Apocalypse engineer: Ukrainian helped Oppenheimer create a nuclear bomb, and then fought for the disarmament of the world

Ukrainian Georgy Kistyakovsky helped Oppenheimer create a nuclear bomb, and then advised three US presidents to abandon it. His story is told Babel.

Photo: IStock

Among the characters in Christopher Nolan's film "Oppenheimer" is scientist George Kistiakowski. This American physicist and chemist of Ukrainian origin was one of the direct creators of the atomic bomb - in fact, it was he who designed the trigger for the first nuclear explosion in Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945.

He became George in the USA. Georgy Kistyakovsky was born in Boyarka near Kiev in 1900. It is hard to think of a more difficult time for a quiet professorial life. At the age of 18 he fought with the Bolsheviks, at 25 he defended his doctorate in Berlin, at 30 he taught at Harvard, and at 40 he became a well-known explosives expert.

For these merits, he was invited to the project to create an atomic bomb. Kistiakovsky then served as a science adviser to three American presidents and actively campaigned for nuclear disarmament. And then he joined the anti-government movement against the war.

At the epicenter of history

Kistyakovsky was a scientist with combat experience. He was born in 1900 in Boyarka near Kiev into a family of intellectuals. His paternal grandfather Alexander Kistyakovsky was a law professor and a well-known criminal lawyer. Father Bogdan worked as a professor of philosophy, in tsarist times he was considered politically unreliable, and in 1919 he became a member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. His uncle Igor was the Minister of the Interior in the government of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadsky.

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Brother Oleksandr became an outstanding Ukrainian ornithologist and headed the Department of Zoology at Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv.

George from childhood occupied the world of substances. While still studying in Kyiv, during the war, he got the hang of finding unexploded shells on the battlefield, neutralizing them, and selling the stuffing.

After the Bolshevik coup, 18-year-old George joined the White movement and fought against the Soviet regime. Further - a short service in the cavalry, evacuation by steamer from the Crimea, typhus and Turkish captivity. Georgy Bogdanovich did not like to remember this, reports TInvariant.

In 1921 he finally reached Paris. There, Georgy met Uncle Igor, who also fled the Bolshevik regime, but not empty-handed, but with jewels sewn into the lining of his clothes. This was enough for him to equip a law office and pay for his nephew's education at the University of Berlin.

In 1925 Kistyakovsky defended his Ph.D. thesis in physical chemistry. In 1926, on the recommendation of his supervisor, Professor Bodenstein, he received a scholarship and a teaching position at Princeton University and went to America. In 1930, Kistyakovsky was invited to Harvard in the Department of Chemistry. Within three years, he received American citizenship as George Kistiakovsky.

Explosive career

In the US, Kistiakovsky became an explosives expert. Scientific advances gradually led him into the military sphere. In 1940, Kistiakovsky joined the National War Research Committee and became head of the Explosives Research Laboratory at Harvard. He experimented with various types of explosives, most notably RDX, a powerful explosive developed by the Germans. One of the main tasks was to establish the production of hexogen on an industrial scale.

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He created dozens of new chemical compounds, including what would later be called a plastic bomb, as well as the world's first "edible" explosive, which saved China from destruction. While experimenting with RDX, Kistiakovsky also found a use for one of its by-products, HMX. He mixed this non-toxic explosive with flour so that the Chinese guerrillas could smuggle it in to fight the Japanese. It was a kind of "edible explosive" from which both bombs and pancakes could be made. Subsequently, his developments in the field of explosive processes were compared with the invention of dynamite by Alfred Nobel.

nuclear experience

Without Kistyakovsky, the atomic bomb might not have taken place. In early 1943, a group of scientists led by Robert Oppenheimer went to Los Alamos to work on the US nuclear program. The first work was focused on "gun-type" designs. In simple terms, one piece of a critical substance was shot at another to create a nuclear chain reaction. For the uranium bomb, this approach worked.

But for plutonium, the new technology of implosion, an inward-directed explosion that compresses the charge of a nuclear bomb until the mass of plutonium becomes supercritical, was more suitable.

This is where the experience of Kistyakovsky was needed, and in October 1943 he was invited to join the Manhattan Project.

At first he wanted to refuse: he had never worked with nuclear fuel before, but the head of the Manhattan Project, Robert Oppenheimer, managed to persuade him. To do this, he even took unprecedented liberties: he allowed Kistyakovsky's daughter Vera to visit him in the summer (at a secret facility!). The first thing George did when he arrived was to buy a pair of horses for family outings.

Usually the secret service, which looked after scientists, forbade this, but they made an exception for Kistiakovsky. Vera spent the summers of 1944 and 1945 there. She recalled how she and her father rode horses, and he sometimes violated safety rules to impress her. One day at dinner, he pointed to one of the scientists and told his daughter that it was the famous Danish physicist Niels Bohr. It was impossible to do this - Bohr worked at Los Alamos under a pseudonym. Subsequently, Vera Kistyakovskaya followed her father's path of nuclear physics. She became the first professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and actively campaigned for gender equality in science.

Kistyakovsky coped with his task - he developed complex polygonal explosive lenses, which became a kind of trigger for the atomic bomb. After a series of experiments, Kistyakovsky came up with the idea of ​​the combined action of two different explosives with different detonation velocities. The first (fast) was supposed to create the main wave, and the second (slow) was to correct it and direct it exactly to the core. A mixture of hexogen, TNT, and torpex was used as a fast explosive, and a slow one was developed specifically at the request of Kistyakovsky in his Pittsburgh laboratory. She received the name baratol.

When, in July 1945, the required lens molds were finally made and delivered to Kistiakovsky's laboratory, they already had traces of corrosion and small cracks. The chemist was furious! Time was running out, and he had to fix defects with a dental drill and liquid explosives. Years later, he would describe his condition at that moment as follows: “I thought if twenty-three kilograms of explosives exploded in my hands, I would hardly feel it.”

The first tests were scheduled for July 16, 1945. On the morning of July 16, the situation at the Alamogordo training ground was close to hysterical. The body of the bomb did not even have time to be bolted, but simply rewound abundantly with adhesive tape. But everything went smoothly in the end. The explosion made an unforgettable impression on scientists.

“I am sure that when the end of the world comes, in the last millisecond of the Earth’s existence, humanity will see the same thing that we have now seen,” Kistyakovsky said then.

In early August 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “There was no party after Hiroshima. The people who created such a terrible weapon simply could not have fun about it. Only after the surrender of Japan came a huge relief. The war is over, and not a single American soldier will die again, ”recalled Vera Kistyakovskaya, who at that time came to her father in Los Alamos.

Vector change

Kistiakovsky became an anti-war activist. After the closure of the Manhattan Project, Kistyakovsky returned to his favorite work - teaching and research at Harvard. But the nuclear race was growing. The White House did not forget about him. In 1957, he was invited to the Presidential Advisory Committee on Science under the Dwight Eisenhower administration. Scientists received unprecedented power: they could veto the decisions of the heads of departments, influence personnel changes and the distribution of budgets. One day, the president asked Kistyakovsky to analyze the activities of the Strategic Directorate of the Air Force with the words: "I do not trust these generals, so I sent George to look into it."

Kistyakovsky was also a scientific adviser to other American presidents: John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

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In this position, the scientist advocated that the nuclear arms control strategy should be focused on disarmament, and not on inspections. According to Kistiakovsky's proposal, all nuclear tests that exceed the level of seismic detection technology should be banned. These provisions were included in the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in the Atmosphere, Outer Space and Under Water. It was signed by the then nuclear powers - the USA, the USSR and Great Britain.

For services to the state, Kistyakovsky received several awards. However, in the late 1960s, he severed ties with the government in protest of the Vietnam War.

In the end, he realized that the role of experts is largely dependent on the whims of politicians, in whose hands is real power. “I began to understand that politics is created in a way that is highly questionable. Its formation involves people who do not know the real facts and who do not have time to study them due to bureaucratic employment. Some are at a low intellectual level,” he wrote.

In 1972, he retired from Harvard and became active in the movement to prevent nuclear war. The scientist became a member, and later chairman of the Council for a Liveable World, and campaigned against the spread of nuclear weapons. “Back in Los Alamos, I had a sad experience. In the spring of 1945, intelligence told us that Japan would not give up so easily, and we would have to organize an invasion with huge human losses. This convinced me that the use of atomic bombs was justified in order to end the war as quickly as possible. Then I gradually realized that this was not so, ”Kistyakovsky recalled.

Kistyakovsky emphasized his Ukrainian origin. As a scientific adviser to the president, he repeatedly talked about his Ukrainian roots and membership in Ukrainian organizations, in particular, the Taras Shevchenko Scientific Society. But all his life he constantly had to clarify that he was Ukrainian, not Russian. This happened during his last interview in 1982, when he was asked again: “You are Russian, right?” To which Kistyakovsky replied: “No, I am Ukrainian. It's like telling a Scot that he's English."

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