Richard Garwin, who died on May 13, 2025, at the age of 97, was sometimes called “the most influential scientist you have never heard of. “He obtained his doctorate in physics at 21 years old under Enrico Fermi – a winner of the Nobel Prize and a friend of Einstein – who called Garwin”The only real genius“He had never met.
Polymathe curious about almost everything, he was one of the rare people elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine for pathogenic contributions in all these areas. He held 47 patents and published more than 500 scientific articles. A giant mine of his papers and talks can be found in the Garwin Archives to the Federation of American Scientists.
Garwin was best known to have Make technical design for the first Thermonuclear explosionturning it Ulam tintor idea to trigger a fusion reaction with radiation pressure in a hydrogen bomb that works – one with roughly 700 times power Hiroshima’s bomb. He did it during the summer at the age of 23. Over the decades that followed, he contributed to countless other military advances, in particular by inventing key technology that has enabled recognition satellites.
Defender of arms
However, Garwin was also a long -standing defender of nuclear weapons control and ultimately nuclear disarmament. Work 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 of Russia, China, India and elsewhere, to assert measures to limit nuclear weapons and reduce their dangers.
Garwin was an early participant in Pugwash conferences on world sciences and businesswho won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 For his work of disarmament. He was also a founding member, in 1980, of national academies’ Committee for International Security and Arms ControlWhere he continued to discuss ideas for reducing nuclear dangers with foreign colleagues throughout his life.
The deep respect that the main scientists of Russian and Chinese nuclear weapons had for him were palpable – even if he was often frank by telling them where he thought that their arguments were false. Once, during a workshop in Beijing, after listening to the leader of the Chinese program to develop nuclear “breeders” reactors with his program, Garwin started his remarks by saying: “It is a badly designed breeder program that will fail” – then explaining why he thought it was.
Because non -governmental experts have the freedom to explore the ideas that are lacking in government negotiators, this type of dialogs played a key role in the development of concepts that have led to nuclear weapons control agreements and, I would say, contributed to the end of the Cold War. For example, a committee team that included Garwin helped convince Chinese scientists of weapons that their country no longer needed nuclear tests and should sign the full testing of test ban – which it did shortly after the discussion.
Only weeks before his death, he and I participated in a zoom meeting with Russian nuclear weapons experts discussing the initial measures that should be taken if American-Russian political relations improved enough to resume discussions on nuclear restraint and risk reduction.
Garwin’s mind seemed to be interested in all at the same time – and it had a sense of ironic humor which could animate a dry meeting. When I directed a study of national academies on the treatment of nuclear weapons dismantled after the Cold War, he would send an e-mail with an overview entering a question in the study, followed by an equally long question on the parking provisions for Reunion.
We have charged it to assess all the particularly strange options to cope with plutonium. Once, while schematizing on a chalk painting the possibility of diluting the plutonium in the ocean, he drew the ship that would work and then started drawing many smaller ships. Someone asked him what it was, and he said, “Oh, these are the Greenpeace boats.”
Science, technology and politics
Garwin’s incredible energies have focused on three major areas: fundamental science, new technologies and the government advisor.
In fundamental science, he made a major contribution to detection and Study of gravitational wavesAnd he helped discover what physicists call violation of parity in the low nuclear force – a discovery which was one of the constituent elements of what is now the standard model 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 GPS technology that allows all of us to obtain routes on our mobile phones. It was a Researcher at IBM From 1952 to 1993.
Garwin advised the government on panels ranging from President’s scientific advisory committeeAt Jason high-level defense advisers, to the Directorate of the Advisory Council for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation of the State Department (now called the International Security Advisory Council). He made a major contribution to reflection on problems ranging from antisubmarine war to anti -missile defense. He was a spicy critic of the “Star Wars” anti -missile defense program launched in the Reagan administration, highlighting the wide range of ways that enemies could overcome him more at a lower cost. Its range was remarkable: it was called upon to offer ideas to cap the brilliance of the Deepwater Horizon oil platform and to manage the COVVI-19 pandemic.
His curiosity was not limited to important questions. Once, when I was sitting next to him while waiting for a meeting to start, he told me that if you took a Superball – An extremely elastic little rubber ball – and bouncing it diagonally on the ground so that it bounced on the bottom of the table, it would rebound on the same place on the ground and returned to your hand. I said I didn’t believe it for a minute – it would surely continue to bounce until it happens on the other side of the table. He gave me an explanation that I did not fully understand, involving the energy of the forward movement converted into a torque, then converted into energy of the rear movement.
When I went home, I received an express package from him containing an article he had written in the American Journal of Physics, entitled “Kinematics of a rough ultra -lelastic bullet“With equation pages explaining how it worked. The first figure of the paper is a drawing of a stick to bounce such a ball, with a footnote:” It was first demonstrated by LW Alvez using a super Wham-O ball. “” Luis Alvez was a winner of the Nobel Prize in physics.
An honored life
Garwin’s brilliance was obvious to all those who met and conquered him. In addition to the election of the three national academies, he received National Science Medal In 2002 by President George W. Bush. In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded him Presidential Freedom Medal.
In the middle of all this activity, Garwin was a father. His marriage to his beloved wife, Laws, lasted over 70 years, until his death in 2018. They have three children, five grandchildren and a great-grandchild.
Garwin advances have helped improve our understanding of the universe and have benefited millions of people around the world. And as dark as nuclear dangers may seem today, the world is more distant from the nuclear edge than it would have been if Richard Garwin was never born.
This article is republished from The conversationAn independent non -profit press organization bringing you facts and a confidence analysis to help you give meaning to our complex world. It was written by: Matthew Bunn,, Harvard Kennedy school
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Matthew Bunn is a member of the National Committee of Academies on International Security and Arms Control and member of the Board of Directors of the Association of Arms. He is a member of the Academic Alliance of the United States Strategic Command and consultant of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.