Richard
Lawrence Garwin (born
April 19, 1928) is an American physicist, best known as the author of the first hydrogen bomb design. Garwin received his bachelor's degree from
the Case Institute of Technology in
1947, and two years later his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago under
the supervision of Enrico Fermi at the
age of 21. Another of Fermi's students, Marvin L. Goldberger,
claims that Fermi said that "Garwin was the only true genius he had ever
met". After graduating from the University of Chicago, Garwin joined the
physics faculty there and spent summers as a consultant to Los Alamos National
Laboratory working on nuclear weapons. Garwin was the author of the actual
design used in the first hydrogen bomb (code-named Mike) in 1952.He was assigned the job by Edward Teller, with the instructions that he was to make it as
conservative a design as possible in order to prove the concept was feasible. He also worked on the development of the
first spy satellites, for which
he was named one of the ten founders of national reconnaissance. While at IBM, his work on spin-echo magnetic
resonance laid the foundations for MRI; he was the catalyst for the discovery and
publication of the Cooley–Tukey FFT algorithm,
today a staple of digital signal processing; he worked on gravitational waves; and
played a crucial role in the development of laser printers and touch-screen
monitors. He has been granted 47 patents and has
published over 500 papers. In
December 1952, he joined IBM's Watson laboratory, where he worked continuously
until his retirement in 1993. He is currently IBM Fellow Emeritus at the Thomas J. Watson Research
Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. During his career Garwin
divided his time between applied research, basic science, and consulting to the
U.S. Government on national-security matters. Parallel to his appointment at
IBM, at different periods he held an adjunct professorship in physics at Columbia University; an
appointment as the Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large
at Cornell University; and a
professorship in public policy, and in physics, at Harvard University. He
has also been the Philip D. Reed Senior
Fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations in New York, NY. Garwin served on the U.S. President's Science
Advisory Committee from 1962–65 and 1969–72, under Presidents Kennedy, Johnson,
and Nixon.[8] He has been a member of the JASON Defense Advisory
Group since 1966. As a member of the Institute for Defense
Analyses' Jason Division of U.S. university scientists. on Sat. Feb. 3, 1968,
Garwin “traveled to Vietnam” with Henry Way Kendall and several other scientists “to check
on the operation of the electronic barrier” he and other Jason scientists
developed for the Pentagon to utilize in Indochina, according to The Jasons by
Ann Finkbeiner. And, in the 1960s, "Jason scientist Richard Garwin, a nuclear
physicist who, years before, helped design the Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb, held
a seminar on the SADEYE cluster bomb and other munitions that would be most
effective when accompanying the sensors" of the electronic barrier in
Vietnam, according to page 205 of Annie Jacobsen's book, "The Pentagon's
Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top Secret Military Research
Agency," that Little Brown & Company, NY published in 2015. From 1993
to August 2001, he chaired the Arms Control and Nonproliferation Advisory Board
of the U.S. Department of State.
From 1966 to 1969 he served on the Defense Science Board. He
also served on the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States in
1998. He is currently a member of the National Academies' Committee on International Security and Arms Control and
has served on 27 other National Academies committees. In 2017,
science journalist Joel N. Shurkin published a biography of Garwin, True
Genius: The Life and Work of Richard Garwin, in which Shurkin writes
about "the most influential scientist you never heard of.