Evsei Rabinovich

Evsei M. Rabinovich was a Soviet nuclear physicist and mathematician. He was a co-developer of the two-stage RDS-37 thermonuclear bomb and its successor, the RDS-220, the largest-ever bomb.

Rabinovich worked at KB-11 ('Design Bureau-11'), now known as the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics, where was one of a significant group of physicists, mathematicians and chemists working in secret; his work was under the direction of Yakov Zel'dovich, a principal nuclear theorist (and well-known cosmologist) who was directing research groups at KB-11 and the Institute of Chemical Physics.

During the development of the RDS-220, Rabinovich became concerned that the device would not work and shared his worries with colleagues before raising them with his superiors. His concerns were taken so seriously that after discussion with the project design leads Viktor Adamsky and Vyacheslav Feodoritov, and chief weapons designer Andrei Sakharov, all of whom provided counter-arguments, Sakharov - one of the chief designers - altered the design of the bomb to reduce the margins of error in calculating the processes which had vexed Rabinovich.[1][2][3] [4]

He authored papers on electron-positron pair production and (with Zel'dovich) statistical formulae in a Fermi gas. Later, he became a deputy director of the Wave Research Centre in Moscow, an offshoot of the Lebedev Physical Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences.[5][6][7]