Yulii Khariton

Yulii Borisovich Khariton
Yulii Borisovich Khariton, 1924
Born	27 February 1904 Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire
Died	December 19, 1996(1996-12-19) (aged 92) Sarov, near Moscow, Russia
Citizenship	Soviet Union
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, 27 February 1904 – 19 December 1996), also known as YuB was a Russian physicist who is widely credited as being one of the leading scientist in the Soviet Union's nuclear bomb program.

Since the initiation of the atomic bomb project by Joseph Stalin in 1943, Khariton was the "chief nuclear weapon designer" and remained associated with the Soviet program for nearly four decades. In honor of the centennial of his birthday in 2004, his image appeared on a Russian postal stamp by the Russian government.

Yulii Borisovich Khariton was born in Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire to an ethnic middle class Russian Jewish family, on 27 February 1904. His father, Boris Osipovich Khariton, was a political journalist, an editor, and a publisher, who had attained a law degree from Kiev University in Ukraine. His 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. After the Russian revolution dismantled the in 1917, Boris Khariton had clashes with the Bolsheviks as he was at odds with Vladimir Lenin's Soviet ideology. His father was exiled to 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.