World: A Russian Physicist's Passionate Plea for Cooperation

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THE Soviet Union knows very well how to deal with dissidence from its disaffected artists and writers. Their criticism is dismissed as the predictable plaints of those whom Lenin scornfully characterized as the khliupiki or "intellectual wet rags." The dissidents themselves are sent to asylums or to jail. It is a far different matter, however, when the dissenter is an honored, brilliant and necessary figure in the Soviet Establishment.

Such a man is Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, partner in a major scientific discovery at the age of 29, a full member of the prestigious Academy of Sciences at 32 and now, at 47, a leading Soviet research physicist. Last week, after circulating underground for some time in Russia, an extraordinary manuscript by Sakharov was published in the U.S. by the New York Times. In it, the physicist boldly denounces major aspects of Soviet policy and practice, goes so far as to urge an East-West "convergence" to provide a safe and single world leadership. It is, as Library of Congress Kremlinologist Leon Herman said, "a thunderbolt"—not only for what it says but because of its origin in the very bosom of the Soviet elite.

Sakharov's 10,000-word essay, entitled "Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom," begins with two principles that the author considers axiomatic: that ."the division of mankind threatens it with destruction," and that "intellectual freedom is essential to human society." He then catalogues the clear and present dangers to physical survival: thermonuclear war, hunger, police dictatorship and atmospheric pollution. The threats to intellectual survival, he says, are the propaganda of mass culture, spreading bureaucracy and, again, dictatorship. The world's only hope in overcoming these menaces, he says, lies in a rapprochement between socialist and capitalist systems. To suggest how this might be accomplished, he analyzes the growing similarities between the world's two superpowers and lays out a four-stage timetable that would lead toward total U.S.-Soviet cooperation,

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"Every rational creature, finding itself on the brink of disaster, first tries to get away from the brink, and only then does it think about the satisfaction of other needs," writes Sakharov. Beyond the brink, of course, is nuclear war, and Sakharov speaks so authoritatively on the destructive power of nuclear weaponry, on its low-cost production and "the practical impossibility of preventing a massive rocket attack" that U.S. analysts are certain that he has engaged in military research. Present foreign policy in both Washington and the Kremlin, he says, is aimed "at maximum improvement of one's position everywhere possible and, simultaneously, a method of causing maximum unpleasantness to opposing forces without consideration of common welfare and common interests." In recent years, says Sakharov, such policies have engendered two wars: Viet Nam and the Arab-Israeli conflict.