REMINISCENSES OF RUSSIA Irvin R. (Irv) Lindemuth June 2017 “It is easy to blow up our planet. All it takes is a button to be pressed …,” Russian school children’s song. “After so many years of very bad relations between our countries, this work is extraordinary...I wish you further success," Yuli B. Khariton, September 1993. “All of you can be sure your children and grandchildren will be proud and this is the beginning...,” Yuri Trutnev, September 1993. The words above by Yu. B. Khariton, founder of the Soviet nuclear weapons program and Chief Scientist of the All-Russian Scientific Research Center of Experimental Physics (VNIIEF) in Sarov, were spoken to a Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) team after the completion of the first joint fundamental scientific experiment conducted at VNIIEF with LANL. Trutnev, Deputy Chief Scientist of VNIIEF and a colleague of Nobel Peace Laureate Andre Sakharov, added his comments at a banquet celebrating the same experiment. Khariton was absolutely right: the budding LANL/VNIIEF collaboration was extraordinary and it was unprecedented in the nuclear age. Trutnev was absolutely right, too: it was just the beginning, and his words imply the hopes of all of those who have participated in the collaboration: that our children and grandchildren will live in a world free of the international tensions and fear of nuclear war that put a cloud over his and my generation. For the author and most, if not all, of the LANL members of the collaboration, the opportunity to participate in the collaboration was one of the highlights of their careers. Each participant in this collaboration has accumulated a lengthy string of memories. These memories will be shared over and over with our grandchildren and any one else who will listen. This review of those memories supplements the Lindemuth/Reinovsky and Garanin chapters that appear in Doomed to Collaborate.1,2 It is also in many ways a supplement to 1 I. R. Lindemuth and R. E. Reinovsky,” LANL/VNIIEF Collaboration in Pulsed-Power- Based High-Energy-Density Physics—An American Perspective,” in Doomed to Collaborate: How American and Russian scientists joined forces to avert some of the greatest post-Cold-War nuclear dangers, edited by S. S. Hecker (Bathtub Row Press, Los Alamos NM, 2016), Vol. II, pp. 199-214 2S. F. Garanin, ”LANL/VNIIEF Collaboration in Pulsed-Power-Based High-Energy- Density Physics—A Russian Perspective,” ibid, Vol. II, pp. 215-234. 1 previously published articles. 3 Although this review stands alone, the author recommends that the reader first become familiar with these prior publications. In the following, I share some of my favorite memories of my interactions with VNIIEF scientists and Sarov residents. Most of the memories are from time spent in Russia. I also have many memories of the times the LANL team hosted VNIIEF scientists in the US. Some of those experiences, as seen through the eyes of VNIIEF scientists, have been documented.4 These memories are, for the most part, memories shared with my LANL and VNIIEF colleagues. They are memories that cover more than two-and-one-half decades. Setting the stage for collaboration 1989-1992 July 1989 My first trip to Russia was for participation in Megagauss-V, the Fifth International Conference on Megagauss Magnetic Field Generation and Related Topics. As discussed in Reference 1, the series of Megagauss conferences provided a forum throughout the Cold War for US-Russian dialog on magnetic flux-compression technology and applications, and essentially all of the initial LANL/VNIIEF collaborative topics that would be delineated in a June 1992 meeting were topics that historically fell under the megagauss conference umbrella. My adventures in trying to secure visas and prepaid vouchers required for the trip will not be described in detail here. Suffice it to say, after having spent hours on the phone in Moscow, having taken a trip to Sheremetevo airport unaccompanied and having spent hours in back rooms of the airport’s freight terminal, I never did receive vouchers forwarded to me by a US travel agency—fortunately, the conference organizers were able to arrange for me continue my travel in spite of not having the vouchers normally needed. On a post-conference tour in St. Petersburg, we overheard some teenagers speaking English. We were to learn that they were travelling with the Hugh O’Brien Youth Foundation. And, because O’Brien was travelling with them, I met face-to-face with a 3I. Lindemuth, “”US-Russian Nuclear Cooperation and the CTBT,” Nonproliferation Review 16:483 (November 2009); I. Lindemuth, “Removing a Roadblock to the US Russian Nuclear Reset,” Nonproliferation Review 17:214 (July 2010). 4 In addition to Reference 2, the following papers by VNIIEF authors describe both pulsed-power collaboration and personal stories of that collaboration: A. A. Petrukhin, “The VNIIEF and LANL Interaction in the Field of Thermonuclear Fusion Using MAGO Systems”; V. P. Korchagin, “Experimental Studies of Magnetized Thermonuclear Plasma. Our Experience in the International Collaboration”; B. E. Grinevich, “Liner Experiment”; and Mikhail Ivanovich Dolotenko, “High Interaction Energy, International Collaboration in the Field of Ultra-high Magnetic Field Investigations.” (All articles will be available in this electronic archive, translated from: International Scientific Cooperation of RFNC-VNIIEF: Perspectives, Views, Recollections. Sarov: FGUP “RFNC-VNIIEF”, 2010.) 2 boyhood hero of mine who had played Wyatt Earp in the television series of the same name. Describing my observations in a trip report, I wrote, Because this was my first visit to the Soviet Union, I experienced for the first time the Soviet society and culture. For clearly irrational reasons, I entered the Soviet Union expecting a very different world. Because of my mindset … I had a rather strange feeling as I adjusted to the fact that … the people of the Soviet Union are like people in the United States. Little did I know then that over the next two decades and more, I would learn even more just how much alike we are. I also wrote “there were even suggestions of using Soviet DEMGs to drive US loads and that US scientists spend six months at a Soviet laboratory … the collaborative efforts should be actively pursued.” Little did any of us realize what the future held in store. September 1991 Because I had interacted with Russian scientists from the Kurchatov Insitute in Moscow, most notably L. Rudakov, at international conferences, I had been invited to present lectures at the 2nd International Youth School on Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, which was to be held in Sochi, September 13-19, 1991. The attempted coup just a few weeks earlier had put the trip in jeopardy and it was only a few days before departure that the school organizers had confirmed that the school would be held as scheduled. I was then on a LANL sabbatical to the Nuclear Engineering Department of Texas A&M University in College Station TX. Unfortunately, in spite of my frequent phone calls, many unanswered and unreturned, to Washington during the weeks prior to the trip, the US Department of Energy had not granted permission to travel right up until it was time to depart for the airport in Houston TX, some two hours away. At essentially the last moment before I would have to cancel my flight, I made contact with a person who told me “your trip has been approved … the last signature was obtained yesterday but I didn’t enter the approval into the computer until this morning because I had to go to a class.” It was an eerie feeling as our small twin-engine YAK40 jet to Sochi took off from Moscow, climbing into cloud cover so heavy that all we could see as the “CCCP” on the wing tip. Recognizing that there was still a possibility of some unrest in Russia, my wife, Hedy, and I didn’t really know if anyone would know where to find us if turmoil erupted. 3 Figure 1. Looking out window as plane takes off from Moscow en route to Sochi (September 1991) At the school it was obvious that most of the Russian participants were using the school as an opportunity to recover from the traumatic events in their country just a few weeks earlier. Several of the participants had taken to the streets in Moscow to protest. When I had received the invitation to the School, I had attempted to make contact with V. K. Chernyshev, hoping to set up a visit to Sarov (or Arzamas-16 as we knew it then) as a follow-up to the discussions that had taken place in June at the IEEE Pulsed Power Conference in San Diego and in Los Alamos. Through sporadic communications before my US departure and during the School itself, a visit to VNIIEF appeared to be a distinct possibility even though, to my knowledge, the only previous western visitors to VNIIEF was the Joint Verification Experiment (JVE) team in 1989. Chernyshev had phoned me, and subsequently the School chairman, in Sochi inquiring about the return schedule to Moscow. As I wrote in my trip report, I was to find out … later that the return (to Moscow) schedule, coupled with our scheduled departure from Moscow the following day, made the security people at VNIIEF ‘very happy,’ for in their minds the schedule made it impossible for me to visit (VNIIEF). Because I could not visit VNIIEF, Chernyshev, Vladislav Mokhov and several of his colleagues travelled to Moscow to meet me at my hotel near the Kurchatov Institute upon my return to Moscow. Although we had studied papers authored by Mokhov, this was apparently the first time that an American had met him.