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Monday, September 12, 2011

Andrei Sakharov Essay

Andrei Sakharov Essay

Throughout history, societies have practiced the erroneous concept that by imprisoning or destroying a person, they can also destroy the ideas that this person believes in and espoused. Many people have stood up against governments or societies because they feel that the government was committing a crime against its citizens. When one person stands up to a large and powerful government, the government tries to destroy his beliefs by destroying him. Most times his beliefs live on even if he is murdered by the government. His Beliefs live on by other people seeing what the government is doing and then standing up for what they feel is right. Andrei Sakharov is one of these people who saw a government doing something unjust and decided to stand up for what was right. He saw that what he had built for the Soviet Union, the Hydrogen bomb, was dangerous and he also felt it was wrong the way they were testing the bomb. He was then exiled for standing up for what he believed in.
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Andrei Sakharov was born in Moscow, Russia on May 21, 1921. At a young age Sakharov learned respect for work, mastery of one's profession, and decency towards other human beings. He went of to be one of the most brilliant students of his class at the University of Moscow were he majored in physics. He was exiled from World War II because of his studies of Physics. He was employed for a few years as an engineer and patented several inventions. After the war with Germany, he was recruited into the Soviets top-secret Nuclear Weapons Program were he went onto be known as the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb. He soon saw that he had helped create a great monster.

In 1957, Sakharov saw the damages nuclear weapons had on the environment. He wrote a pioneering article on the effects of low-level radiation. Sakharov also would not contribute anymore research to the Soviet Nuclear Weapons Program. With in ten years his work took a more civic tone. In 1964 he led a group of prominent intellectuals and artists to stop the rehabilitation of Stalin. He then emerged dramatically in the human-rights struggle and became the movement's inspiration, with the publishing of his essay "Reflection on Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom". He urged an end to the cold war, and a reconstruction of the Soviet Union and the rest of the World.

Sakharov believed that the Soviet Union needed much reform. He wanted a halt to be called all nuclear weapons tested in the USSR. He also pushed for the World wide nuclear disarmament. Sakharov has a large advocate for human rights, which was seen as treason in the Soviet Union. He was also a leader in the defense of prisoners of conscience, which were people imprisoned by the Soviet Union because of what the believed about the USSR. Sakharov was also against the military action against Afghanistan in December 1979.

For Sakharov's civil disobedience, which was seen as treason to the Soviet government, he and his family were exiled to the Gorky, 250 miles east of Moscow on January 22, 1980. He was never charged, tried before a court of law, or convicted. Sakharov was seen as a "Judas" and a "lad rat of the west". They say him as trying to undermine the Soviet Union for the Western World.

Sakharov's ideas did live on after his exile and his death. For one he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, even though he was not given a visa to leave his country. His work help start the Moscow Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963. A decade and a half pasted before his Nobel Peace Prize showed any change in civil rights for the Soviet Union. In June 1989, at the First Congress of People's Deputies, Sakharov appealed for a radical reformation of the Soviet system and for an end to the Communist Party's dictatorship. Only a few days before his death, he completed a draft of a new constitution for the "Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia."

After his exile, he was a free man for less than three years, but these were the years when the totalitarian colossus began to crumble. Andrei Sakharov witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the beginning of irreversible changes that swept Russia. He also saw his ideas, his steadfast, uncompromising dedication to truth and justice, shared by thousands of people in his country. In his endeavor to "make good the demands of reason and create a life worthy of ourselves and of the goals we only dimly perceive," he revealed those rare qualities that distinguish genius from talent: the ability to identify the crucial element in complex situations, great originality, and an instinct for the currents of time. He also was never halted in his works for civil rights and nuclear disarmament, even after the Soviet Union tried to "control" his ideas by imprisoning him. He is a great example of a person not changing there ideas even while they are pressed to.

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