 In 1950, Oleg Lavrentiev, then a Red Army sergeant stationed on Sakhalin with little to do, wrote a letter to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.The letter outlined the idea of using an atomic bomb to ignite a fusion fuel, and then went on to describe a system that used electrostatic fields to contain a hot plasma in a steady state for energy production.The letter was sent to Andrei Sakharov for comment.