Charles Hyder

Charles Latif Hyder 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, 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.