Charles Hyder

Charles Latif Hyder (April 18, 1930 – June 8, 2004) was an American astrophysicist and dissident from Albuquerque, New Mexico, who campaigned against arms race, nuclear weapons and nuclear waste, and ran for the U.S. presidency. Media coverage of his hunger strike by the Communist press and television was seen as a Cold War retaliation to Andrei Sakharov, a Soviet scientist whose protest in turn was rallied by the Western media but received little or no coverage in the Soviet Bloc. By the end of his strike Hyder achieved superstar status in the USSR and the allied socialist countries (parallel only to Angela Davis, Dean Reed, and Samantha Smith before him), his name became nearly symbolic behind the Iron Curtain, though he remained little known in the United States, and apart from his wartime tour of duty never traveled outside the U.S.

Biography Hyder was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1930. After graduating from Albuquerque High School, he served in the United States Air Force during the Korean War.

Hyder attended the University of New Mexico, graduating with bachelor's (1958) and master's (1960) degrees in physics. In 1964, he received a doctorate in astrophysics from the University of Colorado. and was also involved in NASA's Solar Maximum Mission satellite.

Hyder was married twice and had four children.

Controversy

In the US, Hyder's hunger strike did not attract much attention. Furthermore, the astrophysicist was not always present at the White House. The Russian Gosteleradio (government broadcasting) correspondent in Washington, Vladimir Dunaev, introduced and explained the scientist's story to the Russian audience. Dunaev's son later revealed that to make the hunger strike look continuous, Dunaev would shoot five stories in succession every day, asking Dr. Hyder to change into different suits and ties.

According to Dunaev, Hyder was advised by doctors to diet, as his weight openly threatened his health. During the hunger strike he lost almost half of his weight of 300 pounds. He also subsequently accused the USSR of environmental pollution, after which Russian news agencies stopped reporting about him in the USSR. In 1999, he published the book "Human Survival on a Plutonium-Contaminated Planet," again trying to fast in order to fight against the storage of nuclear waste (Waste Isolation Pilot Plant).