[Xmca-l] Re: Anniversary for Sakharov's essay

[David Kellogg]

Yes, I remember. But I remember a good bit more than that.

In 1958, the year before I was born, my father helped to confirm the
existence of two large belts of ionized matter around the earth which do
not cover the poles. These were named van Allen belts, after James van
Allen, of the University of Iowa, who helped supervise the discovery and
provided the theoretical basis for thinking they were there. My father used
otherwise useless data from America's first two satellites, hastily put up
in response to Sputnik, in order to confirm their existence.

In 1962, my father and his colleague Ed Nye calculated that the amount of
energy in the belts was roughly equal to the amount of energy released by
the hydrogen bombs then being developed in the USA and the USSR. Sakharov
was project scientist in the USSR and directly responsible for the largest
thermonuclear device very exploded, the "Moab", or "mother of all bombs";
Teller was his equivalent in the USA). They speculated that it might be
possible to destroy the van Allen belts with a hydrogen bomb exploded in
space and casually mentioned the possibility to a science reporter for the
New York Times.

Dad realized that we didn't know what the consequences of destroying the
van Allen belts would be, and when the NYT called up for follow-up he
denied ever suggesting the possibility. Both men were then frog-marched to
the Pentagon and told that never to mention the possibility again--because
the experiment HAD ALREADY BEEN DONE, as part of the "Starfish Prime"
experiments over Hawaii.

Sakharov says, in his essay, that like most intellectuals he went through
three phases in his journey beyond the valley of disillustionment with the
Soviet system. The first was belief in his country and readiness to do
everything he could to help socialism vanquish fascism. The second was
"symmetry"--that is, the belief that governments everywhere were engaged in
bad things, and that for every foolish bit of hubris like "Moab" there as a
corresponding reckless act like "Starfish Prime". The third was that,
according to Sakharov, there was neither country nor symmetry--the USSR, he
says, is like a cancer cell, and the USA like a healthy one.

I heard a commentator on the BBC yesterday wondering foolishly why Sergei
Prokofiev would give up a promising career as a modernist in New York and
return, in 1938, to write patriotic drivel like War and Peace, and
Alexander Nevsky. The answer is simple. Sakharov got it right the first
time. If there is no symmetry, it's only in this: over there people asked
questions and over here people don't. And the cancer is not socialism, but
scientism: Sakharov was the part of the disease, not part of the cure.

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New in *Early Years*, co-authored with Fang Li:

When three fives are thirty-five: Vygotsky in a Hallidayan idiom … and
maths in the grandmother tongue

Some free e-prints available at:

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/7I8zYW3qkEqNBA66XAwS/full



On Sat, Jul 21, 2018 at 1:16 PM, Annalisa Aguilar <annalisa@unm.edu> wrote:

> Hello Xmcars and venerable others,
>
>
> I saw this in the NYT, thought it would be the stuff of good discussion in
> the hear and know:
>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/20/opinion/andrei-sakharov-e
> ssay-soviet-union.html
>
>
> Additionally, here is the PDF of the original essay, "Thoughts on
> Progress, Peaceful Co-existence and Intellectual Freedom"  appearing in the
> NYT on July 22, 1968. You will have to enlarge it to about 250% to be able
> to read it.
>
>
> By chance, who here on the list remembers the splash this essay made?
> Anyone?
>
>
> I especially enjoy this sentence: "Freedom of thought is the only
> guarantee of the feasibility of a scientific democratic approach to
> politics, economy, and culture."
>
>
> Kind regards, as always,
>
>
> Annalisa
>
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