21 Facts About Yulii Khariton

Yulii Borisovich Khariton was a Russian physicist who was a leading scientist in the former Soviet program of nuclear weapons.

Since the initiation of the Soviet program of developing the atomic bomb by Joseph Stalin in 1943, Khariton was the "chief nuclear weapon designer" and remained associated with the Soviet program for nearly four decades.

Yulii Borisovich Khariton was born in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire, to an ethnic middle class Russian Jewish family, on 27 February 1904.

Yulii Khariton's father, Boris Osipovich Khariton, was a political journalist, editor, and publisher who had attained a law degree from Kiev University in Ukraine.

Yulii Khariton's father worked for the newspaper Rech, the main organ of the Constitutional Democratic Party, and was a well known figure in the political circles of Russia.

Yulii Khariton's father was exiled to the Baltic states from Russia in 1922 at the age of forty six along with professors and journalists on one of the so-called Philosophers' ships, subsequently working for an emigrant newspaper in Latvia.

Yulii Khariton's mother, Mirra Yakovlevna Burovskaya, was a theatre actress who performed at the Moscow Art Theatre.

Yulii Khariton left Russia in 1910 due to an illness that had to be treated at the European resort.

Yulii Khariton was six years old when his mother left him and was taken care by an Estonian woman, hired by his father while in exile in Latvia.

Yulii Khariton was forbidden to contact his parents after he had started classified work in the Soviet Union.

Yulii Khariton's travels were highly restricted by the Soviet Union and later by Russia.

Yulii Khariton was home schooled by his Estonian housekeeper, hired by his father, who taught him the German language.

Yulii Khariton studied physics under Russian physicists, Abram Ioffe, Nikolay Semyonov, and Alexander Friedmann.

In 1926, Yulii Khariton completed his degree in physics from the Leningrad Polytechnical Institute and ended his research project as he prepared for his first foreign trip to England.

In England, Yulii Khariton attended the University of Cambridge to do his doctoral in physics under Ernest Rutherford in 1926.

In 1928, Yulii Khariton decided to take up the residence in to be near his mother, but was appalled and frightened by the political propaganda of the Nazi Party in Germany; therefore returning to Soviet Union while his mother left for Palestine.

Physicist Igor Kurchatov asked Yulii Khariton to become part of the Soviet atomic project in 1943, in Laboratory No 2 of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

In May 1945, as part of a team of physicists sent to Berlin to investigate Nazi atomic bomb research, Yulii Khariton found 100 tonnes of uranium oxide, which was transported back to Moscow; this reduced development time for domestic plutonium production.

Yulii Khariton was elected as a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union in 1946, and as a full member in 1953.

Yulii Khariton was deferential to political superiors but supported the scientists under him in a politic and diplomatic way.

Yulii Khariton's diplomacy meant absorbing criticism and put-downs from political leaders who came and went.