearances and banning him from all military-related research.

Unbowed, Sakharov founded the Moscow Human Rights Committee, and the KGB began tailing his friends, opening his mail, and monitoring his phone calls.

He married Yelena Bonner, who was another human rights activist, and the KGB began spreading vicious rumors about him, trying to drag down his moral character in the public eye.

In 1975 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace, but the KGB revoked his external passport, and his wife had to go to Stockholm to read his acceptance speech.

By 1980, the KGB struck back even harder. Sakharov couldn’t be shot or even jailed; he was simply too important a figure in Russia as well as in the rest of the world. They did the next best thing by exiling him to the closed city of Gorki, now called Nizhniy Novgorod, out in the boondocks three hundred miles east of Moscow. While he was there, the KGB continually harassed him, following him, listening to his phone calls, reading his mail, and even breaking into his apartment and stealing manuscripts he’d written. Sakharov wrote: