Latest news with #Garwin
LeMonde
22-05-2025
- Politics
- LeMonde
Richard Garwin, designer of the first hydrogen bomb, dies aged 97
What would American physicist Richard Garwin, who died on May 13 in Scarsdale, New York, at the age of 97, have thought of the "Golden Dome," the missile defense shield project announced by President Donald Trump a week later, on Tuesday, May 20? In 1968, alongside Nobel laureate Hans Bethe (1906–2005), he spoke out against the development of such a system, which they both considered unnecessary and costly, and later vigorously criticized Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" program. At just 23 years old, Garwin designed the first hydrogen bomb, tested on November 1, 1952, in the Marshall Islands. He later became a leading figure in nuclear arms control and a vocal proponent of disarmament, notably alongside the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, which bring together scientists worldwide to reduce the risks of armed conflict. Described by his biographer, Joel Shurkin, as "the most influential scientist you've never heard of," Garwin long remained discreet – even with those closest to him – about his role as adviser to US presidents, from Dwight Eisenhower to Barack Obama, and his involvement in developing the hydrogen bomb. His role was only revealed in 2001, following testamentary statements by Edward Teller (1908–2003), who had been tasked by President Harry Truman with building such a weapon. In a 2024 interview with Spectrum, the magazine of the IEEE, the world's largest engineering professional society, Garwin said the mission he was given felt more like a challenge than a sign of trust.
NDTV
21-05-2025
- Science
- NDTV
He Made World's First Hydrogen Bomb But Kept It A Secret For 50 Years
Richard L Garwin, the creator of America's hydrogen bomb, died on May 13 at his home in Scarsdale, New York. He was 97. Over the course of his seven-decade career, Mr Garwin laid the groundwork for insights into the structure of the universe. He also helped in the development of several medical and computer marvels. But his contribution to the one invention that changed the course of history remained a secret for almost 50 years. At the age of 23, he designed the world's first hydrogen bomb. Mr Garwin, who was then a professor at the University of Chicago and just a summer consultant at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, used physicist Edward Teller and mathematician Stanislaw Ulam's concepts to design the hydrogen bomb in 1951-1952. The experimental device, code-named Ivy Mike, was successfully tested on the Marshall Islands on November 1, 1952. Mr Garwin's contribution to the creation of the first hydrogen bomb was a well-kept secret for decades. Outside a select group of government, military, and intelligence officials, no one knew about his role in the experiment due to the secrecy surrounding the project. Edward Teller, whose name had long been associated with the bomb, first credited Mr Garwin in a 1981 taped statement, acknowledging his crucial role in the invention. "The shot was fired almost precisely according to Garwin's design," Mr Teller said, as per The NY Times. The recording was lost to history for 22 years. The late acknowledgement received little attention, and Mr Garwin remained unknown to the public for a long time. In an interview with Esquire magazine in 1984, Mr Garwin opened up about getting little to no recognition for his work on the hydrogen bomb. He said, "I never felt that building the hydrogen bomb was the most important thing in the world, or even in my life at the time." This changed in April 2001 when George A Keyworth II, Mr Teller's friend, provided the transcript of the tape recording to The New York Times. Even though Teller had earlier recognised the young physicist's contribution, such references were lost in specialised writings and meetings. Suddenly, fifty years after the event, Mr Garwin gained wide public recognition as the creator of the H-bomb. Meanwhile, after his success on the hydrogen bomb project, Mr Garwin accepted a job at the International Business Machines Corporation, where he worked for four decades, until his retirement. In between this, Mr Garwin remained a government consultant, offering advice on matters pertaining to national defence. The physicist was an adviser to several American Presidents, such as Dwight D Eisenhower, John F Kennedy, Lyndon B Johnson, Richard M Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Richard L Garwin's many honours include the 2002 National Medal of Science, the nation's highest award for accomplishments in science and engineering, given by US President George W Bush and the 2016 Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award, given by President Barack Obama.
New York Times
19-05-2025
- Science
- New York Times
A Scientist Fighting Nuclear Armageddon Hid a 50-Year Secret
Enrico Fermi's battle with cancer was nearing its end in late 1954 when he received a visitor. Fermi, a Nobel laureate in physics, had fled fascism in Europe and become a founder of the nuclear age, helping bring the world's first reactor and first atom bomb to life. The visitor, Richard L. Garwin, had been Fermi's student at the University of Chicago, the laureate calling him 'the only true genius I have ever met.' Now, he had done something known at the time only by Fermi and a handful of other experts. Not even his family knew. Three years earlier, the boy wonder, then 23, had designed the world's first hydrogen bomb, which brought the fury of the stars to Earth. In a test, it had exploded with a force nearly 1,000 times as powerful as the atomic bomb that leveled Hiroshima, its power greater than all the explosives used in World War II. To his reverential student, Fermi confided a regret. He felt his life had involved too little participation in crucial issues of public policy. He died a few weeks later at 53. After that visit, Dr. Garwin set out on a new path, seeing nuclear scientists as having a responsibility to speak out. His resolve, he later told a historian, came from a desire to honor the memory of the scientist he had known best and admired most. 'I modeled myself to whatever extent I could after Fermi,' he said. Dr. Garwin, the designer of the world's deadliest weapon, died last Tuesday at age 97, leaving behind a legacy of nuclear horrors he devoted his life to countering. But he also left a strange puzzle. Why for a half-century did he hide what Fermi and a dozen presidents knew? It was a topic I discussed with him this January in an interview, the last of many. The riddle is especially odd because his central role in creating the H-bomb became the motivating force that drove him forward, that helped him turn Fermi's regrets into a life of political and social activism, that made him an inconspicuous giant of nuclear arms control. 'If I could wave a wand' to make the H-bomb vanish, he once told me, 'I would.' In a blinding flash, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima by the Enola Gay killed at least 70,000 people. Deadly like no earlier weapon, it was still quite limited in contrast with Dr. Garwin's superweapon. One proposed version had the force of more than 600,000 Hiroshimas. The mind boggles at such numbers. Even so, Cold War analysts coolly judged that it could reduce a region the size of France to ashes. His weapon was a planet shaker. It could end civilization. That bomb wasn't the only feat driven by Dr. Garwin's prodigious intellect. He made basic discoveries about the structure of the universe, laid the groundwork for wonders of health care and computers, and won many awards. He pushed back frontiers in astronomy, physics, superconductors, orbital reconnaissance and a multitude of other topics he investigated, often at the U.S. government's behest. But what drove him, what made him eager to advise presidents, was not his gift for coming up with marvels of discovery and innovation but, courtesy of Fermi, a personal crusade to save the world from his own creation. Henry A. Kissinger advised at least 12 American presidents in some capacity. Dr. Garwin never officially joined any president's cabinet, as Kissinger had. But in our last interview, the physicist looked over a list of presidents and one by one identified the commanders-in-chief he had counseled. There were 13. While eager to counter his brainchild, Dr. Garwin took no personal or moral responsibility for bringing the H-bomb into existence. Its birth, he argued, was inevitable. 'Maybe I sped up its development by a year or two,' he said in 2021. 'That's all.' Historians of the age tend to agree. The Soviet Union quickly followed his pioneering lead, then a half-dozen other nations. Today, hydrogen bombs have replaced atom bombs in most arsenals, creating a world of uneasy standoffs among nuclear foes. By all accounts, Dr. Garwin believed that he — and sometimes he alone — could peer into the chaos of the universe and discern its underlying order. Like J. Robert Oppenheimer, who during World War II led the making of the first atomic bomb, he could also be cruel and intolerant of those he saw as less gifted. Even so, Dr. Garwin showed a knack for teamwork and generosity with peers he respected. Over decades, the physicist worked hard to advance the hunt for gravitational waves — ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein predicted. He supported the construction of costly detectors, which, in 2015, successfully observed the ripples, opening a new window on the universe. Dr. Garwin beamed with pride when the finding won a Nobel Prize. So too, Dr. Garwin managed to walk a tricky path through the nation's military-industrial complex, which crushed Oppenheimer and coddled Edward Teller, an early proponent of hydrogen bomb research. For decades, he criticized the complex from within, promoting some ideas and undermining others, using his intellect and standing as a knowledgeable insider to shake things up — often anonymously. 'The most influential scientist you've never heard of' is how his biographer cast him. The physicist told newcomers to the federal apparatus that they could get something done or get credit, but not both. He was, in some respects, the antithesis of Kissinger, who carefully tended his public image. The left loved Dr. Garwin's attacks on the American military establishment, but his own compass seemed to align less with politics than pragmatism. He received awards from President George W. Bush, a Republican, as well as President Barack Obama, a Democrat. 'He's never met a problem he didn't want to solve,' Mr. Obama said in 2016 when he presented Dr. Garwin with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. The two-term president described the physicist as advising White House occupants 'rather bluntly.' Overall, Dr. Garwin's life can be seen as a tale of genius in which key manifestations were obscured by a wall of silence. Why, for instance, did he wait so long to tell his family about his H-bomb role? Was he trying to protect his loved ones from criticism and hateful bluster? No. It turned out that, as can happen in lives of government service, he felt that sensitive issues of national security loomed over him. In our last interview, Dr. Garwin said he worried that talkative family members might inadvertently bring him to the attention of foreign intelligence agencies eager to learn H-bomb secrets. That concern, he added, haunted him even after his role became known publicly. 'I still worry about that,' he said at his home in Scarsdale, N.Y., on a cloudy winter day. He glanced out the window. 'They could be listening now.' Richard Lawrence Garwin was born in Cleveland on April 19, 1928. His father taught electronics at a technical high school. As a child, Richard, called Dick, impressed adults with his language and math abilities. He loved to take apart and reassemble things, including a vacuum cleaner. Despite his obvious talents and his early entry into high school, an English teacher there told his parents that Dick would never get into college. He defied that prediction, studying physics at the Case School of Applied Science, in Cleveland. The teen lived at home, took the bus to school and worked nights. He graduated at 19 and Standard Oil offered him a full ride for graduate study at the University of Chicago, which had one of the nation's top physics departments. Fermi became the young man's adviser. Two years later, in 1949, Dr. Garwin graduated from Chicago with a doctorate in physics and became an instructor at the school. The 21-year-old had been too young to play a role in the Manhattan Project, but now found himself deeply involved in what followed. Like many Americans, Dr. Garwin grew concerned when Moscow that summer detonated its first atom bomb. How would Washington respond? In early 1950, President Harry S. Truman announced that the nation would seek to make 'the so-called hydrogen or superbomb.' Fermi invited Dr. Garwin to join him at Los Alamos, the base set amid the tall pines and deep canyons of New Mexico's backcountry where Oppenheimer's bomb was born. Now on the agenda for the sprawling lab: trying to make good on Truman's threat. Deep inside every star, extraordinarily high heats and pressures fuse hydrogen atoms into helium, releasing bursts of energy. The Los Alamos idea was to mimic that fusion process. The experts called it thermonuclear — in part to distinguish its high-temperature reactions from those of atomic bombs, which start at room temperature. The general plan was that an exploding atom bomb would act as a match to ignite the hydrogen fuel. The question was how. Early ideas had atomic and hydrogen fuels layered in alternating bands, similar to the insides of a baseball. The breakthrough came in early 1951. Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, a Los Alamos colleague, envisioned two distinct stages set next to each other inside a cylindrical casing. Moving at the speed of light, radiation from the exploding atom bomb would hit the casing's inner wall and, in a rebound, flood the interior with a colossal burst of rays that would compress and ignite the hydrogen fuel. The new idea gave the bomb unlimited power. Because the hydrogen fuel was separate from the initial mayhem of atomic debris and shock waves, it could, in theory, be infinitely large. Teller asked Dr. Garwin to draw up a detailed plan. He warned that it would have to address 'every conceivable doubt' of top scientists. 'Garwin's paper was criticized up and down,' Teller wrote in his memoirs, but the young man's plan 'remained unchanged.' The prodigy turned the rough idea into a four-page plan that's still classified top secret. He attached a large schematic diagram. On a coral atoll in the Western Pacific, the device grew slowly. Dr. Garwin never visited the test site where his finished creation stood two stories high and weighed 82 tons. The test blast, code-named Ivy Mike, took place on Nov. 1, 1952. It vaporized a Pacific isle and produced a mushroom cloud 100 miles wide. Dr. Garwin, then 24, kept his head down. No news accounts cited his name. No one condemned or praised him. He was an assistant professor of physics at the University of Chicago, not a high government official or a scientific celebrity. A month after the blast, he joined the International Business Machines Corporation, which allowed him to hold a physics post at Columbia University. In the decades to come, he was granted 47 patents for his IBM work. The unusual arrangement also gave him the freedom to repeatedly change the course of history. Dr. Garwin did so mainly by offering scientific counsel to presidents and their advisers — a continuum of White House consulting that ran from Eisenhower to Trump. President John F. Kennedy used the nation's scientific and military feats to spook Moscow and showcase the West's technological edge. It was his top Cold War strategy. Then disaster struck. In a case of bad things having good outcomes, the repercussions of the disaster helped give birth to the first successful instance of nuclear arms control. The crisis began on July 9, 1962, when the American military, seeking ways to destroy incoming Soviet warheads, detonated an H-bomb some 250 miles above the Pacific Ocean. The record height for a thermonuclear blast produced surprises both on the ground and in space. Streetlights in Hawaii went out. Satellites in orbit failed. It turned out the blast had pumped up the radiation belts around Earth, making the doughnut-like rings of energetic particles more dangerous. The military was planning an even higher-altitude detonation that summer — more than 800 miles up. Kennedy wanted to quickly assess the risks. Pressed by the Pentagon, he had already approved preparations for that extremely high blast, code-named Urraca. The president's urgent question was whether the detonation of U.S. nuclear arms in outer space could produce enough radiation to poison humans and ruin his announced plan to land astronauts on the moon. On July 25, 1962, he sent Dr. Garwin a telegram, inviting him to join his White House science advisory team. Weeks later, Kennedy met with Dr. Garwin and senior advisers in the Oval Office to discuss the radiation dangers. The physicist recalled the president fearing that the recent blast 'had killed the Apollo program,' which was working to put Americans on the moon. How long would the enhanced radiation last? 'A long time,' Dr. Garwin replied, adding that exactly how long was impossible to say. After some discussion of the risks and uncertainties, Dr. Garwin suggested that the danger zone might persist anywhere from two to 20 years. That Oval Office meeting was, in all likelihood, a turning point. On Sept. 5, 1962, Kennedy asked his national security and science advisers if the radiation hazard could 'make a lunar journey prohibitive.' They discussed the risks, the lineup of impending American nuclear tests and whether the military could live without the 800-mile-high Urraca detonation. At a National Security Council meeting two days later, the high-altitude test was canceled. The next year, Kennedy signed a treaty with the Soviet Union that banned nuclear tests in outer space, in the atmosphere and under water. The weapons could be tested only deep underground. Slowly, the heightened radiation levels in the planetary belts declined through the natural process of nuclear decay. From 1968 through 1972, NASA sent two dozen Apollo astronauts hurtling through the danger zones. Afterward, experts studying the crews' exposures found that their doses were less than those of workers who held industrial jobs involving radiation. The astronauts suffered no debilitating health effects. President Richard M. Nixon wanted Moscow and Washington to sign a historic pact to limit their nuclear arms. Formal talks began in 1969, the year he took office. In parallel, the president and his advisers sought ways to better assess the size of the Soviet arsenal and thus verify compliance with any accord. The overall aim was to make the balance of nuclear terror — the threat of mutually assured destruction — more stable, and a stronger deterrent to war. A new generation of spy satellites would be a central tool. High above the Earth, they would open a new lens on the secretive movements of Soviet bombers, submarines and missiles capable of hurling thermonuclear arms at the United States. Dr. Garwin, already one of President Nixon's science advisers, threw himself into the satellite effort. The nation's early spy satellites, which relied on photographic film, were slow, clumsy and wasteful. It could take weeks for exposed film to get to photo analysts. And the costly orbiters, once out of film, went into the celestial junkyard. Dr. Garwin led a team of experts who foresaw a more advanced type of spacecraft that would replace film with microelectronics and radio transmitters. Fresh images would flash to Earth. The team also called for powerful new telescopes. In effect, the spy craft were to be precursors to the Hubble Space Telescope, but aimed at the Earth. Even by the usual standards of federal secrecy, the satellite project was extremely hush-hush. In July 1971, Dr. Garwin had drafts of the final report delivered by a special class of courier to members of his team. They were required to read them, return them and keep no copies. The next month, Dr. Garwin and a colleague briefed Kissinger, who backed the new electrooptical approach. Remarkably, the innovation was decades ahead of the shift in consumer cameras from film to digital. That September, President Nixon approved a plan to develop the new spy satellite, which became the archetype for all that followed. For East-West relations, the technology was seen as raising predictability and lessening surprise, thus lowering tensions between the superpowers. The next year, Nixon met in Moscow with the Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev to sign an accord that, for the first time, limited their nuclear arsenals. Dr. Garwin received two awards for this work, one from the C.I.A. in 1996, and another in 2000 from the National Reconnaissance Office, which runs the satellite fleets. That office's citation said the physicist had helped Kissinger 'understand the critical role' the spy technology would come to play in national security — in stabilizing the uneasy standoff between foes armed with the deadliest of weapons. Simplicity made the Hiroshima bomb a sure thing. It had no test explosion. H-bombs were tricker. By definition, they needed multiple tests to uncover flaws and optimize results. For decades, Dr. Garwin's push for a comprehensive ban on test detonations rested primarily on that fact — no testing, no H-bomb. Though he saw Kennedy's space ban as a good start, he wanted to head off not only new arms races, but also new states aspiring to the world's most destructive weapons. The end of the Cold War seemed like the moment. In 1993, President Bill Clinton announced plans for a treaty in which all nations would forgo all nuclear blasts, as Washington was doing unilaterally. This meant banning tests even underground, the last permissible zone. In 1993, Dr. Garwin became chair of the Arms Control and Nonproliferation Advisory Board in the State Department, which guided senior federal officials, including in the White House. It also helped build public support for a test-ban agreement. Crucially, in August 1995, Dr. Garwin helped resolve a technical dispute that was threatening to become a deal-breaker in the treaty negotiations. It centered on whether a ban should allow minuscule blasts. He addressed it as a longtime member of the Jasons, a secretive group of independent federal science advisers. In a lengthy report, the group backed the comprehensive ban, saying the United States could sign a treaty even if it ruled out minute tests. Days later, Mr. Clinton echoed that finding in announcing that he would seek what experts called a zero-yield treaty. 'I hope,' he said, 'it will lead to an early consensus' at the negotiating table. Instead, the talks dragged on. And France and China rushed to do last-minute detonations before any ban took effect. Finally, in September 1996, a solemn procession of world government representatives, including Mr. Clinton, signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Then things fell apart. Mr. Clinton won re-election that November but now faced Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate. Worse, the president's dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, an intern, came to light in early 1998, fueling a political firestorm that crippled the White House. As Senate Republicans raced for a quick treaty vote, Dr. Garwin testified before the Foreign Relations Committee. 'We are better off,' he argued, 'with a test ban than without it.' Six days later, on Oct. 13, 1999, the Senate rejected the treaty. Though eventually signed by 187 nations, the treaty never entered into force because the United States and a handful of other key players failed to ratify it. Still, Dr. Garwin and his colleagues had created a new global norm. The long, hard process of hammering out a global consensus on the merits of a ban, embraced by thermonuclear states, led to a more stable new era. Gone were the shock waves that had radiated from underground test sites and ricocheted around the globe. Since then, the United States and other main nuclear powers have tested no weapons. Now there's a new kind of silence. 'You do these things,' Dr. Garwin told me shortly after the Senate rejected the treaty. 'And if you keep at it for a long time, sometimes you win.' In 1979, Edward Teller suffered a heart attack and so discovered, as he told a friend, 'that I am not immortal.' While recovering, he shared his recollections on the making of the hydrogen bomb with that friend, who had brought along a tape recorder. 'So that first design,' Teller said, 'was made by Dick Garwin.' He repeated the tribute to avoid any misunderstanding. For 22 years, that recording was lost to history. By chance, it also fit nicely with Dr. Garwin's own determination to hide his H-bomb role. Myths spread. In 1995, 'Dark Sun,' a 700-page account of the hydrogen bomb's making, attributed its design to a committee of elder scientists. It made no mention of the Cleveland upstart. That changed in April 2001. George A. Keyworth II, Teller's friend, who later served as President Ronald Reagan's science adviser, gave me a transcript of the tape recording and I wrote about it for The New York Times. It was noticed, including by Dr. Garwin and his family. Though Teller had previously acknowledged the young physicist's role, those mentions were buried in specialist writings and meetings. Now, suddenly — a half-century after the fact — Dr. Garwin gained wide public recognition as the H-bomb's designer. 'That was when people really knew,' Lois, his wife, told a historian. 'And people who knew Dick very, very well, and had known him for a very long time, expressed real surprise.' After that, as much as ever, he raced ahead. The polymath lectured and wrote papers on space weapons, land mines, terrorism, pandemics, submarines, science advising, food aid programs, automatic teller machines, Iran's nuclear ambitions, the nation's electrical grid, the disposal of radioactive waste, catastrophic risks and nuclear disarmament. The last entry in his comprehensive archive is dated early this year. Around that time, I decided that the elder statesman of nuclear arms control, like Teller, was probably not going to live forever. He was 96. I had some questions. During that interview, to my surprise, Dr. Garwin said Fermi had emphasized the wrong danger in once calling the H-bomb 'an evil thing' because of its unlimited destructiveness. 'That's not the threat,' he said. The great danger, he added, is 'so many nuclear weapons,' which raise the risk of theft, missteps, accidents, unauthorized use — and the world falling from mutual deterrence into a thermonuclear abyss. To me, that last visit with Dr. Garwin was another glimpse of a bygone era in which he struggled inconspicuously to counter an existential threat to humankind. I asked if he had ever considered a memoir. 'I tried,' said the man known for his blunt honesty. 'It's an impossible job.'
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
H-bomb creator Richard Garwin was a giant in science, technology and policy
Richard Garwin, who died on May 13, 2025, at the age of 97, was sometimes called 'the most influential scientist you've never heard of.' He got his Ph.D. in physics at 21 under Enrico Fermi – a Nobel Prize winner and friend of Einstein's – who called Garwin 'the only true genius' he'd ever met. A polymath curious about almost everything, he was one of the few people elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine for pathbreaking contributions in all of those fields. He held 47 patents and published over 500 scientific papers. A giant trove of his papers and talks can be found in the Garwin Archive at the Federation of American Scientists. Garwin was best known for having done the engineering design for the first-ever thermonuclear explosion, turning the Teller-Ulam idea of triggering a fusion reaction with radiation pressure into a working hydrogen bomb – one with roughly 700 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. He did that over the summer when he was 23. Over the decades that followed, he contributed to countless other military advances, including inventing key technology that enabled reconnaissance satellites. Yet Garwin was also a longtime advocate of nuclear arms control and ultimately of nuclear disarmament. Working on nuclear deterrence and arms control, now at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, I got to know Garwin as a tireless and effective participant in dialogues with scientists and current or former officials in Russia, China, India and elsewhere, making the case for steps to limit nuclear weapons and reduce their dangers. Garwin was an early participant in the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 for its disarmament work. He was also a founding member, in 1980, of the National Academies' Committee on International Security and Arms Control, where he continued discussing ideas for reducing nuclear dangers with foreign colleagues throughout his life. The deep respect that top Russian and Chinese nuclear weapons scientists had for him was palpable – even though he was often blunt in telling them where he thought their arguments were wrong. Once, at a workshop in Beijing, after listening to the leader of China's program to develop nuclear 'breeder' reactors lay out his program, Garwin started his remarks by saying, 'This is a poorly designed breeder program that will fail' – and then laying out why he thought that was the case. Because nongovernment experts have a freedom to explore ideas that government negotiators lack, these kinds of dialogues played a key role in developing the concepts that led to nuclear arms control agreements and, I would argue, contributed to ending the Cold War. As an example, one committee team that included Garwin helped convince Chinese weapons scientists that their country had no more need for nuclear tests and should sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty – which it did soon after the discussion. Only weeks before his death, he and I and others participated in a Zoom meeting with Russian nuclear weapons experts discussing what initial steps should be taken if U.S.-Russian political relations improved enough for them to resume discussions of nuclear restraint and risk reduction. Garwin's mind seemed to be interested in everything at once – and he had a wry sense of humor that could enliven a dry meeting. When I was directing a National Academies study about dealing with the plutonium from dismantled nuclear weapons after the Cold War, he would send an email with a penetrating insight on some issue in the study, followed by an equally long query about the parking arrangements for the meeting. We put him in charge of assessing all the especially strange options for dealing with the plutonium. Once, while diagramming on a chalkboard the option of diluting the plutonium in the ocean, he drew the ship that would be doing the work and then began drawing many smaller vessels. Someone asked him what those were, and he said: 'Oh, those are the Greenpeace boats.' Garwin's unbelievable energies focused on three broad areas: fundamental science, new technologies and advising the government. In fundamental science, he made major contributions to the detection and study of gravitational waves, and he helped to discover what physicists call parity violation in the weak nuclear force – a discovery that was one of the building blocks for what is now the standard model of the fundamental forces of the universe. In new technologies, beyond weapons and satellites, he played a key role in the invention of touch screens, magnetic resonance imaging, laser printers and the GPS technology that enables us all to get directions on our cellphones. He was a researcher at IBM from 1952 to 1993. Garwin advised the government on panels ranging from the President's Science Advisory Committee, to the JASON panel of high-level defense advisers, to leading the State Department's Arms Control and Nonproliferation Advisory Board (now called the International Security Advisory Board). He made major contributions to thinking about problems ranging from antisubmarine warfare to missile defense. He was a pungent critic of the 'Star Wars' missile defense program launched in the Reagan administration, pointing out the wide range of ways enemies could defeat it more cheaply. His range was remarkable: He was called on to offer ideas for capping the blowout of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig and on managing the COVID-19 pandemic. His curiosity was not limited to important matters. Once, as I was sitting next to him waiting for a meeting to start, he told me that if you took a Superball – a small, extremely elastic rubber ball – and bounced it diagonally on the floor so that it bounced up onto the bottom of the table, it would bounce back onto the same spot on the floor and back into your hand. I said I didn't believe it for a minute – surely it would keep bouncing forward until it got to the other side of the table. He gave me an explanation I didn't fully understand, involving energy of forward motion being converted to torque, and then converted into energy of backward motion. When I got home, I received an express package from him containing an article he'd written in the American Journal of Physics, titled 'Kinematics of an Ultraelastic Rough Ball,' with pages of equations explaining how this worked. The first figure in the paper is a stick-figure drawing of bouncing such a ball, with a footnote: 'This was first demonstrated to me by L. W. Alverez using a Wham-O Super Ball.' Luis Alverez was a Nobel Prize winner in physics. Garwin's brilliance was obvious to all who encountered him and won him wide recognition. In addition to election to all three national academies, he was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2002 by President George W. Bush. In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Amid all this activity, Garwin was a family man. His marriage to his beloved wife, Lois, lasted over 70 years, until her death in 2018. They have three children, five grandchildren and one great-grandchild. The advances Garwin contributed to have enhanced our understanding of the universe and benefited millions of people around the world. And as dark as nuclear dangers may seem today, the world is further from the nuclear brink than it would have been if Richard Garwin had never been born. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Matthew Bunn, Harvard Kennedy School Read more: Hiroshima attack marks its 78th anniversary – its lessons of unnecessary mass destruction could help guide future nuclear arms talks Russia announces its suspension from last nuclear arms agreement with the US, escalating nuclear tension New postage stamp honors Chien-Shiung Wu, trailblazing nuclear physicist Matthew Bunn is a member of the National Academies Committee on International Security and Arms Control and a board member of the Arms Control Association. He is a member of the Academic Alliance of the United States Strategic Command and a consultant to Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Boston Globe
15-05-2025
- Science
- Boston Globe
Richard L. Garwin, a creator of the hydrogen bomb, dies at 97
While his mentor, Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, called him 'the only true genius I have ever met,' Dr. Garwin was not the father of the hydrogen bomb. Hungarian-born physicist Edward Teller and Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, who developed theories for a bomb, may have greater claims to that sobriquet. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up In 1951-52, however, Dr. Garwin, at the time an instructor at the University of Chicago and just a summer consultant at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, designed the actual bomb, using the Teller-Ulam ideas. An experimental device code-named Ivy Mike, it was shipped to the Western Pacific and tested on an atoll in the Marshall Islands. Advertisement Intended only to prove the fusion concept, the device did not even resemble a bomb. It weighed 82 tons, was undeliverable by airplane, and looked like a gigantic thermos bottle. Soviet scientists, who did not test a comparable device until 1955, derisively called it a thermonuclear installation. Advertisement But at the Enewetak Atoll on Nov. 1, 1952, it spoke: An all-but-unimaginable fusion of atoms set off a vast, instant flash of blinding light, soundless to distant observers, and a fireball 2 miles wide with a force 700 times greater than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. Its mushroom cloud soared 25 miles and expanded to 100 miles across. Because secrecy shrouded the development of America's thermonuclear weapons programs, Dr. Garwin's role in creating the first hydrogen bomb was virtually unknown for decades outside a small circle of government defense and intelligence officials. It was Teller, whose name had long been associated with the bomb, who first publicly credited him. 'The shot was fired almost precisely according to Garwin's design,' Teller said in a 1981 statement that acknowledged the crucial role of the young prodigy. Still, that belated recognition got little notice. Compared with later thermonuclear weapons, Dr. Garwin's bomb was crude. Its raw power nonetheless recalled films of the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico in 1945, and the appalled reaction of its creator, J. Robert Oppenheimer, reflecting upon the sacred Hindu text of the Bhagavad Gita: 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' For Dr. Garwin, it was something less. 'I never felt that building the hydrogen bomb was the most important thing in the world, or even in my life at the time,' he told Esquire magazine in 1984. Asked about any feelings of guilt, he said: 'I think it would be a better world if the hydrogen bomb had never existed. But I knew the bombs would be used for deterrence.' Advertisement Although the first hydrogen bomb was constructed to his specifications, Dr. Garwin was not present to witness its detonation at Enewetak. 'I've never seen a nuclear explosion,' he said in an interview for this obituary in 2018. 'I didn't want to take the time.' After his success on the hydrogen bomb project, he said, he found himself at a crossroads in 1952. He could return to the University of Chicago, where he had earned his doctorate under Fermi and was now an assistant professor, with the promise of life at one of the nation's most prestigious academic institutions. Or he could accept a far more flexible job at the International Business Machines Corp. It offered a faculty appointment and use of the Thomas J. Watson Laboratory at Columbia University, with wide freedom to pursue his research interests. It would also let him continue to work as a government consultant at Los Alamos and in Washington. He chose the IBM deal, and it lasted for four decades, until his retirement. For IBM, Dr. Garwin worked on a stream of pure and applied research projects that yielded an astonishing array of patents, scientific papers, and technological advances in computers, communications, and medicine. His work was crucial in developing magnetic resonance imaging, high-speed laser printers, and later touch-screen monitors. A dedicated maverick, Dr. Garwin worked hard for decades to advance the hunt for gravitational waves -- ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein had predicted. In 2015, the costly detectors he backed were able to successfully observe the ripples, opening a new window on the universe. Meantime, Dr. Garwin continued to work for the government, consulting on national defense issues. As an expert on weapons of mass destruction, he helped select priority Soviet targets and led studies on land, sea, and air warfare involving nuclear-armed submarines, military and civilian aircraft, and satellite reconnaissance and communication systems. Much of his work continued to be secret, and he remained largely unknown to the public. Advertisement He became an adviser to presidents including Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton. He also became known as a voice against President Reagan's proposals for a space-based missile system, popularly called Star Wars, to defend the nation against nuclear attack. It was never built. One of Dr. Garwin's celebrated battles had nothing to do with national defense. In 1970, as a member of Nixon's science advisory board, he ran afoul of the president's support for development of the supersonic transport plane. He concluded that the SST would be expensive, noisy, bad for the environment, and a commercial dud. Congress dropped its funding. Britain and France subsidized the development of their own SST, the Concorde, but Dr. Garwin's predictions were largely correct, and interest faded. A small, professorial man with thinning flyaway hair and a gentle voice more suited to college lectures than a congressional hot seat, Dr. Garwin became an almost legendary figure within the defense establishment, giving speeches, writing articles, and testifying before lawmakers on what he called misguided Pentagon choices. Some of his feuds with the military were bitter and long-running. They included fights over the B1 bomber, the Trident nuclear submarine, and the MX missile system, a network of mobile, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles that were among the most lethal weapons in history. All eventually joined America's vast arsenal. Advertisement While Dr. Garwin was frustrated by such setbacks, he pressed ahead. His core message was that America should maintain a strategic balance of nuclear power with the Soviet Union. He opposed any weapon or policy that threatened to upset that balance, because, he said, it kept the Russians in check. He liked to say that Moscow was more interested in live Russians than dead Americans. Dr. Garwin supported reductions of nuclear arsenals, including the 1979 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II), negotiated by Carter and Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet premier. But Dr. Garwin insisted that mutually assured destruction was the key to keeping the peace. In 2021, he joined 700 scientists and engineers, including 21 Nobel laureates, who signed an appeal asking President Biden to pledge that the United States would never be the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict. Their letter also called for an end to the American practice of giving the president sole authority to order the use of nuclear weapons; a curb on that authority, they said, would be 'an important safeguard against a possible future president who is unstable or who orders a reckless attack.' The ideas were politically delicate, and Biden made no such pledge. Dr. Garwin told Quest magazine in 1981, 'The only thing nuclear weapons are good for, and have ever been good for, is massive destruction, and by that threat deterring nuclear attack: If you slap me, I'll clobber you.' Richard Lawrence Garwin was born in Cleveland on April 19, 1928, the older of two sons of Robert and Leona (Schwartz) Garwin. His father was a teacher of electronics at a technical high school during the day and a projectionist in a movie theater at night. His mother was a legal secretary. Advertisement At an early age, Richard, called Dick, showed remarkable intelligence and technical ability. By 5, he was repairing family appliances. He and his brother, Edward, attended public schools in Cleveland. Dick graduated at 16 from Cleveland Heights High School in 1944 and earned a bachelor's degree in physics in 1947 from what is now Case Western Reserve University. In 1947, he married Lois Levy. She died in 2018. In addition to his son Thomas, he leaves another son, Jeffrey; a daughter, Laura; five grandchildren; and one great-grandchild. Under Fermi's tutelage at the University of Chicago, he earned a master's degree in 1948 and a doctorate in 1949, scoring the highest marks on doctoral exams ever recorded by the university. He then joined the faculty, but at Fermi's urging spent his summers at the Los Alamos lab, where his H-bomb work unfolded. After retiring in 1993, Dr. Garwin chaired the State Department's Arms Control and Nonproliferation Advisory Board until 2001. He served in 1998 on the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States. Dr. Garwin's home in Scarsdale is not far from his longtime base at the IBM Watson Labs, which had moved in 1970 from Columbia University to Yorktown Heights. Dr. Garwin held faculty appointments at Harvard and Cornell as well as Columbia. He held 47 patents, wrote some 500 scientific research papers and many books, including 'Nuclear Weapons and World Politics' (1977, with David C. Gompert and Michael Mandelbaum), and 'Megawatts and Megatons: A Turning Point in the Nuclear Age?' (2001, with Georges Charpak). He was the subject of a biography, 'True Genius: The Life and Work of Richard Garwin, the Most Influential Scientist You've Never Heard Of' (2017), by Joel N. Shurkin. His many honors included the 2002 National Medal of Science, the nation's highest award for science and engineering achievements, given by President George W. Bush, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award, bestowed by President Obama in 2016. 'Ever since he was a Cleveland kid tinkering with his father's movie projectors, he's never met a problem he didn't want to solve,' Obama said in a lighthearted introduction at the White House. 'Reconnaissance satellites, the MRI, GPS technology, the touch-screen -- all bear his fingerprints. He even patented a mussel washer for shellfish -- that I haven't used. The other stuff I have.' This article originally appeared in
