Basov was born in the town Usman, now in Lipetsk Oblast in 1922. He finished school in 1941 in Voronezh, and was later called for military Service at Kuibyshev Military Medical Academy. In 1943 he left the academy and served in the Red Army participating in the Second World War with the 1st Ukrainian Front.
Basov graduated from Moscow Engineering Physics Institute (MEPhI) in 1950. He then held a professorship at MEPhI and also worked in the Lebedev Physical Institute (LPI), where he defended a dissertation for the Candidate of Sciences degree (equivalent to PhD) in 1953 and a dissertation for the Doctor of Sciences degree in 1956. Basov was the Director of the LPI in 1973–1988. He was elected as corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences (Russian Academy of Sciences since 1991) in 1962 and Full Member of the Academy in 1966. In 1967, he was elected a Member of the Presidium of the Academy (1967—1990), and since 1990 he was the councillor of the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In 1971 he was elected a Member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. He was Honorary President and Member of the International Academy of Science, Munich. He was the head of the laboratory of quantum radiophysics at the LPI until his death in 2001.
He entered politics in 1951 and became a member of parliament (the Soviet of the Union of the Supreme Soviet) in 1974. Following U.S. President Ronald Reagan's speech on SDI in 1983, Basov signed a letter along with other Soviet Scientists condemning the initiative, which was published in the New York Times. In 1985 he declared the Soviet Union was capable of matching SDI proposals made by the U.S.
Basov's contributions to the development of the laser and maser, which won him the Nobel Prize in 1964, led to new missile defense initiatives seeking to employ them.
