He was an avid motorcyclist and reader; he read and re-read the complete works of Vladimir Lenin and Friedrich Engels.

He organised the manufacture of military items for Soviet resistance under a civilian cloak e.g. making grenades at a toy factory.

[1][2] On the order of the State Defence Committee, he was sent to join Igor Kurchatov's Laboratory No.2 in 1944, as a junior technician in the nascent nuclear industry.

The production route used newly-produced, vastly more efficient but highly dangerous beryllium/polonium material, following intelligence gathered from Allied research developed from the Manhattan Project.

Khariton ordered the first three sets of primers from Aleksandrovich for June and July 1949; the first Soviet nuclear bomb, the RDS-1, was detonated on 29 August.

He was also the sole old friend to remain on good terms with physicist Boris Smagin after the latter was investigated, sacked and internally ostracised (and unable to leave as a security risk) for having losing a small nuclear component.