Black Sun

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

Black Sun is based on a true story.

At 10:50 Moscow time on the morning of 30 October 1961, a specially adapted Tupolev-95 bomber took off from Olenya air base carrying the most powerful weapon ever created by mankind.

The twenty-seven-ton, twenty-six-foot-long device’s code name was RDS-220. American journalists later nicknamed it the Tsar Bomb. But RDS-220’s actual creators took it far too seriously to call the bomb by anything but its real name. In truth, they feared it. In the weeks leading up to the test-firing of RDS-220, the bomb’s real-life designer, academician Andrei Sakharov, of whom my fictional Yury Adamov is a dark twin, became concerned that his new device was so powerful that it might cause a runaway chain reaction in atmospheric hydrogen, or possibly nitrogen. Sakharov ordered a team of his engineers at Arzamas-16 to calculate the chances that the detonation might actually set the earth’s atmosphere on fire.

Earlier in his career, Sakharov had speculated about the theoretical possibility of even larger bombs, of two hundred and five hundred megatons. But he was so shocked by the results of his colleagues’ theoretical conclusions about the unpredictable effects of RDS-220 that he made a radical decision. Ten days before the test, he ordered the device’s revolutionary new uranium tamper to be replaced with a lead one. The bomb makers of Arzamas-16 had finally touched the outer limit of science. They had created a bomb too powerful for the earth to withstand. And they stepped back.

Even with a specially extended runway, the Tupolev took off with difficulty. The bomb’s weight was twice that of the aircraft’s usual payload. Both the release plane and a Tu-16 observer aircraft that was to take air samples and film the test had been painted with special reflective white paint to minimize heat damage. But despite this precaution, the chances that the crew would survive the test were put at 50 percent. The Tupolev’s pilot, Major Andrei Durnovtsev, had been informed of the risk. The rest of his airmen had not.

Shortly after 11:30, Durnovtsev had reached Mityushikha Bay, a nuclear testing range in the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. The film of the test shows a desolate landscape of snow and rock. At 11:32 Moscow time, at an altitude of 10,500 meters above Zone C of the Sukhoy Nos section of the test site, he released the bomb. Its fall was slowed by specially made parachutes designed to allow the plane time to get a safe distance from the detonation.

The altimeter-activated firing mechanism of RDS-220 detonated perfectly at four thousand meters. The fireball nearly reached the altitude of the release plane and caused both aircraft to tumble more than a kilometer. In the official film, the cameraman in the Tu-16 observer plane struggles to maintain focus on the detonation during the free fall. But both aircrews survived.

The explosion destroyed every building, both wooden and brick, in the evacuated village of Severny, some 55 kilometers from ground zero. The heat from the blast, according to unmanned sensors, was still strong enough to have caused third-degree burns 100 kilometers away. The thermal pulse was felt by human observers 270 kilometers distant. The shock wave broke windows in Norway and Finland, some 900 kilometers from the test site.

The mushroom cloud eventually rose to an altitude of 64,000 meters, over seven times the height of Mount Everest and far above the earth’s stratosphere. The cap of the mushroom cloud had a peak width of 95 kilometers and its base was 40 kilometers wide. It could be seen over a thousand kilometers away. Earthquake sensors in America and Japan registered the blast as a seismic wave measuring 5.5 on the Richter scale, and the shock waves were still measurable on their third circuit of the earth.

Sakharov and his team later estimated the yield of RDS-220 at 56 million tons of TNT, the equivalent of 3,800 Hiroshima bombs detonated simultaneously, or ten times the combined energy of all the conventional explosives used in World War II. The zone of “total destruction,” formally defined by Soviet military planners of the day as the complete annihilation of all buildings and life, was 70 kilometers across, roughly equivalent to the entire area of metropolitan Paris.

The world was shocked. Sakharov was shocked. The power of RDS-220—even in its reduced form — was so enormous that Sakharov, the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, refused to ever work on another device. He began to campaign, first within the Academy of Sciences and then publicly, for a total ban on atmospheric nuclear testing. It was to be the first of many, increasingly existential, battles that Sakharov was to fight against Soviet power. Amazingly, he was ultimately to win them all, though at the cost of his career, his privileges, and his health.

Sakharov’s first victory came in 1963, when both the United States and the USSR agreed to sign the first Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. The world’s nuclear powers continued to test much smaller nuclear bombs underground and under the sea, but never again was a nuclear device detonated in the atmosphere. Sakharov went on to become the Soviet Union’s most prominent dissident, applying his fearless physicist’s rigor to his attacks on the amorality of the Soviet State. He successfully campaigned for the right of dissidents and Jews, the so-called refuseniks, to leave the USSR. During Mikhail Gorbachev’s era of glasnost, Sakharov became a passionate and authoritative voice calling for a frank appraisal of the Soviet crimes of the past. Sakharov was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1975. In 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed.

My fictional Adamov is not Sakharov, though both Adamov and Korin give voice to the paradoxical hope argued in Sakharov’s Memoirs, that they are building bombs in order to create world peace. Adamov’s story is borrowed from the lives of two giants of Soviet science: Nobel Prize winner Lev Landau, who pioneered much of the quantum physics used in the hydrogen bomb, and Academician Sergei Korolev, the father of the Soviet manned space program.

Landau was born to a Jewish family in Baku in 1908. He studied with Niels Bohr, one of the fathers of nuclear physics, in Copenhagen before voluntarily returning to Stalin’s Russia in 1932 to head the Department of Theoretical Physics at the Institute of Physics and Technology in Kharkov, Ukraine. Under Landau, the Kharkov Institute became one of the world’s leading centers for nuclear physics; the discoveries listed in my fiction under Adamov’s name in reality belong to Landau. Like Sakharov, and like Adamov, Landau was fearless in his moral judgments of the Soviet State, despite working in the heart of its defense establishment. In 1956 the KGB noted that Landau described the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian uprising as “red fascism.” But like all the cloud dwellers of the Soviet postwar nuclear program, Landau was allowed to voice his views freely, as long as they remained inside the secret world that he inhabited.

Korolev’s career as the father of Soviet rocketry was no less stellar but was almost destroyed by Stalin’s paranoia. Like tens of thousands of Soviet scientists, Korolev found himself denounced and sent to the Gulag in 1938, during the hysteria of the Purges, on spurious charges of sabotage. He was eventually transferred to a sharashka, a prison research laboratory, in Moscow, but not before nearly dying of scurvy and losing all his teeth in a gold mine in Kolyma. His brilliant colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Research Institute were less lucky: Both his bosses were executed. In the sharashka known as Central Design Bureau 29, Korolev worked alongside the famed Soviet aircraft designer Andrei Tupolev. From their prison laboratory they created the Tupolev Tu-2 bomber and the Petlyakov Pe-2 dive-bomber, as well as rocket-assisted takeoff boosters for aircraft motors. Korolev was finally allowed to return to his family in 1944, though friends noted that his character was profoundly damaged by the experience, and charges against him were not dropped until 1957. Korolev went on to create Sputnik 1, the world’s first orbiting satellite, and to put Yury Gagarin into space in April 1961, a few months before the test of RDS-220. My fictional Adamov and Korin stand for a whole generation of leading Soviet scientists and engineers who spent some of their best years in prison.

Maria Adamova is also based on two extraordinary Soviet women. One of them is Ekaterina Segeyevna Gvozdeva, whom I met in Leningrad in August 1991 during the tumultuous days of the failed hard-line coup attempt that was to bring a final end to Soviet power. Gvozdeva, known as Kitty, was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. She married the rector of Petrograd University and in the 1920s played hostess to some of the city’s leading intellectual lights, including the poets Anna Akhmatova and Alexander Blok. She remained in her native city throughout the nine-hundred-day Nazi siege, enduring the horrors of entire families of her neighbors dying of hunger. The story of Masha’s murder of the man who tried to rape her actually happened to Kitty’s best friend, and was recounted, matter-of-factly, by Kitty as she cut into rock-hard pears she had bought at the market with half of her monthly pension.

The other woman on whom Masha is modeled is my mother. Born into the family of a senior Party apparatchik in Kharkov, Ukraine, in 1934, my mother and her sister, Lenina (named for Lenin), had their privileged world turned upside down by the arrest of their parents during the great Purge of the Party in 1937. Her father, unbeknown to her, was almost immediately shot on spurious charges of sabotage; her mother was sent to a prison camp in Kazakhstan for fifteen years; there she went mad. My mother and her sister were first sent to a children’s prison and then to an orphanage to be reeducated as model Soviet citizens.

During the German advance across Ukraine in the autumn of 1941, Lenina was mobilized with the older children to dig trenches. My mother, aged seven, was put on a raft with the younger orphans and set adrift on the Dnieper River to float to safety. For much of the following year my mother was one of the thousands of wild, starving, homeless children carried eastward on the winds of war. She spent the bitter winter of 1942–43 on the east bank of the Volga near Stalingrad, gathering cigarette butts to sell to soldiers for food. She was eventually evacuated to a vast orphanage in Solikamsk in the Urals, where by miraculous coincidence she was reunited with her sister.

My mother remembers little of that time, except to say that she lived by “wolves’ laws.” And like Maria Adamova, she found her salvation in study, winning a place at Moscow University and graduating at the top of her class. She later met a British academic and, after a six-year struggle against the Soviet authorities, married him. The world my mother made for her adult self was one of books, intellectual friends, a passion for ballet and beautiful things. But the memory of childhood hunger and violence never left her. But unlike Masha’s, my mother’s spirit never wavered.

— Owen Matthews Wytham Abbey, Oxfordshire, November 2018