ABSTRACT
Andrei Sakharov's credentials as an advocate of peace are unassailable. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1975, he argued in his Nobel lecture, delivered in Oslo by his wife because he was not allowed to leave the Soviet Union, that everyone, not just governments, had an obligation to ensure the survival of humanity by preventing the most obvious and dangerous threat to it: Nuclear war. To Sakharov, it was critical that the arms race be slowed and possibly reversed to preserve nuclear peace, but he considered constructing anti-ballistic missile systems quite possibly the worst way of doing so. Sakharov presented his views on how conventional forces, in sufficient numbers, could deter a nuclear war in his acceptance speech on receiving the Szilard Award in 1983, and again later that year, in his open letter to Sidney Drell, who had written on the same subject.
