For many years until his recent semi-retirement, Prof. Chernyshev was the head of the Electrophysical Department at VNIIEF, the Russian counterpart of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and the institute where the first nuclear weapons of the Soviet Union were developed. Although US scientists had monitored Chernyshev's published work for many years prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Chernyshev is most known for his leadership role, beginning in late 1991 and early 1992, in establishing the now well-known collaboration between VNIIEF and LANL, a collaboration that has received wide-spread international media coverage including the cover story of the international issue of Newsweek and the two-hour Discovery Channel documentary, "Stockpile." The collaboration has also resulted in more than 250 technical papers presented at international conferences and published in archival journals on subjects as diverse as imploding liner physics and applications, controlled thermonuclear fusion, isentropic compression of noble gases, and explosively driven high current generation technology. Joint LANL/VNIIEF experiments conducted under Chernyshev's leadership set a LANL record for the number of deuterium-tritium fusion neutrons produced in a single experiment and a US record for the highest current and highest kinetic energy ever delivered to an imploding liner. Experimental data obtained by the Chernyshev team on fusion plasma formation and on ultrahigh kinetic energy imploding liners for plasma heating to fusion temperatures, combined with theoretical work conducted by Chernyshev's VNIIEF colleagues, rekindled a US interest in an unexplored approach to fusion now known in the US as Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) and in Russia as MAGO (magnitnoye obzhatiye, i.e., "magnetic compression"). MAGO/MTF is an approach that combines the magnetothermal insulation of magnetic confinement fusion (MCF) with the implosion heating of inertial confinement fusion (ICF) and operates at a fusion plasma density that is the geometric mean of the 10-12 orders of magnitude in density that separates the two more conventional approaches.

For his service to the defense program of the Soviet Union, Chernyshev was a recipient of the Orders of Stalin and Lenin and a recipient of the Stalin, Lenin, and State awards. In 1997, Chernyshev and his team were chosen as one of the leading scientific schools by the Russian Foundation of Fundamental Research. In 2003, he was awarded the Erwin Marx Award by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), but the US bureaucracy's failure to issue a visa, even though Chernyshev had held many US visas previously and had spent much time in the US, prevented Chernyshev from traveling to the US to receive the plaque and monetary award.

Condolences may be sent to Chernyshev's family and colleagues at ivanovsky@elph.vniief.ru.