Sakharov's efforts to save humanity from the nuclear weapons he helped create

After Sakharov’s contribution to the Soviet Union’s desperate effort to catch up with the US in the qualitative nuclear arms race ended in the mid-1950s, he began to worry about the dangers from both nuclear testing and the nuclear confrontation. He became passionately concerned about the biological effects of atmospheric nuclear testing – especially that the production of long-lived carbon-14 in the reaction n + ¹⁴N à ¹⁴C + p would contaminate the human gene pool and pushed for the atmospheric test ban treaty of 1963.  Later, in 1987, he helped quiet Soviet paranoia about President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative by arguing that it could only result in an expensive and ineffective “Maginot Line” in space. Finally – and still relevantly – he warned that vulnerable multi-warhead silo-based intercontinental ballistic missiles create an incentive for a first strike during a crisis.