Yuri Babayev was a Soviet physicist.
Babayev was born in 1928. He graduated from Moscow University and went on to work at an unknown closed city. He was a junior member of a team that was awarded a secret Stalin Prize in 1953, the same year the Soviets exploded their first hydrogen bomb, so it is likely that he worked on this project. He is also believed to have worked on the Tsar Bomba test, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonanted. Babayev went on to receive the Lenin Prize and was awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labor. He would also become a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
Babayev died in 1986 in Moscow. His official obituary, published in Izvestia, praised him as a ”major scientist, an outstanding specialist in the field of nuclear physics and atomic technology.”