Physicist from Sakharov's group who became the lead declassifier and historian of the Soviet H-bomb project
Against the mystery of the 'Third Idea' that Sakharov himself left ambiguous, Goncharov concluded that its seed lay in Klaus Fuchs's 1948 report.
A Soviet nuclear physicist who began his career in Sakharov's theoretical department, Goncharov participated directly in the development of the RDS-6s (1953), RDS-37 (1955), and Tsar Bomba (1961), and proposed a new design direction for megaton-class thermonuclear charges. In the late Cold War, as the lead declassifier of Soviet nuclear archives under Yeltsin, he compiled the multivolume 'USSR Atomic Project: Documents and Materials' and published key papers analyzing Klaus Fuchs's 1948 report and the origins of the 'Third Idea,' placing himself at the center of the historiographical debate. His archival work provided the empirical foundation for arguments over whether the 1955 radiation implosion design was an indigenous achievement or aided by espionage.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1952Senior lab assistant, then engineer, Experimental Nuclear Reactors Dept, KB-11 (Arzamas-16)
- 1953Staff physicist, Theoretical Department, KB-11 (under Sakharov)
- 1955Co-designed and computed the two-stage RDS-37 thermonuclear charge
- 1961Co-designed the principal physical scheme of Tsar Bomba (RDS-220)
- 1965Proposed new megaton-class charge design; first successful test in 1966
- 1967–2004Head of theoretical department, VNIIEF
- 1990년대–2009Lead compiler of 'USSR Atomic Project' volumes; nuclear weapons historian
- 2002–2009Chief research officer, Institute of Theoretical and Mathematical Physics, VNIIEF
Related historical events
Declassifying the Archive and Answering the Riddle of the 'Third Idea'
After the Soviet collapse Goncharov turned to reconstructing, from documents, the history of the weapons he had helped build. As the principal figure in the declassification of Soviet nuclear weapons archives under Yeltsin, he served as the responsible compiler of the multivolume 'USSR Atomic Project: Documents and Materials,' and in 1996 intervened directly in the historiography with a comparative article on American and Soviet H-bomb development and a contribution to Physics Today.
The question he posed was the origin of the 'Third Idea,' the two-stage radiation implosion design realized as RDS-37 in 1955, on which Sakharov himself left only ambiguous notes. Goncharov's hypothesis was that the seed lay in the report Klaus Fuchs delivered in the spring of 1948, and that the roughly fortyfold gap between the American Castle Bravo test of 1 March 1954 (about 15 megatons) and the Sloika (about 400 kilotons) is what brought that recollection back to life. There is, however, no evidence that anyone in the Soviet project registered that gap in 1954.
The hypothesis was one of several competing readings, not a settled conclusion. The American H-bomb veteran turned historian Thomas Reed argued, on the ground that Fuchs's knowledge had not inspired American physicists before Teller's 1951 breakthrough, that a separate act of espionage in 1954 was required; the historian Gennady Gorelik advanced his own reading that Sakharov never had access to Fuchs's report. Sakharov himself wrote only that several people in the two theoretical departments had arrived at the Third Idea almost simultaneously.
The significance of Goncharov's work lies less in settling the question than in laying a verifiable foundation. The document collections he compiled moved the argument over whether the 1955 design was an indigenous achievement or aided by espionage out of conjecture and into the comparison of archival sources.