Grigory Klinishov, one of the creators of the first Soviet two-stage thermonuclear bomb RDS-37, died in Moscow. One of the first in this regard with reference to the source Wrote regnum According to the publication, the 92-year-old scientist committed suicide.
The body of the engineer-physicist was found by relatives in his apartment on the Kosmodamianskaya embankment in the Zamoskvorechye district. A suicide note was found next to the body, in which Klinishov said goodbye to his relatives.
Subsequently, information about the death of the scientist was confirmed with reference to the sources of RIA Novosti and TASS.
After a while, Regnum reported the details of what had happened. The suicide occurred on June 17, but only heard of it today – four days later. Klinishov was very upset by the death of his wife and his own health problems. The scientist lived with his 67-year-old daughter in an apartment on the Kosmodamianskaya embankment. Shortly before his death, he spoke to his father and then left home for a few hours. At this time, the physicist committed suicide, his daughter found his body in one of the rooms and returned home.
Citing sources, Kommersant writes that the capital’s Investigative Committee has launched an investigation into Klinishov’s death.
Klinishov was born in 1930 in the Ryazan region. In early childhood, the future scientist and his family moved to Moscow. After graduating from school, he entered the Moscow Mechanical Institute (now the National University for Nuclear Research MEPhI). After graduating from high school in 1956, he was assigned to KB-11 in the closed city of Sarov. Now this bureau is called the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics.
In Sarov, Klinishov worked as an engineer in the theoretical department headed by Andrei Sakharov, one of the creators of the first Soviet atomic bomb. In 1967, the scientist received a doctorate in physical and mathematical sciences, and six years later he headed the theoretical department of KB-11. He has been working as a lead researcher in this department since 2002.
Even at the beginning of his work on KB-11, Klinishov was involved in the creation of the RDS-37, a two-stage thermonuclear bomb, which was the first bomb of this type in the USSR. His name is in the list of participants in the computational and theoretical study of the device.
The RDS-37 was tested at the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan in November 1955, it was shot down from a bomber. The rated power of the explosive device was 3 Mt, but for testing it was almost halved – to 1.6 Mt. The main difference between this thermonuclear bomb and previously developed explosive devices was that it used a uranium-238 core and a stable charge of solid – lithium-6 deuterite.
In 1955, an emergency occurred while a bomb was being tested. When the Tu-16 bomber loaded on board gained an estimated altitude of 12 km, clouds over the test site covered the sky. The crew was allowed to bombard in radar sight, but she refused – it was impossible to make a targeted drop. For the first time in the history of nuclear testing, the question arose of landing an airplane with an enormous bomb on it.
As a result, 2.5 hours after takeoff, the plane still received clearance and successfully landed at the Zhana-Semey airport. The RDS-37 was released for retesting and the tests were delayed for two days. As a result, November 22, 1955 passed: the bomb fell on the automatically opened parachutes, exploded in the air a kilometer and a half above the ground. By this time, the bomber managed to fly 15 km from the point of explosion.
As a result, the crew felt the thermal effects of the explosion much stronger than expected. 7 minutes after the charge was triggered, the radioactive mushroom reached 14 km in height and almost 30 km in diameter. This was the world’s first drop test of a hydrogen bomb with an efficiency of more than 1 Mt. But it had tragic consequences. In one of the villages located tens of kilometers from the landfill, the ceiling of a private house collapsed from a shock wave, a three-year-old girl died. 36 km from the epicenter, in a bunker equipped for observation, six soldiers, one of whom drowned, were covered with earth. Windows in houses were thrown out within a radius of 200 km from the dump, buildings were damaged in 59 settlements, more than 43 people were injured in various ways.