About the book: 2004 / This book is the first biography of the “father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb” and the first Russian Nobel Peace Prize laureate. It is based on unique, recently declassified archival documents and about fifty interviews of science historian Gennady Gorelik with people who personally knew A.D. Sakharov while still a student, then an outstanding physicist and, finally, a disgraced human rights activist. For the first time, the book provides answers to the questions of how and why the main theorist of Soviet thermonuclear weapons turned into a defender of human rights? Was the Soviet hydrogen bomb created by physicists independently or with the help of intelligence? What do the symmetry of a butterfly and the asymmetry of the Universe have in common? How Andrei Sakharov looked at his fate and what he thought about the relationship between scientific thinking and religious feeling?