Father of the hydrogen bomb. Lavrentiev Oleg Alexandrovich (physicist) Lavrentiev Oleg Alexandrovich biography

nuclear physicist, doctor of physical and mathematical sciences

On February 10, 2011, at the 85th year in Kharkov, the Honorary Citizen of Pskov Oleg Alexandrovich Lavrentiev, the legendary nuclear physicist, the initiator of scientific direction- controlled thermonuclear fusion, one of the "fathers" of the hydrogen bomb, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Honored Scientist of Ukraine, participant in the Great Patriotic War. He was awarded the Diploma of the Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus' on September 4, 2007 as a blessing for sacrificial service to the Fatherland and a significant contribution to the creation of a nuclear weapons complex.

Oleg Alexandrovich Lavrentiev was born on July 7, 1926 in Pskov, in a two-story brick house at Museum Lane. 3 (the house has been preserved). Studied in the 2nd exemplary high school(this building now houses the Technical Lyceum). In the 7th grade, after reading a book about nuclear physics, he decided that this would be his profession. The war prevented him from completing his education. At the age of 18, Oleg joined the army. Participated in the battles for the liberation of the Baltic states, had military awards.

After the end of the war military service continued on Sakhalin. In response to the call of US President Truman to speed up the creation of a hydrogen bomb, O.A. On July 29, 1950, Lavrentiev sent a letter to the TsKVKP(b) address, in which, for the first time in the history of mankind, he outlined the idea of controlled thermonuclear fusion and proposed the design of a hydrogen bomb. The world learned about this only at the end of 2001, after some materials from the president's archive were declassified.

For many years, Oleg Alexandrovich actively worked at the Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology.

Name O.A. Lavrentiev is rightfully on a par with such names as V.I. Kurchatov, I.E. Tamm, A.D. Sakharov.

Krainy M.M., Pskov local historian

On July 7, 2011, in the I.I.Vasilev Library of Local Lore, an Evening of Remembrance “And my ancient name will merge with the ancient honor of my native city” was held on the occasion of the 85th anniversary of the birth of nuclear physicist, Honorary Citizen of Pskov Oleg Alexandrovich Lavrentiev ( 1926-2011).

The evening opened with a multimedia presentation "Oleg Lavrentiev's Hydrogen Bomb", reflecting the life and scientific activity nuclear physicist O.A. Lavrentiev. The presentation was made by Anna Olegovna Timofeeva, Head of the Sector of Periodicals of the Pskov Regional Universal scientific library. After the presentation ended, those present honored the memory of the great Pskov scientist with a minute of silence. Alexander Nikolayevich Rumyantsev, O.A. Lavrentiev’s nephew, Marat Mikhailovich Krainiy, a local historian, Stanislav Mikhailovich Glazkovsky, a childhood friend, and Boris Ivanovich Sokol, chairman of the Kolchuga Military Historical Club, shared their memories of Oleg Alexandrovich Lavrentiev.

No matter how they scold Andrei Karaulov, for me he remains a talented TV journalist and freelancer and, in general, a source of unique information. And his financial and family affairs are his business, don’t go into someone else’s pocket, don’t peek through the bedroom window. I am glad that his Moment of Truth program has resumed on the TVC channel. Watched on Monday March 10, 2008 and never ceased to be surprised. I was struck by the ingenuous story of another Russian nugget and my colleague in the Physics Department of Moscow State University Oleg Alexandrovich Lavrentiev about the invention of a device for the implementation of a thermonuclear reaction. It turns out that Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov met him at the checkpoint of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks in 1950 and together with him attended a conversation with Beria Lavrenty Pavlovich, when Lavrentiev received the go-ahead to continue research, and Sakharov agreed and was at first equal with Lavrentiev.

"According to the memoirs of Sakharov himself, "the impetus for the acceleration of work on this topic was the acquaintance with the work of Lavrentiev." In 1948, Oleg Lavrentiev, a sergeant in one of the units located on Sakhalin, sent a letter to Stalin with a single phrase: "I know the secret of the hydrogen bomb." At that time, the USSR did not even have an atomic bomb, while the idea of a hydrogen bomb, according to Sakharov's memoirs, had "a very vague outline." The first letter in the secretariat of the leader was ignored, and after the second, a colonel of the NKVD was sent to the unit where the young sergeant served, who, having checked the adequacy of the author, took him to Moscow to Beria.

In 1950, Lavrentiev formulated the principle of thermal insulation of plasma by an electrostatic field "for the purpose of industrial utilization of thermonuclear reactions." The fathers of the Russian hydrogen bomb rejected the idea of an inventor with a seven-year education, however, and proposed to hold the plasma with an electromagnetic field.
In 1950, Sakharov and Tamm carried out calculations and detailed studies and proposed a scheme for a magnetic thermonuclear reactor. Such a device is essentially a hollow donut (or torus), on which a conductor is wound, forming a magnetic field. (Hence its name - a toroidal chamber with a magnetic coil, in abbreviated form - tokamak - became widely known not only among physicists).

In order to heat the plasma in this device to the required temperatures, a magnetic field is used to excite electricity, the power of which reaches 20 million amperes. It is worth recalling that modern man-made materials deal with a maximum of 6 thousand degrees Celsius (for example, in rocket technology) and after a single use they are only suitable for scrap. At 100 million degrees, any material will evaporate, so a very high magnetic field must keep the plasma in a vacuum inside the “donut”. The field does not allow charged particles to fly out of the “plasma cord” (the plasma is in a tokamak in a compressed and twisted form and looks like a cord), but the neutrons formed during the fusion reaction are not delayed by the magnetic field and transfer their energy to the internal walls of the installation (blanket), which are water cooled. The resulting steam can be sent to a turbine, just like in conventional power plants.

In the early 1950s, Lyman Spitzer, an American astronomer and physicist who worked at the Princeton Laboratory, had similar thoughts on curbing the thermonuclear reaction. He proposed a slightly different way of magnetically confining the plasma in a device called the "stellarator". It holds the plasma magnetic fields, created only by external conductors, in contrast to the tokamak, where a significant contribution to the creation of the field configuration is made by the current flowing through the plasma itself.

In 1954, the first tokamak was built at the Institute of Atomic Energy. At first, they did not spare money for the implementation of the idea: the military saw in such a reactor a source of neutrons for enriching nuclear materials and producing tritium. At first, even Sakharov believed that before practical acquisition There are ten to fifteen years of energy left at such installations. The first to understand the ambiguity of prospects using controlled thermonuclear fusion was the military, and when in 1956 academician Igor Kurchatov asked Khrushchev to declassify this topic, they did not object. It was then that we learned about stellarators, and the Americans - about tokamaks.

Yes, the rise of our science was in post-war period colossal, and when I entered the Faculty of Physics of Moscow State University in 1955, I took the advanced laboratory equipment for granted, and when I did my internship in Obninsk at the first nuclear power plant, I generally lived in paradise and mastered it in the library and even kept myself the newest Western magazine and book production, including the most authoritative English and German publications on philosophy.

And what was the fate of Oleg Lavrentiev after the execution of his patron Lavrenty Beria in 1953. By the way, Lavrentiev spoke about Beria in Karaulov's TV program "The Moment of Truth" very respectfully ("good man!"). Journalist Valentina Gatash in the article Top-secret physicist Lavrentiev writes:

“Oleg Lavrentiev was born in 1926 in Pskov. Having read the book "Introduction to Nuclear Physics" in the 7th grade, he had a burning dream to work in the field nuclear power. But the war began, the occupation, and when the Germans were driven out, Oleg volunteered for the front. The young man met the victory in the Baltic states, but again his studies had to be postponed - he had to continue military service on Sakhalin, in the small town of Poronaysk.

Here he returned to nuclear physics. In the unit there was a library with technical literature and university textbooks, and Oleg, on his sergeant's allowance, subscribed to the journal "Advances in Physical Sciences". The idea of a hydrogen bomb and controlled thermonuclear fusion first came to him in 1948, when the command of the unit, which distinguished a capable sergeant, instructed him to prepare a lecture on the atomic problem.

Having a few free days for preparation, I rethought all the accumulated material and found a solution to the issues that I had been struggling with for more than one year, - says Oleg Alexandrovich. To whom and how to report it? There are no specialists in Sakhalin, which has just been liberated from the Japanese. The soldier writes a letter to the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, and soon the command of the unit receives an order from Moscow to create working conditions for Lavrentiev. He is given a secure room where he writes his first articles. In July 1950, he sends them by secret mail to the heavy engineering department of the Central Committee.

Sakhalin work consisted of two parts - military and peaceful.

In the first part, Lavrentiev described the principle of operation of a hydrogen bomb, where solid lithium deuteride was used as a fuel. In the second part, he proposed using controlled thermonuclear fusion to generate electricity. The chain reaction of the synthesis of light elements should not proceed in an explosive manner, as in a bomb, but slowly and in a controlled manner. Outstripping both domestic and foreign nuclear scientists, Oleg Lavrentiev solved the main question - how to isolate the plasma heated to hundreds of millions of degrees from the reactor walls. He proposed at that time a revolutionary solution - to use a force field as a shell for the plasma, in the first version - an electric one.

Oleg did not know that his message was immediately sent for review then to the candidate of sciences, and later to the academician and three times Hero of Socialist Labor A.D. Sakharov, who commented on the idea of controlled thermonuclear fusion: "... I consider it necessary to discuss Comrade Lavrentiev's project in detail. Regardless of the results of the discussion, it is necessary to note the author's creative initiative right now."

In the same 1950, Lavrentiev was demobilized. He comes to Moscow, successfully passes entrance exams and enters the Faculty of Physics of Moscow State University. A few months later, he was summoned by the Minister of Instrumentation V.A. Makhnev - that was the name of the Ministry of Atomic Industry in the realm of secrecy. Accordingly, the Institute of Atomic Energy was called the Laboratory of Measuring Instruments of the USSR Academy of Sciences, that is, LIPAN. At the minister's, Lavrentiev met Sakharov for the first time and found out that Andrei Dmitrievich had read his Sakhalin work, but they only managed to talk a few days later, again at night. It was in the Kremlin, in the office of Lavrenty Beria, who was then a member of the Politburo, chairman of a special committee in charge of the development of atomic and hydrogen weapons in the USSR.

Then I heard a lot of kind words from Andrei Dmitrievich, - Oleg Alexandrovich recalls. - He assured me that now everything will be fine, and offered to work together. Of course, I agreed to the proposal of a man I liked very much.

Lavrentiev did not even suspect that A.D. liked his idea of controlled thermonuclear fusion (CNF) so much. Sakharov that he decided to use it and, together with I.E. Tamm also began to work on the problem of CTS. True, in their version of the reactor, the plasma was held not by an electric, but by a magnetic field. Subsequently, this direction resulted in reactors called "tokamak".

After meetings in "high offices" Lavrentiev's life changed like in a fairy tale. He was given a room in a new house, given an increased scholarship, delivered on demand the necessary scientific literature. He took permission to attend classes freely. A teacher of mathematics, then a candidate of sciences, and later an academician, Hero of Socialist Labor A.A. was attached to him. Samara.

It was a big surprise for me, - Oleg Alexandrovich recalls. - When meeting with me, Andrei Dmitrievich did not say a single word about his work on the magnetic thermal insulation of plasma. Then I decided that we, Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov and I, came to the idea of isolating the plasma by a field independently of each other, only I chose electrostatic as the first option. fusion reactor and it is magnetic.

On August 12, 1953, a thermonuclear charge using lithium deuteride was successfully tested in the USSR. Participants in the creation of new weapons receive state awards, titles and awards, but Lavrentiev, for a reason completely incomprehensible to him, suddenly loses a lot. / MY COMMENT: Everyone knew that L.P., who had been arrested by that time, patronized him. Beria /. In LIPAN, his permit was withdrawn, and he lost his permanent pass to the laboratory. I had to write to the fifth-year student thesis project without an internship and without a supervisor on the basis of the theoretical work he had already done on TCB. Despite this, he successfully defended himself, receiving a diploma with honors. However, the pioneer of this idea was not hired to work at LIPAN, the only place in the USSR where they were then engaged in controlled thermonuclear fusion.

In the spring of 1956, a young specialist with an unusual fate came to our city /Kharkov/ with a report on the theory of electromagnetic traps, which he wanted to show to the director of the institute K.D. Sinelnikov. But Kharkov is not Moscow. The inventor of the TCB was again settled in a hostel, in a room where eleven people lived. Gradually, Oleg made friends and like-minded people, and in 1958 the first electromagnetic trap was built at the KIPT.

At the end of 1973, I sent an application to the State Committee for Inventions and Discoveries for the discovery of "Thermal Insulation Effect force field", - says Lavrentiev. - This was preceded by a long search for my first Sakhalin work on thermonuclear fusion, which was demanded by the State Committee. When I asked, they answered me that the secret archives of the fifties were destroyed, and they advised me to contact its first reviewer for confirmation of the existence of this work. Andrey Dmitrievich Sakharov sent a certificate confirming the existence of my work and its content, but the State Committee needed that same handwritten Sakhalin letter that had sunk into oblivion.

But finally, in 2001, in the August issue of the journal "Uspekhi fizicheskikh nauk" a series of articles "On the history of research on controlled thermonuclear fusion" appears. Here, for the first time, the Lavrentiev case is described in detail, a photograph of him from a personal file of half a century ago is placed, and, most importantly, for the first time the documents found in the Presidential Archive are presented. Russian Federation documents that were stored in a special folder under the heading "Soviet secret". Including Lavrentiev's proposal, sent from Sakhalin on July 29, 1950, and Sakharov's August review of this work, and instructions from L.P. Beria... Nobody destroyed these manuscripts. Scientific priority is restored, the name of Lavrentiev has taken its present place in the history of physics.

The Academic Council of the KIPT, after publication in the journal "Uspekhi fizicheskikh nauk", unanimously decided to petition the Higher Attestation Commission of Ukraine to award Lavrentiev a doctoral degree based on the totality of published scientific works He has over a hundred of them. The Ukrainian VAK refused.”

February 10, 2012 marks the one year anniversary of his death Honorary citizen of the city of Pskov, veteran of the Great Patriotic War, outstanding scientist, Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Honored Worker of Science and Technology of Ukraine, Oleg Alexandrovich Lavrentiev - the father of the hydrogen bomb.

Oleg Aleksandrovich was born on July 7, 1926 in Pskov. His parents, immigrants from the peasants of the Pskov province, worked in Pskov: his father was a clerk at the Vdvizhenets plant, his mother was a nurse in a mother and child home. The family lived in Pogankin Lane.

The future scientist studied at the second exemplary school (now it is the Technical Lyceum). After reading the book "Introduction to Nuclear Physics" in the 7th grade, Oleg discovered new world. From this book, the author of which, due to his childhood habit, he did not begin to remember, Oleg first learned about the atomic problem, and even then he had a dream - to put the atom at the service of man.

But the war began. At the age of 18, Oleg Lavrentyev volunteered for the front, becoming a reconnaissance observer. Participates in the battles for the liberation of the Baltic States, for which he receives military awards.

After the end of the war, Oleg ends up serving on Sakhalin. There he was lucky to have commanders - political officer Major Shcherbakov and Lieutenant Colonel Plotnikov. Firstly, they helped Oleg retrain from scouts to radio telegraph operators and take a sergeant's position.

This was very important, since Oleg began to receive allowances and was able to order the necessary books from Moscow and even subscribe to Science Magazine Academy of Sciences of the USSR "Successes of physical sciences" which is intended for scientists, graduate students, teachers of physics.

In addition, the garrison had a library with a fairly large selection of technical literature and textbooks.

And Oleg independently, without having an official secondary education, mastered differential and integral calculus in mathematics, worked in physics general course university program - mechanics, heat, molecular physics, electricity and magnetism, atomic physics, and in chemistry - Nekrasov's two-volume book and Glinka's textbook for universities.

Of course, his dream, nuclear physics, occupied a special place in his studies. In nuclear physics, Oleg absorbed and assimilated everything that appeared in newspapers, magazines, and radio broadcasts.

The idea of using thermonuclear fusion to create a "dry", that is, without liquid deuterium and tritium, hydrogen bomb, was first conceived by Lavrentiev in the winter of 1948. The case helped: the command of the unit instructed him to prepare a lecture for personnel on the atomic problem.

“Having a few free days to prepare, I rethought all the accumulated material and found a solution to issues that I had been struggling with for more than one year,” Oleg Aleksandrovich recalled.

He found a substance - lithium-6 deuteride - capable of detonating under the influence of an atomic explosion, amplifying it many times due to a thermonuclear reaction - this is the first. And secondly, he came up with a scheme for using thermonuclear reactions for industrial purposes.

Private Lavrentiev came to the idea of a hydrogen bomb by successively sorting through various options for new nuclear chain reactions until he found what he was looking for.

What happened next was a matter of technique. In the two-volume book by Boris Vladimirovich Nekrasov, Oleg found a description of hydrides - chemical compounds with hydrogen (deuterium is heavy hydrogen). It turned out that it was possible to chemically bind deuterium and lithium-6 into a solid stable substance with a melting point of 700 °.

So, the essence of Lavrentiev's invention: thermonuclear process is initiated by a powerful pulsed neutron flux, which is obtained during the explosion of an atomic bomb. This stream gives rise to a nuclear reaction of the interaction of a neutron with lithium-6, the product of this reaction is tritium, which reacts with deuterium, and in sum both of these reactions lead to the release of enormous energy. In the above description, the scheme of the bomb is similar to the one that both the Americans and Tamm and Sakharov worked on, but only in it liquid deuterium and tritium were replaced by solid lithium deuteride.

In such a design, tritium is no longer needed, and this is no longer a device that would have to be brought on a barge to the enemy coast and blown up, but a real bomb, if necessary, delivered by a ballistic missile. Oleg Lavrentiev understood the importance of the discoveries made, and understood the need to bring them to the attention of specialists dealing with atomic problems.

In May 1949, having completed three classes in a year, Lavrentiev received a matriculation certificate. Demobilization was expected in July, Oleg was already preparing documents for admission committee Moscow State University, but the country experienced a terrible post-war shortage of men to serve in the army, and, quite unexpectedly for Lavrentiev, he was awarded the rank of junior sergeant and detained in the service for another year.

In August, a successful test of an atomic bomb in the USSR was reported, and junior sergeant Lavrentiev knew how to make a hydrogen bomb! And he wrote a letter to Stalin. It was a short note, just a few sentences, that he knew the secret of the hydrogen bomb. I did not receive a response to my letter.

After waiting for several months to no avail, Oleg wrote a letter on July 29, 1950 of the same content to the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. Oleg did not know that his message was immediately sent for review to the then Candidate of Sciences, and later Academician and three times Hero of Socialist Labor Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, who commented on the idea of controlled thermonuclear fusion: "... I consider it necessary to discuss in detail the draft comrade. Lavrentiev. Regardless of the results of the discussion, it is necessary to note the author's creative initiative right now." In the same 1950, Lavrentiev was demobilized.

He comes to Moscow, successfully passes the entrance exams and enters the Faculty of Physics of Moscow State University. A few months later, Vasily Alekseevich Makhnev, the Minister of Measuring Instrumentation, called him to him - that was the name of the Ministry of Atomic Industry in the realm of secrecy, respectively, the Institute of Atomic Energy was called the Laboratory of Measuring Instruments of the USSR Academy of Sciences, that is, LIPAN. At the minister's, Lavrentiev met Sakharov for the first time and found out that Andrei Dmitrievich had read his Sakhalin work, but they only managed to talk a few days later.

He was assigned a teacher of mathematics, then a candidate of sciences, and later an academician, Hero of Socialist Labor Alexander Andreevich Samarsky.

In May 1951, Stalin signed a decree of the Council of Ministers that laid the foundation for the State Program for Thermonuclear Research. Oleg received admission to LIPAN, where he gained experience in the field of emerging high-temperature plasma physics and at the same time learned the rules of working under the heading "Soviet secret". In LIPAN, Lavrentiev first learned about the ideas of Sakharov and Tamm on a thermonuclear reactor. - For me it was a big surprise, - says Oleg Alexandrovich. - When meeting with me, Andrei Dmitrievich did not say a single word about his work on the magnetic thermal insulation of plasma. Then I decided that we, Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov and I, came to the idea of plasma isolation by a field independently of each other, only I chose an electrostatic thermonuclear reactor as the first option, and he chose a magnetic one.

On August 12, 1953, the world's first hydrogen bomb was tested at the Semipalatinsk test site. It was the fourth Soviet test of a nuclear weapon. The power of the bomb reached 400 kilotons - this is 20 times more than the first atomic bombs in the USA and the USSR.

After the ordeal, Kurchatov turned to the 32-year-old Sakharov with a deep bow: "Thank you, the savior of Russia!" The Union received a deterrent that effectively prevented a third world war. For this achievement, Andrei Sakharov receives the first medal of the Hero of Socialist Labor.

Participants in the creation of new weapons receive state awards, titles and prizes, but Lavrentiev, for a reason completely incomprehensible to him, suddenly loses everything. In LIPAN, his permit was withdrawn, and he lost his permanent pass to the laboratory. A fifth-year student had to write a graduation project without an internship and without a supervisor on the basis of the theoretical work he had already done on the CTS. Despite this, he successfully defended himself, receiving a diploma with honors. However, the pioneer of this idea was not taken to work at LIPAN, the only place in the USSR where they were then engaged in controlled thermonuclear fusion.

Unable to get a distribution in Obninsk, after graduating from Moscow State University he goes to the Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology. A young specialist with an unusual fate came to Kharkov with a report on the theory of electromagnetic traps, which he wanted to show to the director of the institute K.D. Sinelnikov. But Kharkov is not Moscow. The inventor of controlled thermonuclear fusion, the creator of the hydrogen bomb, was settled in a hostel, in a room where eleven people lived.

Gradually, Oleg made friends and like-minded people, and in 1958 the first electromagnetic trap C1 was built at the Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology, in which a good agreement was achieved between the measured plasma values and the classical ones. This was a major victory in the fight against plasma instabilities.

In the same year, when the secrecy of thermonuclear research was removed, it turned out that dozens of different types of traps had already been created in the world.

At the 1968 Novosibirsk Conference on Plasma Physics and Controlled Thermonuclear Fusion, Lavrentiev's work on both electrostatic and electromagnetic traps received international recognition. The fact that after all it was he who first proposed to hold the plasma by the field, that the creation of the hydrogen bomb belongs to him, Oleg Alexandrovich found out by chance, having stumbled upon Tamm's memoirs in 1968 in one of the books. His last name was not, only an indistinct phrase about "one military officer Far East”, who proposed a method for the synthesis of hydrogen. Lavrentiev had no choice but to defend his scientific authority.

At the end of 1973, I sent an application to the State Committee for Inventions and Discoveries for the discovery of “Thermal-insulating effect of a force field,” says Lavrentiev. - This was preceded by a long search for my first Sakhalin work on thermonuclear fusion, which was required by the State Committee. When I asked, they answered me: the archives of the fifties were destroyed, and they advised me to apply for confirmation of the existence of this work to its first reviewer.

Andrey Sakharov sent me a short certificate, drawn up in accordance with all the rules, confirming the existence of my work and its content. Later, Golovin also responded to the request of Oleg Alexandrovich, who confirmed that Lavrentiev's letter "... initiated the birth of the Soviet research program on controlled thermonuclear fusion." But the documents did not impress the State Committee, although by that time this department had already issued 30 copyright certificates for inventions to the Kharkiv citizen. What was needed was the same handwritten Sakhalin letter that had sunk into oblivion.

In 2001, in the August issue of the journal "Uspekhi fizicheskih nauk" a series of articles "On the history of research on controlled thermonuclear fusion" appeared. An amazing coincidence - it was this edition that Sergeant Lavrentiev ordered on Sakhalin half a century ago. It tells in detail about the Lavrentiev case, contains a photograph of him from a personal file half a century ago, and, most importantly, for the first time presents documents found in the archive of the President of the Russian Federation, which were stored in a special folder under the heading “Top Secret”. Including the proposal of O. Lavrentiev, sent from Sakhalin on July 29, 1950, and Sakharov's review for this work, and L. Beria's instructions ... It turns out that no one destroyed these manuscripts! Scientific priority is restored, the name of Lavrentiev has taken its present place in the history of physics.

Today, his merits are recognized not only by world science.

In addition to the letters of Sakharov and Golovin, which contain a high appreciation of the work of Oleg Lavrentiev, there is also a letter of thanks from the Patriarch of Moscow and All Rus' Alexy II in blessing for sacrificial service to the Fatherland and a significant contribution to the creation of a nuclear weapons complex.

The first President of Ukraine Viktor Kuchma and local television came to visit him.

In July 2010, Oleg Lavrentiev was awarded the title of "Honorary Citizen of the City of Pskov".

On February 10, 2011, Oleg Alexandrovich Lavrentiev passed away. The condolences of the employees of the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine said: “Oleg Alexandrovich’s talent was equal to his modesty, but time put everything in its place, and the well-deserved recognition eventually came to him.”

Pskov is proud that Oleg Alexandrovich Lavrentiev contributed to the creation of the hydrogen bomb. And it is not known how the fate of our Motherland would have developed if this bomb had not been created in 1953. On July 22, 2011, a memorial plaque to the Honorary Citizen of the city of Pskov, nuclear physicist Oleg Lavrentiev, appeared at house No. 3 on Museum Lane.

Anna Timofeeva

Oleg Lavrentiev was born in 1926 in Pskov. Having read the book "Introduction to Nuclear Physics" in the 7th grade, he had a burning dream to work in the field of nuclear energy. But the war began, the occupation, and when the Germans were driven out, Oleg volunteered for the front. The young man met the victory in the Baltic states, but again his studies had to be postponed - he had to continue military service on Sakhalin, in the small town of Poronaysk.

Sakhalin work consisted of two parts - military and peaceful.

In the same 1950, Lavrentiev was demobilized. He comes to Moscow, successfully passes the entrance exams and enters the Faculty of Physics of Moscow State University. A few months later, he was summoned by the Minister of Instrumentation V.A. Makhnev - that was the name of the Ministry of Atomic Industry in the realm of secrecy, respectively, the Institute of Atomic Energy was called the Laboratory of Measuring Instruments of the USSR Academy of Sciences, that is, LIPAN. At the minister's, Lavrentiev met Sakharov for the first time and found out that Andrei Dmitrievich had read his Sakhalin work, but they only managed to talk a few days later, again at night. It was in the Kremlin, in the office of Lavrenty Beria, who was then a member of the Politburo, chairman of a special committee in charge of the development of atomic and hydrogen weapons in the USSR.

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After meetings in "high offices" Lavrentiev's life changed like in a fairy tale. He was given a room in a new house, given an increased scholarship, and the necessary scientific literature was delivered on demand. He took permission to attend classes freely. A teacher of mathematics, then a candidate of sciences, and later an academician, Hero of Socialist Labor A.A. was attached to him. Samara.

It was a big surprise for me, - Oleg Alexandrovich recalls. - When meeting with me, Andrei Dmitrievich did not say a single word about his work on the magnetic thermal insulation of plasma. Then I decided that we, Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov and I, came to the idea of plasma isolation by a field independently of each other, only I chose an electrostatic thermonuclear reactor as the first option, and he chose a magnetic one.

On August 12, 1953, a thermonuclear charge using lithium deuteride was successfully tested in the USSR. Participants in the creation of new weapons receive state awards, titles and prizes, but Lavrentyev, for a reason completely incomprehensible to him, loses a lot overnight. In LIPAN, his permit was withdrawn, and he lost his permanent pass to the laboratory. A fifth-year student had to write a graduation project without an internship and without a supervisor on the basis of the theoretical work he had already done on the CTS. Despite this, he successfully defended himself, receiving a diploma with honors. However, the pioneer of this idea was not hired to work at LIPAN, the only place in the USSR where they were then engaged in controlled thermonuclear fusion.

In the spring of 1956, a young specialist with an unusual fate came to our city with a report on the theory of electromagnetic traps, which he wanted to show to the director of the institute, K.D. Sinelnikov. But Kharkov is not Moscow. The inventor of the TCB was again settled in a hostel, in a room where eleven people lived. Gradually, Oleg made friends and like-minded people, and in 1958 the first electromagnetic trap was built at the KIPT.

At the end of 1973, I sent an application to the State Committee for Inventions and Discoveries for the discovery of "Thermal-insulating effect of the force field," says Lavrentiev. - This was preceded by a long search for my first Sakhalin work on thermonuclear fusion, which was required by the State Committee. When asked, I was then told that the secret archives of the fifties had been destroyed, and I was advised to apply for confirmation of the existence of this work to its first reviewer. Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov sent a certificate confirming the existence of my work and its contents. But the State Committee needed that same handwritten Sakhalin letter, which had sunk into oblivion.

But finally, in 2001, in the August issue of the journal "Uspekhi fizicheskikh nauk" a series of articles "On the history of research on controlled thermonuclear fusion" appears. Here, for the first time, the Lavrentiev case is described in detail, a photograph of him from a personal file of half a century ago is placed, and, most importantly, documents found in the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation, which were stored in a special folder under the heading "Soviet secret", are presented for the first time. Including Lavrentiev's proposal, sent from Sakhalin on July 29, 1950, and Sakharov's August review of this work, and instructions from L.P. Beria... Nobody destroyed these manuscripts. Scientific priority is restored, the name of Lavrentiev has taken its present place in the history of physics.

In 1948, Oleg Lavrentiev, a sergeant in one of the units located on Sakhalin, sent a letter to Stalin with a single phrase: "I know the secret of the hydrogen bomb." At that time, the USSR did not even have an atomic bomb, while the idea of a hydrogen bomb, according to Sakharov's memoirs, had "a very vague outline." The first letter in the secretariat of the leader was ignored, and after the second, a colonel of the NKVD was sent to the unit where the young sergeant served, who, having checked the adequacy of the author, took him to Moscow to Beria.

In order to heat the plasma in this device to the required temperatures, an electric current is excited using a magnetic field, the strength of which reaches 20 million amperes. It is worth recalling that modern man-made materials deal with a maximum of 6 thousand degrees Celsius (for example, in rocket technology) and after a single use they are only suitable for scrap. At 100 million degrees, any material will evaporate, so a very high magnetic field must keep the plasma in a vacuum inside the “donut”. The field does not allow charged particles to fly out of the “plasma cord” (the plasma is in a tokamak in a compressed and twisted form and looks like a cord), but the neutrons formed during the fusion reaction are not delayed by the magnetic field and transfer their energy to the internal walls of the installation (blanket), which are water cooled. The resulting steam can be sent to a turbine, just like in conventional power plants.

In the early 1950s, Lyman Spitzer, an American astronomer and physicist who worked at the Princeton Laboratory, had similar thoughts on curbing the thermonuclear reaction. He proposed a slightly different way of magnetically confining the plasma in a device called the "stellarator". In it, the plasma is held by magnetic fields created only by external conductors, in contrast to the tokamak, where a significant contribution to the creation of the field configuration is made by the current flowing through the plasma itself.

In 1954, the first tokamak was built at the Institute of Atomic Energy. At first, they did not spare money for the implementation of the idea: the military saw in such a reactor a source of neutrons for enriching nuclear materials and producing tritium. At first, even Sakharov believed that ten to fifteen years remained before the practical production of energy on such installations. The first to understand the ambiguity of prospects using controlled thermonuclear fusion was the military, and when in 1956 academician Igor Kurchatov asked Khrushchev to declassify this topic, they did not object. It was then that we learned about stellarators, and the Americans - about tokamaks.

Yes, the rise of our science in the post-war period was colossal, and when I entered the Faculty of Physics of Moscow State University in 1955, I took the advanced laboratory equipment for granted, and when I did an internship in Obninsk at the first nuclear power plant, I generally lived in paradise and mastered in the library and even kept the latest Western magazine and book production, including the most authoritative English and German-language publications on philosophy.

“Oleg Lavrentiev was born in 1926 in Pskov. Having read the book "Introduction to Nuclear Physics" in the 7th grade, he had a burning dream to work in the field of nuclear energy. But the war began, the occupation, and when the Germans were driven out, Oleg volunteered for the front. The young man met the victory in the Baltic states, but again his studies had to be postponed - he had to continue military service on Sakhalin, in the small town of Poronaysk.

Sakhalin work consisted of two parts - military and peaceful.

In the same 1950, Lavrentiev was demobilized. He comes to Moscow, successfully passes the entrance exams and enters the Faculty of Physics of Moscow State University. A few months later, he was summoned by the Minister of Instrumentation V.A. Makhnev - that was the name of the Ministry of Atomic Industry in the realm of secrecy. Accordingly, the Institute of Atomic Energy was called the Laboratory of Measuring Instruments of the USSR Academy of Sciences, that is, LIPAN. At the minister's, Lavrentiev met Sakharov for the first time and found out that Andrei Dmitrievich had read his Sakhalin work, but they only managed to talk a few days later, again at night. It was in the Kremlin, in the office of Lavrenty Beria, who was then a member of the Politburo, chairman of a special committee in charge of the development of atomic and hydrogen weapons in the USSR.

It was a big surprise for me, - Oleg Alexandrovich recalls. - When meeting with me, Andrei Dmitrievich did not say a single word about his work on the magnetic thermal insulation of plasma. Then I decided that we, Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov and I, came to the idea of plasma isolation by a field independently of each other, only I chose an electrostatic thermonuclear reactor as the first option, and he chose a magnetic one.

On August 12, 1953, a thermonuclear charge using lithium deuteride was successfully tested in the USSR. Participants in the creation of new weapons receive state awards, titles and prizes, but Lavrentyev, for a reason completely incomprehensible to him, loses a lot overnight. / MY COMMENT: Everyone knew that L.P., who had been arrested by that time, patronized him. Beria /. In LIPAN, his permit was withdrawn, and he lost his permanent pass to the laboratory. A fifth-year student had to write a graduation project without an internship and without a supervisor on the basis of the theoretical work he had already done on the CTS. Despite this, he successfully defended himself, receiving a diploma with honors. However, the pioneer of this idea was not hired to work at LIPAN, the only place in the USSR where they were then engaged in controlled thermonuclear fusion.

But finally, in 2001, in the August issue of the journal "Uspekhi fizicheskikh nauk" a series of articles "On the history of research on controlled thermonuclear fusion" appears. Here, for the first time, the Lavrentiev case is described in detail, a photograph of him from a personal file of half a century ago is placed, and, most importantly, documents found in the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation, which were stored in a special folder under the heading "Soviet secret", are presented for the first time. Including Lavrentiev's proposal, sent from Sakhalin on July 29, 1950, and Sakharov's August review of this work, and instructions from L.P. Beria... Nobody destroyed these manuscripts. Scientific priority is restored, the name of Lavrentiev has taken its present place in the history of physics.