Vitaly L. Ginzburg, 93, Developer of Hydrogen Bomb Is Dead
Matthew Kruk
Developer of Hydrogen Bomb Is Dead
By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ
MOSCOW - Vitaly L. Ginzburg, the Russian physicist who helped develop
the first Soviet hydrogen bomb and went on to win the Nobel Prize, died
in Moscow on Sunday. He was 93.
Mr. Ginzburg had been in poor health for some time, a spokeswoman for
the Russian Academy of Sciences said. Mr. Ginzburg was a member of the
academy as well as the in the United States and the Royal Society in
Britain. Russian press reports said he had died of a heart attack.
Born in the waning days of czarist Russia on Oct. 4, 1916, Mr. Ginzburg
overcame severe prejudices against his Jewish, middle-class heritage in
the Stalin era to become one of the world's most renowned physicists.
In 2003 he won the Nobel Prize for his contributions to the theory of
superconductors, substances that under certain conditions are able to
conduct electricity without resistance. The powerful magnets that make
particle accelerators and magnetic resonance imaging possible depend on
superconductors.
Mr. Ginzburg's theories have also been employed in string theory and
other fields of physics. He shared the award with a British scientist,
Anthony Leggett, and with Alexei Abrikosov, a Russian-born American.
After World War II, Mr. Ginzburg worked with Andrei Sakharov, later one
of the Soviet Union's most famous dissidents, to develop the Soviet
hydrogen bomb. Mr. Ginzburg came up with the recipe for the weapon's
nuclear fuel, for which he received the Order of Lenin and Stalin Prize.
"Then an especially terrible time came: Stalin went totally insane," he
wrote in his 2003 autobiography for the Nobel committee.
Stalin initiated a wave of anti-Semitism and hostility toward
intellectuals in the early 1950s that nearly derailed Mr. Ginzburg's
career. He was removed from the hydrogen bomb project, accused of
anti-Communist leanings and denied promotions, he wrote. He also
suffered for his marriage to a woman who had once been arrested on
charges of plotting to assassinate Stalin.
"It was a tremendous luck that the Great Leader did not have enough time
to carry out what he had planned to do and died, or was killed, on 5th
March, 1953," Mr. Ginzburg wrote. "In the former U.S.S.R. many people
(at any rate, my wife and I) have up till now been celebrating this day
as a great festival."
After Stalin's death, Mr. Ginzburg used the prestige he had gained as a
scientist to speak on social issues when the political climate allowed.
Though an atheist himself, Mr. Ginzburg openly denounced prejudice
against Jews in the perestroika-era Soviet Union. In 1990, he and
several others sent a petition to the Soviet government calling for an
official condemnation of anti-Semitism in the country.
In recent years, Mr. Ginzburg warned of the increasing degradation of
science in Russia and criticized officials for not taking a more active
role in promoting scientific innovation.
He also spoke out against the increasingly close relationship between
the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church. In 2007 he and several
other scientists signed an open letter to Vladimir V. Putin, who was
then Russia's president and is now its prime minister, expressing
concern with the "increased clericalization of Russian society."
Oleg Rudenko, a fellow physicist, told Echo Moskvy Radio, "Vitaly
Lazarevich Ginzburg is of course an eminent physicist." Mr. Rudenko
said, "But no less important were his public activities and his articles
in support and defense of science."
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