The world learned about George Kistiakowski, a Ukrainian who played a decisive role in the creation of the American atomic bomb, thanks to Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer, which was awarded five Golden Globes. After its premiere, it became known that the Ukrainian scientist George (George) Kistyakovsky, played by the Norwegian actor Trond Fausa Aurvåg, took part in the development of the atomic bomb in the United States.
The film premiered in August 2023, and before that, the scientist’s very participation in the development of weapons of mass destruction was strictly classified; moreover, no one wrote or said anything about its origin. Kistyakovsky himself always insisted that he was Ukrainian. When they called him Russian because he was born in the Russian Empire, he retorted: it’s the same as calling a Scot an Englishman.
Descendant of famous families
George – Georgy – Kistyakovsky was born in December 1900 in the city of Boyarka, Kyiv province. The Kistyakovsky family dates back to the Zaporozhye Cossacks, and closer relatives played a significant role in the life of society and – this can be said without exaggeration – went down in history. Thus, Kistyakovsky’s grandfather on his father’s side was a criminologist and legal historian, one uncle, Vladimir, became an academician of the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, and the second, Igor, became the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian State, Hetman Skoropadsky.
George’s parents – professor of philosophy at Kyiv University Bogdan Kistyakovsky and teacher Maria Berenstam, who came from an aristocratic German family – did everything to give their son a good education – he studied at the best Kyiv gymnasium. The October Revolution and the civil war that followed found the family in Kyiv, where they moved from Boyarka. Without graduating from high school, Kistyakovsky enlists in the ranks of the White Guard to fight against the “Reds”.
Flight to Europe
Kistyakovsky was wounded, suffered from typhus and in 1920 sailed from Crimea by ship to Istanbul, from where he moved to Germany. In Europe, Kistyakovsky met with his uncle Igor, who managed not only to escape from the country under Bolshevik rule, but also to take away – sewn into clothes – part of the family jewelry. Using the money received for them, Igor Kistyakovsky opened his own business in Paris, and Georgy received a livelihood that allowed him to continue his studies.
Georgy Kistyakovsky entered the University of Berlin, where he studied physics and chemistry. One of his teachers was Max Bodenstein, a scientist whose research formed the basis for the work on the atomic bomb. Bodenstein gave Kistyakovsky a recommendation, with which he went on an internship in the USA – at Princeton University he worked with the famous British scientist Hugh Stott. Under his leadership, George – or, as he began to call himself at this time, George – published his first monograph on photochemical processes.
Head of Department B
Having become an assistant professor at Princeton University, Kistiakowski soon went to work at Harvard, which became his place of work for the rest of his life. When the National Defense Research Center, which was engaged in classified research, was created in the United States in 1940, it was headed by Princeton University President James Conant – he also invited George Kistiakowski to work, inviting him to become the head of Division B, which was developing bombs and fuels.
Among the achievements that Kistyakovsky was able to chalk up here was the industrial production of hexogen and a unique explosive that looked like ordinary flour and could even be used for cooking – however, few people survived after such “buns” with octogen. It was used by Chinese partisans to fight the troops of militaristic Japan. Kistyakovsky proved himself so well that in October 1943, when work began on the top-secret Manhattan Project, the goal of which was to develop an atomic bomb, he was invited to take part in it.
Modest accommodation and poker on Saturdays
The work was supervised by the “father of the atomic bomb,” Robert Oppenheimer, and the research itself was carried out in the Los Alamos laboratory. Kistyakovsky did not immediately agree to join the working group. But the thought that American scientists needed to get ahead of the German ones, otherwise Nazism would not be stopped, pushed him to a positive decision.
George began his work on the project as a consultant to American physicist Seth Neddermeier, who was studying ways to improve the cumulative effect of an atomic explosion.
Kistyakovsky, who had given up a room in the dormitory for male scientists, lived at that time in a small extension to the college where the children of the group members studied. The advantage that he received as a result was his own shower room, which he did not need to share with anyone: this was very important for him, since his daughter Vera lived with him at the secret facility – of course, with the permission of the management. He did not even tell her about the details of his work. The girl didn’t even know the names of the scientists her father worked with – they all had code names. The only entertainment for those who created the atomic bomb was Saturday poker – Kistyakovsky taught everyone this card game.
Without him there would be no bomb
If we talk about the role that the Ukrainian scientist played in the invention of the atomic bomb, then without exaggeration we can say that it was decisive – it was he who invented polygonal explosive lenses, without which it simply would not have existed. The first tests of the bomb, which was called “Trinity” (“Trinity”), took place on July 16, 1946 in the desert of New Mexico. Even its creators themselves, who were supposed to watch what was happening from the bunker, did not know how it would end – many of them believed that everyone would die as a result. Kistyakovsky, confident of the success of such a “rehearsal,” argued with Oppenheimer himself, betting his entire salary—$700—and won. The explosion made a stunning impression on the scientist himself – he later said that people would see something similar a few seconds before the end of the world. Less than a month later, on August 9, 1945, the same bomb named “Fat Man” was dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki….
The struggle for disarmament and demilitarization
After the end of World War II, Kistiakowski returned to Harvard. He, as before, taught and advised the American government on issues of weapons of mass destruction – in particular, on the ballistic missile program. In 1959, at the invitation of President Dwight Eisenhower, he became his special adviser on science.
Kistyakovsky worked in the White House under other presidents of the United States – John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson; he was part of the American delegation during the visit of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to the United States. In his own words, the higher he climbed the career ladder, the more convinced he became of the futility of a nuclear war, which would lead to the death of civilization. He did a lot for disarmament and demilitarization throughout the world, becoming the author of the idea of the “nuclear test threshold” – limiting nuclear activity below threshold of fixed seismic activity. With the outbreak of the Vietnam War, Kistyakovsky, who opposed this invasion, left all government structures and began to actively advocate for the peaceful coexistence of countries with different political systems. In 1977, he became head of the Council for a Livable World, which advocates for the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.
Three wives and death from cancer
Kistyakovsky first married in 1926, his chosen one was the Swede Hildegard Mobius, whom he met in Berlin: having received an immigration visa, the girl followed her lover to the USA. In this marriage, the scientist had a daughter, Vera, who also devoted her life to science – she became the first female professor at a university in Massachusetts.
The scientist’s second wife was Los Alaosma HR manager Irma Schuler, whom he met while working on the atomic bomb. Their marriage took place in 1945, but also ended in divorce. And only with his third wife, Elya Mahoney, whom he married in 1962, did he live until the end of his life.
George Kistiakowski died in Cambridge on December 8, 1982, shortly after his birthday. The cause of death was lung cancer. His colleagues at Harvard University noted in their obituary that until his last days he led a “courageous fight for control of nuclear weapons.” The scientist’s body was cremated and his ashes were scattered at his summer home on Cape Cod, the easternmost point of Massachusetts.
2024-01-20 10:00:00
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