Thumbnail sketches about Sergey Kislyak, Russian Ambassador to the United States, skip over his university pedigree. Sergey is a graduate of Moscow Engineering Physics Institute (MEPhI), far from a proletariat technical trade school.

MEPhI, nearly on par with Moscow State -- at least in the Soviet era -- was perhaps the premier institute to train physicists with a single focus: the behavior of neutrons and protons in building nuclear weapons. Period.

Nuclear physicists are a brilliant lot, yet their world can be as dense as an osmium bunker. Often preoccupied with lofty mathematical abstractions, nuclear nerds can be bored with neutrons sticking together, promoting humdrum harmony, or be exhilarated by a neutron’s acceleration as a singular projectile, fracturing an isotope of uranium or plutonium, with apocalyptic consequences. And when protons get out of whack, radioactive chaos reigns. All binary melodrama; not much nuance in the world of nuclear brainiacs.

Chemists, on the other hand, devote their lives to the more subtle behavior of electrons enjoying a vast web of picturesque possibilities and combinations, from solitary isolation, to bonding, sharing, enjoying inside and outside orbits, never revealing whether they are waves or particles. Electrons can be gregarious, or paranoid.

Sergey Kislyak, erstwhile manipulator of big muscle nucleons, must have envied the social gadfly potentials of electrons -- the stuff of chemistry. The behaviors of yeasts, sugars, carbohydrates, and proteins are far more romantic than pondering the strong force glues that keep protons from stiff-arming one another.

And so Sergey changed his life forever by forsaking the hard world of thermonuclear calculations, giving up pickled cabbage, and chunks of rye bread at the MEPhI comrade cafeteria, for the aromas and culinary dreams of foie gras, Canard a ‘l Orange, and chocolate truffles, the end game at practitioners from the USSR Academy of Foreign Trade, his next stop after MEPhI.

Indeed, one look at Sergey confirms he did not make some twenty plus visits to the Obama White House, as Russian ambassador, to partake in Michelle Obama’s school lunch program, with her veggie burgers, and brussels sprouts.

Sergey’s abbreviated bio from the Russian Ambassador info webpage shows that he spent little time practicing his trade in channeling nucleons. Four years after graduating from MEPhI in 1973, Sergey enrolled at the USSR Academy of Foreign Trade, arriving at the United Nations in New York City in 1981.

Sergey returned to the USSR/Russia in 1989 just in time to see the Berlin Wall come down, with former East Germany reunited with Germany by 1992. He remained in Russia for the next seven years -- undoubtedly the most tumultuous epoch since the revolution of 1917 -- in the foreign ministry science and technology sector involved with nuclear disarmament. He witnessed, and may have had a hand in, remaking Russia’s geopolitical identity, as virtually all its satellite states were stripped away, gaining independence, and Russia’s global influence dissipated like stray electromagnetic pulses in the vastness of empty space.

It should be little surprise that Sergey Kislyak -- in 2009 named Russian Ambassador to the United States, the most prestigious Russian foreign ministry posting anywhere -- has used his gregariousness, charm, and apparent boundless curiosity to probe a flaccid and reticent Obama administration engineering the United States withdrawal from the global geopolitical stage.

What opportunity could Sergey Kislyak seize for his Kremlin bosses by Obama’s retreating vacuum “leading from behind”? How would Sergey Kislyak, versed in nuclear physics and ballistic missile defenses, student of foreign trade, and congenial connoisseur, advance Russia’s renewed ambition to reprise its global hegemony, putting the humiliation of the 1980s and 90s behind it?

Accounts of Sergey’s prodigious social and diplomatic calendar would suggest he is well traveled throughout the Washington DC cocktail reception, and dinner circuit -- public or private. No doubt anybody who was anyone in president Obama’s circle, including most Democratic U.S. senators and  congressmen, along with all manner of State Department, Defense Department, trade, Treasury, and energy assistant and deputy assistant secretaries, functionaries, and operatives met Ambassador Kislyak, with keen anticipation. Perhaps on dozens of occasions.

Such probing by Ambassador Kislyak, cloaked in diplomatic outreach, would be commonplace for any ambassador in DC, especially the Russian variety. That is an ambassador’s job, fully endorsed by his hosts. And who would say “no thanks” to the invitation for an encounter -- whether for coffee at Union Station, or a private dinner in Georgetown? After all, Russians are fascinating -- mysterious, inscrutable, often well read… and humorous.

Sergey may appear to be an innocuous apparatchik. Such an impression would be mistaken. Sergey had Obama all figured out, and his boss Vladimir acted on Sergey’s insights, willingly proffered by Obama and his tribe. Crimea, Ukraine, and Syria may be the result of Sergey correctly predicting that Obama would melt when faced with any and all of Putin’s aggressions.

Uncertainties accompanying a president’s re-election prospects are far fewer than the unknowns about potential successors as the same president wraps up two terms. While Sergey might logically deduce Hillary Clinton’s approach to Russia, should she be president, Sergey had zero clue about Donald Trump.

In the meantime, Obama, in turn, well aware of Sergey’s approachable and agreeable style, could readily surmise that Sergey would make multiple overtures to Trump, and or Trump’s campaign staff and advisors. Did Obama then launch electronic surveillance targeting the Russian ambassador with the intent to ensnare Donald Trump?

Such a prospect is not implausible, in fact may be more likely than not. After all, Obama and his duplicitous acolytes have a sordid history of wiretapping, and electronic eavesdropping on Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, Germany’s Angela Merkel, among other foreign leaders, American reporters, and even members of Congress.

We tend to use “nuclear” rather carelessly these days, for example in “nuclear option” in eliminating super-majority U.S. Senate debate and voting rules. Yet

Obama’s dalliance with political nucleons is every bit as ominous for a democratic republic as Sergey Kislyak’s more deadly Russian pas-de-deux with real nucleons.

Moreover, was Obama’s late-term neutron bombardment, calculated to destabilize Trump’s core, contrived to create an intimidating cloud shielding Obama and Hillary from scrutiny? To divert attention from their complicity in subversive transactions with foreign governments re Libya, and uranium for Russia? To hide the compromise of U.S. foreign policy matters to benefit the Clinton Foundation? To shroud Obama’s betrayal in dealing with Iran, and how he may have actively participated in obstructing the Hillary email probe that might otherwise be revealed once Trump’s camp is sworn in?

If proven that Obama unleashed his stream of neutrons against Trump’s nucleus, its radioactive residue would bury the Democrats in an epic nuclear winter. What if it was Obama who meddled with the 2016 U.S. presidential election all along?

Maybe Obama should have stuck with peddling Michelle’s school lunches, and whacking a more mundane particle -- a golf ball.