Special Issue: Andrei Sakharov

Until Andrei Sakharov published his essay “Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom,” most physicists had never heard of him. That year, 1968, I was attending an international conference on plasma physics and controlled fusion in Novosibirsk. A highlight of that meeting was the Soviet announcement of new experimental results on the tokamak that demonstrated its outstanding confinement properties. The Soviet results led to a major reorientation of magnetic fusion research. But one of the inventors of the tokamak, Sakharov, was absent. When one of us Americans asked after him, our host, Andrei Budker, replied, “Don’t ask about him or you may be visited by the KGB.”

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