Georgy Flyorov

Georgy Nikolayevich Flyorov was a Russian physicist, born March 2, 1913 in Rostov-on-Don and died November 19, 1990 in Moscow, whose discovery and warning about nuclear fission research helped set the Soviet atomic energy program in motion. After earning a physics degree from the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute in 1939, he discovered spontaneous fission in 1940 together with Konstantin Petrzhak while working at the Ioffe Institute under Igor Kurchatov, the previously unobserved phenomenon of a heavy atomic nucleus splitting on its own without an external trigger. In April 1942, as a Soviet Air Force lieutenant, he wrote directly to Stalin warning that the sudden disappearance of nuclear fission research from Western scientific journals meant the Allies were secretly developing a bomb, and urged the Soviet Union to build a uranium bomb without delay, a letter credited with helping catalyze the Soviet nuclear weapons program. In 1957 he founded the Flyorov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna and directed it until 1989; his laboratory's work in the 1970s produced claimed discoveries of the elements seaborgium and bohrium. He was named Hero of Socialist Labor in 1949, received two Orders of Lenin and the 1967 Lenin Prize, and element 114, flerovium, was named in his honor in 2012.