Richard Garwin
American physicistWikipedia
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Search complete. 8 mentions across 4 episodes found for "Richard Garwin".
Oct 20, 2026
Mark DannerHOST
I mean, also, you and I spoke about this before the program that there have been proposals over the years.
Mark DannerHOST
One was by Richard Garwin, who a brilliant scientist who designed the hydrogen bomb when he was, I think, 23.
Mark DannerHOST
And he I knew him late in life.
Mark DannerHOST
And he had a proposal for minimum deterrence that would be putting relatively small nuclear weapons on submarines.
Annie JacobsenGUEST
And he was in charge of the U.S. satellite program that first lofted spy satellites into space called Corona.
Annie JacobsenGUEST
And then Dick Garwin, who was the designer of the world's first thermonuclear weapon.
Annie JacobsenGUEST
That's on the cover of my nuclear war scenario book.
Annie JacobsenGUEST
Garwin was the scientist who, at the age of 23, 24, was able to make the thermonuclear bomb explode.
Micheal WhelanHOST
Whether the panel ever saw the Navy's full analysis is still an open question.
Micheal WhelanHOST
At the 2019 Wilson Center conference that I mentioned in part one, both Richard Garwin and Richard Muller said they did not believe it had.
Micheal WhelanHOST
Garwin, reading from a prepared statement, said, "I would have loved to have had the data from the 300-page technical report because this is just the sort of thing that you can analyze." Berman and his team did eventually brief the panel in person at its final meeting on December 3rd and 4th, 1980.
Micheal WhelanHOST
On December 11th, Berman followed up with a letter to the White House science officer that I quoted in part one, apparently trying to clear up what he saw as confusion among the panel members about the Navy's findings.
31 MINS LATER
Micheal WhelanHOST
Considering this was 40 years later, several key figures had already died.
Micheal WhelanHOST
They even reached out to Jimmy Carter through an intermediary and were told he was no longer able to record even a brief statement.
Micheal WhelanHOST
In the end, about a dozen participants took place, in person or by phone, including David Aaron, Jessica Matthews, John Dupré, John Deutch, State Department officials Robert Gallucci and Thomas Pickering, Leonard Weiss, Dan Raviv, and the two surviving members of the Ruina Panel, Richard Garwin and Richard Muller.
Micheal WhelanHOST
Gallucci, who in 1979 ran the nuclear section of the State Department's Intelligence Bureau, set the tone for the bureaucratic chaos early on by stating, "I had more bosses on non-proliferation than the Pope has cardinals." The sharpest exchange concerned the question at the center of all of it.
Micheal WhelanHOST
And one of the scientists who had looked at the data early on was a man who, by then, had spent nearly 30 years as one of the most influential physicists you've probably never heard of.
Micheal WhelanHOST
Richard Garwin was born in Cleveland in 1928.
Micheal WhelanHOST
He earned his PhD at the University of Chicago at the age of 21, studying under Enrico Fermi, who is widely quoted as having called Garwin the only true genius he had ever met.
Micheal WhelanHOST
In 1951, at age 23, working as a summer consultant at Los Alamos, Garwin produced the working design for the first hydrogen bomb.
Micheal WhelanHOST
And he advised pretty much every president from Eisenhower to Obama.
Micheal WhelanHOST
He spent much of the second half of his life arguing for arms control, which, considering what he built at age 23, has a certain Oppenheimer symmetry to it.
Micheal WhelanHOST
By Richard Garwin's own account at the 2019 conference, a day or two after the flash, he was summoned to CIA headquarters along with Harold Agnew, the former director of Los Alamos, and Steven Lukasik, a former director of DARPA, to give a technical judgment on the signal.
Micheal WhelanHOST
On October 19th, 1979, he summarized his view in a letter to Spurgeon Keeney, the deputy director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.