Dr. Richard Garwin was a physicist, inventor, professor, respected advisor, and longtime ally of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Dr. Garwin was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1928. The son of a high school teacher, he worked nights in movie theaters to support himself in college. He earned his doctorate in physics from the University of Chicago by the age of 21, under the mentorship of Dr. Enrico Fermi, one of the creators of the world’s first atomic bomb. Garwin and Fermi worked together in the early 1950s to develop the hydrogen bomb, the world’s most powerful weapon.
Garwin became a researcher at IBM, a position he would hold for 40 years, on his own terms: maintaining a faculty position at Columbia University and continuing to consult for the government on nuclear weapons and nuclear arms control. Over the course of his career, Garwin contributed to the invention and refinement of several now-indispensable technologies: touch screens, laser printers, GPS, MRI imaging, and reconnaissance satellites, among others. He published more than 500 papers and was granted 47 US patents.
Garwin served as a senior fellow and director of science and technology for the Council on Foreign Relations and, for seven years, chaired the Arms Control and Nonproliferation Advisory Board at the US State Department. He was one of a select group of scientists to have been elected as a member of all three US National Academies: the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the National Academy of Medicine.
Garwin was also a longtime member and chair of JASON, the independent group of scientific advisors to the US government on military issues that also included UCS co-founder Henry Kendall. Garwin advised the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and presidential administrations from Kennedy to Obama. He was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2002 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016. Beginning in 2009, he served as a consultant to the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Offices of the President, advising former Secretary of Energy Steven Chu on the Deep Water Horizon oil spill in 2010 and the US response to the damaged reactors at Fukushima in 2011.
Famously, in his disparate consulting work, Garwin never shied away from speaking his mind when he perceived wrongheadedness or fuzzy thinking. He was vocal in his criticism of the US Defense Department’s Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative, known as the “Star Wars” missile defense program, as well as other missile defense systems he saw as ineffective and wasteful. He advocated strenuously for the United States to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which bans all nuclear explosive testing.
Garwin’s strongest collaborations with UCS focused on proposing changes to US nuclear policies to keep Americans, and the world, safer. He worked with UCS to push for reductions in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, and to take U.S. land-based nuclear weapons off “hair-trigger alert.” He was also one of the original signatories of the 2004 UCS statement on scientific integrity, written during the George W. Bush administration to oppose political interference and suppression of science in the federal government. Just weeks before his death, he co-authored the foreword to a UCS report on plutonium pits.
Dr. Garwin passed away on May 13, 2025 at the age of 97.