Yulii Borisovich Khariton

Yulii Borisovich Khariton
Yulii Borisovich Khariton, 1924
Born	February 27, 1904 Saint Petersburg
Died	December 18, 1996(1996-12-18) (aged 92)
Citizenship	Soviet Union/Russia
Nationality	Russian
Fields	Physics
Institutions	Institute of Chemical Physics
Alma mater	Leningrad Polytechnical Institute, Soviet Union University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
Doctoral advisor	Ernest Rutherford
Other academic advisors	Abram Ioffe
Known for	Soviet atomic bomb project
Notable awards	Hero of Socialist Labor Order of Lenin Lomonosov Gold Medal (1982)

Yulii Borisovich Khariton (Russian: Ю́лий Бори́сович Харито́н, February 27, 1904 – December 18, 1996) was a Russian physicist working in the field of nuclear power. He was the chief designer of the Soviet atomic bombs, including the Tsar Bomba, and worked in the Soviet nuclear program for many years.

Yulii Khariton was born in Saint Petersburg to journalist Boris Osipovich Khariton and actress Mirra Yakovlevna Burovskaya, a Jewish family. His father worked for the newspaper Rech, the main organ of the Constitutional Democratic Party. In 1922, by Lenin's decree, the elder Khariton was expelled from Soviet Russia on one of the so-called Philosophers' ships, subsequently working for an emigrant newspaper in Latvia. After the annexation of Latvia by the Soviet Union, Boris Khariton was arrested by the NKVD and died in the Gulag. Yulii's mother, Mira Burovskaya, was also an emigre and in the 1930s joined the Zionist immigration to the British colony of Palestine.

Yulii was forbidden to contact his parents after he had started classified work. Khariton studied at the Leningrad Polytechnical Institute (1920–1925) under Abram Ioffe and then at the University of Cambridge (1926–1928) under Ernest Rutherford, where he received a doctor's degree. From 1931 to 1946 he was head of the Explosion Laboratory at the Institute of Chemical Physics. In 1935 he received his doctorate in physical and mathematical sciences. During this period, Yulii Khariton and Yakov Zel'dovich conducted experiments regarding chain reactions of uranium. He was elected as a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1946, and as a full member in 1953.