About the book: 2020 / Student of the great E. Fermi, collaborator of F. Joliot-Curie, honorary member of the Italian Academy dei Lincei Bruno Pontecorvo was born in Italy , worked in France, USA, Canada, England, and lived most of his life in Russia. Bruno Pontecorvo is known as one of the leading physicists of the Cold War era. While heads of state dreamed of world domination that nuclear weapons would give them, the best scientists around the world fought for “nuclear balance” and tried in every possible way not to break the strong scientific ties that helped move science forward. Until the last days of his life, Pontecorvo maintained friendship with his teacher, one of the leading scientists of the Manhattan Project, Enrico Fermi, and also corresponded with other participants in the project. The memoirs of this scientist are full of unusual details describing the closed and even classified life of nuclear physicists in the mid-twentieth century. An interesting and eventful life, an exceptional mind and independent views allowed the scientist to create a number of articles describing the world from a simple and understandable point of view of a physicist. It was they, along with memories of life in the States and the USSR, that formed the basis of this book.