Richard L. Garwin, an architect of the American hydrogen bomb, who formed the immune policy for post-war governments and laid the foundation for insights into the structure of the universe, as well as for computer wonders such as Touchscreen monitors, died on Tuesday in his house in Scarsdale, no he was 97.
His death was confirmed by his son Thomas.
Dr. Garwin, a polymatic physicist and geopolitical thinker, was only 23 when he built the world's first merged bomb. He later became a science advisor for many presidents, designed Pentagon weapons and satellite exploratory systems, argued for a Soviet-American balance of nuclear terror as the best bet for survival of the Cold War and defended verifiable nuclear arms control agreements.
While his mentor, the Nobel Prize winner Enrico Fermi, called him “the only true genius I once met,” Dr. Garwin not the father of the hydrogen bomb. The physicist Edward Teller and the Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, who developed theories for a bomb, can have more claims on that sobriquet.
In 1951-52 Dr. However, Garwin, however, at the time an instructor at the University of Chicago and only a summer adviser at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the actual bomb, with the help of the counter-ulam ideas. An experimental device code-mentioned Ivy Mike, which was sent to the western Pacific and tested on an Atol on the Marshall Islands.
Only intended to prove the merger concept, the device didn't even look like a bomb. It weighed 82 tons, was indefinited by the plane and looked like a gigantic thermos bottle. Soviet scientists, who did not test a similar device until 1955, soon called it a thermonuclear installation.
But on the Eenwetak Atol on November 1, 1952 it spoke: an all-but-dismissable merger of atoms that caused an enormous, immediate flash of blinding light, soundless to distant observers, and a fire ball two miles wide with a force of 700 times larger than the atomic bomb destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. The Champignonon in 1945. Champignon cloud in 1945. The Chewistroomwolk in 1945.
Because confidentiality has changed the development of America's Thermonuclear weapon programs, the role of Dr. Garwin when creating the first hydrogen bomb for decades virtually unknown outside a small circle of government officials and intelligence officials. It was Dr. Teller, whose name had long been associated with the bomb, who has publicly credited him for the first time.
“The shot was fired almost precisely according to Garwin's design,” said Dr. Teller in a statement from 1981 that recognized the crucial role of young wonder prodigy. Yet that late recognition was not noticed much and Dr. Garwin openly unknown for a long time.
Compared to later thermonuclear weapons, Dr. Bom was Garwin coarse. The rough power nevertheless remembered films of the first atomic bomb test in New Mexico in 1945, and the terrible reaction of his maker, J. Robert Oppenheimer, reflective on the holy Hindu text of the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I get dead, the destroyer of the worlds.”
For Dr. Garwin was a little 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 for some guilt feelings, he said:” I think it would be a better world if the hydrogen bomb never existed. But I knew that the bombs would be used for deterrence. “
A pivot to IBM
Although the first hydrogen bomb was built according to his specifications, Dr. Garwin is not even present to witness his detonation in one law roof. “I have never seen a nuclear explosion,” he said in an interview for this death report in 2018. “I didn't want to take the time.”
After his success on the hydrogen beam project, Dr. Garwin, he was at a crossroads in 1952. He was able to 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 in one of the most prestigious academic institutions in the country.
Or he could accept a much more flexible work with the International Business Machines Corporation. It offered a faculty appointment and use of Thomas J. Watson Laboratory at Columbia University, with broad freedom to pursue his research interests. It would also make him work as a government consultant at Los Alamos and in Washington.
He chose the IBM deal, and this lasted four decades, until his retirement.
For IBM, Dr. Garwin to an endless stream of pure and applied research projects that produced an amazing series of patents, scientific articles and technological progress in computers, communication and medicine. His work was crucial in the development of magnetic resonance image formation, high-speed laser printers and later touchscreen monitors.
Dr. Garwin, a dedicated Maverick, has been working hard for decades to promote the hunt for gravitational waves in the tissue of the space time that Einstein had predicted. In 2015, the expensive detectors that he supported were able to successfully observe the ripples and open a new window on the universe.
In the meantime, Dr. Garwin work for the government, consultation on national defense issues. As an expert in the field of mass destruction weapons, he helped Soviet goals in selecting priority and led studies into land, sea and air wars with nuclear armed submarines, military and civil aircraft and satellite exploratory and communication systems. Much of his work remained secret and he remained largely unknown to the public.
He became adviser to presidents such as Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. He also became known as a voice against President Ronald Reagan's proposals for a RAKETING SYSTEM -based rocket system, popularly called Star Wars, to defend the nation against nuclear attack. It was never built.
One of the celebrated battles of Dr. Garwin had nothing to do with the national defense. In 1970, as a member of Nixon's Science Advisory Board, he ran Afoul from the President's support for the development of the Supersian Transport Life. He concluded that the SST would be expensive, noisy, bad for the environment and a commercial guy. The congress dropped its financing. Groot -Britain and France subsidized the development of their own SST, the Concorde, but the predictions of Dr. Garwin turned out to be largely correct and the interest faded.
Collisions with soldiers
A small, professional man with a thinner flyway hair and a soft voice that was more suitable for lectures than a conference hot chair, Dr. Garwin An almost legendary figure in the Defense Establishment, giving speeches, writing articles and witnessing the legislators about what he called Pentagon choices.
Some of his feud with the army were bitter and long -term. They include fighting on the B-1-bomber, the Trident Nuclear Submarine and the MX Missiles System, a network of mobile, land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles that were among the most deadly weapons in history. All eventually came to the huge arsenal of America.
While Dr. Garwin was frustrated by such setbacks, he pushed through. His core message was that America should maintain a strategic balance between nuclear energy in the Soviet Union. He opposed every weapon or policy that threatened to upset that balance, because he said, the Russians kept under control. He liked to say that Moscow was more interested in living Russians than dead Americans.
Dr. Garwin supported reductions of nuclear Arsenals, including the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (Salt II) of 1979, negotiated by President Carter and Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet Prime Minister. But Dr. Garwin insisted that the insured destruction was the key to maintaining peace.
In 2021 he joined 700 scientists and engineers, including 21 Nobel Prize winners, who signed an appeal with President Joseph R. Biden Jr. To promise that the United States would never be the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict. Their letter also called to an end to American practice to give the president the authority to order the use of nuclear weapons; A sidewalk for that authority, they said, “would be” an important protection against a possible future president who is unstable or who orders a reckless attack. “
The ideas were politically delicate and Mr Biden did not make such a promise.
Dr. Garwin told Quest Magazine in 1981: “The only thing that nuclear weapons are good for and have ever been good is massive destruction and the threat that deters the nuclear attack: if you have a blow, I will confuse you.”
A whizz child on 5
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 cinema at night. His mother was a legal secretary. At a young age, Richard, named Dick, showed remarkable intelligence and technical skills. Towards 5 he repaired family equipment.
He and his brother, Edward, went to public schools in Cleveland. Dick graduated in 1944 from Cleveland Heights High School and in 1947 obtained a bachelor's degree in physics on what is now Case Western Reserve University.
In 1947 he married Lois Levy. She died in 2018. In addition to his son Thomas, he will be survived by another son, Jeffrey; a daughter, Laura; Five grandchildren; And a great -grandchild.
Under the custody of Fermi at the University of Chicago, Dr. Garwin A master's degree in 1948 and a doctorate in 1949, scored the highest figures on doctoral exams ever recorded by the university. He then joined the faculty, but at the insistence of Fermi Spent his summers in the Los Alamos Lab, where his H-Bomb work unfolded.
After retiring in 1993, Dr. Garwin chairman of the arms control and non -proliferation advisory board of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs until 2001. He served in 1998 to the Commission to assess the ballistic rocket threat to the United States.
Dr. Garwin's house in Scarsdale is not far from his old base in the IBM Watson Labs, which had moved from Columbia University in 1970 to Yorktown Heights, in Westchester County.
He held faculty appointments at Harvard and Cornell and Columbia. He held 47 patents, wrote about 500 scientific research papers and wrote many books, including “nuclear weapons and world politics” (1977, with David C. Gompert and Michael Mandelbaum), and “Megawatt 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 distinctions include the National Medal of Science 2002, the highest price of the nation for science and engineering performance, given by President George W. Bush and the presidential medal of freedom, the highest civil prize in the nation, which was given by President Barack Obama in 2016.
“Since he was a Cleveland -child that tinkering for his father's film projectors, he has never stopped a problem that he did not want to solve,” said Mr Obama in a light -hearted introduction to the White House. “Exploring satellites, the MRI, GPS technology, the touchscreen all wear his fingerprints. He even patented a mussel washer for shellfish that I didn't use. The other things I have.”
William J. Broad And Ash Wu contributed reporting.
