Conference of young Russian nuclear researchers to begin near Nizhny Novrogod

Sarov, a town in Nizhny Novgorod region that is broadly known under the codename of Arzamas-16 is hosting the first-ever conference titled ‘Russia’s Nuclear Shield and Sword.’ It will bring together more than 300 young researchers and experts from eighteen enterprises and research centers reporting to the State Atomic Energy Corporation /Rosatom/ and to the Defense Ministry, the press service of Russia’s Federal Nuclear Research Center said. The latter center has been the main organizing force as regards the convocation of the conference. The gathering is dedicated to the 60th anniversary since the testing of Russian hydrogen bomb /RDS-6s/. The people who designed, assembled and tested that super-weapon, which became the Soviet Union’s durable and reliable shield in the years of the Cold War, have been invited to attend the conference as guests of honor. The list of the invitees includes Academician Yuri Trutnev, the veteran of the Sarov center, Nikolai Balandin, and Academician Radiy Ilkayev who heads the Sarov research center. Sarov officials note a sharp increase in the number of young researchers and workers who come to the center upon graduation from colleges and universities. The RDS-6s hydrogen bomb that was tested August 12, 1953 near Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan was also designed by young people the majority of whom - physicists and mathematicians many of whom were 25 to 27 years old at the time. Dr Andrei Sakharov, who came up with the idea of a sandwich-like structure of the bomb, in which the two layers of lithium would squeeze the heavier uranium. This proposal laid the groundwork for getting a thermonuclear reaction. The thermonuclear ‘beauty’ that had the power or 400 tons in the TNT equivalent is the largest and the most scaring of the bombs of different calibers that one can see in Sarov’s Museum of Nuclear Armaments.