From nuclear-weapon designer to critic of the arms race
Of the nuclear arms race, he wrote: “I cannot see a use even for one bomb.”
Lev Feoktistov was a Soviet theoretical physicist who helped develop nuclear and thermonuclear weapons before becoming an advocate of disarmament and reactor safety. At Arzamas-16, he worked on thermonuclear designs growing out of the Sloika and left a firsthand account of the breakthrough known as the “Third Idea,” the emergence of a workable two-stage design. He recognized the technical achievements of the weapons program while questioning the logic of nuclear testing and the arms race, and later turned to laser fusion and inherently safe reactors.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1945–1951Studied nuclear physics at the Physics Faculty of Moscow State University
- 1951–1955Researcher, theoretical department of KB-11, Arzamas-16
- 1955–1978Theoretical physicist, VNIITF, Chelyabinsk-70
- 1966Hero of Socialist Labour and corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences
- 1978–1988Researcher at the Kurchatov Institute and professor at MEPhI
- 1988–2002Head of the laser-fusion department at the Lebedev Physical Institute
- 2000Elected full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Related historical events
The 1977 letter and the departure from military atomics
Feoktistov did not disown the achievements of the weapons program, but by the 1970s he began to question the arms race itself. In 1977 he wrote to Minister of Medium Machine Building Efim Slavsky arguing that the Soviet Union gained nothing from the nuclear arms race, and proposed that the state declare a unilateral halt to nuclear testing. He held that such a move would be a major gain for the USSR both politically and economically. Around the same time he decided to change the direction of his work; leaving weapons research was not simple, given that he was first deputy scientific director of a key nuclear center. The CPSU Central Committee would not release him, and it was Slavsky's approval that finally allowed him to move to Moscow and work at the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy. In 1978, judging that the “topic had exhausted itself,” he left military nuclear research.
His research then turned to reactor safety. In the wake of the Chernobyl accident he worked on the concept of a reactor whose safety is intrinsic to its physics, one not dependent on an external control system or on the operator's judgment. In “The Weapon That Has Exhausted Itself” (1999) he wrote that only people who have never seen the consequences of a nuclear explosion could propose using atomic bombs. His departure from military atomics was less a job change than the outcome of his own reckoning with the meaning of the weapons systems he had helped build.