In 1951, Richard Garwin was 23, a junior physicist working summers at Los Alamos National Laboratory, home of the atomic bomb that had decimated Hiroshima six years before.
Edward Teller, Garwin’s older colleague at the University of Chicago, mentioned to him that Teller had an idea for an even bigger bomb, the hydrogen bomb, but needed to be sure it would work.
A few weeks later, Garwin handed in a four-page memo with a large foldout drawing of how to construct that bomb. It was used to build the first test, 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, and worked exactly as Garwin had designed it.
I and everybody else who’s interviewed Garwin asked him what it felt like to have designed this terrible thing. He was pragmatic: Someone else would have designed it anyway, and if his work led to further problems, he would solve those too. He was very good, he said, at taking the next step.
The next step was apparently to spend the rest of his life using his knowledge of nuclear weapons to deter their use. Beginning four years after he designed the hydrogen bomb, and for decades afterward, he advised the government on every aspect of nuclear weapons: their spread, testing and proposed improvements; and the missile systems to deliver and defend against them. His point was that they could be controlled, that people could behave rationally. And, in fact — except for tests, which Garwin worked successfully to ban — the hydrogen bomb has never been used.
I interviewed Garwin a great deal because he was nonpolitical and infinitely knowledgeable about science and technology. He was famous for pickiness: I’d get email replies such as, “Call me anytime after 8 p.m. In the meantime, ‘orbiting’ has only one ‘t.’” We kept in touch the rest of his life. He died May 13 at 97.
After he drew up the hydrogen bomb, he went back to Chicago and walked around his bedroom, wondering what to do with his life.
He’d done fundamental particle physics, but booking the cyclotron six weeks ahead, as he would have to do at the university, was “not my style,” he said.
Instead, he took a job at IBM, where he stayed for 41 years, on the incredible condition that he would spend one-third of his work time giving the government scientific advice.
Over the next 70 years, for every administration, regardless of party, usually unpaid and often unasked, he answered the government’s every conceivable science-adjacent question.
Most of his advice was on nuclear weapons control, but his intellectual range was vast and he advised on all kinds of technologies: air traffic control, oil spills and oil fires, navigation systems, solar sails, counterterrorism, and floating airports.
He advised on early generations of spy satellites that located Russian radars and enabled satellites to return intelligence digitally in near-real-time.
He opposed Ronald Reagan’s plan to build a missile defense system, the Strategic Defense Initiative that came to be known as “Star Wars.”
He told an interviewer what he surely told the generals: “If you feel compelled to have a missile defense because you’ve always said missile defense is necessary, go ahead, have a missile defense. But don’t spend very much money on it, and don’t lie about its performance.”
SDI died, but missile defense, though unrealistic, remains politically alive.
He was scientifically honest, generally right and direct in his advice.
