This man was one of the most classified academics in the USSR

The academic, quoted by Stephen Hawking, didn’t even have a university diploma. However, for almost 20 years, he was kept under close guard in the closed town of Sarov. Zeldovich knew too much, as he headed the nuclear project, but most importantly, he was considered a genius.

E.Kassin/Sputnik

At 22 years old, he defended his dissertation for the Candidate of Sciences degree. At 25, he became a Doctor of Sciences and, at 29, he received his first of four Stalin Prizes. He received it for his discoveries in physics of explosions and the theory of combustion, which were his biggest passions.

Along with another physicist named Yulii Khariton, he practically invented the nuclear bomb back in the 1930s, when no one was interested in it (A decade later, the design of his colleague, academic Sakharov, was accepted for development and tested). In the 1950s, he became a co-author of RDS-6s, a transportable hydrogen bomb, the yield of which exceeded that of a nuclear bomb by 20 times.

RFNC-VNIIEF/russiainphoto.ru

But the most ambitious project of Zeldovich appeared in 1958, a year before the Soviet spacecraft ‘Luna 2’ was launched to the Moon. This spacecraft became the first one in the world to land on the surface of the Moon. A year prior to the mission, Zeldovich proposed to equip it with a nuclear charge and literally blow up the Moon. Why? In short, to demonstrate the space-military superiority of the USSR and “every space observatory with its gaze trained on the Moon would be able to register it”.

Yes, this was a mad idea, but, back then, it had a lot of supporters. Thankfully, they decided not to do it. The risks of the warhead not reaching its destination and falling back on Earth were too high.

Read more: The story of Kliment Voroshilov, the Soviet Union’s first marshal

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